Lee Lyttle Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

LyttleLee

Title

Lee Lyttle Oral History Interview

Date

21 October 2021

Creator

Lee Lyttle

Contributor

Anthony Zaragoza

extracted text

Lee Lyttle
Interviewed by Anthony Zaragoza
The Evergreen State College oral history project
October 21, 2021
FINAL
Zaragoza: Good afternoon. It’s October 21, 2021, and we are here with Lee Lyttle. Lee Lyttle, welcome
to the Oral History Project.
Lyttle: Thank you. It’s good to be here and share.
Zaragoza: Wonderful. Lee, why don’t you just start by telling us a little bit about your early life and
early career.
Lyttle: Sure. I’m a New York City, South Bronx kid. Raised Roman Catholic, and in a pretty tough
neighborhood, but I think I made it through in pretty good shape.
I attended Catholic elementary school, K through 8. For high school, I went to a prep seminary.
I was studying to be a priest while in high school, and that really started a major psychological shift
about where I was going, what options there were out there for me, and how I looked at the world. But
that exercise also opened my mind to broad thinking about religion and social issues and all those other
kinds of things.
It also got me out of the ghetto, as it were, and got me into a situation where a number of other
folks were thinking about being a priest. It was a fairly small school on the West Side of Midtown
Manhattan. I was the only black kid in my class, and that was a new experience for me, thus reacculturating me with a whole different part of society which the South Bronx did not give me an
opportunity to do.
There’s a whole range of stuff that happened there, but for the most part, I really felt very
unsteady and challenged. Nonetheless, I found my way, at least psychologically, to look at opportunities
outside of the hood.
Zaragoza: I don’t mean to interrupt, but quickly, did your parents grow up in the South Bronx?
Lyttle: No, no. My mom is a 1930’s immigrant from Jamaica. My dad grew up in Manhattan, met my
mom in the late ‘30s, actually, right before World War II. After he served, they got married, moved to
the South Bronx and started a family. I’ve an older sister and two younger sisters.
Zaragoza: Thank you for that. It’s good to know a little bit about your folks.

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Lyttle: You bet. My high school and early college years—17 through 20s—I had some pretty unusual
kinds of experiences that came about through people who were also working in areas of the city that I
had no idea I could get access to. For instance, I was an usher at Radio City Music Hall, which was quite
interesting. There was a very heavy-duty dress code there—dress livery, day and evening tux, etc... I
don’t know if there are any devotees of Downton Abbey reading this, but we were supplied with similar
specified ‘uniforms’ that were quite formal for various occasions. You had the change them for the
evening, day, weekend. I was really blown away by that. You had inspections and all the rest of that
kind of stuff.
Zaragoza: Lee, what year is this?
Lyttle: This was 1965-66.
Zaragoza: What did you say your job was?
Lyttle: I was an usher at Radio City Music Hall, which is a quite regimented affair, which was very
unusual for me, because, as I said, people don’t know but Radio City Music Hall has several underground
levels where the Rockettes have their dressing rooms. There’s also a whole big stage under there for
rehearsals. There are dressing rooms where stars and musicians prepare for their performances.
There’s more underground than there is aboveground there. They’re very tightly regimented down
there, which is really quite interesting, as a matter of fact. When you’re out on the ‘floor’ (exposed to
the public), you have to be very formal. You’re marching in step to your post. You have white gloves,
and you’re inspected. It was a mindblower for me. But there were entertaining/servicing people from
all over the world, so they wanted you to put your best foot forward. That’s where I learned a little bit
about discipline, and dressing, and how to stand, and approach people from different parts of the
country, different parts of the world. It was really quite an eye-opener for me.
But I did other character-building things over those years. I was a New York City taxi driver in
the summers; I worked at Kennedy Airport in the control tower—one floor below the flight controllers—
helping to direct arriving travelers to open parking lots; I drove delivery trucks; I was a federal nuclear
bomb shelter reviewer. All told, it was a very eclectic set of extra-curricular school experiences. Most of
those jobs I got because some of my classmates worked in those areas and they said, “Do you need
money, they’re hiring now.” It’s an avenue into networks that I never would have gotten in the South
Bronx. I guess that’s the point. And that’s why I think some of these things were meaningful for me
because they were so transformational in how I viewed society. It just opened my mind to a wider
world and to a whole different way of interacting with people who aren’t black. It was transformational.

2

All these things prepared me for the future. In college, I started out as a computer science
major at the New York Institute of Technology for a couple of years. It was during some very heavy antiVietnam issues, and I was caught up in a number of the protests and realized that I needed to learn even
more about what was going on in the world. I also had wanderlust, and though I pretty much decided
that computer science wasn’t for me, I discovered a love for the design world. I left NYIT and went on to
doing the rest of my undergraduate work at the University of New Mexico studying architecture to
maintain a side interest in computer graphics.
Zaragoza: Wow! That must have been quite a move for you.
Lyttle: It was a big transition for me. Our family never had money, so my mother took out a loan to give
me one semester, a place in the dorms, and a one-way ticket. I remember getting on that airplane at
LaGuardia Airport. This was the day when the whole family got on the plane and gave me sandwiches
and wished me well. An announcement was made on the plane, “If you’re not flying, please get off the
plane. Please disembark.” It was a totally different experience than flying these days. [laughter]
I couldn’t afford the non-stop flight, so this plane had four stops between LaGuardia Airport and
Albuquerque New Mexico, I think St. Louis, Texas, and Kansas. I was amazed at where this plane went.
When it finally touched down, I was in the middle of, for me, could have been Oz or Munchkin land.
Zaragoza: Is this the early ‘70s?
Lyttle: This was ’71. I got off that plane and I could see from horizon to horizon of New Mexico. As a
kid growing up in New York City, I had never been west of New Jersey. I felt like, boy, I’ve just landed on
the moon. There were people there. There were Native Americans that were not the Indians you see
on TV or in John Wayne movies. These were real Native Americans. And Hispanic people that were not
Puerto Ricans. Again, I was thrust into a weird, weird kind of place. Again, another one of those mindblowing episodes.
Eventually, I got a little motorcycle. I remember going out and getting on one of the roads.
When you leave these towns out in the Southwest, you’re out in the middle of the desert. I remember
traveling on this road outside of Albuquerque for about 50 miles—about an hour—and the sign said the
next town is 50 miles away ahead of me. I stopped the motorcycle. I realized there is nothing within 50
miles in any direction! I’m in the middle of 100 miles, because to the left and right of this road, it went
over hundreds and hundreds of miles down to Alamogordo, where they exploded the first nuclear
bomb.
I had a come-to-Jesus time then. I remember going, wow, this is so unlike New York City.
Zaragoza: Wow!
3

Lyttle: Yeah, it just blew me away. But again, another one of those mind-opening experiences that then
you realize, wow, it’s an amazing planet. Amazing country in that state. Just an amazing country.
Zaragoza: After New Mexico, where do you go from there?
Lyttle: After I got my degree in architecture—it was actually fine arts majoring in architecture—I
realized that I wasn’t quite sure of my direction from there. So, I applied to three different graduate
schools in three different majors. I figured whichever one comes through, that’s where I’ll go next. One
was a master’s in architecture right there in New Mexico, or computer graphics up at the University of
Utah. They were at the cutting edge of doing computer graphics, design by computers. This was the
early stages. This was ’74. My third application was to the urban planning department at the University
of Washington in Seattle.
I happened to get accepted into all three schools, so the decision really came down to which
offered me the most money and the most opportunity. I had a faculty member there in New Mexico
who was a graduate of UW’s Urban Planning Urban Design program. He put in a good word at the
school for me and they gave me a full scholarship, a full-ride scholarship with an internship.
Zaragoza: Wow. That’s great.
Lyttle: That pulled me back here into the Puget Sound area. It’s amazing how these paths—it’s not a
straight line. That’s what I’ve always told students there while teaching at Evergreen. You never know.
You just never know. You keep your options open, keep your mind open, you stay into the networks
that are healthy for you, and things can happen. That’s pretty much what happened to me, so I did my
first master’s degree in urban planning at the University of Washington. That’s how I ended up there.
Zaragoza: The next step?
Lyttle: The next step included my work as an intern at the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department.
This was at a time when Seattle had just passed a major bond issue (called ‘Forward Thrust’) for parks
throughout Seattle. The work taught me how to write environmental impact statements. I was writing
environmental impact statements for the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department for about a year, so
there’s a number of those parks that didn’t even exist but are there now that I wrote the impact
statement for, which was really neat because with the new Growth Management Act of the state, they
were trying to accommodate growth within the state, and they knew they needed to increase their
parks and recreation facilities. So, that’s what I learned to do. The whole state was going through this.
How do we adapt to the new Growth Management and State Environmental Policy acts and some of the
changes that were happening around the state?

4

A notice got out that over in Kitsap County—Port Orchard, which was, at the time, a pretty rural
county—that there was going to be a new Trident Submarine base built there called the Bangor Base.
This is where they were going to base this new class of nuclear submarines. It’s the time of the Cold War
and the Navy announced that we’re going to be bringing in 30,000-40,000 people to live and work at this
brand-new base. The county had to ratchet up its land-use planning activities, so they started a big
canvass of the region to staff the Planning Department. I applied for one of the jobs there and became
the Environmental Planner for Kitsap County—Bremerton, Bainbridge Island, Gig Harbor—implementing
the State’s new Environmental Policy Act. The job was basically overseeing the preparation of
environmental impact statements—which I’d learned at the Parks Department in Seattle—for all
different kinds of development projects—housing, industry, shopping centers, etc. They all had to
prepare impact statements prior to permitting, and I was the coordinator of all of that for the county for
about three years.
That’s pretty much how I got to move a little bit further west and started really understanding a
little bit more about the intricacies of government, and community meetings. I learned firsthand what
community meetings were all about in basically a rural county. These were mostly farmers, very
conservative people. It was like the east side of the state, because there’s nothing out there except big,
rural land, big tracts of land. These folks were anti-planning. They were anti-growth. But the Navy said,
“Ready or not, we’re bringing our people in.”
Luckily, we’ve had good county commissioners and a good planning director that said, “Look,
we’ve got to do this. If not, it’s going to be haphazard growth, and we can’t afford it. It’s going to have
to be done with some rationality.” I was part of a planning team to look at that, and work with the
Navy, and with the local folks at community meetings about “This is how we’re going to stomach it.
These are the choices we’ll have, and these are the choices we don’t have, so let’s put together some
rational thinking about growth.”
That opened my eyes to the whole notion of working with communities as to what they need,
and how you try to find that middle ground between their desires and their plans and their futures, and
the balance the economics of the whole area, including the environmental sanity that has to be brought
to growth. Those three years were pretty intense. Our planning team was a bunch of young people,
freshly minted grad students like myself. A few older folks were among us, but for the most part, we
were branded by the community as ‘the young Turks’. We were actually called ‘Planning Nazis’ in one
local newspaper. We were ‘coming in and changing things.’

