Tom Rainey Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

RaineyTom

Title

Tom Rainey Oral History Interview

Date

31 July 2017

7 August 2017

9 August 2017

Creator

Tom Rainey

Contributor

Stephen Beck

extracted text

Tom Rainey
Interviewed by Stephen Beck
The Evergreen State College oral history project
July 31, 2017
FINAL

Beck: This is Stephen Beck. I’m recording an interview with Tom Rainey on July 31, 2017. We are here
in Tom and Nina’s living room. Tom, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. I really appreciate it.
Rainey: My pleasure.
Beck: I’d like to start by asking if you could say a little bit about your early childhood, and your
upbringing, and how that might have informed your academic career.
Rainey: Oh, sure. Well, it formed my whole life, really, in a sense. I’m a seventh-generation Floridian.
My folks have been in Florida since 1823, before it was a state. I was born in Wauchula, Florida, in a real
cracker county, in the sense of being a kind of rural Southern county in central Florida. I was born in a
place where my father was born, where my great-grandfather, my grandfather was born. My folks had
drifted south into Florida from Georgia and Alabama during the nineteenth century, and all were in
place by 1900, wherever they were going to be, that they are now.
That meant that I was born well within a Southern tradition. My folks had been farmers, but
three generations back from that. My grandfather was the only Republican in town, and he was
Republican as a patronage Republican, because he decided that he wanted to be postmaster, as his
father, my great-grandfather, had been in 1909. So they shifted from the Democratic Party to the
Republican Party. Every time there was a Republican in the White House, there was a Rainey in the post
office. So I didn’t grow up in a rural atmosphere. I grew up in a shopkeeper/businessman/postal
atmosphere.
When I was born, in 1936, my father was a mail carrier. We weren’t that touched by the
Depression, largely because my father was employed the whole time. My mother was from a much
poorer cracker family than my father was. She had wanted to be a schoolteacher, but she had to drop
out of school in the tenth grade, lie about her age, and get a job at McCrory’s Five and Dime, because
she was one of 12, and there were four children younger than her left in the household.
When my grandfather, her father, was chased out of town in Fort Meade by irate husbands in
his church—he was a Pentecostal preacher, and one of these people that had high moral standards for

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everybody but himself—my mother was not able to finish high school. But my mother was a reader all
her life, as I am.
When my sister Mary Sue and I came along, the first thing I remember about learning anything
was how to speak the language, because my family was class conscious, in the sense that they wanted
all of us to speak correct English because they didn’t want any of their children to be confused with
those people down in Tin Top. I would say, in some ways, my family in Wauchula was more prejudiced
toward white trash than they were toward blacks. There was a black population. Virtually everyone in
our family had black people working for them.
I grew up in a really quite loving atmosphere. My childhood was a happy childhood. And I grew
up a reader; my mother taught me how to read when I was four and five. She read a book a week, and
so she set the example. She was very determined to get away from her poor cracker background, so she
was very much interested in us becoming educated, and speaking English the correct way. We could
have an accent, of course, and she was very funny about this. She said, “I don’t want you to say ‘y’all’, I
want you to say ‘you all.’” Of course, that’s still Southern.
My father had grown up—and I think this is important in my early life—my father had grown up
a rich boy, because my grandfather, his father—postmaster, businessman, developer and so on—was,
for a while, during the teens and the ‘20s, a very wealthy man, wheeling and dealing in large pieces of
real estate, and had crate mills and everything. My hometown was a sort of citrus/vegetable shipping
center. It was cows, cucumbers, melons, strawberries—so my hometown was around the depot, and
there were packinghouses by the tracks, so things were being shipped directly from these
packinghouses to the North.
My grandfather was quite wealthy, and kind of spoiled my father. My father’s mother had died
when he was three and a half, and Granddaddy was too busy making money, gaining power, to take very
good care of his son, so he farmed my father and his sister out to a grandmother, my greatgrandmother, who was a real cracker girl. Her family had been in Florida since 1840. So, I grew up very
much in a Southern atmosphere, with all the bigotry and the prejudice there appertaining to Jews and
Catholics, anybody who wasn’t white, Anglo-Saxon, Metho-Baptist. That’s the general atmosphere that I
grew up in.
But a very happy childhood, in the sense that I had a cousin that I played with that was older
than me, who taught me how to be a boy, essentially; a loving mother; an employed father.
Beck: What early experiences might have contributed to you pursuing history?

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Rainey: Well, I’ve actually written about that. I’ve written a family history, finished now but not yet
published, called Crackers in Paradise: Stories and Memories of a Florida Family.
My father and my uncle, and my grandfather in particular, were great storytellers. So I grew up
sitting literally at my grandfather’s knee on the front porch. He was a broken man by the time I knew
him. He’d lost it all in the ‘30s. But there he was on the front porch, with a white linen suit slightly
stained with tobacco juice, smoking a Tampa Crook or a King Edward cigar, holding forth. I was the one
child that was really interested in all of his stories about old Florida, and his snake stories, and that sort
of thing, so I started listening to him. I was just interested in things in the past. I used to like to
rummage through his attic, and find things that went back—items, broken furniture—things that went
back to the nineteenth century.
The other part of that is that my family was very status conscious, in the sense that Grandfather
would always say, “We’re not much now, but there was a time when the Raineys meant something in
this part of the state.” He was always talking about how the Raineys came to Florida, and how they got
involved in business, and that sort of thing.
But he had all these stories about old Florida, and the way Florida was when he was a boy, and I
was very interested in that. I think I became a historian as I listened to him tell these stories, and I think
of myself as a person who tells stories that just happen to be mostly true, and narrative stories. When I
started to read, I started reading simple histories. In the meantime, my grandfather was imparting all of
this. I must have heard from him maybe 300 or 400 stories. As with all such, they were mostly true. But
they were also part of the mythology of being a pioneer cracker in the state of Florida. Snake stories, for
example, were told to give you some idea of the character that was involved with the snake, so I heard
lots about his encounters with snakes. But I was just very much interested in that at an early age.
My father was also a good storyteller. My father had grown up learning how to fish, learning
how to hunt. At that time, Florida was open still. It was not posted or fenced off. He could hunt and
fish across the state. I remember one time him telling me, after telling me a story about fishing and
hunting, and carrying with him just a bag of grits, some salt and fatback, and eating fish and picking
salad and berries—my father was a genius in the wild. He was a genius in the wilds of Florida. He just
had a sense for the woods. He knew where the snakes were, he knew where the birds were. He raised
dogs, and always told me stories about hunting and fishing and so on. I was the one of Granddaddy’s
grandchildren that was most interested in hearing about all that.

3

My book is essentially based on all these stories. I’ve got a lot of primary evidence in it,
photographs and letters, and the usual primary evidence. But a lot of it is, I just assumed there’s an
element of truth in virtually every story, and that you can tell a story to make a point.
Beck: Where did you do your undergraduate studies?
Rainey: Let me start with high school. The only courses I did well in were literature and history. I could
have done well in other things, but I played football and chased the ladies, so I was not academically
inclined.
I joined the Navy immediately after high school. The way I would put it, I grew up in the Navy. I
did as well in Navy schools as I did poorly in high school. But I’d been reading history and literature—
some fairly serious literature—from the sixth grade on. I was more and more interested, and testing the
historical veracity of films, for example. I didn’t think I could make it in college. That’s, I guess, the
point. I didn’t, because I was not prepared in high school. In the Navy, I did several things that prepared
me for college, even though I actually thought I was going to stay in the Navy.
Beck: When were your years of service in the Navy?
Rainey: August 1954 – August 1959. I took American history, I took English, and I took mathematics
from East Carolina University, when I was stationed at Cherry Point, North Carolina, Second Marine Air
Wing. I was a hospital corpsman, and this may sound strange, but hospital corpsmen, electronics mates,
they were a sort of elite within the enlisted ranks. Those were rates, as we called them, that required
some education. I not only did well in hospital corps school, but I did well in lab at a blood bank school.
That took me to Bethesda, Maryland. And that took me to Washington, D.C., which is a historian’s
paradise.
In the Navy, I’m reading Civil War history, and that takes me to something else and something
else, and Reconstruction and so on. I’ve read virtually 50 books on the Civil War. Became interested
also in a little bit in philosophy, when a fellow hospital corpsman, “You ought to read this.” He sort of
quoted Aristotle to me when I was about 20 in the Navy. He said, “It’s better to teach and lead than
follow and learn. But you have to follow and learn in order to teach.”
Of all things, I read Voltaire. That turned me into a skeptic, or rather, confirmed my native
skepticism. I’ve always been a bit of a skeptic. From vacation Bible school on, I was a skeptic. You had
to show me. I’m well named Thomas. It’s the same as a historian. You have to show me the evidence,
or I don’t believe it.
Beck: Perhaps Voltaire gave you a focus for your skepticism.

4

Rainey: Philosophical Dictionary. I read the whole thing. Then I read Candide. Then I read some of his
histories and so on. In the meantime, I was trying to learn what I hadn’t learned in high school. The last
two years I was in the Navy, I took some university courses from East Carolina University.
I had a hard time getting out of the Navy. I loved the Navy. I did extremely well in Navy schools.
I went up in rank quickly. I probably would have been an officer, or a warrant officer, had I stayed in,
because I was doing so well. Then, I took these courses, and became more skeptical, philosophically
skeptical. But I almost stayed in, but I was admitted to the University of Florida.
I felt I was going to be pre-med, and I thought I was pre-med. I was actually in pre-med and
pharmacy. And then, one day, I was just sitting around in the student center at the University of Florida
with some vets—I hung out with vets. The school was set up for vets then. I hung out with vets, and I
said, “You know, I’ve liked being a hospital corpsman, I’ve liked being a blood bank technician, I’ve liked
doing the emergency medicine I did in the Navy—with Marines in particular—but that’s not what I want
to do with my life. I don’t want to be that kind of doctor.”
So, I switched to history and Russian at the same time. The question people have asked me is,
“How did you become interested in Russian history?” I became interested in Russian history, I did
extremely well. I got one B in all of my university career. I did extremely well. I had great teachers at
the University of Florida. I had a great humanities sequence, which was another kind of intellectual
turning point for me, at the University of Florida. It’s like the one, in some ways, at Reed College. Every
sophomore in arts and sciences had to take this humanities sequence. It was world history, world
history. We had lectures in Chinese culture and Chinese history, Russian, and European, and American,
and so on. It was a year-long, two-semester program. And I loved it. It was just sort of one story. And
here is this vet that’s not sure he’s able to be in school.
I did a paper on Hamlet. It was part of an exam. The discussion leader was an Oxford graduate.
He was very disappointed with the papers, except for one paper. And I’ve loved Hamlet ever since.
[laughter] And I started reading Shakespeare, started getting interested in Shakespeare, started getting
really interested in the language that we speak. And just loved to be able to take history courses at that
level. Do something in the nature of history, my own history, historiography, historical methods. Loved
it all. So I think I had a really excellent education at the University of Florida, and I look back on it
frequently, as this is where I learned how to do this, this is where I thought, this is what I thought might
be the case.
Beck: That led you to graduate school in history?

