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Identifier
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MacGregorJean
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Title
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Jean MacGregor Oral History Interview
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Date
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26 March 2019
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Creator
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Jean MacGregor
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Contributor
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Barbara Leigh Smith
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extracted text
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Jean MacGregor
Interviewed by Barbara Leigh Smith
The Evergreen State College oral history project
March 26, 2019
FINAL
Smith: Let’s get started. Can you begin by talking a little bit about growing up and becoming an
educator?
MacGregor: Sure. I wrote a few notes down so I can, you know, it isn’t super complete, but it’s a few
things I do want to mention.
I grew up in northern New Jersey, west of New York City, out in the countryside, but not too far
from urbanizing and suburbanizing northern New Jersey. The most formative people in my life were my
two parents. My dad was an investment banker, but he loved natural history and hunting and fishing,
and was very active in conservation activities at his citizen life. He was also a very middle-of-the-road,
slightly left-leaning Republican. Every dinner table conversation, and people coming through the house,
were always talking politics. He was a big supporter of people who were candidates for office, so we
had any number of getting-to-know-you things with the neighborhood with candidates.
My mother was a Left Coast Berkeley grad who worked in social work after her time in Berkeley
in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, and then in Alameda County. Then, when World War II broke out,
she became a Red Cross social worker at Fort Ord, and worked with returning soldiers and their families.
She encountered what was then called shell shock and is now called PTSD, and she was so alarmed by it
that she actually went to the National Red Cross in Washington, D.C. to urge them to take it more
seriously.
When she married my dad and moved to New Jersey, she became a homemaker, but she was
the quintessential community leader volunteer, and got very involved in the settlement house in
Morristown, New Jersey that was built to serve the families, and particularly the community that lived in
Federal housing in Morristown, New Jersey, which is a mix of Italian immigrants and African Americans.
So, it was an interracial settlement house with an African-American director who was my third role
model, Mrs. [Grace] Mead.
I became a volunteer at this settlement house at the age of 14 or so, working with younger kids,
so my teaching career began with kids in poverty. I was a group leader of arts and crafts and sports and
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all that. But my mother observed that the kids in this settlement house, many of them were
academically talented but had no vision of anything after high school. None.
She had a vision of creating a scholarship fund for students from the neighborhood to go to
college, but it was not just a matter of fundraising, it was a matter of coaching about appropriate college
choice, about prep for tests, about how to craft an application. Then she rounded up a group of
volunteers who were all women who were parents of college students who had all gone through it with
their kids—they were a little older than she was—to help out. Many times, with kids as they were
leaving for college, she’d say, “Here’s my phone number. If you need anything, call me collect.” And
they did.
So, she saw a lot of them through college, and one of her happiest moments toward the end of
her life was there was some sort of reception for the latest and greatest at the Neighborhood House
over the years, and she went to it. She was now living in Pennsylvania, but got her friend to drive her to
this event.
She said, “I really want to meet the new director of the Neighborhood House,” because Mrs.
Mead had retired. This African-American man came up to her and said, “Hello, Mrs. MacGregor. You
probably don’t remember me, but I’m Joe Smith, and I was one of your kids that you put through
college, and I’m the new director.”
Smith: Wow! [laughter]
MacGregor: So, really happy times for her. Anyway, that got me interested in teaching. Then, as a
college student, I was actually on the staff of the Neighborhood House, doing more leadership work
around organizing other volunteers to work with teenagers and kids. At the same time, on weekends I
was a naturalist interpreter at the just-created Great Swamps National Wildlife Refuge, about four miles
from home. So, I was teaching all through my high school years. Then, in my college years, when I got
to the University of Michigan, I helped pay the bills for myself by being a tour guide at the University of
Michigan Exhibits Museum. We were giving tours with tour groups, with everything from kindergarten
to high school students, even some college classes with some of the really excellent dinosaur exhibits
and all that at the university museum.
I want to jump along a little bit. I would say really, teachers that played a really significant role
in my college years were two. At Wellesley, I encountered Robert Shupe, who taught ecology, and was
very, very field-based, which was fabulous and spoke to me. I became so enamored of ecology that I
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went to him and asked, “How can I do advanced work here? Because what I see in the catalog is all the
sort of bench biology, microbiology and cell biology and physiology and all that.” He said, “Leave.”
Smith: Wow!
MacGregor: I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “You’ve got to leave. You have to transfer, unless
you want to wait till graduate school.” He said, “This place is fabulous if you want to go to medical
school or start a PhD, but if you want to do anything with skin-out biology as opposed to skin-in biology,
it won’t happen here.” He said, “I want to leave.” And he did. The year after I left, he went to U of
Rhode Island, and stayed there for the rest of his career. He instilled the love of ecology and natural
history and environmental questions.
When I got to Michigan, I ran across this amazing professor named William Stapp, who was
deeply committed to what was then called conservation education, and community-based learning. He
taught this impactful course in community studies. Every Saturday morning was a fieldtrip. What he did
was he led a fieldtrip for about four hours every Saturday morning about things going on in the
community of Ann Arbor, most of them environmental, but some social issues, too, and some kind of
community plan issues. Then the assignment for the following week was one to do the readings for the
next fieldtrip, but then also to write a paper, where you had to choose something that spoke to you on
that fieldtrip and write more about it by interviewing other people. You couldn’t just go to the library.
You had to interview people.
So, I started interviewing all the professors at the university. I’d say, “Okay, who’s doing things
with downtown revitalization?” Even at a huge university, there’s always somebody around. Then I’d
ask that person, “Is there anybody else I could talk to?” And this was way before e-mail, so you could
literally knock on professors’ doors and discover things.
Smith: Meanwhile, you’re learning a lot about methodology, among other things.
MacGregor: Yeah. And he did coaching about how to interview people, how to not take up too much
time. If you borrow anything, you must be sure to bring it back, he said, “Because this course is on the
line, and I’m on the line if you lose anything.”
I went off into the working world, and a year later he called me and he said, “I’ve been given
permission by the University of Michigan to start a graduate program in environmental education.” I
said, “What’s environmental education? I’ve never heard the phrase.” And he said, “That’s why I want
you to come. We’re going to figure it out.”
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He had money, so I immediately went back a year later to Ann Arbor to start master’s work.
There were like eight of us, and he said, “We’re going to spend a year writing the first definition of
environmental education. And I said, “Bill, why can’t we just spend an afternoon writing the definition,
and then sort of roll it out for a year?” He said, “Uh-uh. This is theory-building.”
So, we spent a year, and it became the very first article in the Journal of Environmental
Education, Volume 1, Number 1. It’s William Stapp et al, and I’m part of the et al. It was an amazing
group of people. I’m still in touch with many who were part of that original.
Smith: How did you do that one-year exploration?
MacGregor: We started out on the chalkboard, thinking of all the elements of, why is this field different
from nature study and outdoor education and experiential education, all that stuff? We went into
Dewey big time and Alfred North Whitehead big time.
Another strand of it was, why is the conservation field becoming obsolete in view of
environmental pollution? Because schools of natural resources were about managing watersheds and
soil and wildlife and fish, but it wasn’t about air pollution, and public health, and all these emerging
fields in the late ‘60s. This was ’69, so we were behind the curve of a changing world, and a highly
urbanizing world. So, we had to face urban issues, demographic issues, and the hard stuff was root
causes. Because air pollution and water pollution are symptoms, but the root causes have a lot to do
with lifestyles and capitalism.