5

Zaragoza: Wow.
Lyttle: Yeah, I’d go to meetings and wonder, boy, am I going to make it home without people egging the
car and being shot at. [laughing]
Zaragoza: I was thinking about how, a black man from the South Bronx in the early ’70s, could now be
in rural Washington and bringing this enormous change, what that experience must have been like.
Lyttle: Boy, it was emotionally disjointed, Anthony. The best way I could put it is that it was like there
was never a place where I felt—it was like I was in a total, constant state of psychological dynamism. I
was always, ‘this is new, this is crazy, that’s dangerous…that’s not.’ There was nothing laidback about
any of this time. The people I was meeting and interacting with were so far from the South Bronx
experience that it was… I was living in a different world.
I realized how different when, from time to time, I’d go back to the Bronx to visit my parents
and my sisters, the Bronx was all unreal. I was meeting with some old friends, and some of them were
still hanging out on the corner and talking jive. Actually, talking a bunch of crap about “Oh, yeah, the
world is like this,” and “This is what’s really important.” And what was important to them was drugs,
rock ‘n’ roll, sex, and that was it. [laughing] How to jive the next guy.
I could not explain what I was doing and how I felt about stuff. It just didn’t register with that
group of friends, and I found myself moving further and further away from, I guess, the Bronx attitude
about things, and putting that experience and the people I knew and those experiences, into a larger
context of how the country worked.
It was a pretty emotionally unstable time for me, but I was young enough to be going ‘oh, It was
like a big joyride’. It was being in a big amusement park where there was something different and
strange going on. Pretty amazing, Anthony, to be quite honest with you, when I think back at it. As I
was putting together the work for this little talk, I had to think about some of that stuff again, and try to
reconnect the journey, re-live a little of the journey. It was weird.
But what it also led me to, what was the next phase, and that is, after working in government in
urban planning and land use development and the economic growth of the community, I was courted by
the private sector to come and work and actually work from the land developer’s side of things. Okay,
now you have to write the environmental impact statements for us and be at community meetings and
represent us. I did that for a company called Dick Tracey and Associates, believe or not.
Zaragoza: What industry were they?
Lyttle: They were land use developers. Folks would hire them—say, an individual would have 20, 30
acres and say, “We want to develop it from farming or a grass area.” They’d hire these big developing
6

companies to put together develop plans that they think would fit with the community and get passed
through city councils and county councils.
They would hire these private sector companies to do that because they weren’t knowledgeable
about all the governmental regulations. They weren’t knowledgeable about some of the design work
and land use design, so they hired these companies. The two companies that I worked for hired me.
These are two different periods of time. One was for about a year and the other was for two or three
years.
I was then on the other side of the fence, with a better understanding of what the government
side was looking for in regard to zoning and land use and those issues, and then what the developer and
the client of the developer, what their interest was. I was kind of in the middle of that. I was giving
presentations before city councils and county councils about land use development of this particular
project; negotiating what would work with the community and what wouldn’t work. We’d go back and
forth and back and forth.
It was a pretty rewarding time because I knew enough now about both sides. It was the middle
ground here that I found interesting to work. I wasn’t always successful in making both sides happy, but
there was a middle ground where you could say, “Yeah, this will fulfill your needs, Mr. Developer and
Client, economically and timewise. And County, yes, this has all the elements of good land use design,
land use planning that fits into this particular part of our community.” It was that kind of negotiation
that I was in the middle of.
Zaragoza: Wow.
Lyttle: It was interesting, to be quite honest with you.
Zaragoza: Lee, how do you then get on over to Evergreen?
Lyttle: Before I even do that, let me continue the story, and then we’ll get to Evergreen. From there,
what was interesting to me was the larger context of this stuff, about a world with all kinds of stuff
happening in these times—all of the Cold War issues, underdeveloped countries, etc. I realized that I
had made a pretty good life for myself working in the private sector in land use development, but I
needed to learn more about the rest of the planet.
So, I sold everything and joined the Peace Corps. One day, I was in my apartment. I had an
apartment that overlooked the water—it was really quite nice—and I asked myself, “Is this all there is?”
I need to do something that will expand my view and put this in a bigger context than just money in the
United States, land use development in the United States, the economy of the United States.

7

I had two cars and a motorcycle. It was time to just chuck all this. I was in my thirties by then. I
was in my mid-thirties. I just sold it all and I joined the US Peace Corps.
They based me on a small island in the Caribbean for two years. I was on the island of Nevis
working in community development in a 4-H program with kids. It was probably one of the most
fulfilling work that I’d done in a lot of years up till then.
Zaragoza: How amazing, man.
Lyttle: It was a mindblower. Nevis is an island that’s like five miles by six miles with a volcano coming
up the middle. You could walk around the entire island in a day. It was dotted around the outside with
just villages. There were people on one side of the island who had never visited the other side of the
island because they were viewed by the locals as ‘different’ people.
Zaragoza: Wow.
Lyttle: I could not believe it. I just couldn’t believe it. I learned a whole lot about the Third World there,
and how they lived and what is important to them. The island had power that came on for a few hours a
day and then it went off. You’d have to turn on your faucet at a designated time to have running water,
so I had a big cistern out in front of the house that collected water during those periods. It was an eyeopener.
Then, of course, was the working with the community, with community leaders and with the
kids. I learned an awful lot about what they thought was important, and how they viewed the US, how
they viewed their social network, and what was important for them as a people. What was important to
me was to just listen. I knew damn little about agriculture and the 4-H stuff. To be honest with you, I
cheated a lot. I was mostly pretty selfish during those years, and I just wanted to listen and learn. It was
a fascinating experience for me.
Zaragoza: It must have been beautiful, and you get to go back to the Caribbean where your mother’s
folks were from.
Lyttle: Yes! That was the amazing thing. In the training for the Peace Corps—I don’t know if you’ve
done this at all, Anthony—there’s this process by which you have in-country orientation, or close to incountry training where they brief you on all these things that’s going to be strange about where they’re
going to put you. They teach you how to be magnanimous and flexible with these different kinds of
people that you’re going to be working with for two years.
When I got in the country and they told me, “Be careful about the food and the people,” I
realized, these were just like my aunts and uncles! I grew up with these kinds of people. [laughter] It
was beautiful, man. It was beautiful.
8

Zaragoza: Right.
Lyttle: The accents weren’t strange. During the training, I remember one session I sat with this trainer.
We were in a big class in Barbados, where we did some of our initial orientation. He was going around
asking some of these folks where they were from. Again, I was the only black guy in my group of 25
young volunteers, probably one of the oldest, although we had a woman who was in her seventies.
But he came to me and says, “Where are you from?” I told him. He said, “What are you
parents?” I said, “Jamaican.” He says, “You’re Caribbean, mon! Hey!” [laughter]
Zaragoza: Exactly.
Lyttle: He says, “What are you doing here? What are you doing here?” But one thing that was really
funny. When I got into Nevis, there were only three PC volunteers on the whole island. When I first got
there, folks were asking, “Who are you? Where are you from? What are you doing here?” That kind of
thing. I’m saying to them, “I’m with the Peace Corps and I’m working with this person and that group
and that group.” They’re going, “You’re not Peace Corps. There’s no such thing as black people in Peace
Corps.” “Well, yeah, there are. There’s not a lot of us, but here we are.” And they’re going, “No, no,
no, no.” To this very day, there’s a group of them that still thinks—and told me when I was leaving two
years later, “we know you’re really with the CIA, but you don’t have to say anything.” [laughing] I’m
going, “I’m not CIA! I was really Peace Corps.” They said, “There are no black Peace Corps people.
You’re CIA, and you’re looking at something. You don’t have to say anything.” I’m going, “Okay. You
want to believe it, fine.”
Zaragoza: How interesting.
Lyttle: Yeah, it gave me a real insight as to how they viewed African Americans as folks from the land of
milk and honey, as it were. The Americans at that stage were viewed as everybody in America is rich.
When I came home it was only for about a year because I was looking at still studying. That’s
when I went back to graduate school and did another master’s degree in public administration. That’s
when I started to think, okay, I really need to better understand the inner workings of how governments
work.
In the meantime, I got a call or a letter from my old Peace Corps. “The United Nations is looking
for a person who can coordinate the United Nations Development Program and be an officer in a
country.” That sounded really interesting to me. That was a time when I was getting ready to graduate.
I was going to look for a job. I said, “Well, let me look this up.”
Ultimately, the United Nations Development Program brought me on as the United Nations
Volunteer Program Coordinator. Basically, the job was to support groups of international volunteers
9