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Rainey: I had to decide. I was a history major. Actually, I was a double major. I also had a major in
biology. That’s what I was doing as pre-med, but I continued with that, so I had all the courses—the
advanced biology, the advanced physics, physical chemistry, chemistry, all of that stuff. But many of us
had a mentor—I think Pete Sinclair was yours, Frank Haber was mine—a professor mostly of intellectual
history—had written a book called Age of the World: From Moses to Darwin. So I took History of Science
from him, I took Intellectual History from him, and he was sort of my mentor. He was my example of
what a historian is.
When I went in to talk to him seriously about being a historian, being a professional historian, I
didn’t know what to do. I said, “Frank, what do I need to do?” No, I didn’t say Frank, I said Professor
Haber. “What should I do? How do I do it?” And he says, “What do you want to specialize in?” I didn’t
know I had to specialize. [laughing] “Well, American, European, Russian, Asian.” I said, “I don’t know. I
like American history, but I find European history much more interesting.”
Right at that time, I had another professor that made a Russian historian out of me. A very
eccentric, crazy guy named Ed Chmievevsky. I took his two-semester Russian history, and, as I was
taking Russian, that turned me into that channel. Again, I didn’t know exactly what I had to do, because
I was not that knowledgeable about academia. I went and talked to Frank and said, “What do I have to
do, to do what you’re doing?” was essentially what I said. And he said, “Well, you have to go to
graduate school.” I said, “How do you do that?” [laughter]
My family was very proud of the fact my father had gone to university, my grandfather had gone
to law school. So they didn’t expect me to go to university, but they had some anticipation or some . . .
they were glad that I went to university. They were very proud of the fact. I’m a first-generation, the
first one to get a college degree. My father went, and got kicked out of several schools in the South. He
was a smart ass.
So, just sort of incrementally, step by step, as I learned what it was like. I had three, four very,
very good professors in history. I didn’t know what a fellowship was, I didn’t know any of that stuff. I
remember a conversation with Frank—I only called him Frank when I finished my Ph.D.—about how to
go about it. He said, “Well, this is what you have to do, apply for a fellowship.” And I said, “What’s a
fellowship?” He said, “Let me tell you what a fellowship is.”
I applied to UC-Berkeley; I applied to Harvard; I applied to Indiana University, which has a great
Slavic history program; University of Illinois; and University of Florida. I was admitted everywhere, and
Harvard said, “Well, we admit you, but we can’t give you any money at this point. We’ll reconsider after
your first year here.” Harvard did that with everybody, I think. I couldn’t do that. I had a wife and two
6

children by then. I was married when I was in the Navy, and I had a daughter in the Navy, and then a
daughter as a freshman at the University of Florida.
The University of Illinois offered me a university fellowship, as did Indiana University. So I went
to Champagne-Urbana. I had a university fellowship the first year. This was after Sputnik. There was a
lot of money to study the Russians then. The second year, I had a Department of Defense foreign
language fellowship. I had that the third year I was there, and then the final year, when I was working
on my doctoral dissertation, I had a teaching fellowship. I actually taught Western European civ. I had
graduate students as my seminar leaders, so I taught there.
Beck: What were the years that you were at the University of Illinois?
Rainey: I was at the University of Illinois from ’62 to ’66. I finished my doctoral dissertation. There’s
one story that I tell sometimes. I don’t know if it’s relevant, but I’ll tell it anyway.
When I was a senior in high school, I was not doing well in algebra. I went in to talk to Miss
Thelma Cole Miller, who was a formidable old-maid algebra teacher. I thought I could charm her out of
a grade, because I was not doing well, and I needed to have a good grade to stay in school—not in
school, but to stay and play football, which is the only thing I cared about then.
She listened to me and she said, “No, Tommy, I can’t do that to you.” I said, “What do you mean
‘to’ me?” She said, “It would not be good for you to give you something that you haven’t earned. I’ll
help you a little bit with it, and your sweetheart”—who also became my wife later—“she’ll help you.”
And, as I walked out the door, she said, “Well, Tommy, one of these days you’re going to learn that
you’re not as stupid as everybody thinks you are here.”
When I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation, the first person I wrote a letter to was
Miss Thelma Cole: “Dear Miss Thelma Cole, I think I’ve finally discovered that I’m not as stupid as
everybody else thought I was at the Hardee County High School.” [laughter] And I signed it “Dr. Thomas
B. Rainey.” [laughter] She got the biggest kick out of that. She took it to Beeson’s drugstore and
showed it to everybody. “Well, our Tommy did all right now.” It was that kind of town that I grew up in,
that pretty close community that I grew up in.
Beck: Did you start teaching at SUNY right out of grad school?
Rainey: No. I had six offers. It was pretty competitive, but I had six offers. I had a couple of
publications in refereed journals coming out of graduate papers, and I won an Alpha Theta scholarship
award, and The Historian published this paper that I’d written. So I had some pretty good credentials
coming out, and a very strong recommendation.

7

In my field of Russian studies, there were three schools, really. The Yale School; George
Vernadsky founded that. The Harvard School; Michael Karpovich founded that. And the Columbia Slavic
Studies Program, founded by Geroid Tanqueray Robinson. It was very Byzantine then, it seems to me.
My faculty advisor and mentor at the University of Illinois was Ralph Fisher. He was a Robinson
Ph.D., and there was a whole stable then, so to speak—a couple of generations, by that time—of
Robinson people. And then there were the Karpovich people. Well, the Harvard people got jobs for
each other, the Yale people got jobs for each other, and the Columbia people got jobs for each other. So
I was considered a third-generation Geroid Tanqueray Robinson student.
I knew John Shelton Curtiss, who was a very well-known Russian historian at Duke, was going to
retire, because Fisher told me that he was going to retire, and that he would recommend me for that job
at Duke. But it was going to be a year after I finished, and so I took a kind of stand-in job at the
University of Arkansas. I taught everything there. I taught Near Eastern history, I taught European
history, I taught Russian history, and I taught American foreign policy there. Then, this job at Duke came
open, and so I got it. I was at Duke for three years on a tenure track.
Martin Luther King was assassinated in ’68, and about nine assistant professors and I
participated in this massive civil rights demonstration called the Duke Vigil. It shut the school down. We
ended up with demands that the Board of Trustees recognize the custodial union, which was mostly
black, and we participated in what locally was the famous, or infamous, Duke Vigil and the Durham
boycott, with all of the black preachers and so on boycotting the businesses there.
It was an integration struggle, for the most part, and I was heavily involved in that. I was a
member of the Southern Students Organizing Committee, an all-white civil rights group that consisted
largely of those people that were kicked out SNCC when Stokely Carmichael said, “You white boys have
to do your own thing, because if we achieve something, you’ll get the credit for it. And we need the
credit for it.” So, we did. And I was the president of the chapter in North Carolina.
Beck: How did the administration take that from you nine assistant professors?
Rainey: Not well, so it was not clear that I was going to get a contract renewal. To be honest about it, I
look back, and the only regret I think I have, academically, is not keeping the Duke job. It was a great job
for a Russian historian. Duke had a consortium with the University of North Carolina. We had a speaker
series coming and going. I had graduate students that were good. It was just an ideal place in the South
for me to be. I had, as a Southerner, a kind of missionary zeal, too, that I wanted to be in a Southern
school because I wanted to help my benighted white Southerners. But it was clear my contract was not
going to be renewed. They didn’t fire me, exactly, but they wouldn’t give me an early decision.
8

Just at that time, a former teacher of mine at University of Florida, Cliff Yearly, who was at SUNY
at Buffalo, it happened that Frank had changed from the University of Florida to the University of
Maryland. Frank lived in Georgetown, which he referred to as the “most affluent slum in America.”
And Cliff called him, just to chat, because they had been fellow graduate students at Johns
Hopkins. Frank said, “Tom Rainey’s here, and he’s visiting with me, and he’s on the way to Russia.” I
was on the way to Finland, actually, to use the huge library on Russian stuff that they have at the
University of Helsinki.
So I talked to Cliff, and Cliff said, “Well, I remember you as a very good student, but I’m not sure
what you’ve done since, because I left the University of Florida before Frank did.” I said, “I’ve been
teaching Russian history.” He asked me about my credentials. He said, “We need a Russian historian.
Would you apply for it?” And I did. And I got it, at double the salary I was making at Duke. [laughter]
Beck: That was SUNY Buffalo?
Rainey: SUNY Buffalo. I was there from ’69 to ’72.
Beck: I know that you and Chuck Pailthorp were both at SUNY Buffalo at the same time.
Rainey: Yes.
Beck: And he told me a story. I wonder if you’d be able to tell me a little bit about the protests that you
were involved in there at SUNY.
Rainey: Well, after the news of the Cambodian bombing came out, SUNY Buffalo blew up, and was
essentially on strike—I think I’ve got the dates right—the spring semester of ’71. Police were on
campus, beating up our students every night. The students were bombing ROTC buildings and stuff like
that.
So Chuck and I, and 43 others—faculty, and a couple of graduate students—tried to talk to the
President. In the administration building, the President’s office was on the fourth floor, and I had an
office in the basement, so I had a key to the building, so that’s the way we entered on a Sunday. We
knew the President was there. We wanted to talk to him, and try to get him to get the police off
campus. We got into the anteroom before the President’s office. It was full of police. He had us all
arrested. We spent three nights in jail, and were released, and not charged. One of the people that
helped bail us out was Gabriel Kolko, who was a faculty member there, and a radical revisionist
historian.
It became clear that this was going to affect—and I was bumping right up against it by then—up
or out. And so, I passed the department. There were three or four people that opposed my
reappointment—well, by then, elevation to associate professor. But one, who was just adamant, for
9

reasons I never quite understood. I met all of my teaching responsibilities. I had published several
things in refereed journals. I had just published a monograph on the Russian peasant problem. I’d done
all of those things that I should have. I had excellent faculty evaluations from students. But he actually
made up a story that turned out not to be true, that I was a sloppy teacher. I’d given someone credit
that wasn’t actually in my class. Once that got out, and the college-level committee, they voted, I think
it was, seven to six against me getting tenure and a new contract.
So, ’71-’72, I was looking for a job. And Micki Pailthorp, as I said, was the administrative
assistant to the—we were kind of friends. I was not that friendly then with Chuck. I mean, we were
friends, and we’d had this common experience, but we weren’t that good of friends, I would say. But
Micki and I were conversational, and she would tell him it was too bad, that they would miss me in the
department. She said, “Well, would you be interested in teaching at a school that’s a little different?” I
said, “Well, how different?” [laughing]
Beck: She was the administrative . . .
Rainey: Administrative head, administrative assistant, to the chairman of the history department. She
was working there. And this was conversation in front of the mailbox in the history department.
Beck: And so she told you that there was this school a little different.
Rainey: Yeah. Chuck had come out here in ’71.
Beck: That was the first teaching year.
Rainey: That was the first teaching year.
Beck: You found out about it. So how did you go about applying, and what was that whole process?
Rainey: Well, I talked to Chuck, and Micki told Chuck that I would be interested. I said yes. So Chuck
sent me information about TESC.
What I had also been doing, I’d been interested in team teaching. The only way you could do
that at SUNY Buffalo was with an overload; by teaching with somebody else in one of the new colleges,
which were formed around certain interests. There was a Rachel Carson College, there was a Social
Science College. So I taught with other faculty programs on American studies, with Native Americans
and so on, in the American studies program, and the social science program. Taught mostly history—
literature combinations, as we do here, and some philosophy. I liked it, liked it a lot. So, in that sense, I
was pretty well disposed to look favorably on a place that taught that way. And, you know, I needed a
job.