Smith: Yes.
MacGregor: So, we got into all of that, and then one of our grad students was in policy and looking at
the whole Saul Alinsky approach. Another person was at the leading edge of environmental psychology
about what motivates people to take action. We had all these doctoral students, who were bringing in
their expertise. It was a very interdisciplinary group of people. We just had seminars and argued this,
and finally, we had to put it on paper. And we did it, and it was really exciting.
I’m going to keep talking about Bill for a minute, because it has something to do with what
shaped my career, and particularly working with you, Barbara. But four years later—’73 or ‘74—
UNESCO in Paris called Bill and said, “Would you come to Paris? Could you get a leave of absence for
two years to open and Office of Environmental Education in Paris?” And he said, “Absolutely,” and did.
His travel budget was something like four times his salary, and he went to every UN nation at
the time, which was, I think, 124. He went to every single country, and lined it up ahead of time to meet
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people in science education, museum personnel, zoo personnel in the major city; any kind of eco club,
environmental club or nature club he could find. He would bring them all together and say, “This is my
big idea. Environmental education is terribly important because the people who are in schools today—
elementary, secondary and tertiary levels—are all going to have to make decisions about the quality of
their environment, and we haven’t prepared them. We have to. So what does that look like to you?”
He didn’t lay out all the steps or all the qualities of environmental ed. He said, “There is a need. How do
you see it?” And then he said, “Well, this is why I’m trying to develop this field of environmental ed,”
but he didn’t lay it on anybody. I mean, it was such a Saul Alinsky approach. It was “Here’s a vision.
How do you see it?”
Smith: They had to own it, and think.
MacGregor: So ’75 was the first big UN conference in Belgrade, and what came out of it was called the
Belgrade Charter, which was all the nations agreeing on sort of the framework. A couple of years later,
there was an even bigger conference in Tbilisi, which was so important to Russia at the time that they
had time dedicated every evening on the national news in Russia about this conference. It was
phenomenal. He essentially ignited a field in the world in the space of six years.
Smith: What did he do with the academy to ignite that fire?
MacGregor: Well, he motivated all kinds of other institutions to start environmental education
programs, or to start changing the names of courses to conservation and environmental education. By
’71 or ’72, there was the National Association of Environmental Education, which is now the North
American Association. So, within years, there was a journal, there was a national association, and there
were other graduate programs. I was just at the North American Conference in Spokane last fall.
Fifteen hundred people come to the conference. It’s pretty cool.
But the thing that he taught me was you can have a very big vision, but to make the vision occur,
you need all kinds of partners to make it happen.
Smith: Which doesn’t happen often. Try to light a fire in one little segment of the choir that you know,
and it doesn’t make it go.
MacGregor: Right. Toward the end of his life, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. They toss
out most of the nominations, but the top, I think, 50 that got nominated are invited to Oslo for the
dinner and the presentation of the Peace Prize. So, all the runner-ups get invited to Oslo, and he was
part of it. Isn’t that great?
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Smith: What a mentor.
MacGregor: Yeah, what a mentor indeed. Anyway, after that unbelievably formative experience, I
spent the first, I don’t know, 10 to 14 years in the world of environmental education, but always building
things from scratch—starting a volunteer program, restarting a failing science museum in Georgia,
creating an environmental ed center in the mountains of North Carolina.
Then I got this call from Warren Wilson College, and then also I got super interested in
environmental planning and rulemaking. I’d been in Georgia when Jimmy Carter got elected President—
I was in Savannah—and he really wanted the Federal government to have much more public
participation in all kinds of policy. So he directed all the agencies to have public involvement.
So the environmental agencies—EPA, Forest Service, Parks Service, Department of Interior, the
Wildlife Refuges, Coastal Zone Management, all these federal projects—the Army Corps—all needed to
have public involvement. And who was around to do it? It was a whole flock of people who had been
environmental activists. So I spent a period of time sort of doing part-time work in environmental
education, and then part-time contracts in public involvement where I was a convener of public
meetings, or acting as an evaluator of public processes. It was absolutely fascinating work, but it
required me to be on the road a lot, and I really got really sick of traveling all around doing it.
Just about that time, I got this call from Warren Wilson College saying, “We at the college are
thinking about starting an environmental studies program, but we in biology don’t want it to just be
science. We need to do some planning with faculty and other disciplines, and we’ve heard that you kind
of can convene things, and we think an external person will keep us all honest.”
Smith: On track, yeah.
MacGregor: I got invited in and started doing it, and started meeting all these really interesting people
with this wonderful vision. Warren Wilson is a unique college like Evergreen is, with a very remarkable
vision about hands and hearts. It’s a work school and has a deeply felt spiritual tradition, not necessarily
religious. It once was a Presbyterian college, but it’s secular now and has been for some time, but it still
had its roots in kind of spiritual commitments.
After about four or five meetings, I thought, I would kill to teach here. [laughter] So I began to
sort of drop hints, and the faculty realized that I could fill a lot of gaps. So they invited me to start
teaching a course or two, and within a year, with the Dean at the time and the President at the time, I
said, “I see two things that are eminently fundable. One would be to build an organic gardening
program to go with the farm program.” There was a longstanding farm at the school. In fact, the
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original name of the school was the Ashville Farm School for Mountain Boys. It was created in 1890. It
only merged with a girls’ school in the 1930s, and then eventually became a junior college, and then a
senior college. It had a longstanding sort of relationship with Yale, because of the Presbyterian thing. I
would say a third of the faculty were from Yale, and the President had worked at Yale, and they had a
big Yale streak there.
Smith: Wow. Very high quality people.
MacGregor: Very high quality, and a lot of retirees from Yale would retire to Ashville and then teach
part-time. It just was odd.
Anyway, there had been this longstanding farm, so Warren Wilson students could be on the
feeder pig crew and the Hereford cattle crew, and the farm crew growing all the corn to feed all the pigs
and the cattle. But there was no garden program, and I thought, it’s great that kids can work on a work
crew, but how many of these graduates are really going to become farmers or raisers of meat?
Smith: And it wasn’t part of the education really.
MacGregor: No, but the work crew stand beside the academic curriculum, so you get an academic
transcript with your major and all that, and then you get a work transcript.
Smith: But were there linkages between those two?
MacGregor: Only occasionally. For example, there was a music library connected to the music program.
Every academic department had secretaries who were all work crew students. But it was largely the
work crew kind of managed the whole community. They took care of the landscape, maintained the
landscape, worked in the library, cooked and cleaned up all the food, were the janitorial crew, electric
crew, on and on and on. Every crew had a crew leader who was a journeyman electrician or a chef,
whatever.
I said, “I think there needs to be a garden crew that could be connected to sustainable
agriculture coursework. We’re sitting in the Swannanoa River Valley. We have all this gorgeous river
valley riparian soil. It would be fabulous. And it could also be fir trees and beekeeping and the whole
thing. We need to create it. And that’s a fundable idea. Secondly, it won’t take as much money, but
there needs to be an environmental education program, because we’re sitting on a thousand acres, and
we can have people come here and enjoy this place. We can have interpretive signs all over the place.