brought into a developing country. What I learned was that other ‘developed’ countries—from the
United Kingdom, England, Germany, Canada, Japan—all have programs like the Peace Corps, except
they would field folks to the United Nations Volunteer Program, not to their own national programs.
The UN needed people who could coordinate in-country groups that were from all over, and
that’s what I did. I was first posted to Papua New Guinea. I had 17, 18 or 19 different volunteers from
all over the world doing different work all around Papua New Guinea. My job was to work with other
UNDP staff and the governmental ministry in advising that the United Nations offers a series of services
where we’ll bring in engineers, policy advisors, teachers, economic advisors, etc... My role was to advise
them that some could come in as volunteers. So, if you don’t have money, some might be able to serve
as volunteers. In conjunction with other UN agencies, I was to figure out what it is they needed. The
World Health Organization needed some people to come in and they would oversee their people. The
refugee agency would come in and they would oversee the refugee issues that were happening in Papua
New Guinea. As volunteers I brought in some teachers, engineers, and a whole range of people with
different skills.
I would contact my headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and then look through all the kinds of
applications we had. Then we would field them in-country. We’d give them a stipend and airfare. My
job in-country was to find them housing, to do the orientation work, to introduce them to their
counterparts in the government, and to oversee their work while they were there for maybe six months
or even years. Unlike the Peace Corps, the United Nations volunteers would field whole families. Some
of these folks were from other African countries and, believe it or not, other Third World countries.
Because they’d bring their whole families, I’d have to make sure that the families were bedded down,
the kids had places to go to school, and all the rest of that.
It was a really intense period of time. Two years in Papua New Guinea, and then they moved
me over to Zimbabwe, Africa, after that. That was my second assignment, doing the same fascinating,
fascinating work.
Zaragoza: How long were you in Zimbabwe?
Lyttle: A year and a half. What happened was my dad died while I was in Zimbabwe.
Zaragoza: I’m sorry to hear, Lee. I know it’s been a while, but my heart still goes to you.
Lyttle: Thank you. I got the call while in-country. I was actually out on assignment out in the toolies.
The message was, “You need to get back to your headquarters in Harare. We just got a call from your
family.” Basically, I reported to the head of the UN Development Program in Harare, who was my
supervisor. They said, “We just got a call saying you need to get back to New York. Your father’s really,
10

really ill. We bought a ticket. You need to be on a plane.” It was like a day and a half. It was a
Thursday, and they got a ticket for Saturday morning. “We’ll get you out of here.” It was a 10-hour nonstop flight from Zimbabwe to Europe, then another 6-8 hours on to New York. I tried to call home before
I left. At that point in time, there were no cell phones. Unfortunately, I was told that my dad had died
the day before I was supposed to fly, so I never got a chance to say good-bye to him.
Zaragoza: I’m so sorry, man.
Lyttle: That was a tough time. I got there the day of the funeral. But when I came home, what I heard
from my mother was meaningful in a new way. Coming home, my mom pulled me aside after the
funeral and said, “Where are you? When are you coming home? What are you doing over there?” She
had that in her voice that said, “You’re just too damn far away.” It was the first time she’d differed
from, "Just do what you want to do. Just be happy and be a good guy.” It was now like, “You’re just too
far away now that Dad had passed.” I went back to Zimbabwe, and I put in my resignation. I said, “I
can’t complete my tour and my obligations here. I need to get home.” It was just that important. I
knew I could not get back to the Bronx—I could not live there—but I needed to be in the country. I
needed to be closer.
So, upon returning I applied and was accepted to do another master’s degree in library and
information sciences. This provided me a degree of refocusing back into the American culture.
Zaragoza: Where did you do that, Lee?
Lyttle: I did that at the University of Hawaii.
Zaragoza: Wow, man! You’ve been all over!
Lyttle: Oh, man, I did some traveling. The reason I went there and not back to UW or one of the other
state colleges is that UH had a program that was focused on information/librarianship in Third World
countries. I had been serving extensively in Third World countries, I knew that the average citizen in
these places did not have very good access to information resources. The libraries were damn thin, and
what was there was usually second- and third-hand books which were really out of date. I realized that
if any of these countries are going to move forward, it had to be in the context of increasing knowledge
and information within the citizenry. That’s what I was learning all this time when I was in the Peace
Corps and while I was in Africa and Papua New Guinea. I could teach these folks, but I couldn’t say, “Go
to the library and get some stuff so you can continue to help yourselves.”
That’s when I got my interest in information sciences and information study. Librarianship was
at the cutting edge of studying the use of information and especially this new thing called ‘The Internet’.
The UH program folks were the ones saying, “This is how we get it down to the individual.” How to
11

bring this technology down. The University of Hawaii was at the cusp of that because that whole
college—the University of Hawaii—has links in the Pacific, and Third World countries in the Pacific, so all
of the Pacific Island nations, East Asia, we had students there who were mostly Asian-Americans, Asian,
whose ancestry was rooted in Asian developing countries.
Studies there were a real eye-opener. It was actually quite interesting learning what
information was and wasn’t. And the school was trying to be that bridge between new technologies,
and new thinking in librarianship that could somehow link into really thin Third World development
structures. I found that interesting.
Zaragoza: Then you came to Evergreen, or is there a stop in between?
Lyttle: No, after UH is when I came back to Washington State. I was looking for an avenue to continue
my work in librarianship and information studies, because the Internet now was really starting to pick
up, and I wanted to be on the cutting edge of that and that was on the mainland.
There were two colleges that had advertised librarian positions. One was Western and the
other was Evergreen. I went up to Western, looked around the library, spoke with folks, and thought,
“Yeah, this would be an interesting place to work.”
Then I did the same down here at Evergreen, and ran into Randy Stilson. Randy Stilson was
holding the fort down as Sarah Pedersen, the Dean at the time, was on vacation. This was in the
summertime after school. Randy looked at my resume and said, “I think Sarah would really want to talk
to you.”
Zaragoza: What year is this, Lee?
Lyttle: This is 1991. It was the summer of 1991. When Sarah got back, she shared they had been
developing a new position she thought was going to be fully funded. It was called an Ethnic Services
Librarian.
The core librarians at the time were Pat Metheny (White), Ernestine Kimbro, Sarah Pedersen,
Randy Stilson, Frank Motley, Sara Rideout, Terry Hubbard, and an amazing staff. Sarah, who
interviewed me, said, “We’ll create a temporary position for you since we know the funding is supposed
to come in the fall.” I said, “Yeah, but they’ve got a real (already funded) position offered up at
Western.” She said, “Learn a little bit more about Evergreen.”
The more I read about the college, its philosophy, and interdisciplinary team teaching the more
interesting Evergreen became. Further, faculty librarians have to teach. “That’s what we do”, Sarah
emphasized. Librarians were faculty members and had to teach. The more I learned about the school,

12

its liberal arts focus, its interdisciplinary work, I realized that this is the place, I think, where I really want
to be.
That’s when I started—it was the fall—as the Ethnic Services Librarian in 1991. But the position
wasn’t fully funded until 1992. There were some budget issues going on then, but I was working there
since ’91 in that “temporary” Ethnic Services Librarian.
That’s also when Ernestine brought me to the Tacoma Campus for the first time. I got a chance
to meet Joye Hardiman, Maxine Mimms, Betsy Diffendal, Duke Kuehn, and at the time, Tony Reynolds.
Who else was teaching there at that time? LLyn De Danaan was up there for some period of time. And,
of course (Willie Parson)—he’s the black scientist who passed on, what’s his name? I forget names.
Faces never leave me.
Zaragoza: I’ll think of it myself. It’s not just you. I was trying to think of his name.
Lyttle: Yeah, yeah. It’ll come to me in a few minutes. But that’s when I got to meet them, and I was
going up twice a week on Monday and twice a day. The model was still the same one you’re working
under now—a morning session and an evening session. I’d have to be up there for both the morning
session and the evening session to try to provide library services.
I’d be schlepping books back and forth, and telling folks, “If you need something, I can get it the
same day. I’ll come up and bring it back and forth.” I was doing workshops on how to use the library
with the shaky landline services that we had at the time. It was all dial-up kinds of stuff to access the
library. [laughing]
Zaragoza: You were the first interlibrary loan.
Lyttle: Yeah, yeah. I think Ernestine did that work until I arrived, so Ernestine was well established up
there.
Zaragoza: Wow.
Lyttle: She said, “This is how I do it.” I pretty much took over most of that work from her, although
there was a time that we both did it together while she was orienting me to Evergreen Tacoma. This was
when we were in the storefront up there. That’s when the college was in the storefront. I loved it. I’ll be
honest with you. I couldn’t believe it was a college, but the more you talked to Maxine and Joye, they
just infused you with energy.
Then the students. As you know—you know better than I because you’ve taught up there much
longer than I had—the students, their energy is contagious. What makes it so contagious for me was
the quest for community. The quest to learn. I’d walk out the door and some folks would say, “Don’t go
out there at night,” and stuff like that. The folks who would hang out in front of the storefront, they
13

seemed to be like gangbangers, but they said, “You don’t touch these folks. No, you leave these folks
alone.” It was like they put their arms around the Evergreen campus there at that time.
You felt it. You’d go outside and have a cigarette. I was a terrible pipe smoker, a big pipe
smoker, and I’d be talking with them and they’re going, “Yeah, yeah. We’re really glad you’re on the hill
in Hilltop and stuff. You’re one of the few colleges that actually paid attention, way before UW had a
presence up there.” UPS (University of Puget Sound) was on the moon compared to—these students
couldn’t get into UPS, but Evergreen was there.
Zaragoza: And it still is.
Lyttle: For many.
Zaragoza: That’s right.
Lyttle: Yeah, so my introduction into Evergreen was basically the work in Olympia, but a lot of the work
was up there in Tacoma. I did lessons with Tony Reynolds on how to access the Internet from a
computer. Tony Reynolds and I did computer workshops in a converted classroom with a few Internetlinked computers. Everything else was CD-ROMs, and dial up stuff. It was challenging work. But then
again, it was challenging for everybody to use. It was the nascent stages of the Internet.
Zaragoza: Lee, what was your early impressions and experiences of the many Evergreens at that time?
Lyttle: I’ll first acknowledgment that I had never been a teacher before. My sense was there was the
faculty, and, yes, I was part of the faculty, but I wasn’t a teacher, and I had a hard time making the
adjustment. Hard is not the right word, but it was a challenging time to become a teacher, because I was
never one by training or by initial inclination. I was one that worked with people.
When I came to Evergreen, I really thought that, number one, I’m a librarian, I’m a research
specialist, I know how to get information out of sourced material. I thought it was important for me to
show students how to access peer-reviewed material, college-level material that wasn’t just high school
level research. It wasn’t just encyclopedia stuff, and its value, peer-reviewed stuff that’s of academic
worth.
Then I slowly got to go deeper and deeper into the interdisciplinary team-teaching focus of the
pedagogy of the place. That’s what really enriched everything else about the college in my own mind. It
took about a year or two before it really became meaningful for me. It sunk in when it was my time to
cycle out fulltime from the library into a team-teaching program.
Barbara Smith was the provost, and she said, “I’ve got a team for you.” She put me on my first
team-teaching program called ‘Environment, Land and People’. It was a five-faculty highly
interdisciplinary team.
14