10

Turns out that I got a job offer at Florida Central University, but I really did not want to go back
to Florida. So, Chuck put my name in the pot. The way it worked then was there was Don Humphrey,
Charlie Teske and Merv Cadwallader. They interviewed the people.
Beck: They were the deans at the time.
Rainey: They were the deans, and they interviewed the people in their areas. I fell in Merv’s area of
social science/history. At that time, they would come east, if there were people to be interviewed
around the East. I had an interview with Merv at the Holiday Inn in a driving snowstorm in Buffalo.
Merv recommended me, but then, I had to fly to Boston when all of the deans were there in Boston, and
people were flying in for the final interview. And they offered me the job.
They offered me a job, and then, I think, that was the big class of ‘72—there must have been 20
people that came in with me. That was the first major class, I think. I’ve got it somewhere—I found it
the other day—I wrote a statement that you might find interesting, and I’ll give it to you next time.
Because I looked for it, and I couldn’t find it. But I’ll find it.
Beck: This is a statement of interest in the position?
Rainey: Statement of interest on why I wanted to do interdisciplinary studies. That was the big draw to
me, team teaching and interdisciplinary studies. Because I figured that—and this has certainly been
true—team teaching, with people from other areas, has made me a better historian. I’m still a historian,
essentially.
Then, I think what happened is I’m not sure how I ended up in American Studies, but I did, with
David Hitchens, Chuck Nisbet and Mary Nelson. This was the first teaching team I was in.
Beck: What was the first program called? What was the title of it?
Rainey: American Studies.
Beck: Okay. And that was Dave and Chuck Nisbet. And who was the other?
Rainey: Mary Nelson, a Native American woman that, by the way, hated Mary Hillaire. I shouldn’t say
that on tape, but both are gone, so I suppose I can. For some reason, she did not get along with Mary
Hillaire. Two she-bears in the same den, I suppose. I came in knowing nothing about what was going on
here.
David and Mary Nelson were in, say, personal crisis. No point in going into the details of that
crisis, but it was enhanced by alcohol. And Chuck and I end up, strangely enough—we have such
different styles, and I was a quasi-, demi-, semi-Marxist at the time, and Chuck is a straight-arrow
mainstream economist—we were both suspicious of each other, but we discovered that there was one
thing we had in common. We wanted the program to be organized well, and for the faculty to do what
11

they say they’re going to do. We were having a situation where Mary wouldn’t show up, and David
wouldn’t show up. And David would organize a film series and wouldn’t show up with the film. Going
through a terrible time with his wife, and with alcohol. It was David’s nadir, I would say, in his life.
So Chuck and I—it’s too much to say we saved the program, but we ended up being friends after
this. [laughing] And it’s really on the basis of that friendship that Chuck and I started teaching with
Alan. We set up the first Political Economy program.
Beck: That’s Alan Nasser?
Rainey: Alan Nasser, and Jeanne Hahn. I taught that program four times, I think, altogether, with the
constellation that usually included Chuck and Jeanne, and sometimes Alan, and sometimes Jerry Lassen.
Beck: I wanted to talk about the first year that you were here just a little bit more.
Rainey: Sure.
Beck: First of all, just general impressions. What was it like coming to Evergreen?
Rainey: In the Buffalo circumstances, I was considered, by fellow faculty members, an anarchist and a
radical and so on. That’s not the way I acted in my classroom at all. I had the reputation there of setting
high expectations, and then helping students reach those expectations. That’s really my simple
academic philosophy, I would say.
I came here, and it seemed terribly chaotic. I didn’t come expecting to teach my specialty area
all the time. I didn’t want to do that. I knew that, and I could always do that. But I wanted to learn
from my colleagues, and I wanted to do interdisciplinary teaching because I honestly thought that’s the
best way to teach about anything topical or historical. I thought it was pretty chaotic, and I was not
comfortable with that.
Beck: What kind of chaos was that?
Rainey: It was chaotic because it seemed like we had to recreate the curriculum every year. There was
not much in the way of planning to go forward. I began to think, yes, that there are certain things that
need prerequisites. It became clear to me as long as it was sort of take any student that comes in the
door, that it would be very difficult to do advanced work. And I missed that. I just thought there had to
be more accountability on the part of faculty; if they say they’re going to do something, they do it. It
seemed loosey-goosey at the time to me, and that there had to be some curricula pathways that were
predictable, and that you at least had to order things so that the lights got turned on, and the faculty
showed up.
That came also out of that first program experience I had. I did not like the way—I didn’t think it
was good for the students. So I took a position, as Chuck did—and Chuck doesn’t get credit for this sort
12

of thing, but he really believed this—the students come first. Not in the sense of coddling them or
anything like that, but they come first, and your responsibility to those students comes first. David was
not able to do that then, and Mary certainly was not able to do that. So I came to the conclusion that
organization, and some kind of predictability, is something we owe the students. I wouldn’t say I have
higher academic standards. That’s not what I’m talking about. But I became a great believer in careful
planning.
The other thing that was not clear—one of the things I figured out here, over the first 10 years—
and I don’t want to sound too elitist about this—is that I discovered that there were people I did not
want to teach with. Not necessarily because they were bad teachers. But, one, I couldn’t learn anything
from them; two, they were organizationally sloppy; three, in some cases, were what Isaiah Berlin calls
hedgehogs. They had ideological pre-considerations that determined everything that they planned or
did. And I’m a fox. Multiple causality. Pluralistic explanations.
So, the first 10 years, I consciously began to sort through the faculty I would teach with, and
people I would not teach with. I think virtually everybody has done that. There were about 25 people I
would teach with. I finally decided, for example, Niels Skov—not your daddy Gordon Beck so much, but
Niels and Andrew Hanfman were considered to be the old fogeys.
Beck: Right. Niels Skov and Andrew Hanfman.
Rainey: But I wanted to teach Russian history. That meant that I had to deal with this particular old
fogey, because he and I had to do it. And we did. We created the first Russia program, and then taught
together five, six times after that. And it’s one of those things that you not only learn subject matter,
but your learn style, and you learn other things from your older faculty members.
What happened to me is—I was still fairly young then, I came here when I was 36—I began to
appreciate the kind of authority that they represented, and the people that were older than I was, and
respect that, and feel like I could learn something from that in the way I teach, not only what I teach,
and how I learn, but the way that they operate. Byron Youtz was another one. And Rudy Martin, I
would say, is another, although Rudy’s only a year older than I am. I discovered I wanted preplanning,
and an orderly delivery. And I wanted to learn from my respected elders.
Beck: What sort of preplanning was there? You were here ’72-‘73, so you were probably involved in
planning for the next year or two.
Rainey: I was. It was chaotic. It was sort of get together and plan, without much in the way of—there
was a thing that was required then that should have been helpful that was never used. The coordinator
of a program was expected to write a program history. I used those, and I helped write several, and it
13

was a way to review that, and make some judgment about what works and what doesn’t work, like the
study of history does.
But it seemed quite chaotic. And I was one of the people that didn’t support departments, but I
supported something in the nature of specialty area concentration, if the baronial boundaries had not
been heavily established, so you could leap from specialty area to specialty area. It just seemed chaotic,
and I wasn’t quite sure . . . and, strange as it may seem, what I discovered is that I can teach with almost
anybody, whatever their opinion, as long as they have the same work habits as I do.
Beck: So it’s the work habits that really make the difference.
Rainey: Yes, right.
Beck: What about other things about the first year, outside of the chaos of the academic planning
process? Were there other experiences, or impressions that you formed of this new school?
Rainey: Right. Yes. The one thing I did like—and Byron was one that kept stressing this—is the
moment I walked in the door, I was not a junior professor. I was a professor, like everybody else. And I
liked the fact that we got raises basically on time and grade, rather than success only the seduceable,
which is the way it was everyplace else I’d been. If somebody else wants you, you can get a raise. And
the people in the business college make twice as much as those people with the same level of
experience as people in the history department. I liked that kind of egalitarianism, as far as the faculty
was concerned. I am a professor because I have something to profess.
I was one of the advocates for having some kind of faculty senate, though, because I thought the
faculty needed to make some decisions about working conditions, and about curriculum; those things
that faculty should do as a group, collectively. There were a fair number of people that didn’t feel that
way, and Willi Unsoeld was one. So we had a lot of debates, Willi and I, in faculty meetings.
The other thing I like about it. I ran into Stone Thomas today on campus, and we reminisced. I
liked the level of civility. You could argue with almost anybody on any question, and what you said
wasn’t necessarily held against you. So I felt that I could virtually say anything, as long as it was right
reasoning and logical [laughing] in some fashion.
I came with the mentality, really, of an assistant professor. I remember going down to Duke and
talking to Joel Colton, who was the department chair, about offering a seminar on the Russian
intelligentsia. “Well, perhaps when you’re an associate professor.” But there was none of that here.
There was, at least within the faculty, a perfect egalitarianism.
I guess the other thing, quite honestly, I learned here about myself as a teacher is that I really do
believe that teachers teach and students learn. And I never bought that kind of egalitarianism, that if
14

I’m teaching something, it means somebody wants to know what I know, and how I think about it. And
that has remained, essentially, my teaching approach.
Beck: Speaking of students, what was your impression of the students when you first arrived here?
Rainey: I had the best students I’d ever had, and the worst students. I had students that wanted to
build spaceships on a $6,000 budget, and asked me would I help them get the money. And I had
students, like Bob McChesney, early on in the ‘70s. I did a program, I did a group contract, called Marx
and the Third World. Incredible students there. Twelve.
I discovered then one of the problems that we have, and I don’t think it’s a problem that we’ve
ever solved, and that is, how to do advanced work. The only way you can do advanced work—which, by
nature, is selective—is to violate the sort of assumed student to faculty ratio. So, if you have seven
people that want to understand more deeply philosophy or study Plato or something like that, that’s
advanced work. But we haven’t been able to break that. I guess my fear has been the same as Kirk
Thompson, as we talked about; that, if we’re not careful, this is going to be the best two-year
community college in the state.
But that’s been a problem that I felt was there from the very beginning, and we’ve never been
able to solve it. The scientists have. The scientists have been the best organized here from the very
beginning. They had pathways, they had understandings about faculty. The most anarchic has been the
humanities. I remember discussions: “Well, I don’t want to talk about pathways. I want to teach what I
want to teach.”
So, in the humanities, we never really—in language studies, we did. Susan Fiksdal and Andrew,
and all the people involved in the Japanese history and language, were able to work out a sequence, so
that we’re not offering that every year, and competing for the students. It was every three years for the
Russia program at first, but in other areas, it was just really impossible, it seems to me. I’m not quite
sure why that’s the case.
Beck: You mentioned the sciences and the humanities, but in the first couple of years, were there
organizations along divisional lines at all?
Rainey: Yes. They were around the deans.
Beck: You had deans’ groups?
Rainey: Yes.
Beck: You were in . . .
Rainey: . . . Merv Cadwallader’s.