That’s a logical career for all these young people who are interested in environmental studies. And it
could also beef up the Education Department.” Because teacher ed was a big deal there.
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It all came together, and within five years, one-fifth of the student body were majoring in
environmental studies, not environmental education. It just popped out. But it was 1979, ’80, ’81. It
was perfect timing, and it really put Warren Wilson on the map with that kind of quality. And we had a
fantastic colleague in a man named Alan Haney, who created a summer forestry program, like a forestry
camp. And the graduates were all going to grad school—Yale School of Environmental Education. He
was fabulous, but he kind of got burned out at Warren Wilson and chose to become Dean of the biggest
forestry school in the country, U of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where he stayed till he retired a few years
ago.
So, we lost him, but we gained the environmental ed program. I had written the grants for that.
The Garden Program became huge and still is. We got major grants for that. The college figured out the
best way to have me stay was to have me have a faculty appointment. But half of my appointment
would be grant money.
Smith: Been there, done that. [laughing]
MacGregor: I said, “Could I be considered then in tenure track?” And he said, “Sure, but it might take
you a little longer just because you’re doing all these other things.” I said, “If that’s acceptable.” They
said, “It’s entirely acceptable. That’s why we’d like to do this.”
I had a couple of people at the top who really supported me, and I was on my way and totally
happy. But then, Rob Cole came on. [laughter] So now, we’re getting to Evergreen.
The love of my life, I had met when he was at UNC-Ashville. He was actually talking about, when
we first got to know each other really well, he was doing his exchange out here in ’79 or so. And he
liked it so much, he had said to Byron Youtz, “If ever a position would come up around energy studies
and physics, I’ll apply.” Because he was from Northern California, done graduate work at the University
of Washington, taught at St. Martin’s earlier, loved south Puget Sound, and had taught Evergreen for a
year, and it was the dream job for him.
When I got here in ’82, it was really exciting to be with him, really exciting to be in Puget Sound,
although all of my networks were in the Eastern time zone. I just jumped out here and hardly knew
anybody out here. There was kind of a depression in Washington at that time, so there was a hiring
freeze in State government, and there was a hiring freeze at Evergreen. My first impression of
Evergreen was I bought a pass to the rec center, and so I would swim in the swimming pool. We were
living in ASH (Adult-Student Housing), so I’d walk over to the gym and work out a little bit, and swim laps
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in the pool, and I’d sit in the sauna. The women’s sauna was always dark. There were never any light on
in it.
Smith: And it was smaller. [laughing]
MacGregor: And it was smaller back then. And I would sit, and I would listen to Evergreen students talk
about their faculty and their coursework and stuff, and they’d discuss it.
Through Rob, my social circle in environmental studies began to grow. What struck me about
Evergreen, because I had, through all my work in science museums and nature centers, the whole
cooperative learning, project-based learning thing was what the conservation was—particularly in
science education—all during the late ‘60s and ‘70s. And so when I looked at Evergreen, I thought, this
is just a fabulous example of collaborative learning. I’ll never forget—I don’t know which environmental
studies person said this to me—but he put his arm around me, as if I was a sixth-grader, and said, in this
totally patronizing way, “No, dearie. It’s interdisciplinary studies that we do here.” [laughter]
Smith: It’s both!
MacGregor: So I said, “That, too. It’s both.”
Smith: That’s great.
MacGregor: I asked if I could sit in a little bit on the environmental studies conversations in faculty
meetings, just to kind of meet people, and they were fine with that. But it was a very sciencedominated and very male-dominated community. I think the only two women that I can remember in
environmental studies at the time were Kaye V. Ladd and Carolyn Dobbs. Jovana [Brown] wasn’t there
yet because she was Dean of Library at the time.
But I discovered pretty rapidly there were a lot of faculty wives hanging about who were feeling
very disaffected. It was Helena Meyer-Knapp, Sandie Nisbit, Flora Leisenring, Kathy Kelly, Betty Tabbutt,
Barbara Perkins, Ann Beug, and[Kathleen O’Shaughnessy. They all had little bitty roles at Evergreen, a
course here or a course there. I think Sandie had the most presence and was teaching the most times.
But a lot of the rest of them were thinking about doctoral work, because almost all of them
came with master’s degrees. Helena was starting her doctorate, Barbara Perkins was starting hers.
Kathleen already had a PhD but couldn’t seem to get a footing, and eventually, realizing the handwriting
on the wall, went into her own private counseling.
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I remember approaching Ken Dolbeare, because I had done so much with public involvement,
and I saw that Evergreen had no course in public involvement and policymaking, which was still a really
big deal in state and federal government.
Smith: And it’s gotten bigger, actually, over the years.
MacGregor: Ken just took one look at me and assumed that I wanted to take the MPA program, not
teach it. So, after I listened to his pitch for 15 minutes, I said, “I really came in to talk with you about
teaching in the program.” And he said, “Oh, well what have you done?” [laughter] It was such a
putdown.
Smith: He didn’t mean it that way, but that’s how it sounded.
MacGregor: It sure came across that way. So I just felt, hmm, maybe this is not where I need to be. But
a couple of people really reached out a hand to me. The first one was Susan Perry Smith, who said, “I’m
teaching a research course at the Evergreen Tacoma Campus. Would you come co-teach with me? You
could do the whole piece around community-based research.” That was great, and that enabled me to
meet Maxine Mimms and Betsy Diffendal at the time. I learned quite a bit about what Maxine’s vision
and the whole experience of it, although the student body at the time was really different than it is now,
because it was mostly men from the post office and the fort, the soldiers, and some of the soldiers
wives. It was really, really a delight to do that.
Within a year or so, Russ Fox was starting the Center for Community Development and wanted a
partner in that. He and Pat Labine were teaching advanced environmental studies, and it was
overenrolled, so they asked me to help. I had a whole year teaching with them, and I think, by winter
quarter, Bill Brown joined the team. So we had a really great senior year program with 50 or 60-some
students, all divided into teams doing projects. They just needed people to manage these teams, coach
the teams.
By the same token, Russ particularly knew about my background with collaborative learning and
high-functioning teams, and so I taught a whole strand in the course on effective teamwork, and team
behavior. Also, I taught like a four-credit thing on environmental impact statements, both national and
state-level environmental impact statements, and how the process works, from scoping to conclusion,
and how the public does or does not get involved.
All this time, I was trying to figure out whether and how to do a PhD. And because my
background and my degrees were so interdisciplinary from Michigan, I couldn’t find my way into a
program at the University of Washington, because they were so rigid. To be in geography, you had to
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have a geography major as an undergrad. Natural resources, same thing. I didn’t have a straight-up
forestry degree, because I’d done these broad, interdisciplinary degrees. My undergrad was science and
my graduate degree, even though it’s an MS, was mostly social science and policy and education.
I tried to go back to U of Michigan to figure out how to do it, but—too long a story to tell—they
are literally not set up for returning adult learners, because if you’ve been away from there for too long,
they almost cancel your graduate work. You have to start over again. Even though I’d lined up two
terrific faculty to work with who were ready to take me, I couldn’t make it work. I’d have to back there
for years. I just finally thought, well, the hell with it.
Then, as you know, the Center for Community Development fell apart with the budget
downturn in ’85. I was at a point of saying, “I can’t make Evergreen work, and I can’t make doctorate
work, so I’ve just got to paddle my canoe in a new direction.” And that’s when you called, Barbara.