Zaragoza: Wow!
Lyttle: It was amazing.
Zaragoza: But it does sound like a good fit for you.
Lyttle: Oh, it was. It was because it was five faculty, and it was a ‘Core’ program. The reason she said, “I
want you on that team” is because the other faculty were really knowledgeable about the college itself
and how to do team teaching. “I wanted to tuck you under the wing of these folks.”
On the team was Oscar Soule, Jeff Kelly, Clyde Barlow, Yvonne Peterson, Jack Longino and
myself. In talking about environment, land and people’ I was bringing in my training and experience as
an environmental land use planner. I reached all the way back to my work in Seattle and in Kitsap
County and pulled out all my material about working with communities. How does development and
environment work together? Where are the challenges and the hiccups around all of that? It was a full
one-year Core program.
Zaragoza: I’ll bet you were also pulling off of your work in Nevis and Zimbabwe.
Lyttle: Without a doubt.
Zaragoza: Wow! You were set up perfect.
Lyttle: Yeah, Barbara put me on a team that really was great for me. You’re absolutely right, Anthony.
It was perfect for my environment. I think she saw that. Then I had some of the greatest mentors. It was
Oscar and Clyde. He, Clyde, just died, I understand, a few months ago.
Zaragoza: I think that’s right, man. Rest in peace.
Lyttle: Teaching with Yvonne Peterson, I learned more about below-the-surface core ideas and values
of the Native American people than anybody else. When you teach with somebody, and you’re talking
in a program and you talk about environment, land and people, it is what the Suquamish are all about,
or it is what the Nisqually are all about. This is what the Native Americans in the Puget Sound are all
about. Yvonne was so woven into that, it is her. My vision has always been, ‘she set my vison for what
working with Native American faculty and communities are really all about’. I learned an awful lot in
that year.
And a core program. These are freshmen. This was when the college would get 3,000 students.
We had to turn students away from this program.
Zaragoza: Wow, with five faculty.
Lyttle: Yeah, five faculty, and it was great. That was my early introduction in the college. I think that’s
what really sucked me in and got my roots established. It was a rich, fertilized firmament, intellectually
and spiritually foundational for me in the college.
15

It wasn’t just a job anymore after that. The college was more than that. The college was aware
that it had a pedagogy that embraced what I thought higher ed should be. In many ways, it felt like I got
what the founding faculty members were trying to put together. It was still being developed, and it was
clear that part of the challenge was explaining to students, how to move away from that monodiscipline approach, when you take this engineering class and that writing class separately. No, it’s all
woven together under themes and challenges and issues, and all of these different disciplines are
nothing more than perspectives.
You have a choice of which one of those you want to make a career out of, or which
combination of these things you want to make a career out of. But that was your job. It wasn’t our job
to tell you. You were going to work with these young students and tell them; “when you choose your
programs, you need to be making choices—almost on a yearly basis and probably more—which one of
these resonates inside of you? Whichever one does, know that all the others also have value.
“If you move toward the arts, know that the math and the sciences are part of that in society. If
you’re open to psychology, know that there are psychological aspects to all the issues that the country
faces right now. There are scientific issues. There are environmental issues. There are all these things.
“And the best citizen in this environment, in this experiment in democracy, is one that doesn’t
eschew any one of those. They try to bring that perspective into it, and you start to see not just the
diversity of the country, but you also start to see how difficult it is to make a democracy work in a
multicultural environment.”
Governmental organizations and structures work very efficiently in monocultures. But the
United States is not a monoculture, and it will never be a monoculture. I don’t think democracy works in
a culture that’s not a monoculture, where there’s not one person at the top. That’s what makes it so
messy.
Some students got it, Anthony, in my view, and some students didn’t. I think it’s still one of the
challenges of the college today, to be quite honest with you. Not just the students but places like
Evergreen are competing with the schools that say, “Well, just master law and you’ll be fine.” “Just get
an MBA and you’re going to be fine.” The fact of the matter is that those folks are too narrow in their
thinking to make democracy work, I think, the best.
Zaragoza: Lee, thank you for that. I hear that for sure. Would you tell us a little bit more about some of
the memorable programs or teaching situations you were in while at Evergreen?
Lyttle: Sure. When I went through some of my old files, there were a few that popped out at me. I’ll
just quickly go through a few of them.
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Besides the ELP Core program, another one that made a really big impact on me was a program
called ‘Great Works and What They’re Made Of’, with Than Curtz and Charlie Teske. That program was
a literature program. It asked students to explore what makes a work great. It was basically literature,
but I’ve always had a penchant for appreciating the arts, so I was, what makes art great? What makes
any of these things great?
Conversations and listening to the lectures of Thad and Charlie, and working with both of them
was a treat. We led students in how to dig into the historical and heritage of these great works, the
heritage of the people, of the writers, the authors, the artists who created these products of great works
of art.
Zaragoza: Do you remember any of the great works that you all looked at? I’m so curious. This was mid
‘90s?
Lyttle: Yeah, but I’d have to go back through my class syllabus to cite some. It was so long ago.
Zaragoza: No worries. Just curious.
Lyttle: There was . . . oh, boy . . . we must have read six or seven novels at the time. Of course, we did a
little bit on Shakespeare. But then there were some more contemporary. I’d have to look through some
of my notes to really to really pull those out.
Zaragoza: I just got curious, Lee. You were telling me about the literature part. What was your role in
this class?
Lyttle: My role as the librarian was [laughing], how do you get access to this stuff? Not just the book
itself, but book reviews. What were people saying about this? Critiques. How do you get access to a
critique of Raisin in the Sun in the time that it was put out? How do you get access to some of these
great novels, some of these great works of art?
My job was to find not just what we thought about it, but what were the people of the time
saying and writing? What were these novels in the age that they were created? How come they made
it? What made them great? What made them endure? What makes that work meaningful?
Zaragoza: I see.
Lyttle: That’s what my role was. That was my technical role, and my other role was to learn myself. I’d
never delved deeply into this, so I considered myself as much a student in that class as anyone else
sitting in a seat in the classroom. There was so much to learn from Thad and Charlie about that. These
guys knew a whole heck of a lot. They knew the context of the works, and they were certainly well
versed in what made a work stand out because they had studied this stuff. And Charlie was particularly

17

focused on music. He was an Oberlin faculty member, so music was always important for him. In many
of his lectures, I was as spellbound as some of the students with some of his stuff.
Zaragoza: You had a really important role there because it seems to me that your bringing students
access to the conversation around these poles of greatness.
Lyttle: Yeah. At first, when they explained what they asked me to do with this, it seemed really logical
to me, but it didn’t really sink in until I listened to their lectures and to their analysis of some of the
works. Then I, too, along with the students, was reading what some of the critics were saying at the
time of some of these works.
Even some contemporaries were saying different things about the classics. Some were staging
some of the works that were initially novels and made them plays. What were they thinking today
about that, and why it worked and why it didn’t work? Why are we addressing this? Why do we think
that staging something like West Side Story was really the Romeo and Juliet story? There was something
that you didn’t get in Shakespeare, but when you watched West Side Story, and you lived in an urban
area, you got it. That kind of stuff.
I just enjoyed that. I enjoyed the interplay. I enjoyed how it linked into my areas that I could
help. Because I always felt an understudy to Thad and to Charlie on this stuff, I always felt like I was a
student as well, and yet I would bolster and support their lead in the program with my areas of
expertise. It was pretty amazing. It was fun and challenging.
I don’t think it was a core program. I believe it was a second-year program, a sophomore-level
program. I’m not sure if they called it ‘all-level’ at the time. There was a different name for those
programs, I think, then.
Zaragoza: What were some of the others? You said there were a few you wanted to talk about.
Lyttle: Nalini Nadkarni and I did ‘Temperate Rainfalls’. Nalini had a habit of doing the Temperate
Rainforest with a different faculty every year. She wanted to share that. That was her interdisciplinary
approach. She’d be teaching Temperate Rainforest and her love for it, so I felt honored that she asked
me. She said, “Given you subject area from information, particularly your work being an environmental
planner”—is what she eventually hooked into. “I’d like to do it with you.” This was after she had done it
three or four times with other folks from other disciplines—scientists, psychologists—so she asked me
to do the program with her, and I did.
That was absolutely fascinating because there’s always a big waitlist to get into Nalini’s classes,
and she was an amazingly dynamic lecturer. It grew out of her passion for the canopy of rainforests