15

Beck: You mentioned the Russia program, you mentioned the Political Economy program. When did
those get started?
Rainey: The ‘70s. If I recall, the first Political Economy, Introduction to Political Economy—it went
Introduction to Political Economy, and then group contracts that came from that. So that’s how we did
some advanced work. Like Chuck Nisbet would do intermediate macroeconomics, or intermediate
microeconomics, or economics and the state, or something of that sort. Jeanne would do radical theory,
and you know what Alan would do.
Alan’s prickly personality has kept him, I think, from being recognized as one of the greatest
minds on this faculty, in my opinion. The other one was the Cornhusker. I think he’s from Nebraska.
David Marr.
Beck: Iowa, I think. Isn’t David Marr from Iowa?
Rainey: Oh, that’s right, the University of Iowa.
Beck: When did you become involved in doing political economy? You got started with Chuck Nisbet
right away?
Rainey: Yeah, I knew that, and it began to coalesce into “Well, we ought to do this.” I think the first was
’74. I think so, ’74 or ‘75. I remember we had a little more informal hiring then, and there were lots of
positions to hire. It was Jeanne and I that were instrumental in hiring Alan. Alan’s a Jesuit, a Jesuitical
Marxist [laughing] who is brilliant at casuistry. [laughing]
But I remember going down to Eugene, when he lived down there, to interview him. I knew
right away that this was somebody I could learn a lot from, so I was instrumental in the hiring of Alan.
I’ve never been sorry. It’s been up and down. Alan reminds me a lot of my father, in the sense that
sometimes Alan outsmarts himself. I don’t want to get into defending Alan, but I ended up doing that,
at a point when I thought he should not be fired for things that did not seem to be reasonable that he
was being charged with. I remember Mark Levensky, and David Marr, and several other people, we got
together at a retreat and said, “We’re going to stop this.” And we did, by going to the Provost. I don’t
know if that tale has ever been told. I don’t think it needs to be told in any more detail. [laughter]
My feeling has always been I don’t want to judge a person on their personality, but on their
intellect, and their contribution. And we have some recent examples of that. They will remain
nameless, because now it can be litigious. But I want to hire the smartest people, the best-qualified
people. And if they turn out to be assholes—what the great Bob Sluss once called an “un-charming
compoo”—those are the people we need to protect. There are those, like you and me, that are
charming compoo. [laughter]
16

Beck: Well, you’re charming anyway. You’re flattering me.
Rainey: So are you.
Beck: That does remind me, because I did watch the mention of the organizing of the faculty meeting.
And I did watch the debate that you had with Willi Unsoeld the other night. I think that was in ’74 when
you had that conversation.
Rainey: Right. I liked Willi, by the way, and he liked me. David Hitchens didn’t like Willi, but I liked Willi.
I had all of his children at one time, except Terrace, but Devi was in Political Economy, Krag was in
Political Economy, and Regon was in Political Economy.
Beck: One of the things that came out from that was, I think, you said something about the role of
diversity of opinion and disagreement.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: That was a really crucial element of the community.
Rainey: The other reason I believed that we ought to have a collective voice, and I believed we ought to
have our own senate, or something like that, is that our working conditions are different than the
working conditions of the staff. That’s the thing that Willi and I really debated over; that if we have our
own organization, and our own this and that, that it will offend the staff. But we have different working
conditions, we have different intellectual demands, we have different responsibilities, and faculty ought
to make the key decisions on those issues.
It’s why I tried to create a union here. I was president of the first AFT that we had on campus, in
the ‘70s and early ‘80s. We had a hard card campaign, and what we were doing mostly was working on
trying to get recognition at the Legislature. And we almost got it. We lost by one vote on enabling
legislation.
Teaching is different from anything else that’s done here, and it seems to me the judgments
about teachers should be made by teachers, and not by administrators. The whole notion of across-theboard equality among everybody was, in some ways, a lie. It’s not equal. And we learned that a couple
times when the Board of Trustees stepped in and asserted their authority, as they should have. But I felt
that we had to have a separate voice on this, because we have a different situation, we have special
needs that no other staff member has. I’ve never wavered from that view. And it’s why I tried to create
a union here, and why I joined the union, and the function, I think, that the union now has.
Beck: When was that hard card campaign?
Rainey: Early ‘70s.
Beck: So ’73, ’74, somewhere in there?
17

Rainey: Not early ‘70s. I’m sorry, ’77, ’78. I’d have to look it up.
Beck: That was after the formation of the faculty meeting. Is that true?
Rainey: Yes.
Beck: Did the faculty meeting actually emerge in ’74? It sounded as though, from the debate you had
with Willi, that what was called the faculty forum at that point was already in place in ’74.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: And were you involved with the organization of the faculty forum, or the faculty meeting?
Rainey: Yes. And never the head, I’m happy to say.
Beck: But you were active in it?
Rainey: There’s just enough Machiavelli in me to believe that the head is restricted, essentially, in what
they say and do. I was asked several times to run for it, but I did not.
The other thing, I guess, the background of that with Willi is I felt that if we didn’t have a senate,
a faculty collective voice that would vitiate, in some ways, what I perceived to be the egalitarian
decision-making within the faculty. Because a number of the people that were opposed to having a
faculty meeting, including Willi, were older people that all they had to do is to walk in and talk to the
President. They had a channel into the President, and into the Provost, and into the deans that all the
younger faculty did not have. That was my perception then, and I still believe that was so. Willi didn’t
need a faculty voice, because Willi was able to get everything he wanted without it. But the rest of us
had to grope around, and work within some specialty areas, or work with the groups that were here
today, gone tomorrow. But I never felt that the faculty should have any control over things that don’t
pertain to the faculty. Now, I think, we have to be . . .
The other part about forming the union that was separate from the meeting is that I believed
then, I believed throughout the ‘80s, I believed throughout much of the ‘90s that the administration did
very little to keep up with faculty salaries. [laughing] I was about to use a Southern expression probably
I should not put on tape, but I’ll just give the allusion. We ended up, on questions of salary and benefits,
sucking hind. I felt that Charlie, not so much, but Charlie, too, was not active as our representative in
raising—
Beck: Are you talking about Charlie McCann at this point?
Rainey: Charlie McCann. Now, I don’t know that to be the case about Charlie. Okay? But it did not
seem to me that the presidents after Charlie were real advocates for the faculty.
Beck: You were saying that you didn’t have the sense that the presidents were advocating for the
faculty.
18

Rainey: Right. I don’t know this to be true, but my thought then in why we needed a stronger collective
voice was that I didn’t feel that the administration represented us well. Particularly when we were in a
period of crisis. This is just the latest we have had. This is maybe, I would say, the worst that we’ve
gone through in terms of lost enrollment and things of that sort. But we’re going to have to deal with it.
I say “we”; I may not be “we,” because we have a low enrollment, lower than we had anticipated in
Chekhov and . . . But I felt that the administration did not work hard enough for the faculty, and, in fact,
did not give the faculty the kind of recognition that it needed when they got up to . . . and I felt that
from time to time from various presidents.
That’s another reason why I’ve supported the union is we’ve gone through some horrendous
administrations. Joe Olander was the worst, but Jane Jervis was not a very effective leader,
intellectually or—and Barbara Smith was a great organizer, but Barbara disliked much of the faculty.
Beck: This was Barbara Smith, who was Provost?
Rainey: Right. And, I think, for the most part—I mean, she told one—and I liked Barbara generally, and
I think generally, she did a pretty good job. But she never taught here. I don’t think she had a very high
regard for the faculty, and in some cases—I mean, she allegedly told one faculty member coming in
here, who told me this, that “Well, here are the people that you should avoid teaching with.” And she
named 10 or so of the brightest people on the faculty, most of whom were white males. Now, that may
be by chance. But I felt that we needed our own representation, we needed our own voice, and I still
feel that way. Strongly.
Beck: I’d like to go back to the Political Economy program a little bit.
Rainey: Sure.
Beck: I know that one of the—and I guess this was one of the reasons that I was bringing up the point
about the diversity of opinion topic that you brought up in your debate with Willi—that you had a
particular view about how political economy should be taught, from a diversity of perspectives. Do you
want to say something more about how the Political Economy program was shaped in the early days?
Rainey: Diversity in terms of diversity of approaches, and diversity of methodology, and diversity of
views. It was mostly how economics should be taught. I’m in no position to say anything about political
economy for the last 20 years, maybe 25 years, but originally the perception was—and I think we all
agreed to this, and maybe it’s because Chuck was a very strong part of creating Political Economy.
Then, I was certainly a revisionist historian, however you define that, in terms of, particularly,
American foreign policy, and opposed to the war in Vietnam. Hardest decision I ever made, by the way,
was to oppose that war, because I very much believe that we need a military, and we sometimes need
19

to fight wars. I believe in just wars. I had a couple of buddies killed in Vietnam that stayed in, hospital
corpsmen that were killed as hospital corpsmen.
Political economy should be put, as we taught it, in the context of so many of us escaping
situations where the Marxist or the radical view was not welcome. So that, we believed had to be
taught. But we also believed—and Chuck convinced us of this—that so did the mainstream view. And I
have never bought the view that our students get taught that in school or other places, so we don’t
need to teach them that, or as if it made any sense. Because, frankly, I believe, in terms of
predictability, and the way economies work, that the mainstream model is just as successful, in some
ways, to understanding certain aspects of the economy as the Marxist one is. We ought to teach those
two positions, and they should be taught by people who believe in what they’re teaching.
When, as I perceived it, it became just one particular view, and mainstream economics, or
mainstream politics, or anything of the sort, was squeezed out of that, it made me, in some ways,
intellectually more conservative, frankly. Because I believe that students should be given an equal shot
on how this sorry democracy of ours works and doesn’t work, but not only from a Marxist standpoint.
And we all agreed to that.
I was more radical then, and I felt sort of—when Alan wasn’t doing it, I did a series of programs
on Marx, and I did it from the perspective that this is going to be helpful in helping us understand
capitalism during a certain period of its development. But altogether, Marx is not prescriptive at all.
There was a lot of seminal discussions going on amongst us. Open, seminal discussions about it.
In some ways, it seems to me, that in some cases, it settled into a routine of teaching it only one way.
And I’m not comfortable with that. I know it’s one of those situations, if I’m in a seminar, for example,
and I see the radical view—which I sometimes, in certain circumstances, use in my own analysis, and
certainly Marx helps me understand capitalism in a certain stage of development—but I’m very
uncomfortable with the homogeny of opinions that I now see in faculty and students in political
economy at TESC.
I see a lot of that coming out of some programs now from students; that that’s the only one that
can be considered. And I joked that I think we ought to hire a conservative philosopher. I think we
ought to hire a theologian. I think students need to be exposed to a variety of ideas, and then give them
the credit that they can choose the one that enhances their understanding of their circumstances best.
Back to the Political Economy program, the discussions and the planning, to me, were some of
the most interesting that I’ve had here, of how are we going to do it? But that we would do it in such a
way as to not presuppose the validity of anything we taught. We’d lay it out, as we understand it. And
20

some students then came out of that, worked with Chuck. Some came out of it, worked with Jeanne.
Some came out and worked with me, and some came out and worked with Alan. That’s how we did
advanced work.
Beck: You started teaching, I think you said, in ’74, in the Political Economy program?
Rainey: Right.
Beck: How long were you pretty seriously active with that group?
Rainey: Through ’85, I would say.
Beck: So it’s really about that 10-year period?
Rainey: Well, that 10-year period, but then, something else interposed, that’s always interposed in my
academic life. Gorbachev brought me back into my specialty area. And teaching with Andrew brought
me back into my specialty area. There was a sort of intellectual tension between teaching my specialty
area—and then doing that every two years, which we decided finally—and Political Economy.
Something else interposed itself that’s of interest, which came of the result of my exposure, I
think largely, to John Perkins, and that’s environmental history. I just simply became more interested in
other fields than straight political economy; political economy in order to understand environmental
history.
Beck: When did you start getting opportunities to teach your specialty in Russian studies?
Rainey: Andrew and I decided to do it. It was easier to do that sort of thing then. [laughing] We
decided to do it. Andrew and I danced around each other, because he’s ex-CIA and I was one of the
resident radicals at the time. And I always have been, and still am, of the sort of Stephen Cohen group—
not with Stephen Cohen now on Russia, but Stephen Cohen then—that was very suspicious of the
totalitarian model that became the cold war view, and saw a sort of multiplicity of causality in the Soviet
Union.
So I shifted over then to Moshe Levin, and Stephen Cohen, and Jerry Hough at Duke, and so on,
who I learned from about how decisions are really made in the Soviet Union, and they were much
different than mainstream Cold Warriors. I became sort of a revisionist Russian historian, in that sense,
and I’m still in that group, I would say, as my intellectual context. I was interested in Soviet political
economy, and Russian stuff. Andrew was the one who not only confirmed my reentry into my specialty
area, but we had a way of working it out in a civil way, where he could express his largely cold war view,
and I could express my more revisionist view, if I could put it that way, of the Soviet Union. I would give
a lecture, and he would comment on it, and we would have a discussion. He would give a lecture, I