Smith: I had no idea that you were in that state at that point.
MacGregor: Yeah, I was literally folding my tent.
Smith: Oh, gosh! [laughing]
MacGregor: I was back East because my mom was recovering from a broken hip, and you called me
when I was in Pennsylvania and said, “The Provost and I have gotten some grant money to start this
Center for Undergraduate Education.” I’ll never forget, you had a line—and I don’t remember if it was
when we first talked or was on the phone—but you said, “Gossip has it that you organize things.”
[laughter] And I thought, I wonder where she got that? It was sort of an interesting way to make a
pitch.
Smith: It’s true! [laughter]
MacGregor: Where was the gossip? Do you remember?
Smith: No. It was like I did know some things about you, and it was all good. It was about community
work, and organizing things, and fundraising, working with other people, and teambuilding. It was
scraps.
MacGregor: Well, my closest friends at the time and supporters were Russ and Carolyn. And Russ and I
figured out that our philosophy and approaches to teaching were peas in a pod.
But my first impressions about Evergreen were these. After Warren Wilson, where every single
student participates on a work crew, and has to show up on time, has to take care of the campus,
because if you toss a bottle on the ground, some other work crew person is going to have to pick it up,
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and because it was such a small school with a faculty-student ratio of about one to 12, Evergreen
seemed very large to me, even though it was very small. [laughing]
It felt really cerebral. It felt like a lot of the campus seemed to function from the neck up. There
was not a lot of practical reality. I particularly acutely felt, from just conversations at parties and stuff,
that there were a lot of armchair Marxists. I felt that people like Pat Labine, and Russ and Carolyn, were
really walking their talk in the community; that it couldn’t be just how you think about how the world
works, it’s how you get involved in the community and make it work. Patrick Hill had some of that, too.
He really believed that you couldn’t just rag on and on about unemployed forest workers. You had to go
meet them.
The other thing that got me was there was there was a lot of rhetoric about seminar. But I met
so many students that were so disappointed in their seminars, and I felt that it was just a really mixed
bag about faculty members who really worked at helping students learn to seminar and help students
learn to work in teams, and others just did it laissez-faire.
The same thing with student self-evaluation; that there was a laissez-faire-ness about, we just
tell the students to do it and they’ll figure it out, and then others who said quite intentionally, “These
are learned behaviors that take time to develop. Just like learning to swim or learning to ice skate, you
have to take baby steps and learn how to do it, and get feedback.”
Smith: I think the hope was that teams would increase competence.
MacGregor: Yeah.
Smith: Because if you have enough teams with at least one person who knew how to do that stuff,
they’d work that out, and that the weekly faculty seminar was the vehicle for that. But I think you’re
right. Both of those observations completely agree with my observations as well.
MacGregor: Yeah. And I think that because I’d done community studies at Warren Wilson—and I left
that out of the story—my favorite big signature course every fall was a community studies course taught
out of the Sociology Department, which was required for sociology majors, and a strongly-suggested
elective for environmental studies majors. So we had a mix. But we were doing community studies in
Ashville.
By the same token, I made teams where they had to look at community issues, but I ended up
being the coach of each team, in which teams worked well, or they had a total breakdown, or they
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struggled and needed coaching. It was such a trial-by-fire for me, but at the end of the course every fall,
I’d get these students standing up saying, “Every student here should be made to take this!”
It was the same thing with Russ and Pat Labine’s and my and Bill Brown’s program. At the end,
students said, “I feel so prepared for the working world now, because I’ve learned about dysfunction in
teams, I’ve learned about effectiveness and teams.” And, because they were working in the community,
they were observing county commissioner meetings, or conservation district board meetings, and they
were watching adults do bad behavior and good behavior.
Smith: And they could see the difference. [laughing]
MacGregor: Yeah. Right about that time, before you called, I think the other, I think, cool things that
happened were Rita Pougiales asked me to help her facilitate the meetings that ended up being
negotiations to develop the new relationship to Western Washington University, with the teacher
education undergrad degree. That enabled me to meet Marie Eaton, a lifelong Western Washington
University person. Great partner on so many things. It was just a very interesting experience with the
teacher education crowd.
You’ll remember this, Barbara, but Patrick wanted to have all the different kind of academic
student affairs offices collocate, because Cooperative Education was over in the Labs, and the
Counseling Center was over in the Health Center, and the Career Advisement was somewhere else. It
was all just scattered, and students were sort of wandering from building to building, trying to figure out
who could help them with what choice. So, he just announced by fiat that they were all going to
collocate in the Library, and every single unit freaked out. This was about May or June, at the end of an
academic year—I think it was ’84.
Smith: Yes.
MacGregor: Or ’85, somewhere in there. People were feeling vulnerable and they were feeling
blindsided. Patrick realized that he’d overstepped, hadn’t consulted enough, so he said, “Okay, let’s just
spend next year having a DTF.” And he actually hired me to staff the DTF, or sort of co-chair it with
somebody, and we would go back to square one.
So I volunteered the idea of doing sensing interviews; that we really needed date, like why did
people get angry? What did they think they were going to lose? And what did they think they might
gain? So I went around interviewing every single unit, and then brought that back to the DTF. Some of
the heads of units were on the DTF, but I brought back all this information from their staff. What it did
was it uncovered all kinds of other issues about lack of coordination, and distrust.
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Smith: Which was the whole reason that he proposed it.
MacGregor: Exactly right. And duplication of services. But also, the reality that Counseling absolutely
didn’t want to be collocated because of issues of privacy for students, and it made perfect sense that
they stay in the Health Center. By winter quarter, everybody was kind of thinking, well, maybe
collocating might really work. At that point, we brought in, I think his name was John Collins, the
architect?
Smith: Yes, that was John Collins.
MacGregor: And we started having design meetings. And then everybody got excited, because they
were actually going to create something together. And they could collocate all their resources and
libraries for students and on and on and on. It really got to be fun, and then we began—I think I
suggested we have potlucks, and they began to . . .
Smith: . . . feel like a community!
MacGregor: . . . be a community. Yeah. [laughter] It was really quite wonderful.
Smith: I don’t remember this at all.
MacGregor: Now, of course, within about a year or two, you couldn’t have gotten them to split up.
Smith: No, that’s right.
MacGregor: But a lot of people, I think, felt isolated, and a little bit threatened by one another. And
they just had never been asked to work together on something, or get to know each other well. And
there were different reporting lines, to be sure. So, it’s worked out, I think, pretty well, over time.
Smith: What a smart approach to how you did that. I think that’s really amazing.
MacGregor: Yeah. Let’s see, what else should we talk about? There’s the whole Washington Center
story, and that’s been written up lots of other places. I don’t know that I need to tell it.
Smith: What were your big takeaways about that? That was a long time.
MacGregor: Yeah, it was about 11 years of the Washington Center, and then another eight years of the
National Learning Communities Project.
Smith: Then the Curriculum for the Bioregion.
MacGregor: Right. I think my takeaways, well, it goes back to Bill Stapp. You have a big vision, but you
can’t do it alone. You have to have partners. And I think we were unbelievably—[unintelligible
00:52:40] interviewed you?
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Smith: Yes.
MacGregor: Oh, good. Because I think that you and I brought somewhat similar values and idealism to
the Washington Center idea, but we kind of brought a little bit different skillsets and background.