18

around the world. She had an amazing trove of experiences, of videos, pictures, and materials that were
just spellbinding for me and the students.
My role in that program as an environmental planner was to talk about some of the more
contemporary issues and challenges around, why are we still cutting down trees? Why is logging being
practiced in old-growth forests? I would bring in some of the economic forces and the industry forces as
to why these forests were under siege, as it were, up in Canada and in the forests here in the Pacific
Northwest. We’ve got one of the few remaining temperate rainforests on the planet. There are not
very many remaining, yet they’re still logging them so I had to talk about the State’s position on
multiuse in forests. We visited a couple of the logging companies and how they were managing the
public lands, and how the State was managing public lands. How private lands were being managed for
forest production. Where it was going well and where it wasn’t going well. How do we protect these
temperate rainforests?
That was very informative for me, and it allowed me to bring in some of my experiences. When
I was working in Kitsap County, and there were 30,000 to 40,000 people coming in to an area that’s
mostly farming and forests. We had to carve out places. How do you do that, and you still want to
maintain the environmental integrity of the lakes, the creeks, the streams? Many of them were still
salmon-spawning areas and active temperate rainforests on the Kitsap Peninsula.
I brought some of those experiences in, and some of my notes from the public meetings about
how folks were really thinking about their ownership of these lands, and their rights to get the highest
investment and the most money out of them, and how that was a big challenge for folks trying to
protect temperate rainforests. That was insightful to me.
Zaragoza: Is there another program you’d like to talk about?
Lyttle: There are two. Real quickly, one was the one with Tony Reynolds and LLyn De Danaan at the
Tacoma Campus. It was called ‘Information Internet Literacy’. As I mentioned earlier, it was done in the
early stages, and Tony Reynolds and I had an amazing time teaching that. I think we just told more jokes
in class than I ever have before. The class was full. Of course, the evening class was fuller than the
morning class, but they were both engaging. The morning class was mostly female, mostly women
where the kids went off to school and the moms were in college.
Zaragoza: That was my experience.
Lyttle: Yeah, it was a different class. The evening class was definitely alive. It probably still is. There’s a
certain kind of energy to the evening classes that the morning classes don’t have—it’s just very
different. Tony and I had a lot of fun teaching that class. And LLyn De Danaan just brought in more
19

incites than ever. Boy, the woman is just so broadly knowledgeable between, I guess, the psychology
and the spirit of some of the issues we were dealing with. I enjoyed that one.
The last teaching big experience for me was teaching in MPA. That experience was most
memorable. Here, these folks were focused on getting their MPA degrees in public administration
across a number of sectors. It was just fascinating to me. I had a special love of public administration
and the arts, but we talked across all of the basics of public administration throughout, across all
sectors.
Those are the ones that jumped out at me.
Zaragoza: What year did you do the MPA teaching?
Lyttle: The MPA teaching, I think I made a note of that. I was the Director there from 2010 to 2013.
Zaragoza: Got it. Wonderful.
Lyttle: Of course, as the Director, I also taught at the same time, as all directors did. I was teaching their
graduate level MPA Core at the same time halftime. That was just very rewarding.
The other really rewarding part of that was putting together the curriculum. In other words,
trying to find the elective classes that supported what Cheryl King, Amy Gould, and Larry Geri were
doing. These guys were also teaching the foundational as well as some elective courses.
My job was to find these other electives in areas that supplemented theirs; areas in public
sector ecology, arts, transportation, and education. In other words, students would indicate an interest
in a sector and I was trying to find electives that would supplement the core pedagogical approaches in
public administration.
There’s a core content for public administrators—personnel management, budget management,
a whole range of the theory of public administration in a democracy. Those are the kinds of courses that
we would teach in the core courses. I taught one of those each year with Larry, Amy, and Cheryl. That
was pretty significant teaching.
For the most part, these were not first-year inexperienced students. These were folks who
maybe had a job. They were coming back to get a credential so they can get a promotion. Or they were
changing careers and wanted to have this degree that would you get a better job. You could be a
budget analyst for a city, or you could be a city manager, or you could just be the head of an arts
organization. Basic public sector management was the heart of it, as opposed to management in the
private sector (MBA). We’re MPAs, so that was fun.

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Zaragoza: I want to go on to some of your administrative work, but for a sec, I want to stay with the
teaching and students at Evergreen. You mentioned that early on you came to Evergreen and you didn’t
have training as a teacher.
Lyttle: Yeah.
Zaragoza: But you taught in all these incredible programs, all these amazing topics. How did you evolve
as a teacher as you got to do the work? You were kind of training on the go.
Lyttle: When I first started teaching, I think it was grounded on what I thought teaching was all about.
It was, I’ve got information to share. You are the receptacle by which I’m going to pour it into you. It’s
an old-school, tried-and-true, memorize this, understand that, and then you’ll get it.
What I got pulled more and more into, because of Evergreen’s pedagogy, and because of the
people I was teaching with, was a shift from an emphasis on my teaching to their learning. One thing is,
how do I teach better? The other question was, how do I make them learn better? That’s the difference
that I felt.
The whole notion of bringing students to where you are asking questions of them that are deep,
relevant, and shows that they are engaged in learning themselves. That implies that I’m not the only
one who can share this kind of spark inside of them. Their colleagues can do it as well, their fellow
students. They can learn as much from the inquiry from a class of engaged other students with
questions than from me getting up there and just lecturing. You need both, I would guess, but I moved
more from me lecturing less to more seminar.
That’s when I got pulled into the whole notion that the seminar is not just important, but it’s a
fundamental way for them to learn. Much the same with the Socratic Method a long time ago was a
way to learn. Just keep asking questions and students come to their own understanding of where they
settle on ideas, concepts, issues, that is being discussed.
Yet it was that transition that I don’t think I ever perfected. At one point in time, I was intrigued
by Don Finkel’s book Teaching With Your Mouth Shut, that he wrote at Evergreen. I employed some of
his major ideas, but I realized that I wasn’t entirely successful at this. It’s not that I didn’t want to do
more of his techniques to make an effective seminar. I don’t know. It seemed to me the less I lectured,
the more feedback I got from students saying, “You didn’t really say a whole lot in this.” “Yeah, I didn’t,
but everybody else did, and we got to the main ideas.” And some feedback I was getting in my student
evaluations were, “Lee didn’t really say a lot.” [laughing] “Yeah, it was my intent not to say a lot.” But
they never really got the impression, did you learn a lot? [laughing]
Zaragoza: Right, right. That’s the real question.
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Lyttle: It was a student’s self- evaluation that was important. That’s why the evaluation conference was
so important in it. That’s why I always had a principle that I learned early on from Charlie Teske and
Oscar Soule; the student has to write the self-evaluation as a ticket into the evaluation conference. I will
write my evaluation of you. You will write a self-evaluation. And we’re not talking until both of those
are done. Then we’re going to exchange them in our conference, and then the conversation begins to
discuss what this program was all about from the student’s perspective? How did you learn? What was
missing? When did growth happen? Where was the growth truncated and you thought we needed to
go a little further? Where do you go from here? That kind of stuff.
That transition is one that I think has always been a work in progress, from the beginning right
until the day I retired from my teaching at the college. That’s why I say I was never really trained as a
teacher coming into Evergreen, but I’ve always tried to engage in the practice of bettering the student’s
ability to learn, not just by me lecturing them. I even left the college going, hm, I got down the road on
this a little bit. I’m not so sure if I completed the journey.
Zaragoza: Yeah, there’s a lot to think about, and we continue learning how to do what we do, how to
relate to students. What were some of your experiences of students?
Lyttle: Probably what most faculty at Evergreen experienced. I’d come to learn that in Evergreen’s
model of education, the students who get the most out of it are the ones who have grabbed their own
educational challenge themselves.
The ones that come and say, “What’s this all about?” and they have a hard time being selfstarters, those are the ones you have to give the most help to, and you hope to bring them in four years
to a point where, by the time they graduate, they can say, “Oh, yeah, I’m a self-learner. I can do it.”
Evergreen has been known for that, bringing students from “Huh? What’s going on here?” to “I think I
know what I want.”
Then you have the kind of student that I’ve experienced where they come in knowing exactly
what they want, and a lot of times, it is what Evergreen teaches. But a lot of times, it isn’t. A lot of
times it is, “I came here to study this.” And you’re going, “To understand that, you really should be
taking some of this, this, this, and this.” They go, “No, no, no, no, no. That’s just getting in my way.”
Those students either have a ‘come-to-Jesus’ moment seeing that this is what Evergreen is about, or
they leave…they end up not staying with us for four years, or they come at the end of community
college for two years.

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It’s a real mix of students. I think the more pertinent, meaningful issue is how the new
generation of students have changed. Evergreen has tried to maintain in its core idea of
interdisciplinary teaching, and the importance of students getting their heads around many disciplines
effecting societal issues. What pieces of an issue link to student-oriented questions and largest
questions of society? Bringing all of that to bear, I believe, is a part of the societal milieu that’s been
changing over the years. Another growing difficulty is when students say, “I need a job. Evergreen
should be teaching me skills.” It’s one of the sad things because out of this milieu is the point that the
student concerns are valid. It comes out of a society that’s been changing. I have to tell students, “Yeah,
you’ve got to make a living, and you’ve got to find your place.” That place, unfortunately, too often is so
discipline-specific lacking an understanding how other disciplines weave with it in the real world. I think
the college has always been struggling with that, and I think it continues to struggle with that. To be
honest with you, I think it’s not just the students. I think it’s the faculty as well, particularly the newer
faculty.
Newer faculty weren’t part of the founding ideas of the place. They were hired for specialties—
filling in gaps in disciplinary coverage. I’ve seen this on the main campus mostly. They’re really good at
what they were hired for, but they have a hard time team teaching. They have a harder time giving up
teaching time for their own discipline to another team faculty. This is understandable. They love their
subjects and want students to get the best of it.
When I was a dean, there was a concerted effort to hire new and nearly new minted PhD
faculty. By nature, those folks as I have said were in love with the disciplines. You have to expect it.
You wouldn’t want anybody who’s not steeped in their own disciplines. But what I found is that many of
them had trouble teaching across disciplines, and we as a college have trouble bringing them along to
that. They were put on a multi-faculty team. “Okay, you’re one of five.” [laughing]
Zaragoza: Right, and you’ve got to find your place and how to work with the other people because all of
the pieces are valuable. You talked about essentially a conscious effort to hire newly minted
disciplinary-tied folks. Where was the energy for that coming from?
Lyttle: As I recall, the energy was in the composition of the hiring DTFs (Disappearing Task Forces). The
college put together these hiring DTFs and created smaller groups of faculty to help hire in specific
areas. In other words, if you needed a new psychologist, you’d make sure you had mostly psychologists
on the hiring DTFs for that specialty area. It was the bifurcation of the college into these special groups,
and they were given the responsibility for taking the point on hiring faculty with that expertise.