21

would comment on it. We worked it in. At the same time, I guess I began to move a little closer to his
position on a lot of things.
Also, the happy part of it, for me, is that the Russian program was truly interdisciplinary, in the
sense that we gave as much time to literature, philosophy, intellectual developments and that sort of
thing as we did the political and economic, whether we were on the tsarist or the Soviet period. He
confirmed, actually, my use of literature in virtually everything I teach in history. I’ve always retained
that interest. That’s still what I know the most about, but it’s going up and down as far as student
interest, and faculty interest, aside from Pat Krafcek and Andrew and I. But I’m modest enough to
believe that the Russia program has been one of the consistently best programs in language and
literature and history that we teach at Evergreen.
Beck: When did you and Andrew finally come together and start teaching Russia together?
Rainey: I think it was ’76. It was about four years after I got there. Maybe three, ’75 or ’76. We taught
every third year, so we taught through about ’87 or so, because I remember one . . . And we became
very good friends, and I much admired him. I much admired him, I think, because, like Niels Skov, he is
one of our colleagues that has worn the twentieth century directly on his back, in so many ways. And I
didn’t have that experience. They’re real Europeans, and so if I want to know about Europe . . .
We had a connection that we didn’t discover until just before we taught. In Russian, there are
no Hs, so it wouldn’t be Hanfman, it would be Ganfman. The G takes the place of the H in Russian. We
were sitting around, with Beryl Crowe, as I remember, and Rudy Martin. There was a sort of “dinosaur”
table in the CAB building, and that got fairly early established in the center.
All of a sudden, I said, “Andrew, what is your patronymic?” Because I didn’t know what his
patronymic was, and that’s important to a Russian. He said, “Maximovitch.” And I said, “You wouldn’t
happen to be related to Maxim Ganfmann, would you, who was the editor of Reich, which was the
major paper of the Constitutional Democratic Party under Paul Miliukov, in the Russian revolutionary
period?” He says, “Yes, he’s my father, thus Maximovitch.” I said, “I used that source exclusively in the
last half of my doctoral dissertation.” [laughter]
So then, he finally sort of laid out his whole history of anti-Fascist activity, and being kicked out
of Italy for that. Then, going to school in Germany during the ‘20s and seeing the street fights between
the Nazis and the CP.
The final culmination of that connection, which is one of my favorite stories about him, is his
godfather was a man by the name of Andrei Shingaryov, who was the minister of finance in the last
provisional government of Alexander Kerensky, and was murdered by Bolsheviks during the Bolshevik
22

revolution. He was in the hospital, and they came in and killed him. Kronstadt sailors surged through
and killed all of the Kadets. Thus, Andrew was Shingaryov’s namesake.
In ’84, I think, Andrew (or Andrei in Russian) went back to Russia for the first time since he was a
child. I took the group the next year. I particularly went to a monastery called the Alexander Nevsky
Lavra. There’s a huge graveyard—there’s a section for Dostoyevsky, and Mussorgsky, and all the
cultural figures—and I found Shingaryov’s grave, and I put flowers on it. I had the monk who showed
me where it was take a picture of me doing that.
We taught the program that following year, ’85-’86, and the first thing I did was to make a big
deal out of it, and to present this photograph, which I’d blown up, to him. I had never before seen him
speechless. [laughter]
That was the best of it, for me, as a young faculty member, is being able to distinguish between
authoritarian and authoritative, and coming to admire people, like your daddy Gordon Beck, who were
older than me—and Byron—and it stopped me from being such a young punk in faculty meetings,
slurring the personality of people and things like that, which I’d been doing for a long time. [laughing]
Beck: You mentioned Byron Youtz a couple of times. Obviously, he wasn’t teaching in your direct area.
I know later, he became Provost, but what kind of contact did you have with him early on, and why was
he so important for you in your first couple of years?
Rainey: Well, I don’t know. There were a couple of times when he stood in for the Provost. But he was
a major figure of that age group in creating the curriculum, particularly the science curriculum. Just
those faculty areas, he was clearly—there was a certain quiet charisma about Byron, and a sense of
humor, a wry sense of humor, that I appreciated just by hearing him talk, and talk about issues. We did
a lot of small-group discussions about what we were doing, and what we needed to do, and that sort of
thing, and he always made a lot of sense to me.
I developed a great deal of respect for him, just vicariously, not by teaching with him. But about
’75, ’76—it had something to do with the union, I think—in a faculty meeting, I made a disparaging
remark about him, and it really upset him. He told his wife Bernice Youtz about it, and Bernice called
me. That’s one of the things that got my young ass fired at Buffalo, doing things like that. [laughter] Or,
at least getting the reputation that nobody would support me, because I was thorny and raspy and
difficult to get along with, or at least that was the perception.
So I went to Byron, and talked to him about it. He said, “Yes, I thought we had a good
relationship.” He was very gentlemanly, and he was a real gentleman. We ended up and I said, “Well,
Byron, I can’t say I’ll always agree with you. But I tell you what, if I ever disagree with you on a major
23

thing, about the curriculum or anything, I’ll come and talk to you personally about it. I won’t say
anything in public.” And he said, “I appreciate that. I think that would be more constructive.”
After that, we became very good friends. We taught together about three years before he
retired. We taught a program called Discovery, Exploration, and Empire, so we could do the scientific
revolution, we could do the building of the European empires. We had the boats, and so Sluss was in it,
too, and we could do ecology.
Byron was one of the few people I knew that could really talk about physics in a way that made
physics, particularly questions like relativity, accessible to students, and accessible to people like me. I
knew something about it, and I always used something on Einstein when I taught Western civ at other
universities. I just developed a great intellectual friendship with him.
When I told my wife Nina about this, retrospectively, she says, “He was like a big brother to
you”—10 years difference—and that was the case. And he suffered through some of my faculty
childhood pains, and helped me, as did Sluss.
Sluss, and Byron, and David Marr, to a certain extent, and Alan, to a certain extent, and Jeanne
for a while, and Mark Levensky. I was arrogant enough to think that I was part of that inner intellectual
circle.
Beck: You described an intellectual circle. What held that group of people together?
Rainey: The care and feeding of The Evergreen State College, that’s what held us together; that we all
cared about what was happening, we were all concerned about some things. And we ended up
mostly—even though Kirk Thompson and I didn’t get along very well, but we got along when it came to
dealing with the college, as we understood it, and the curriculum, and so on. I think we all—and this
may sound corny—we all had a serious love affair, at that time, with the institution.
I said something in a faculty meeting in ’78, ’79 that I truly believe to this day. “For all the
difficulties and the organizational things that we’ve gone through, and the crises, I think that this is the
largest concentration of good teachers, of whatever they’re teaching, of any place I’ve ever been.”
I have taught in places with great scholars, but people that cared little about teaching. And we
disagreed about teaching a lot. I’m not one of the workshop people, as you know, but I always enjoyed
the conversation I had with Bill Aldridge about this, and with Earle McNeil. We could disagree with a
civility on process, and civility on current issues that . . . So, in some ways, Byron taught me how to be
civil within this context, if that makes any sense at all.
Beck: I think so, yes. So you’d say that this love affair that you had with the college was really about—
well, what? Was it really about the fact that there was such an emphasis on good teaching?
24

Rainey: Yes, and I believed firmly—I was a bit on the right, I would think, of the pedagogical scale.
Because, as you know, I really do believe in the importance of lectures to hold together, and to integrate
the themes of a program. It’s not that I’m against workshops.
But we could have those kinds of discussion with a civility that somehow seems missing these
days. You know more about it than I do, because—and I’ve been very happy over the last 15 years, to
teach just in Evening and Weekend Studies, and an occasional program when they want me to teach it
because somebody’s sick or something like that. I stood in for Jerry Lassen, I stood in for Rob Smurr, I
stood in for David Hitchens during his last illness. But mostly, I’ve enjoyed doing what I thought this life
would be all about, and what I wanted in teaching and in academia, and that’s reading, thinking, talking.
And I was glad, for the last 15 years, not to be involved in faculty politics, and doing committee work,
and things of that sort. I can’t honestly say that I know much about what’s going on in the daytime
curriculum, so I’m not exactly sure what’s going on at Evergreen now. [laughter]
Beck: I wonder if we might pause now, and just end up for today.
Rainey: Okay.
Beck: Then find a time when we can talk again.
Rainey: Are these some of the things you wanted to find out?
Beck: Definitely.

25


Tom Rainey
Interviewed by Stephen Beck
The Evergreen State College oral history project
August 7, 2017
FINAL
Begin Part 1 of 2 of Tom Rainey on 8-7-17
Beck: This is Stephen Beck. It is August 7, and we’re sitting out his deck on what passes for a hot day in
the Puget Sound. But, Tom, last time we talked, there were a couple of things that you mentioned that
I’d like to pursue a little bit more.
Rainey: Okay.
Beck: One was the statement of interest that you had about Evergreen.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: You said you were going to find that, and I see you’ve got it here. Tom, I’m wondering if you
could read that to me.
Rainey: Sure. This is the statement I wrote in response to the material that I got from Evergreen, part
of my application for the faculty here, and a follow-up of a conversation that I had with Merv
Cadwallader, who was the dean who interviewed me. So, here it goes: my impressions of Evergreen
State College:
A founder of Black Mountain College once noted that the ideal teaching situation was the lively mind on one end of
the log, facing a lively mind on the other, with no barriers in between. I fully endorse this vision, and for the last six years, I’ve
tried to translate it into my teaching, so far with only moderate success. The sorts of barriers that I’ve encountered are the
usual: lockstep curricula that force both teacher and taught into predetermined little boxes of knowledge; rigid departmental
territoriality, with quote “specialists” unquote jealously guarding the boundaries of their fields; competitive grading systems
that encourage students to wipe out the tracks of their fellows, and thereby make cooperative learning impossible; and
cautious administrators, whose major concern has been satisfying conservative boards of trustees, rather than education,
however defined.
For me, academia has been a world red in tooth and claw, not at all the genteel community of scholars and teachers
that I had been trained to expect. I have found solace and intellectual stimulation only among my students—the enemy camp,
as many of my elite colleagues would have me believe. Somehow, some of them have managed to survive the Catch-22-esque
madness of the American educational system.
I felt for a while that I had found a haven in the experimental colleges, founded at the State University of New York at
Buffalo by its former President, Martin Meyerson. Meyerson established, or allowed students and faculty to establish, a series
of colleges that were to set their own courses of study, their own systems of evaluation, and so on.