Because I knew tons about pedagogy from all these years, and you knew a heap about how to think
about curriculum. I loved to facilitate group stuff, but you knew about the political economy of higher
ed, which I just knew a thimbleful about. I didn’t really understand a lot of that to begin with.
Smith: Some of that was because I was 75 percent a dean, and 25 percent Washington Center. So the
synergy from those two roles, I think, created a natural division of labor in some ways, but also a deep
investment in me to faculty development. That evaporated once that combined role was gone.
MacGregor: Yeah. And I think you also made a huge investment in me. Maybe you didn’t realize you
were doing it, but I think one of the things we decided to do with our original partner colleges—which
was Tacoma Community College and Evergreen College with a bridge program; Seattle Central, North
Seattle, Bellevue and University of Washington, that original group—they were colleges where we
wanted the learning community approach to work. So we invested a heap of time going to visit those
colleges, and interviewing the faculty teams at the end of every quarter, and also interviewing the
deans, or the chairs, to make sure everybody was still on board with it. Really getting to know those
people.
So, the kind of culture and the dynamics at each of those colleges was like a little thing that we
would seminar about. Because I’d come back and say, “Well, I talked to Ed, and he’s skeptical because
of this. But I talked to the faculty, and they’re all excited about that. So how would you go about it,
Barbara?” And then you would just say, “Well, maybe we should ask, or, maybe we should try, or,
clearly they’re not getting something.” And then sometimes we’d go together.
Smith: Those relationships, I hadn’t thought of that in a long time, but that was real singular in terms of
how close we were related to the future of teachers and all the administrators. They really did become
a community, just like your other communities in those previous roles, in some ways.
MacGregor: Exactly. Because then—and this is what Bill Stapp did when he traveled the road—he said,
“We’re all a part of something very important.” He could communicate that, and I think we did, too.
We’re all part of something that’s super-needed, it’s super-important, and we have to take some risks to
make it real. And let’s do it.
That raises a question about scaling it, though. Because we had so much high-touch with those
campuses, those teachers, for years. And then, when it came time to move from the two small grants—
15
from the Ford Foundation and from Exxon—to trying to get State money, you were away at Kobe the
year that the legislative session met about all this, but we had Joe Olander going and pitching it. But my
part of it that I will claim—because I loved doing it—is I went to all these campuses in Eastern
Washington, and met with faculty, and got them interested, and met with the President and kind of laid
it out. I said, “This is never going to get funded unless we get Eastern Washington behind it, and
particularly Jerry Saylor.”
Jerry Saylor was a legislator from Spokane, who had worked for a college? Did he have a
background in higher ed? I think he was Chair of the Higher Ed Committee, and ours were in control. I
just said, “Unless Jerry Saylor’s behind it, we’re dead in the water. We have to get him.” A lot of these
Presidents were great, and Gary Tollefson was Dean at the time at Yakima Valley Community College. I
think he was with the ICRC.
Smith: Yes, he was.
MacGregor: The Inter-College Relations Council or whatever. It was the transfer body. So he got really,
really excited about it, and he called his colleagues in the ICRC, so he was a crucial person. It just sailed
through.
Smith: It helps that the economy was healthy then.
MacGregor: The economy was healthy, and Booth Gardner seemed to make a very positive relationship
with Joe Olander.
Smith: Right. He was into legacy creation. He did the same thing with the Indian community, I found
out.
MacGregor: Yeah, he did. And that year, in ’87, we got money for the national faculty, we got money
for the Labor Center, and we got money for the Washington Center, all in the same year, which was just
phenomenal.
I think the whole rolling out of learning communities was a mix of offering campuses different
ways to do them, so they felt that they could make that choice, and really pushing hard on the deans
and chairs to say, “Please allow the faculty to make their own teams and propose linkages.” I remember
at Seattle Central there was a Dean of Business who got people in a room and said, “You three will teach
the Intro to Business.” And it never worked, because people didn’t like to be stuffed into, told to be on
a team.
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So I think that worked well. And then, of course, Washington Center got into all of its next
chapters around minority student success, which just became the big cultural pluralism grant, and the
calculus reform. And Judy Cushing had her computer science thing. One thing kept leading to another.
I think that was terrific in some requests, because we were getting a lot of regional and national
recognition.
Smith: And a broader audience.
MacGregor: And a broader audience. At the same time, it was exhausting. I would have fantasies of
myself being the guy on the Ed Sullivan Show who was spinning all the plates on the stick, sort of a
short-order cook kind of administrator, just trying to keep everything moving. And yet, the thing that
was in common to all of them were these faculty development events that were a really good
combination of substantive content, permission for faculty to be skeptics, to raise questions, to feel safe
enough to air their questions and concerns.
And the fun factor of having fun events associated with all of this. Like at some of the
curriculum planning retreats, we had dances, or skits, things that were just hilariously fun. And then, at
one of our Summer Institutes with the interdisciplinary approaches to science, with sort of repeating
really highly successful and highly regarded coordinated studies programs in the summer, that NSF
grant, we had the Dickins, Darwin and Marx program with Valerie Bystrom, York Wong, Janet Ott, and
me.
We had a Darwin dinner—this was at Pack Forest—and we asked all the people who were
coming, who were not just from Washington, they were from other parts of the United States—
probably 25 people—we said, “We’re going to reenact the meeting of Linnean Society, at which Darwin
and Alfred Russell Wallace’s papers were read, and we’d like you to bring a Victorian costume.” People
wrote to us and said, “Where the heck am I going to rent that?” We would write back and say, “Your
Theater Department probably has a costume shop. It shouldn’t be too hard to bring a top hat or a
waistcoat or something.” [laughter]
Then I asked the University of Washington Food Service to have a fancy dinner, with roast beef
and Yorkshire pudding and trifle and all that. The cooking ladies out in Elbe wrote me and said, “Do you
have a recipe for Yorkshire pudding?” [laughter] “Do you have a recipe for trifle? We’ve never heard to
trifle.” So I was sending them the recipes, and then I said, “We want to set it up with candlelight.” I had
brought some special paper to make it fancy. These women went to their homes and brought
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wineglasses to make it extra-special. I said, “Well, then, join us for dinner.” They said, “No, no, no, we’ll
just watch.”
So the day of this event, it was 95 degrees. And Pack Hall, that log cabin, was 100 degrees. And,
of course, York had brought the gin and tonic. [laughter] So by the time we had dinner and everybody
had had a glass of red wine—we didn’t overdo it—people were inebriated. And it was so stuffy in this
room, and they were wearing all this Victorian garb. So I had brought some croquet sets. We set up the
croquet sets in the waning light of the evening, and everyone went out on the lawn and played croquet.
It was a scream!
Meanwhile, Jan Ott and Valerie and York and I massively reduced the reading of these papers,
because we were never going to hold their attention. We came in, and by sort of candlelight and dim
light, we read Darwin’s paper and then Wallace’s paper. It was like this happening that people will
always remember. I mean, those kinds of things were just so much fun.
Smith: Yes.
MacGregor: And I think that’s the element that created community. People became friends, and really
good friends, of each other through those events. But they also felt that they were part of creating
something. It was just that sense of creativity, the sense of friendship. That’s something that I don’t
think is easily scalable, because it’s the human relationships that are everything. And when you try to
scale up, often those things fall apart.