23

The idea was, of course, by many of the deans and provosts, that they would be placed, after
they were hired, into multidisciplinary teaching teams. What happened in many cases, in my view, was
that the specialty areas each have become stronger…a stronger psychology area, a stronger science
area, etc. In the sciences, they even had big disagreements amongst themselves about the emphasis on
the hard sciences versus the soft sciences. “We need five more biologists,” or “We need 10 more
chemists,” instead of more social scientists.
It started to turn into—and maybe it’s by nature—a kind of a competition. Forces were growing
among people who just loved their disciplines and found it increasing difficult to compromise. I had a
harder and harder time telling them, “We’re not telling you to give up on your discipline.” But many of
the faculty I spoke with, especially with the newer faculty, saw interdisciplinary teaching as the watering
down of their stuff. “I know more chemistry than I can deliver in this interdisciplinary team. I need to
have a chemistry program, or class.” Or “I need to have a language thing that’s all about Chinese. I can’t
mold my Chinese language stuff into an Eastern Studies coordinated program.” These forces, I think,
were kind of naturally evolving. Many deans had a hard time—and maybe are still having a hard time—
corralling them into areas that are more interdisciplinary within the context of a broad, liberal arts
education.
At the same time that was happening among the faculty, younger students were coming in
looking, again, for the more traditional kind of college experience. They were looking for a psychology
class, or science class. The challenges seem to increase the longer Evergreen exists because of the social
milieu that was happening around us.
That’s how I started to feel in the latter years, because the debates weren’t about the best
interdisciplinary teaching. The debates were mainly about, how do we get more of that discipline? How
do we get more of this discipline? During tight budgetary times the question was asked, should we keep
a place like Evergreen Tacoma going, because it’s not really contributing to the main campus and it costs
a lot? I was like, how could anyone even think that?
These debates seemed more clandestine and hidden to some extent. They were explored in
some of the larger multi-year DTFs like the GenEd DTF. However, these felt seldom open to full student
participation. They were more internal. The discussions were often tense but ‘divisive’ is not the right
way to put it. What was distressing was that we had a hard time honestly dealing with all those forces. I
don’t know if that made any sense at all.
Zaragoza: It makes a lot of sense, and it’s interesting to think about my own experiences over the last
almost 20 years and see that happened. For you, Lee, sketch for us a little bit about the timeline of that.
24

When do you see that emerge? When does it really take off? When does it achieve critical mass, in
your opinion?
Lyttle: It was, I guess, the perception of when we think these things happened all depend upon the
different experiences that each of us have across the college.
Zaragoza: Yes.
Lyttle: For me, I started to see the seeds germinating early after newer faculty were hired, the cost of
higher ed started to rise precipitously, and the recession of the early/mid 1990s. The seeds were
probably there for a long time. I really started to see the seeds when I moved into administration in the
late 1990s. When I was the dean of first-year students, the Core Dean, getting folks to teach Core was
really a challenge.
Zaragoza: What years are we talking about?
Lyttle: I was a Core/First Year Studies Dean from 1998 to 2001. Because I had a chance to really get into
the heart of college ideals, I had a chance to say, “Okay, now we’re going to put together a curriculum
for first-year students that demonstrated what we were all about.” The college started in the early ‘70s,
so we would have been 20 years out, a little over 20 years out. At that time, we still had many of the
founding faculty members who served as anchors of many of the Core programs that we were putting
together.
Nevertheless, it was hard to find faculty who wanted to teach in core programs. Many had felt
that for the first 20 years or whatever it was, everything was a ‘Core’ (expansive interdisciplinary)
program. The college was new. Now after 10 or 20 years they wanted to teach more of ‘their’ stuff.
They wanted to go more deeply into their disciplines. Teaching in Core meant they automatically
couldn’t teach deeply into their subjects. They had to truncate what they felt were some the most
important aspects of their subject. Whoever was the coordinator of that particular program had the
challenge of trying to mediate those forces.
It’s hard to criticize someone who’s in love with their subject at the level of these faculty
members, particularly with some of these folks who’d been teaching there for 10, 15, 20 years. They
were saying, “It’s time for me to teach more in-depth chemistry. It’s time to teach more in-depth
psychology. It’s time for me to teach more in-depth social programs, or literature.” They wanted to do
more upper-division stuff, and it seemed to me that the more upper-division stuff tended to be less
interdisciplinary. But the core programs were very interdisciplinary. The deans were struggling to find a
workable way through this. At some point where there was instituted a requirement—maybe you
remember this—that once in every cycle of your continuing contract, you had to teach in Core.
25

Zaragoza: Yep.
Lyttle: This didn’t need to be a regulation for all faculty, but it had to be because no one wanted to
teach in Core, all-freshman level programs. I was really struggling to put together, with other faculty,
good, interdisciplinary Core programs. Not because they didn’t think they were valuable, but because
many folks thought it was their turn to teach upper-division stuff in their fields.
That’s when the evolution of all-level programs began. It was a compromise with the faculty. In
an all-level program, they could fulfill their obligation to teach freshmen. Yet, because some of the
programs were all-level, they included were some juniors, seniors, and sophomores were in the class.
They could do some upper-division stuff in one program. All-level programs started to meet the needs, I
think, of more of the faculty. But in it were the seeds of, in my view, the weakening of the
interdisciplinary at every level. That’s just my impression.
Zaragoza: I see. I appreciate that. A lot of things have been moving and evolving over the years, and
it’s good to get these impressions, a collection of these impressions, about the ways Evergreen has
evolved.
Lyttle: Yeah.
Zaragoza: Were there particular challenges or successes or disappointments or paradoxes for you in all
this that you want to speak to?
Lyttle: One thing I think I do want to speak a bit about during my first-year studies dean experience is
the Evans Chair visitors. I always thought about it and struggled hard to make it good. I was in a
position to do something about that. In my view, I thought that the Evans Chair was created to bring the
best and the brightest and maybe even the unusual visitors to our freshmen; somehow make sure that
the best visitors made meaningful connections with the youngest learners at the college. I thought
Evans Chair visitors need to be of national stature. How rare is it in most colleges that a freshman can
talk to someone who’s won a Nobel Prize, or they’re at the top of their field? People who wrote books
that are changing society. This is when I worked on the show for bell hooks with your colleague at
Tacoma.
Zaragoza: Dr. Sheppard?
Lyttle: Yeah! Exactly! When I heard in one of her lectures that she knew bell hooks, I said, “It is time
for us to get a woman of color of national, and sometimes international, renown to Evergreen.” That
was my wish. I was looking at a whole bunch of possible folks. But then I heard that Gilda knew bell I
tapped Gilda on the shoulder. Gilda said, “That could be possible.” I’m going, “Damn! How do we make
it possible? Because I’ve got money, and we could have this person be the Evans Chair.”
26

Zaragoza: Wow.
Lyttle: We could support her. And Gilda, with all her energy and all her love and all her dedication, was
as excited as I was to bring bell hooks and get her into Core programs. Of course, the minute we
announced that she’s coming, the whole college wanted her. [laughing] I had a hard time keeping her
away from the upper-division classes.
The highest priority for her visit were our Core programs and the Tacoma Campus. We were
only going to have her here for a few weeks, but we wanted her to have expansive relationships with
those two aspects of this college. One was as a role model and all the things that bell and Gilda could be
together on the Tacoma Campus. The other was to have the newest students in our core programs be
exposed to the best national, internationally known and respected individual who spoke on very topical
social issues. bell hooks filled that bill. That was one of the things that made me most happy. It
happened!
Zaragoza: That’s a huge success, Lee, and you should be congratulated and thanked for that. They
know that Dr. Sheppard will never forget the work that you did to make that happen. She mentioned it
on many occasions.
Lyttle: Gilda was the one who really made it happen, because I didn’t have the contacts. Then after the
initial contact was made, Gilda was most gracious and magnanimous. Not just with her support, but she
also gave so much of her time to work with bell in the classroom. This meant we had two scholars!
[laughing] Both of them taught in both places. They came to the main campus and the Tacoma Campus.
Zaragoza: I wish I could have been there to see it. I can only imagine it.
Lyttle: Oh, oh. We had standing room only in the library lobby during bell’s talk at the main campus.
There was no other place that we could hold the gathering when bell gave her speech. We had one core
program say, “We’re going to have her in our program.” Because of the demand no classroom or
lecture hall was big enough. So, the library lobby was reserved. This was when the library lobby had the
big staircase.
Zaragoza: Yeah.
Lyttle: It was jammed full and there were still people outside trying to get in.
Zaragoza: Wow.
Lyttle: Half the campus was there for bell’s talk. For the following year’s ‘Evans Chair’ visitor we
brought in Vonda McIntyre, who had written a number of the popular Star Trek novels. She happened
to be in Portland, Oregon, and she was a sister of one of the of a small business owner of Radiance, in