1

One college, College A, could engage exclusively in community action programs, while others like Tolstoy, Rachel
Carson and Vico College would try to develop bold new methods of teaching and cross-discipline communication. The entire
experimental system was to exist side by side with traditional departments, and was to be autonomous.
For two years, I have taught gratis in various of these experimental colleges while carrying the normal load of an
assistant professor in the Department of History. During this time, I have experienced the sweet, but mostly the bitter, in
experimental learning. It is impossible, I now believe, to carve out a durable intellectual sanctuary in the middle of a
competitive, hidebound, autocratically run system.
The experimental colleges at SUNY at Buffalo exist on the tolerance of the university administration and senior faculty
members, who hold the commanding heights of the university. A more conservative President than Meyerson, a man less
willing to run the risk of educational experimentation, has so strictly interpreted the rules as essentially to kill the spirit of the
interdisciplinary colleges. The combination of administrative pressure and withdrawal of funds will probably destroy the
colleges within the next five years.

A postscript on this: that is indeed what happened after I came to Evergreen.
External economic conditions moreover have seriously undermined the colleges. When job opportunities were more
plentiful, students were more willing to experiment with their programs, more resistant to parental pressure that pushes them
towards job-oriented curricula. Now, they are beginning to leave the colleges for bread-and-butter programs, or to use the
looseness of the college structure to lighten their course loads.
I’ve had the bitter experience of having students vote to trash the grading system by assigning everyone As, and then
compete like hell for grades in the departmental courses. It is not their fault, after all. For 12 years, they have been taught to
compete, and now they feel that they must do so to eat. All this is not to say that the experimental colleges themselves will not
be partially responsible for their eventual demise. Frequently, faculty members involved have encouraged intellectual laziness,
by allowing students to drift without any direction. Nor have there been any consistent demands in the colleges for qualitative
performance.
Direction must not be so obtrusive as to discourage native initiative and creativity, but there must be some guidance.
It is utopian to think that students, who have had their every scholastic move planned by someone else, can suddenly set for
themselves intellectually defensively goals, and then pursue them, without genteel prompting.

Correction: gentle prompting. Genteel, of course, as well. I come from the South, and would
always be genteel. [laughing]
Finally, students and faculty of the experimental colleges at Buffalo have often engaged in community work, without
sufficient preparation or empathy for the life experiences of working-class people in Buffalo. We must bridge the gap between
the university and the real world. Certainly, no educator with any sense of social responsibility, can deny this. But when
students and faculty descend on a community as missionaries of social change, they only increase the tension between town
and university. The misunderstandings thus generated only aid the enemies of experimental education. Here in Buffalo,

2

Meyerson’s successor has manipulated tension and misunderstanding to place further restrictions on the experimental
colleges.
These then are some reflections based on my experience in the experimental colleges created inside the SUNY at
Buffalo system. With these thoughts as background, I am now prepared to give my response to the materials from Evergreen.
For the most part, Evergreen would seem to be the answer to my dreams. However, I do have one or two specific
questions about Evergreen’s program. It could be that these questions arise out of ignorance. The materials that I have
received only tell about the Evergreen program quote “once over lightly” unquote. So, perhaps it would be useful for me to go
through what I understand to be some of the salient features of the program, and comment on them in some detail, both
favorably and with reservations, as the spirit moves.
I certainly agree that the best way to prepare students for society is through a “flexible program that stimulates their
own lifetimes of learning.” The major impediments to such a program is, in my opinion, the departmental structure of most
colleges. Departments have a tendency to calcify curricula, to institutionalize what seemed right and relevant 20 or 30 years
ago. Many history departments, for example, are controlled by men who still think that the only legitimate fields of study are
American and European history. It took the pressure of the Cold War, and the consequential stimulation of government
money, to expand their vision beyond the limits of Western civilization. They ignored not only the Third World, but also the
pockets of traditional culture within the United States. As one of the powerbrokers in my department once noted, in arguing
for another line in French, rather than a new one in African history, “When Africa has a history, we shall teach it.”
Some men rarely recognize the validity of cross-discipline approaches. It would seem intuitively obvious that only
cross-discipline study can provide the brainstorming techniques necessary just to understand the complex problems that the
future holds. Ideally, departments should encourage this study.
Neatly labeled departments, however, usually breed intellectual parochialism and isolation. Evergreen’s apparent
determination to break down this isolation by dispensing with departments is thereby laudable. The idea of cooperative
learning communities, which embody “a schedule of related academic work,” is another attractive feature of Evergreen’s
program. I take it that the aim is for faculty and students to immerse themselves in a broad category of problems, rather than
chew off a few little hunks at a time. That seems like the only rational way to learn. Configuration is, after all, more than the
sum of its parts.
In the descriptions of the coordinated studies, however, there is no mention of foreign language skills. Computer
science and mathematics doubtless provide the tools for understanding “causality, chance and freedom,” but how is one to
understand Human Development, or some Contemporary American Minorities—two programs advertised in the catalog—
without knowledge of languages other than English? Knowledge of Russian and other Slavic languages has certainly enhanced
my understanding of Slavic peoples. And I never really understood the subtleties of the Native American cosmology, and what
it has to offer a society that has stumbled into eco-catastrophe, until I began to learn Seneca.
What attracts me most about Evergreen, however, is the fact that the whole school seems bent on reasoned
experimentation. All students are apparently subject to the same method of qualitative evaluation. As I noted above, I have
serious reservations about the possibility of developing islands of educational experimentation in a university that is dominated
by traditional curricula, with competition grading. When no one in school competes for grades, can anyone afford not to
compete?
I should conclude then by suggesting some of the ways in which I might contribute to the further development of The
Evergreen State College. In general, I have extreme distaste for calcified, highly departmentalized systems of education that

3

exist in our present institutions of higher learning, and a firm commitment to flexibility in curriculum and pedagogical
experimentation. I already have some experience in the experimental colleges at the University of New York at Buffalo. I’ve
emerged from the experience a little grayer, but essentially unbowed.
In addition, I have specific skills in teaching experiences in history and languages that might prove useful in such
specific coordinated studies as Contemporary American Minorities and Human Development. At the same time, I feel that the
learning process is only just beginning for me. In the past six years, as a matter of fact, I have learned so much from my
students that I have often been confused as to which end of the log I belong.

Rainey: That’s it.
Beck: Great. You said at one point that Evergreen would seem to be the answer to your dreams. How
has that worked out?
Rainey: Uh . . . 80 percent so, I would say. [sighs] I’m convinced by my experience at Evergreen, which
is now 45 years old—this was certainly true when I was teaching in the full-time curricula—that
somehow—and I’m not quite sure how this happened, perhaps self-selection on the part of people that
have come here, who wanted to engage in interdisciplinary, and were willing to experiment—that
Evergreen, at least in my experience, has contained the largest concentration of good teachers of any
place I’ve ever been before.
I reflect on my undergraduate career and my graduate career, and I had some excellent
teachers—at the University of Florida, and then at University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana, but also,
some people that were experts in their field, and good scholars and so on, that were terrible teachers
that were not interested in teaching. So, enthusiasm for teaching as teaching, and how it’s done, and
interdisciplinary teaching, at least in the early years, I think, brought the best and brightest, not always
in their particular field, but in terms of how they taught. And I’ve had one or two bad experiences early
on.
At the same time, I would say that it took me about five or six years to sort through the faculty—
I guess I would put it bluntly that way [laughing]—sort through the faculty and decide who I would teach
with and who I would not teach with. But primarily, it’s been successful—and in some ways, I think I’m
an Evergreen success story—because I’ve learned so much from my colleagues. That was true for the 35
years or so I was a full-time teacher here. Less than that, I guess, about 28 years. So, once I figured out
who it was that I wanted to learn from—and I learned so much from my colleagues, I would say the first
30 years I was here—that expanded not only my intellectual agenda, but expanded my knowledge of
history. So, in a sense, teaching with other people has made me a better historian, because everything
is a grist for a historian’s mill.
4

So, I would say my dreams have been mostly—my concerns sneak in from time to time—but my
experience has made me very happy with my teaching experience here, and I’ve learned so very much. I
must say that by the time I was here 20 years that there were about 25 or 30 people that I wanted to
teach with, and I never stopped wanting to learn something from somebody else. I’ve taught very little
by myself.
On the other hand, I would say that another part of it, and then my anticipation in coming to
Evergreen is that I’ve had the best students I’ve ever had and the worst students I’ve ever had. I won’t
talk about the worst students, but students that sort of took advantage, I think, and sort of drifted
along. But what I learned is you set the bar high, and you teach with people that have the same
philosophy of what you could expect, or should expect, from students, that in the process of selfselection over the years, you don’t get somebody that wants to build a spaceship on a $6,000 budget, or
things of that sort.
Beck: Word gets around.
Rainey: Word gets around. And word gets around within the faculty, and so I’m not saying necessarily
that . . . well, in some ways [laughing] I can say . . . the faculty members that I liked, and that I thought
were good with students, but what they were teaching, and their method of teaching, was not
interesting to me. And I did not want to teach with them, not because they weren’t good intellects, but
because I didn’t think I could learn anything from it. And I carried that philosophy over, really, into
teaching in the Evening and Weekend Studies. I tried to teach with people from whom I can learn
something.
Reflecting on the full 45 years, if I thought that I could not learn something from somebody I
could teach with, I did not agree to teach just because I thought it was good for the institution. I
thought it was good, as long as I was intellectually active and learning and curious, and teaching with
people that could teach me something, and learn from students—advanced students and group
contracts—then I was happy. So, I certainly realized my expectations, and hopes and dreams.
Absolutely.
Beck: The last time we spoke, you mentioned an intellectual circle that included . . .
Rainey: Yeah.
Beck: . . . I think you talked a fair bit about Byron Youtz, but also you mentioned Bob Sluss.
Rainey: Yeah, Bob Sluss.
Beck: And Dave Marr. Jeanne Hahn. Alan Nasser.
Rainey: Alan Nasser.
5

Beck: Mark Levensky.
Rainey: Mark Levensky. I never taught with Mark, but Mark was the person, if I had something—a
paper that I’d written, or an application for leave—I would always ask Mark to look through it.
Beck: What were you expecting to get from Mark?
Rainey: Whether what I had written, or the application I had made, was good or a piece of shit. And he
would tell you. [laughing] My experience with Mark is—and I think students had the same experience
that the faculty had—is you’d go into Mark’s office, and Mark would take your paper. I remember he
had Scotch Tape here, and he had a pair of scissors here—a very orderly desk—and he would take the
paper, and if he didn’t like a section of it, he would take the scissors and cut it off into the trashcan sort
of ceremoniously. [laughter]
Every time that—sabbaticals, when I first came, were actually competitive, there were just so
many people that were allotted sabbatical leave, and it was competitive. It wasn’t just because you’d
had it before, you hadn’t had it before, your time and grade, that sort of thing. I got three sabbaticals in
that system, largely, I think, with the help of Mark Levensky. [laughter]
The other thing that I’ve experienced—and I’ll talk about this maybe later, when we talk about
some of the institutional barriers, and some of the encouragement, at the same time, to engage in
continuous scholarship in my field—Mark was one of the seven or eight people that I would always
show if I was giving a presentation at a conference, or I’d written something for a journal, or even larger
than that. Ken Dolbeare was another one I’d never taught with, but that I had great respect for as an
intellectual.
I must say that in many respects the faculty that I ended up respecting most, and wanting to
teach with, were people not just—I would say the criteria for me is that they—David Marr was a good
example—that did not think that what we taught necessarily had to have immediate application, and
were people that were interested in the life of the mind. And I’ve never been, as a result of teaching
with people like Marr and Levensky’s encouragement, and John Perkins—I’ve never felt that I was
anything but what I’ve always wanted to be, and that’s an intellectual. In an anti-intellectual society,
right? [laughter]
Beck: Yeah!
Rainey: I just recently read Hofstadter’s Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism in America, and a
comparative study that was made with German universities and American universities, and the
importance of theory, and the importance of intellectual sophistication and intellectual exploration. So,