Smith: Well, I learned about that when I came to Evergreen.
MacGregor: Yeah, because there was a lot of that.
Smith: And Malcolm Stilson was writing plays that people were in.
MacGregor: Right, and Doug Scrima and Gail Martin were all part of that.
Smith: Exactly.
MacGregor: They were hilarious and wonderful.
Smith: Then we imposed it on the new faculty that they had to do a skit about Evergreen at the retreat
in the spring. And they still do that, I was told.
MacGregor: Yeah. When you became Provost, and we hired—I said, “I need a break.” And I was
thinking maybe at that point, I’d go do a PhD, but it didn’t work out. And I really wanted to get back to
environmental studies, so that’s when I started teaching in MES. I’m so glad I did because it reengaged
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me in a disciplinary way. And I was longing for sort of close colleagues on the campus, and it gave me
that. And it gave me some wonderful students. I was very content doing that.
But also, I was beginning to think, what’s next for learning communities? I really wanted to kind
of go deeper with learning communities, rather than managing all these other pieces. It just
happened—and this was a happy accident—Frank Frankfort, from FIPSE [Fund for the Improvement of
Postsecondary Education] was in Seattle visiting a FIPSE grant, and just for the heck of it, he decided to
come down and say, “Well, what’s going on with Evergreen? I’ve known about Evergreen for years.”
And no one was around. The deans were gone on a retreat, and someone called me and just said, “Give
Frank Frankfort a tour.”
And I did, and I told him a lot about Evergreen, and then I told him about the Washington
Center, and the work we were doing in learning communities, and Vincent Tinto’s research and
everything. He went, “Why haven’t we heard about you? Why aren’t you rolling this out at a national
level?” And I went, “That’s a good idea.” He said, “Let’s stay in touch.” That led to the FIPSE grant that
started the whole national rollout.
Smith: Right.
MacGregor: That went pretty well. We stumbled a little bit at the beginning with some of our first
Summer Institutes, but we found our feet with it. By the year 2000 or so, you’d been Provost for about
six years, and we’re sort of seeing a time to exit out of that. Together, we cooked up the idea of
approaching Russ Edgerton at Pew.
Smith: Yeah, and that had happened partly because I was the President of [AHEE? 01:08:58] before he
went to Pew. He had an entry into Pew with a big pot of money to distribute to very successful projects,
and we were on his radar.
MacGregor: Yeah. And I’ll never forget the morning that we had a conference call with him, and it was
super early—like we had to be in your office at 7:00 or something?—it was still dark.
Smith: He was on the East Coast.
MacGregor: Yeah, and I remember that it was still dark. We kind of described the idea of a national
project and fellows and everything, and he said, “Well, who would run it?” We both in unison said, “We
would.” [laughter] It was like, wasn’t that obvious? He said, “Well, okay.” I think you said to me, “I
think he just said yes.”
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Smith: And he did. That was one of the most wonderful financial things in my whole career. That grant
was beautiful.
MacGregor: Yeah. That was an enormously successful grant, and by the end of it, we had an emerging
learning communities, we had loads of colleges starting them with a lot of wonderful coaching. We had
regional networks that were beginning to grow. And we had well over 50 very confident learning
community leaders. We had a regional conference that’s now become a national conference over time
that was not being led by us, it was being led by a consortium of colleges in the Midwest. It was really
entirely on its way.
Can I jump to the end of that project? When it was winding down, now Emily Lardner and Gillies
Malnarich were running the Washington Center. I have to say, they took the learning community
Summer Institute to an even more sophisticated level around really asking campuses to think—we had
always said, “Look at your needs and design communities to meet your needs.” But they really forced
campuses to document and provide evidence of trouble spots in the curriculum, or places where
underprepared students were failing.
Smith: And build teams.
MacGregor: Yeah.
Smith: I mean, the application process itself requires a lot of strategic[planning.
MacGregor: Yeah. And we had suggested teams—what should be on a team—but they insisted.
Smith: Yeah, that was great.
MacGregor: They kind of deepened the Summer Institutes in ways that we had only started on. They
kind of took it to not only a deeper level in terms of content, but a much bigger scale. Because we were
doing Summer Institutes of about 100 people, and they were going for 250 and much larger.
Smith: And making it pay.
MacGregor: Yeah, that was great. So I was feeling by 2004 that the learning community movement was
launched. I could have just retired at that point, but I kind of said, “I think I have one more big, messy
project in me. I’m not quite sure what it is.”
But the thing that really got me thinking was the 1998—I think it was 1998—presidential
address to AAAS. When you get elected president of AAAS, you have to give a formal address to the
annual meeting, which is like 5,000, 10,000 people. And it’s published on the AAAS Web site, and it’s
published in Science. That year, Jane Lubchenco, who is an oceanographic scientist, marine biologist,
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was the president. Her presidential address was called “Entering the Century of the Environment: A
New Social Contract for Science.”
It was a brilliant speech about how important environmental matters were going to be in the
21st century, including in public health, not just environmental matters, but feeding the world. How do
you have sustainable development? And public health matters. She said that the role of the
government in relation to science has to be a new social contract, where scientists do their science to
serve society. It was really, really compelling. It was the sustainability kind of manifesto.
I thought, I think we’re doing a really good job of preparing the students for the century that just
went by, and we’ve got to really step up to the whole notion of sustainability. Sustainability was sort of
being thrown around at this point, and, of course, I ended up doing tons of interviews of students about
this. But at the time, they were just thinking, oh, you know, that’s something our grandchildren might
have to deal with. But it was sort of far away and abstract.
But then, when it got popular—thanks to Al Gore in Inconvenient Truth and all that—the
students were still kind of stuck in kind of 50 handy-dandy things you can do to be more green.
Smith: Like recycling.
MacGregor: Like, oh, you can recycle, and take shorter showers, and ride your bike, take public transit,
and be a green purchaser.
Smith: All good, but not enough.
MacGregor: All good, but not really going deep. That caused me to create Curriculum for the Bioregion.
I think maybe I could just include in my interview the article I wrote about developing Curriculum for the
Bioregion, because it tells the whole story of launching the project.
Smith: That would be great.
MacGregor: But it became, over time, the biggest sustainability initiative in the curriculum in the whole
country, and the most longstanding. Happily, now it has moved up to Western under the leadership of
Grace Wong. I am totally thrilled about that, but that ended up involving all of the campuses in
Washington, some in the Portland area, a few in Montana, a couple from B.C. We created nine or 10
faculty learning communities that met for a year in different disciplines, including biology, chemistry,
geoscience, math, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, English.
Smith: So you organized the mobilization around departments in that case.
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MacGregor: I did. Some around departments, sort of asking the same question about, how is your
discipline preparing students for this century? And what are the big ideas in your discipline that could
be taught around sustainability content?
Each faculty community met a few times to kind of brainstorm about that, or interrogate it. You
payback for having nice meetings that were paid for was you had to develop one course or one activity
in depth, and publish it online.
Smith: Okay, that’s where you put it on the Web site eventually.
MacGregor: Yeah. Most of the communities were in the disciplines, but a few communities were
interdisciplinary. There was one on service learning, there was one on sustainability in contemplative
practice, and that community is still going after nine years, which is amazing, and we wrote a book. A
couple of other interdisciplinary ones, but then, we also got money to put on either workshops, like oneday workshops around pedagogy. We did stuff with service learning, we did a workshop on your cases.