27

downtown Olympia, and I found that out. At the time, I was with the Arts Commission as one of the
Olympia Arts Commissioners. I’m thinking, here’s another nationally known author.
I always thought this was what the Evans Chair was supposed to be about. Bring the best and
the brightest, not just an opportunity for people to cycle through it, which I think the Chair evolved into.
It doesn’t mean the students wouldn’t get anything out of it, but I think we lost that notion of the whole
community realizing, hey, there’s bell hooks happening at Evergreen. How do I get into that? There’s
Vonda McIntyre. Oh, yeah. I’m a Star Trek fan, and she’s one of the authors of the novels. She’s
written two or three of the Star Trek novels. Let’s get to any lecture that she’s having. And the
freshmen have got number one priority around that. These folks are actually In their seminars, in their
lectures. That person’s right here in the classroom!
I always thought that was the core of the Evans Chair, and I’m sorry. I don’t want to say it’s
evolved, but I think it’s lost its panache. Along with Super Saturday. BTW, I think it’s a big loss that we
don’t do Super Saturday as a connection to the community.
Zaragoza: Speak a little bit more about that, Lee. That does seem to be important to you. Give us a
little bit of background about what Super Saturday was, what its intentions were, and how we lost it.
Lyttle: Super Saturday, from what I understand, started because Evergreen was the college on 1,000
acres just outside of Olympia. It’s kind of apart from the community. Even though we’ve had a number
of our students and faculty who were involved in community efforts around, Evergreen was always
looked at as this weird place out there on 1,000 acres, with a bunch of students smoking dope, jumping
rope, telling jokes. [laughing]
Super Saturday was this reach out room of the college to Olympia. It was a grand invitation to
the community to come to the college and just be with us. It had all kinds of things going on. We had
poetry reading in the library, it had music, we had all the vendors in the region selling food and
tchotchkes and homemade crafts. Many of them were Evergreen grads who had their own little
business making crafts and batik and all the rest of things like that.
At one point in time, for a number of years, it was the largest one-day event in the state. It was
bigger than the Fair at Puyallup. It was huge. It was absolutely huge.
Zaragoza: Wow.
Lyttle: And it was high energy. Politics made no difference. Far left, far right, everybody was there
having a good time on the campus. Students were showing some of their end-of-the-year projects in
certain parts of the campus. We had a beer garden, so we got around the alcohol restrictions by getting
a temporary liquor sell license. It was great. But it was mainly supported through the volunteer work of
28

the maintenance folks and staff from across the college. Folks were not paid to do the clean-up and all
that.
Zaragoza: Oh-h-h.
Lyttle: After so many years folks just said, “I can’t do this anymore. It’s just too taxing. I’m not getting
paid for it.” That sentiment changed things. The library held a 5K race on the Sunday after Super
Saturday.
Zaragoza: I ran in it a couple times.
Lyttle: Yeah! It was right after Super Saturday. Super Saturday was after graduation, so the parents
would come in and stay for Super Saturday. You’d have the graduation on one day, and the following
day was Super Saturday, and then the third day was the race. We had some parents running in the 5K
race. [laughing] One year Les Purce would give the “Ready, set, go!” at the top of the parkway. It was
an amazing weekend, where the community and the parents and the families of our students had a ton
of fun!
Then the word I got was economically, we can’t afford this anymore. I think that’s when we lost
our strongest connection to the community. It was a major loss. I believe we’re still suffering from the
schism. Now we want students who are coming out of high school to come to Evergreen, and they’re
going, “Evergreen? What the heck is Evergreen?” I think a part of it is that we lost the connection to
the community.
It’s almost the opposite of what’s been happening with the Tacoma Campus, with what you do,
and what Gilda does, and what the teaching team—all the stuff you do to bring the community in and
try to reach out to the community.
Zaragoza: On a regular basis.
Lyttle: On a regular basis. Exactly right. You want to be a part of that Tacoma community. At
Evergreen Olympia say it’s economics that keeps us from continuing SS. However, I think it’s a false
economic, from my own perspective, to say, “we can’t afford it, so the community is going to have to
come and find us.” Or “We’ll have to attract them in another way.” I think they forget, or forgot, that at
one time, we had a powerful attractor. The community would see that we were part of the Olympia
area, from the high school right on to when they graduate from there. The small business owners in
downtown Olympia and in Centralia and Chehalis saw value in us. Maybe that’s also a part of the kind of
the schism that’s happened in our political environment as well.
Zaragoza: Do you know who started Super Saturday?
Lyttle: I don’t.
29

Zaragoza: You’re not going to believe it, but in these interviews, I found out who actually started Super
Saturday. In fact, you named him earlier today. It was Duke Kuehn.
Lyttle: Did Duke start Super Saturday?
Zaragoza: Yes.
Lyttle: That doesn’t surprise me one bit. [laughing] I always loved working with Duke.
Zaragoza: That’s great.
Lyttle: It’s that kind of spirit that would do it. I could see it. I could actually see that. That’s a
believable revelation to me. [laughter]
Zaragoza: That’s great. We’ve talked about teaching. We’ve talked about some of these issues. Tell us
a little bit about your time in governance and as an administrator. You were dean on multiple occasions.
You were director of programs.
Lyttle: The longest period in administration was the Dean of the Library and Media Services from 2001
to 2008. Those were fascinating times for me content-wise, because it was the blossoming of the
Internet and social media. Libraries and information agencies and social media sectors were still
developing, and search engines were just starting to become really used well and functioning. They
were a little funky, but the college was using them, and we were starting to weave that stuff into the
teaching, I’ll put it that way. I gave a lot of workshops on how to create a Web page. Content-wise, that
was very fulfilling.
More than anything else, I think, it was the people on the staff in Media Services and the library,
my colleagues, Ernestine, Sarah, and Frank Motley and a few of the others who were very supportive.
The staff, Mindy Muzatko and a whole bunch of other folks were just really good people to work with.
They were dedicated to the profession. They were dedicated to the college. They were volunteering for
all kinds of stuff that was happening around it. It was just a pleasure to work with them and to be the
dean. I really felt, in many ways, it was my job to just get out of their way, and just make sure the
budgetary and the administrative ‘hoo-ha’ was dealt with, with a modicum of competence. My teaching
at that time was minimal. I didn’t have a lot of time to do a lot of teaching outside of the dean work, but
that’s kind of typical for a dean.
The major part of that whole experience was the library remodel, a $17 million renovation. We
had to move the entire library twice in two years.
Zaragoza: That’s right.
Lyttle: It was a challenge and a half to get that project done, and work with the architects, the
engineers, and all the folks over in Facilities. This is where my past architectural training really paid off.
30

I could read all the blueprints and understand exactly what they were doing and felt that I had a voice at
the table. They depended upon me to provide input.
Actually, what I felt was my role was to be a kind of intermediary between the faculty librarians,
the staff, and the project design team. Ideas and floorplan options went back and forth and back and
forth. Evergreen’s Facilities folks were looking at us to be saying, "Okay, tell us what you need.” I’d
work with the staff, and they’d say, “Where should the office of the dean be? Where should the stacks
be? How do we move things around to make things work better?” Some things worked wonderfully
better. Some things, we ran into all kinds of hiccups. Those big, shear walls in the library came on late
in the project and unexpectedly took up a lot of space. There were earthquake mitigation walls.
Unfortunately, they had to be placed where you would put lights or open space in the middle of the
library. The library was supposed to be a lot more open. We also needed more media rooms. There
were a whole bunch of challenges like that. I would say it was a major project.
That’s when we moved the Writing Center and the Math, now Quantitative Reasoning, Center
into the library. They previously had their own little space upstairs someplace, and we actually moved
them into the library reasoning that information and our academic library is greater than just a
repository for books. Those conversations were happening at those stages—bringing in new hires for
the centers including a Director for the Writing Center. I helped hire the Director of the centers and
bring them into an Information Zone of the campus. The imagined goal was to expand the library into
another teaching center, with math, writing, and research all working together. That was just fun stuff,
Anthony, very challenging, but a ton of fun.
Then representing the college and the library in the alliances (the Cascade Alliance), with the
University of Washington, Eastern, and Central Universities. Working with those deans made sure that
the interlibrary loan systems worked well. The bigger one, we joined was the Oregon Orbis system. That
became the Orbis/Cascade Alliance system that we have now. It includes the majority of Oregon’s fouryear and Washington State’s public colleges. We share materials, share databases, buy stuff together.
It was just a good time to be in administration in that particular sector—to sit around the table
with the other deans, looking at the broader picture of how the college is moving our curriculum
through those times. That was just a ton of fun. I’ve got to admit I enjoyed that.
Zaragoza: Those are truly large projects and large roles that you played at the college. I always said my
favorite folks on the Olympia campus are the library folks.
Lyttle: It’s a good group, Anthony. They really are and were a good group.

31

Zaragoza: Absolutely. How about any other major events, crises, turmoil, tensions, shifts that you
noticed that you feel are important to talk about?
Lyttle: Let me just go through some of the ones that I came up with. I don’t think we’ll have time to talk
about them all.
I served on the first arming of the police on campus. I was on that DTF. That, I thought, was one
of the meatier ones, because it was at a time when the police were under—not just our police but police
nationwide—a lot of . . . attack was the wrong word, but they were being held to question because of
the use of arms and stuff like that, and the unions were defending them in being armed for patrolman
safety reasons.
Before that, Evergreen police were on bicycles and t-shirts and shorts. In other words, they
really wanted to fit in and feel like a part of the students. It wasn’t a police department. It was a
security force. The decision was made because those police felt that because of the shooting on
campuses across the nation, they felt threatened. They said, “We are not in the position to protect the
students on this campus.”
They made that case to the administration. I was a dean at the time, and I think Barbara Smith
was the provost, and Les Purce was the President. I think Les was still the President then. Yeah, I think
he was the President then. We formed a DTF, and then they brought the union concerns in, saying, “We
have to be able to protect—be armed—and have the resources to protect this campus. If somebody
came on campus with a gun, there’s nothing we could do.”
Boy. Art Costantino chaired that, and I think he did a masterful job in this. Some of the
arguments were intense. We had some students on the DTF were understandably really strong in their
anti-arming views. There were times when the conversation got really messy. Some of the officers
were saying, “We need to have assault rifles that would match any assault rifle that appeared on
campus.” “We need to have cars and uniforms. We need to turn into a police department as opposed
to a security office.”
Of course, as I said, the students were really against that. They did not want to see uniformed
cops around campus. They certainly didn’t want to see them armed and riding around in police cars.
Basically, over the years, there were, I think, two other DTFs following up on that one. We agreed in
that initial one that, yeah, they need to be better supplied if the campus was to be safe. It came down
to safety. But the final decision was not unanimous. Some folks were thinking, well, they need to
continue to investigate non-lethal weapons. Just use tear gas. Just use sprays. Just use batons. We
didn’t want to see you with rifles and sidearms and things like that. The police department at the time
32