6

I haven’t been dissatisfied with that, the intellectual tenor of my colleagues here. But it was very
selective. That’s what I mean.
Beck: Yes. But you did teach with David. Although you didn’t teach with Mark, you did teach with
David at least one program. Right?
Rainey: I taught two programs. David Marr, right?
Beck: Yeah.
Rainey: David Marr, I came to—along with—there were about five or six people, I would say, were pure
intellectuals, and they made no compromises on that, and David was one of them. And I found it very
strange [laughing] in a farm boy from Iowa, in some ways. And it carried over into faculty affairs, and
into discussions about discussions about the curriculum, that I ended up, I think, respecting most those
faculty.
Now, there are exceptions to that. I’m not saying that, let’s say, a faculty member that was
engaged in community action or that sort of thing. Because we’ve had several, I think, that have made a
huge contribution to the intellectual life, in some ways, or to the curriculum as well.
Beck: Russ Fox comes to mind.
Rainey: That was the man I just had in my mind. And great respect for him. But, as far as my own
academic life, I have insatiable intellectual curiosity. And I lean towards history, and I lean towards
philosophy, and liberal arts in general. And I would include the best of our scientists in that. Byron
Youtz, Burt Guttman, and so many other faculty that I was always sort of, I would say, somewhat
envious of the ability of the hard scientists to organize their curriculum, and stick to it, and work out
prerequisites.
I must say, in retrospect, that I think one of the major mistakes that we made was not having a
required humanities sequence, which I experienced at the University of Florida, of all places. At the
University of Florida, everybody in liberal arts, the college of arts and sciences—the biologists, the
mathematicians—everybody in the college was required to take a humanities sequence sophomore
year. And it gave the students in that college a common language, and a common experience. And it
even led to a very select senior seminar, which was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had
intellectually with a group of students, where two representatives from every department, and the
college of arts and sciences, were in a senior seminar together. And David was—I’ve had probably the
most, I’d say by far, the most interesting discussions about literature and history amongst the colleagues
that I taught with at this time, with David. And David is not a flashy intellectual at all. I mean, he’s not

7

flashy, he’s not supercilious about his profound knowledge [chuckles], of literature in particular. We
had great conversations.
We taught a program—which was, in retrospect, one of my favorite programs that I’ve taught—
called Literature, Values and Social Change. We did a full-year program—Nineteenth Century Russia,
Nineteenth Century America, Nineteenth Century Britain. It was dynamite. It was the best program, I
think, of that sort that I’ve ever taught.
Beck: So, it was centered on literature, but presumably—
Rainey: No, literature and history. The social change part was the history part. And again, a person like
David that had great respect for the life of the mind, would learn in other areas besides his own special
American late-nineteenth century philosophy and literature and so on.
I heard probably the best lecture I’ve ever from any colleague on Tolstoy from David, and almost
as good a lecture on Dostoyevsky [laughing] as I could give. It was just . . . and, I wouldn’t say it was a
take-no-prisoners program, but it was reading-rich, it was lecture-rich. And he stopped lecturing—
which I thought was a great pity—and started doing “recitations,” he called it, with students, which was
more Socratic. He would have students—I’m sorry that he stopped. He lectured a lot in our program
and the students were dazzled.
But I watched him also—it reminds me of the professor in The Paper Chase; good professors of
law use the Socratic Method—he would have a person read a passage out of the book. And every
discussion that we had, every lecture, was text-oriented. It was to elucidate the text, and to understand
the text. So, he would do something that I’ve tried—and I never did this as successfully as him—have
someone read a passage, and then ask them what it meant. What’s its purpose in that particular part of
the text? How did that elucidate other parts of the text? What is their understanding of it? At first, it
was terrifying to the students, because everybody, at some point—and he would do it in lectures, and
he’d do it in seminars.
Beck: Tell me more about that. What did that look like? Did he conduct questions with that one
student for 15-20 minutes?
Rainey: Yes, it was about 15 or 20 minutes, and it was “Well, what exactly do you mean by that?”
David, you know, [in] that soft-spoken way of taking a statement and “Well, what do you mean by
justice? I mean, you say that this shows that Tolstoy’s concern with universal justice. How do you
understand the word justice?”

8

I would say he did it in a cutting way, but he cut the skin and not the brisket of the argument,
and helped people in intellectual conversation, and in seminars, his method was very like Levensky’s
critique of a paper.
Beck: So, he’d find what’s good, and emphasize that in some way.
Rainey: Yeah, in cut away the dross, I would say, in an argument. I remember when I learned critical
reasoning, I learned it in a course that I took at the University of Florida called “Practical Logic.” So, our
students learned the fallacies, not by reading a text on the fallacies; they learned the fallacies by the
way they were inquisitorially [laughing] . . .
Beck: . . . committing them.
Rainey: Right, exactly. And not every student . . . liked that, or was comfortable with it. But, over the
years, as with Pete Sinclair—I never taught with Pete; I wanted to one time. I’ve got one thing and I’ll
just throw this in, a dazzling moment with Pete, in Exploration, Discovery and Empire. Bob Sluss and
Byron Youtz and I taught this program. It was the boat program, too. We had Pete come in, and read
“The Old Wives’ Tale” from Chaucer.
Beck: “Wife of Bath’s Tale.”
Rainey: “Wife of Bath’s Tale.” I just recently read that, “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” from Chaucer in Middle
English. And it was a tour de force.
Beck: Yes.
Rainey: To get back to David—and I would say the same with someone like Mark Levensky, and Pete,
and another person, and Rudy Martin, and Jeanne Hahn. Over the years, they got the best students,
because students understood that that’s the way it was going to be. I mean, Jeanne was going to rip
their papers to pieces, but they ended up learning to write better.
Or David, they have to use right reason. And what’s that Alfred Ayer thing? “A statement is true
if, and only if, it’s empirically verifiable, or true by definition.”
Beck: Right.
Rainey: But what’s the evidence of that? Right? That’s the great question of the historian. And Alan is
not for everybody, but the students ended up doing as close to advanced work with faculty like that as
we’ve ever been able to reach.
David was not, and Mark was not, and Jeanne was not, and Byron was not for—and Byron did
this with such a gentle hand that you didn’t know that you were being torn apart in your thinking, and
put back together. It was like the first seminar I went to in graduate school, when they just ripped my
paper to pieces. But they didn’t have to do it a second time.
9

Beck: I certainly experienced that with Mark [laughter] as his student.
Rainey: Yeah.
Beck: And with Pete, although he had a more gentle hand.
Rainey: Yeah, Pete. I’m fascinated sometimes—and just having written a book that’s, in part, as all such
books, are travels around myself as well—how, for lack of a better term, people that don’t come from
an intellectual background, whose parents were intellectuals or were professors, or something like that.
The other person I really regret not teaching with that I had great respect for was Beryl Crowe.
Beck: Why is that?
Rainey: Well, because Beryl had a way of dealing with current issues, and questions like totalitarianism,
in a way that enhanced the critical thinking of the students. So, a left-leaning student that had come
from some sort of what I would call radical indoctrination—which is what some faculty were engaged
in—didn’t survive that with Beryl, because he just would not put up with sloppy thinking. And he used
Hannah Arendt to the best advantage, I think.
His major concern was totalitarianism, and authoritarian regimes. He was sort of like Eric
Hoffer. He was sort of a dockside intellectual. Very muscular mind, in the sense that—but he also was
like Pete. He had a kind of gentle handed way of doing that. He never humiliated a student. He never
criticized a student in public. It’s just he set an example of critical thinking.
One of the reasons why I believe in lectures is that I think we teach as much by example, in the
way we deal with ideas, and the way we don’t deal with ideas. Beryl had this rapier-like intellect. It’s
hard to think of an analogy that quite fits, but he was an iron fist in a velvet glove. And students that
came out of his program—and the best program, I think, that he did was he taught with David, and he
taught with Rudy, and he taught with Betty Estes mostly—I can’t remember what it was called, but it
was something Society and Social Change.
Beck: Individual Society . . .?
Rainey: No, it was more political. Beryl was a political scientist—he wasn’t a political scientist, he was a
political theorist, that’s what Beryl was. You’ve given the best lectures I’ve ever heard on Plato, but he
gave one incredibly good lecture on Plato’s Republic, and put Plato in his place [laughter] as a political
theorist. But he knew political theory so well. And, like Hoffer, he told me that while he was working as
a stevedore [laughing] in San Francisco is when he read Plato [laughter] and Aristotle.
It’s just that it’s a hard thing to explain that when a program like David and I taught, when you
create an intellectual atmosphere somehow, an atmosphere that demands critical thinking, close
analysis and empirical investigation. And that’s what Beryl was able to do—Beryl and Rudy and David.
10

The first sort of internal document that I read when I got here in 1972 that I just said, “This is the right
place for me,” was the M and M Manifesto.
Beck: That was Rudy and David.
Rainey: That was Rudy and David, yeah.
Beck: I’ve read that, but it’s been some years. What’s your impression of what that document
envisioned for Evergreen?
Rainey: I see it as a statement about pedagogy and critical thinking mostly, and not allowing sloppy
thinking and totally subjective views to go unchallenged by faculty. That’s the way I see the M and M
Manifesto, and that we had to put together curriculum that was challenging, demanding. And
students—and this is, I think, one of the glories of our curriculum—are free to choose it or not. But you
know that if you’re going to do a program with them that this is the way you’re going to have to
proceed.
I never came here really with the idea—and I’ve never felt, since I’ve been here—that I’m a colearner. I’m not. Frankly, I’m a little traditional in that sense, that it’s the teacher teach and the student
learn. And if they don’t want to, they don’t have to.
I do think we should have had some prerequisites, but it’s a form of self-selection. If they know
if they sign up with me, they’re going to do a lot of reading, they’re going to do a lot of writing, they’re
going to do a lot of critical thinking. And it they’re not willing to do that, there’s the door.
Beck: At the same time, you have said that you have chosen colleagues largely because those are
people from whom you can learn.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: And you’ve said that you learn from students as well. So, there is—
Rainey: I’ve learned from some students. I say that in my statement, but that was true about Buffalo.
It’s not been true about Evergreen, frankly. [laughing] I’ve learned from students puzzling through
things, and asking questions that I hadn’t thought of. That’s the way I’ve learned from students.
There are some students I’ve learned from because of the way they attacked social problems
and political problems and things like that, and I can cite one example. But that was mostly in group
contracts. Group contracts used to be the way we did advanced work. I used that term to a new faculty
member the other day and they said, “What’s a group contract?”
But I did a year-long group contract called Marx and the Third World. I had the two best
students I’ve ever had.
Beck: Was that John Bellamy Foster?
11

Rainey: John Bellamy Foster. I learned Hegel from the questions that John asked, and how John learned
Hegel. He taught me Hegel. [laughing] And I did have students say sometimes to me, if they see me
coming across the quad and they don’t have 15 or 20 minutes, like Charlie Teske, that they’d try to find
the closest head they can, because I’m going to say, “Okay, you need to read this book,” “You need to
read that book,” “You need to read this book,” and “No, I’m not sure that’s the way it is, but let’s talk
about it."
And that was John Bellamy Foster. Even if we were at some sort of drunken student party—
there were a lot of those in those days—John would buttonhole me [laughing] in my cups. So, yes, I
have learned from students, but I’ve learned mostly from faculty, and from my own reading and writing.
And my own teaching.
Rob Cole made an interesting comment about why I keep teaching. He said, “You have done
two things. You teach things that you know very, very well. And you teach what you want to learn.”
For example, in the recent thing that I taught on the Pacific Rim, I spent nine months preparing
for that. Now, I can do that easier in Evening and Weekend Studies than I could teaching full-time. It’s
hard to do teaching full-time. But the reason I like Evening and Weekend Studies is that I’ve got the
leisure to prepare for it.
Beck: Of course, the other students—
Rainey: You want to go into the house, if it’s cooler?
Beck: We could do that. Let’s pause this.
End Part 1 of 2 of Tom Rainey on 8-7-17
Begin Part 2 of 2 of Tom Rainey on 8-7-17
Beck: I’m back with Tom Rainey. We stepped in out of the heat for the rest of today’s interview here on
August 7, 2017. I’m wondering whether you’d like to talk a little bit about the way your own interests
developed over the time you were at Evergreen, specifically related to your own research and
scholarship.
Rainey: Well, I spent many years after I got out of graduate school, or in graduate school, preparing
myself to teach Russian/Eastern European/Balkan history. And I didn’t do much of that at all the first
five years, six years I was here. But I’ve had my interest in my specialty area rekindled several times and
remind me of why I went into Slavic studies in the first place. I don’t have an ounce of Slavic blood. I am
a typical Southern American mongrel—you know, Sots-Irish, a dash of Anglo-Saxon, one-fourth Creek
Indian.