Smith: Like the UPS workshops?
MacGregor: Yeah. The other thing that I really loved doing, and I thought had a very high impact, was
through a series of grants with different foundations. We put on weeklong summer field courses, like
Summer Institutes, on the future of Puget Sound. We did one in Seattle focusing on King County and the
Cedar River Watershed and Elliott Bay; one in Tacoma focusing on the Puyallup Watershed and
Commencement Bay; one up north focusing on the Skagit Valley and Bellingham Bay; one
headquartered at Evergreen with the Nisqually and the Deschutes and the whole Capitol Lake
controversy.
It was interdisciplinary. We made welcome graduate students, a couple of graduate students,
but there were 25 in each with 100 faculty. In each case, we had a Listserv for people to share stuff, and
then met during winter quarter on Saturday, where it was kind of a call for proposals, where the
participants had to bring something they were doing. So for one day, you learned about what each
other was doing a lot more.
As a result of that, a lot of other things got cooked up—courses got cooked up, new Evergreen
programs got cooked up. One of the faculty members at U of Puget Sound partnered with a faculty
member at UW-Tacoma because one had some sort of analysis equipment that UPS didn’t have, so they
had joined fieldtrips, and then shared their data.
Smith: Oh, wow!
22
MacGregor: Made a whole partnership out of it. There were some really cool things that occurred, and
the fieldtrips that resulted, and the use of community experts that resulted, just went geometric. So
when I saw like the head of storm water for the City of Tacoma, or somebody with Washington
Environmental Council, or somebody with the Cedar River Watershed project later, they would say, “I’m
getting all these phone calls from faculty.”
Smith: Really?
MacGregor: Because they were discovered finally.
Smith: And the connection was made.
MacGregor: It showed me that so many teachers, even great community-based teachers, didn’t really
have much of a network. And I asked that guy at Tacoma, “Before that workshop, which college and
university faculty did you work with?” He said, “Only one. Now I’m working with every school. Every
group of college students needs to learn about storm water. It’s what we’re struggling with.”
You can see how excited I am when I talk about it, because it was really putting college faculty in
touch with important issues that they were already teaching about, but it was putting it in a local
context.
Smith: I think teachers don’t even think about using those resources until someone shows them that
they can, and that they actually want to come.
MacGregor: My other great triumph was over at WSU. I had money from another FIPSE grant through
the congressional appropriation that we got to do regional workshops on sustainability across the
curriculum. But Pullman is not really in a region. You can cluster a meeting in Spokane and get the
Spokane schools. You can cluster a meeting in the Tri-Cities and get a few schools, you know, Walla
Walla schools and around there. At Vancouver, we got Clark College and WSU-Vancouver, and a bunch
of Portland colleges. In Ellensburg, we got all those Central Washington campuses. But Pullman’s out
there, you know.
Smith: It’s kind of its own self, but it’s so big.
MacGregor: So I thought, why not go to Pullman and see if they can just do something if I brought
money. But I was bringing puny money, like $5,000. So I went over there, and they have this wonderful
institute called the Center for Environmental Research, Outreach and Education. It’s on all three WSU
campuses—Vancouver, Tri-Cities, and Pullman—so when they have their steering committee meetings,
it’s all done with interactive TV.
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I sat in a meeting, and I get the whole idea from the meeting that this is just a way to get grants.
They don’t really have a lot in common with each other, other than they want to partner up with each
other to go for the big Department of Ag grants and the Department NSF grants. That’s what they’re
doing, and they’re doing fabulous work. So it was my turn on the agenda. Imagine maybe 14 people,
two women. The other woman besides me was the woman from the Development Office. No women
faculty in this group. That just knocked me over. I thought, oh, great, here’s this interdisciplinary gal
from Evergreen coming to pitch something to these guys? I just thought, they’re going to laugh at me.
Nothing’s going to happen.
I thought, well, no time like the present to jump in. I said, “So you’re a center for environmental
research, education and outreach. What is the education and outreach you’re doing?” They said, “Well,
all these NSF grants require us to have a dissemination component, so we go to big national meetings
and we take our doctoral students.” I said, “And that’s it?” They said, “Well, yeah,” and they just
shrugged their shoulders, like what’s the problem?
Smith: That’s kind of the normal academic answer.
MacGregor: Absolutely. It’s the Tier 1 Research U way of doing business. I said, “You are a treasure
trove of bioregional information, right?” They said, “Right.” “Did you ever think that you could share
what you’re learning with your colleagues here, with the WSU community?” “The WSU community?” I
said, “Yeah, you could do outreach to your larger community.” And, in fact, as I got to know them, they
were doing some really terrific stuff through Extension. They really are.
So they said, “What are you thinking?” I said, “Well, I have this Federal grant money to create
faculty development around bioregional approaches to sustainability. I’ve just sat in this meeting.
You’re doing all this work with water in the future, and climate change, and different land management
ideas around farming. But do your colleagues down the hall know this so they can tell their students
about all this wonderful research you’re doing? Could we do that?” Two of them—two—said, “That’s a
fantastic idea. Let’s talk.”
We ran out of time in that meeting, but I went home and got on conference calls. Sometimes I
went down to Jane’s room and got on her interactive TV, from downtown Oly over to Pullman. We
cooked up a Summer Institute and we called it the Palouse Project. We got Mary Wack involved, who
was then and still is the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Affairs. We put on these Summer Institutes for
about 25, 30 faculty. They brought money to the table. I said, “Could we possibly match $4,000?” And,
of course, pocket change to them.
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At one Summer Institute, when iPads were new and hot, they gave everybody an iPad to come.
They got some deal on them through their bookstore or something. Or, they gave them $400 worth of
money to spend for professional travel or books or something. They worked it nicely, with really good
incentives. They all created a community, and often their follow-up was to do a brown bag through the
following year, and continued to share what they were doing with each other. After the money I had
ran out, I think it went for three more years.
Smith: That’s a long time.
MacGregor: But it ended up completely influencing a lot of the gen ed courses, because Mary, who ran
gen ed reform there, wanted to attract all these young faculty who were new to Pullman, who didn’t
know much about the region, and were handling these big gen ed courses. It worked.
Smith: Very important.
MacGregor: It was so exciting. Now WSU has a fantastic new director, who’s female. [laughter]
Anyway, so that really worked well.
I think the other thing I’d like to just comment on is maybe some of the really good experiences
in MES, and then maybe sort of impressions over time. Because I think we’re running out of time, aren’t
we?
Smith: Yes.
MacGregor: My closest community in Evergreen, besides faculty exchanges and some of the faculty we
marshaled to be part of the Washington Center activity, and subsequently the National Learning
Communities Project, was the MES faculty. It was all faculty. You developed life-long friendships with
students and professional relationships with students. And many, many of the MES graduates work in
this region, so I see them a lot, and see many of my former students, who are doing terrific work in the
region. It also put me in touch with some fantastic international students, who’ve done some amazing
work in the world.
Smith: Like the one from Japan?
MacGregor: Yeah, Maki?
Smith: Yeah.
MacGregor: Maki’s in a doctoral program now. Did I tell you that? I’ll tell you that later. It’s very cool.