said, “Okay, we’ll keep the guns in our car, and we won’t have sidearms.” Of course, the union came
back, I think a year or two later, and said, “No, that’s not good enough. It’s against union rules. You’re
putting our members out there and they can’t protect themselves, so it’s a safety issue.”
The progression from security folks on bicycles with t-shirts and hats to now you see patrol cars,
full uniforms, guns, is one that is, in my view, one of the bit challenges in the change in the character of
the campus. That was a big one for me.
Zaragoza: For sure. Thank you for bringing that one up. That, I know, has been a big issue over the
years.
Lyttle: Yeah, it really has. As I’m looking down my list of other things . . . oh, boy . . . most of these are
just kind of personal things, things that I served on and did. I was the Human Subject Reviews Officer for
a couple of years for working with copyright issues and things like that. That was interesting. I also
served as the Board of Trustees faculty rep and the Foundation Board faculty rep. There’s probably
stories around all that stuff that I’m not so sure is all that interesting to get into. There are probably
issues that other folks who have served in those really interesting roles can share as well.
The faculty exchange to Kobe was the highlight for me and my family, since Janet is Japanese
American.
Zaragoza: What year did you go?
Lyttle: We went 2008-2009. When did you go? You were right after me, I think.
Zaragoza: Yeah, I went in 2012.
Lyttle: Okay, so maybe you were not the one right after me but the second round.
Zaragoza: I went right after Mark Harrison and his family.
Lyttle: There you go. Okay. Because I think after me was . . . who’s the Muckleshoot?
Zaragoza: Yes, Jeff Antonellis-Lapp.
Lyttle: Yes, I think it was Jeff, and then Mark Harrison and his family. His daughter just won an Olympic
Gold Medal.
Zaragoza: Yeah, right!
Lyttle: Yeah, man, I watched that race. [laughing] That was great! Then you. I think you went with
your Italian girlfriend?
Zaragoza: Yeah, she and my daughter and I went out there. That is exactly right.
Lyttle: Yeah, and I was saying that I hope that place that they’d given you is big enough.
Zaragoza: It was perfect. It was perfect for us. My time in Kobe was delightful, man. What are some of
the things that stand out for you?
33

Lyttle: Oh, geez. To me, the number one thing was my counterpart and the students. They were just
sparkling. My Japanese counterpart, Yoshiro (Jack) Yasuda and his wife Miko were exceptional. In Japan
Jack planned his teaching so that it would not conflict with my teaching, so all my classes were done
team teaching. He fell really in love with team teaching at Evergreen . . .
Zaragoza: Oh, that’s so smart.
Lyttle: When he was with us in Olympia he said, “I’m going to do that when we go back to Kobe.” When
I was giving lectures in Kobe, he was walking through the classroom and any student who looked like
they couldn’t get it, he would tell them in Japanese what Lee was saying. Then they would say
something in English—they were really struggling with English—and then he would talk to them in
Japanese again, and say, “Oh, yeah. They were trying to say this.” So, the communication barriers
weren’t as deep as I thought they were going to be, just because Jack was there.
Zaragoza: That’s so helpful. I love that.
Lyttle: Yeah, and then the students were great. I’d have two classes a week, which is amazing because I
had so little teaching responsibilities as compared with Evergreen’s. However, the students themselves
came to me after the third week and said, “Do you have time after class just to have conversations?” I
would meet with them, and we would talk about their life, boyfriends, girlfriends, what’s it like dating in
the US? They just wanted to learn more about it, about the US experience for college kids, and practice
their English. I was so honored that they came to me and said, “Would you do this?” I said, “Sure.” It
was great.
Then, of course, with Janet and her family, we made a connection with her family that she didn’t
even know existed. She brought a letter or two from past parental and grand parental communications
that had the family names on them. However, through the kind intervention of other Kobe faculty
colleagues we actually found her family in a town that was about two hours away by train. We visited.
Janet shared some old family pictures with them. They treated us like we were visiting royalty. The
whole village and extended family came out to greet us and our family and sang traditional Japanese
songs at the community center. We visited the grave and markings of the Hayakawa family. It was
beautiful. It really was. That experience was fantastic for us. One of our boys is taking Japanese in
school. Both of the boys want to go back and do maybe their graduate work there or something. It was
good. It was really good.
Zaragoza: Lee, as we wind up, are there memorable people—students, staff, faculty, other folks—that
you’d like to mention as part of your career and your development?

34

Lyttle: I think throughout our talk here, Anthony, I mentioned all the main people. To me, Barbara
Smith and the deans I’ve worked with, my colleagues, were all important to my Evergreen experience.
I’ve never worked with a better bunch of folks who were so welcoming, flexible in their thinking, and
supportive of each other. The deanery has always been great. As an administrator, one of my areas of
training, I especially enjoyed working with that first group of deans. However, there’s not one group of
deans that I I’ve worked with who disappointed me—whether as the group during my service as Evening
and Weekend Studies Dean or as the Interim Dean at the Tacoma Campus.
I never considered myself a Tacoma dean, to be honest with you. I was a placeholder for Marcia
and you guys. [laughing] That’s how I really felt. You guys needed a real dean who was there on site.
The big challenge for me in that whole role—and you know about this—was fending off people who
really thought that the Tacoma Campus was something that we may not be able to afford anymore. It
was from people who were some of the newer administrator folks up on the third floor in Olympia. It
almost hurt to actually hear arguments like that.
That’s why what we did during that whole ‘SORE’ process was absolutely critical. Your role and
Gilda Sheppard’s role were critical and vital. Everybody came together and said, “We’re going to work
on this.” It was hard. We had to make some real concessions about stuff, but there was certainly
enough to go back and fend off that sentiment. They didn’t get it. They just didn’t get it. But it was
enough to keep our work moving forward. In all my experiences in administration, that was probably
the most disturbing and unsettling that they could possibly come to a poor conclusion. It was only a few
people, one person in particular. It was a money thing. I’m going, “No, no, no, no, no. We’re not a
bank. We’re not in this for making money. This is something deeper and richer.”
Zaragoza: I thank you for the work that you did on behalf of the Tacoma Campus, and I apologize for all
the hard times that I gave you. It was never personal but only business.
Lyttle: Of course, Anthony, it was all from love of Evergreen. That’s how I took it. One part that
prickled a bit was that you were so enthusiastic, you wouldn’t let me do my job on the Tacoma Campus.
You’d say, “When are you going to do this? When are you going to do that?” I was like, “I’m working on
it, man.” [laughter] But I knew it came from a passion that we both felt, but you expressed probably a
lot more than I did in that environment.
Zaragoza: I knew you were into it and defending us, but my goal was just to light a little extra fire.
Lyttle: Of course! [laughter] I get it, man. I get it. At the time, I was like, “You’re in my way!” But the
more I thought about it, and we got to the end, maybe that’s a fire that needed to be under my butt so I
could be more vocal when I was dealing with the other folks.
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Zaragoza: That was the message. You got it.
Lyttle: Yes, I got it. I did. Thank you so much for taking the time to even do this little exercise with me
here. Anthony, going through this oral history project, it was fascinating. It gave me the time to go
through some of these old files and pull out some of these old notes, and to reminisce, and to try to
think more deeply about some of the questions that you’ve asked me in this time we’ve had. There’s a
lot of stuff here. I’m looking at my notes, and they’re not going back in the drawer. They’re important
for me to just think more about. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do that.
Zaragoza: I appreciate that, Lee. Thank you. Before you go, just tell us a little bit about what you’ve
done since you’ve retired, and how you’ve built off of your life and career at Evergreen, and all the other
places we’ve mentioned.
Lyttle: Over the years, particularly as I got closer to retirement, Janet and I have been talking about my
retirement when the boys got into high school. I counted off the years to when I was going to be of
retirement age, and where the boys were, so I knew about when I wanted to retire.
Once we realized that schedule, I started going back and thinking. When you teach, you delve
into books and material, and talk about issues and concepts. You could never go as deeply as you
wanted to, particularly when you have new material, you have a new book and everybody’s reading it,
and there are new ideas there. And you’re going, gawd, there’s something important here that maybe a
student mentioned, or we talked about in a seminar, but don’t have time to spend on it now. We’ve got
to move. We have other books. We have other seminars, other students.
I’ve been keeping a list of those. I’m going more deeply into this, this, this, this, this. Since I’ve
retired, I have now been going through and delving more deeply into that list—I wanted to study that, I
wanted to look more deeply into that.
These things are very disparate. It’s into the role of music in the species...the history of the
species from anthropological times in an anthropological way...the origin or the discovery of the
quark.... My look is so broad.
Then there’s a whole list of things about democracy…this experiment in democracy, and other
democracies that are also trying to do some things right now. The Chinese say, “We like capitalism, but
we are only going to use the pieces that work in a socialist, communistic context. We can’t do without it
because it’s the economic engine.” I’m looking at that. I’m looking at a whole list of things.
I was asked to rejoin the state’s Arts Commission, so I am again on the Arts Commission, and I’m
looking at the arts across the state.

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There are so many things now that are really filling in the holes of 10, 15 years of incomplete
thoughts and ideas that I’ve had. I am having the time of my life doing this. This is just so much fun
because I must have at least two or three aha moments, “Oh, that’s what that’s about...” “That’s the
genesis of that...” “That’s the foundation of that thought….” “That’s where this comes from...” “That’s
how this country is put together, functionally, not theoretically, not the founding fathers, but this is how
it’s kind of working...”
I’m doing as much of that as I can. Every day, it’s wonderful to wake up in the morning and say,
“I don’t have to write about this. I just want to understand it.” Sometimes I’ll spend a day on a single
paragraph, or a sentence. I’ll mull it over in my mind, I’ll bounce one concept off of different ideas.
That’s what I’m doing, and I don’t think I’m going to be finished before they sprinkle my ashes
over the ocean or something.
Zaragoza: I hear you, Lee, and that is a fantastic next chapter for an Evergreen emeritus like yourself to
pursue the life of inquiry and engagement in the way that you did during your career, and that took its
seeds from all the work that you were doing.
Lee Lyttle, thank you so much for doing this interview for the Oral History Project, and sharing
your reflections and recollections.
Lyttle: It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for tapping me on the shoulder and giving me this
opportunity. It’s been my pleasure.
Zaragoza: Wonderful.
Lyttle: You take good care.
Zaragoza: You, too, and let’s be in touch. All the best.
Lyttle: Okay, see you. ‘Bye.
Zaragoza: ‘Bye.

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Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

LyttleLee_20211021_Transcript.pdf