But [Ariadne? 01:30:00] went on to create the [Great unintelligible 01:30:04]. Maki did fabulous work in
Japan. Oksana Bartosh from Ukraine wrote a paper for the Journal of Environmental Ed based upon her
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master’s thesis, which is one of the most-quoted papers in the whole field. She went on to do doctoral
work at UBC, and has now become a naturalized Canadian citizen, and is doing fantastic work in the
whole area of research and assessment. Brilliant, brilliant woman. She came in on a [Muskie?
01:30:47]. She was one of the Muskies. Fabulous person.
I think MES has struggled a bit to find itself. In the beginning, it was one of the only MES
programs in the country with an interdisciplinary focus. Now, they’re a dime a dozen. So for a while,
MES was kind of overtaken by many, many, many other institutions where students could stay in-state
and do a master’s in environmental studies.
But I think the person who probably doesn’t get a lot of credit, but really should, for making the
MES program really high-quality is Martha Henderson. She pushed interdisciplinarity. She pushed Foci
within the MES program to say, “They’re not exactly tracks, but if you want to focus in these things, we
can really do a lot with you.” So, it helped students as applicants decide whether they belonged. She
pushed qualitative research along with a heavy emphasis on quantitative. She pushed students to
complete in two years, because there was an enormous backlog of students who hadn’t completed. She
got everybody on the faculty to agree to have the 16-credit thesis, instead of the choice between a
thesis or a practicum. Fantastic. She really embraced GIS. And now, I think they’re going to have a
certificate in GIS, thanks to Mike Ruth. She took program marketing seriously, and found a young
Assistant Director, Gail Wooten, who was fabulous.
That program, I think, is in the best shape it’s ever been, and I’m super happy to have been
associated with it. I think I’m the longest-standing adjunct, being through like seven directors, or eight
directors, over time.
Impressions about Evergreen. I’ll just finish with that. Okay? I think Evergreen has been
caught, over time, in its kind of left-wing bubble, and the safety of it. And I think when a lot of campuses
do strategic planning, they really do good environmental scanning. Like, where’s the country? Where’s
the culture? And I don’t think they’ve sufficiently done that—they, we—in recent years, because the
country is terribly polarized. Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement have deepened the
polarization. As important as those movements are, they’ve deepened the polarization and they’ve also
helped to create, I think, a sense of vulnerability on all sides, and kind of deep-seated worry about the
future. Layer on top of that the recession of the past 10 years, where hundreds and hundreds of
thousands of people lost their homes, lost their retirement, lost everything.
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So I think there’s a polarization and a cautiousness now in the culture. So, I think, you splash on
the Evergreen Web page and it says, “You can design your own education,” I don’t think I’d feel safe at
all. I think there’s a lack of safety around the polarization and #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, but
there’s also a lack of fiscal safety that is anxiety. In some ways, although what’s going on around these
tracks feels kind of sad to me, I think it might communicated more orderliness and safety to students.
Smith: In the curriculum path?
MacGregor: Yeah.
Smith: I don’t know that the whole designing that would buy you cultural analysis, but I think the
Guided Pathways, it’s a national movement.
MacGregor: Yes, I know.
Smith: I think the goal is exactly what you’re describing—a need for more order and more
predictability. But it’s also because the audience is mostly first-generation kids in college, needing more
guidance.
MacGregor: And students have grown up with this expression, “helicopter parenting.” But students
have grown up texting their mothers every day. I think the student coming to college today is less
focused, more anxious—greatly more anxious—and less disciplined.
When I look back, I wish—how many more hours in the day? But one of the things I kept
pushing around learning communities is learning communities do need a pedagogy. I have to say, Emily
and Gillies and I disagreed about this, because they didn’t push it. They said, “This is not about tips and
tricks for teaching.” But I have to argue that collaborative learning, done well, is fabulous. But done
poorly, it’s disastrous.
Smith: I agree.
MacGregor: Learning in community, and taking the idea of community development seriously—which is
learning to disagree—if it’s done well, it’s fabulous, but if it’s not done well, it’s disastrous. Also, the
whole civic engagement deliberative debate, deliberative dialog, if that’s taken seriously, I don’t think it
gets out of control. I think partly what happened to Evergreen is partly what happened to Antioch,
where the students got so out of control that other students just said, “I’m out of here. I don’t need
this.”
Smith: That’s what blew Old Westbury apart as well, same issue.
MacGregor: Yeah. Well, it’s pulling Congress apart, too, right this minute.
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Smith: Yeah.
MacGregor: When I look back, I think that’s something that I see at Evergreen as still an unattendedresearch problem.
Smith: Right. It’s exacerbated, too, by the fact that the faculty has almost 100 percent turned over. We
had veterans for a long time, I think, that while they might not have agreed on how much structure
around pedagogy you need, they were more skilled at it than newcomers.
MacGregor: Yeah, I agree completely. So, my career in retrospect. Super-fulfilling. I was unbelievably
fortunate to be at the right place at the right time.
Smith: In all your careers.
MacGregor: Yeah. But I think to have you pull me into the Washington Center set me on a path that
was way more interesting, way more fulfilling, I think. Had I had the path that my student, Susan Craig
whom we talked about, who got the traditional research university job—and she’s gone deep and has
had a meaningful career—but I’ve gone horizontal, and that made all the difference. I think it’s
stimulating and meaningful.
What I’d like to see Evergreen do, if I could wave my magic wand, would be for the college to
work much harder and more intentionally at community at the program level, and at deliberative
discourse, and to make a much stronger commitment to community-based learning. Where there’s a
little bit of it—it’s a little, tiny slice—but that whole element of Evergreen could be much greater around
civic engagement. I think it happens in loads of internships, and lots of independent contracts, and
there’s a deep commitment to fieldtrips. You drive into the vanpool and there’s a battalion of vans. It’s
great! But I think this whole thing about civic engagement, which is not service. It’s really engaging with
policy, at the community level and the national level, is just an opportunity waiting to happen.
Secondly, like a lot of higher ed, Evergreen is still pretty asleep at the switch about climate
change, as an institution. Faculty are into it, and I know that from the research I did on how faculty in
the region are taking up climate change. I did that big survey in 2014, and the college that had the most
faculty members take the survey was Evergreen. More than any other campus. More than UW, more
than Western, more than any community college, more individuals took the survey.
So I know it’s there, and it’s happening in the curriculum, but the college as an institution was
named one of the greenest colleges in the country when Don Bantz was Provost, but it’s totally slipped
away. Not to say that Scott Morgan is doing his good work with his 50 percent appointment that’s
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sometimes bumped up to 60 or 70 sometimes, and then drops back down to 50. But when you see
what places like Middlebury are doing, or Princeton, or University of Puget Sound even, it’s night and
day.
Smith: Sounds like Evergreen’s next step would be to look at what some of those other model
campuses are doing, to understand where it could go.
MacGregor: Yeah. Well, it takes fundraising and investment. I just don’t think the will has been there.
There have been other priorities. And when you look at the past nine years, there’s been so much fiscal
strain that other things have—
Smith: Survival is more important.
MacGregor: Absolutely. I think I should stop there.
Smith: That’s terrific. Thank you so much.
MacGregor: You’re welcome so much.
Smith: You’ve given so much to Evergreen. Your handprint—your footprint—is all over it.
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