12

But I became interested in Slavic and Russian studies, in particular, in undergraduate, and that’s
what I studied the four years, and focused on European. And I didn’t teach much about it at all, and by
the fifth year I was here, I was really missing that somehow. That’s the area I’m really interested in, and
I kept following things that were going on in the Soviet Union, and I kept reading Russian literature and
Slavic literature, Balkan literature in particular.
And then I had, I would say, a continuous conversation with Andrew Hanfman about “Where are
we going to do something on Russia?” And we did. And meantime, I had taught Political Economy with
Jeanne, and enjoyed that. One of the things I did during the ‘60s, while I was at various universities, is to
study much more American economic history, and American labor history, and foreign policy that I had
not because of the movement. I was involved in the movement for social change.
That was an area I didn’t understand well. So, in some ways, the first five years that I taught
was a continuation of my learning about how the American system worked, how capitalism worked.
Whenever I would do Political Economy, I would do a lecture series on Marx, and American economic
history, and American diplomatic history. I became very interested in American foreign policy during
that period, because we were involved in the Vietnam War. And that spilled over into my teaching here,
so I taught mostly American History, and Political Economy, and Marx in the Third World, and so on.
But somehow, I began to really miss my specialty field, and not teaching in that. So, Andrew and
I decided to create a program, a year-long program on Russia, which we did. That rekindled my interest
in my specialty area. It was a very successful program. Andrew was a linguistic genius. I watched
Andrew one day. If I write my memoir, there’s going to be a chapter just on Andrew Hanfman. I
watched him, with a group of students sort of around his office, go from Swedish to Spanish to Italian to
French to Russian, and a little bit of Turkish. [laughing] Everybody was suspicious of Andrew, because
he was from the CIA. He’d spent his life doing analysis of the Soviet Union in the CIA. He was a real cold
warrior.
And I would say, if anything, my study of American foreign policy made me a sort of revisionist,
and so the people in my field that I most respected were people like Stephen Cohen at Princeton, and
Jerry Hough at Duke, and Moshe Levin at Pennsylvania, who were saying, “Wait a minute,” about the
totalitarian. The standard way of teaching about it—and the way I got into it—is know your enemy.
And after Sputnik and all of that, we had lots of money to do that, and I got a lot of support in graduate
school to do that.

13

But I was a little leery about Andrew, because I was still in the throes of this radical analysis of
American foreign policy. But we had a very successful year, and good students. I actually taught Russian
then. I trust I didn’t do too much damage to the students. My Russian accent is good, but command of
grammar is—actually, I learned English grammar by studying Russian. [laughter] But I became very
excited again about remastering my specialty area, particularly about the Soviet Union. My special area
was Russia before the Revolution—nineteenth century intelligentsia, nineteenth century literature.
So, it rekindled my interest, and then I started sort of reading American foreign policy and
Russian foreign policy together. I’ve been a lifelong subscriber to Foreign Affairs, because that’s the
foreign affairs journal. It may be establishment, but you need to know how the establishment thinks
about Russia and the world, if you want to know this field.
Andrew was very encouraging in that, I would say. Again, it’s an older, more experienced
colleague that I could learn something from. Andrew was one of these people that could carry world
wars and revolutions on his back, because he had experienced it directly; had experienced the twentieth
century on his back. So, his knowledge of Russia and Eastern Europe, and he ended up living in Lithuania
as a child, and that sort of thing was firsthand knowledge. Mine was secondhand; it was from study and
scholarship, and some travel.
So, I became gradually much more interested in my original specialty area, and was successful in
teaching it here in the way we teach things here. Then, more and more successful in it. I sort of drifted
also into local history at the same time, strangely enough, because that was the one area where I could
have students do primary research, old documents and letters. So, students that were interested in,
and then majoring in history, I would always do family histories with them, and local history and that
sort of thing, and publish three or four things. I guess that would include that in my scholarship. I
published something on the Manifest Destiny and the Territory of Washington.
So, did some of that, but did it the way I’ve always done research, or have been taught since I
was at the University of Florida—primary research—back to reading diaries and letters and journals and
that sort of thing. And doing the same thing with Russia.
I did teach a labor history called Working in America. But I ended up thinking about American
affairs and American history in much the same way that I did when I decided to specialize in Russian and
European. American history, by comparison, seems so parochial to me, and so short-lived. And I’m like
Billy Pilgrim; I go back and forth in time and space. I guess, in some ways, it’s a form of escapism. If I

14

don’t like what’s happening now, I just read Rome, and I read Tacitus. [laughing] Or, I read Epictetus
now.
So, bit by bit, I got back into my specialty area, and by this time, I’m into the ‘80s, and we’re
teaching the Russia program every third year, and then, every second year. But I’ve always been
interested in—no, I haven’t always. This comes out of the ‘60s as well. I was increasingly interested in
environmental history, environmental issues, environmental problems, and so I was teaching American
environmental history, and I was teaching Russian political, social and economic history. Then, almost
all of a sudden—with the encouragement of John Perkins, I would say—I said to myself about 1985, I
guess it was, why don’t I blend the two? Why don’t I do something in Russian environmental history,
Russian environmental affairs?
At that point—I think it was ’86, ‘87—John talked me into not only going to the annual meeting
of something that he was a charter member of, which was the American Society of Environmental
History. There, I met Donald Wooster, and there I met Doug Weiner, who was the only person then, in
that association, that had written anything on Russian environmental history. And there I met Richard
White, and what’s the other guy? Alfred Crosby, and people that had formed this group in this interest,
and started then reading sort of the methodology of environmental history—Nature’s Economy by
Wooster, and so on.
I read a book that was important in kind of helping me focus my interest in Russian stuff called
Witnesses to a Vanishing America. The book itself was not so good, but it was about George Perkins
Marsh and David Thoreau, and the Hudson River School of painting, and Albert Bierstadt, and the
development of anthropology at the time. I read a book on beavers, and I read Crosby’s book, The
Columbian Exchange, and that sort of thing.
And I said, that can be applied to Russia; what I’ve learned about how to do this could be
applied to Russia. And John encouraged that. So, I began giving papers at the American Society of
Environmental Historians on mostly areas that I knew of. Joined the Association of Environmental
Education, and gave papers at their meetings—and increasingly, it was on areas under stress, and Lake
Baikal. Because, in 1990, I took two trips to Russia, which is also very important in sort of rekindling my
interest in not only environmental history, which I was already doing, but also in my area; and how to
use what I had learned about American environmental history from White and other people, and John,
and applying that to Russia.

15

I went to an Environmental Education Association meeting in Rocky Mountain National Park.
And there, I met this fellow by the name of Navach Havi Buloff who was a sort of international
representative for Kazan State University, and it turns out, had been a student of a person who is now
still a very much a part of my life, Tatiana Rogova, who is a professor of ecology and botany at Kazan
State.
So, Havi Buloff and I arranged a trip, and an exchange program, with Kazan State University.
And I took a group of students, in June of 1990, to the Volga, and fell in love with the area, and Kazan.
Kazan was the last successor state of the Mongols—Mongols are Tartars—so it’s really a multi-culture, a
very diverse place, with mosques and Orthodox churches. It’s mostly Tartar and Russian, but it’s kind of
the gateway to the East—Russia’s gateway, once Ivan the Terrible reconquered all of the Volga from the
Mongols. We had really great sort of ecological fieldtrip. For me, a monograph came out of that.
And then, I knew I was going to do this before, but I was back in the United States three weeks,
and then I went back to Russia with a group called Expertisa 90. It was a group of American
environmentalists mostly, in association with Moscow environmentalists, that went to Lake Baikal to do
a study of the area, about how the area could be preserved and make some recommendations, and we
went to a place called Severobaykalsk, in the northern part of Lake Baikal. And these two trips really
confirmed my interest directly in doing environmental history of these two areas, and not only that, but
being involved in—we formed a group called Baikal Watch that still exists.
So then, in ’92, I took a group again to Kazan and Baikal. And then, in ’93, I took a group just to
Kazan. In ’96, I went on my own to Kazan State University. And meantime, I’m getting involved with
Tatiana and her family. In ’93, when the reverse coup—when Yeltsin crushed the opposition, and the
Russian Duma with tanks, and the first Chechen War was going on—she asked me to take her son for a
couple of years. She was afraid he was going to be drafted and sent into the Chechen War, which was a
horrible affair. And I did, and so he came here. And so, that strengthened the tie between me and
Kazan State University, and strengthened my interest in the environmental history of the middle basin of
the Volga.
And all this time, here’s John, with his quiet way, saying, “Well, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth
writing about, and it’s worth publishing.” So, under his encouragement, I started publishing things on
environmental history, environmental problems. I became interested in reservoir problems particularly,
and I began to see some way to do comparative studies with reservoir problems in the Columbia, and
reservoir problems in the Volga. I wrote a number of things, and then Tatiana and I coauthored a couple
16

of things, published mostly in Russian. And I began to teach something like Environmental History. And
the question about MES Master of Environmental Studies, I can get to this way.
John’s not that much older than I am—just a couple of years older—actually, he might be a year
or two younger—but John was really my mentor on this. It led both of us, I think, to a kind of dilemma,
that teaching at Evergreen, as you well know, is all-inclusively demanding.
I think by ’98, I was beginning to think, well, you know, where am I going to find the time to
follow these intellectual interests? I’ve got this huge intellectual agenda now that includes
environmental history of Russia, and keeping up with Russia, and that sort of thing, and teaching Russia.
But I want to do research and publishing. [laughter]
So, John then became the person also—there were about six people, if I wrote a paper, I gave it
to Mark Levensky to look at; Ken Dolbeare to look at; Jeanne was not interested in it, so not Jeanne;
John Perkins. About this time, John and [sighs] . . . Ralph Murphy and I co-authored an article on
teaching Political Ecology, on teaching a program that we were teaching in the MES program called PEEP
then—Political, Economic and Environmental Processes.
This was when I became the director, and that came from a conversation with John in the
parking lot, when he had just come back from a discussion with some people about how to replace
Oscar Soule. Oscar had created the program, but Oscar did not want to be director anymore. John and
some of the people involved in it—I’m not quite sure who—were a kind of ad hoc committee to decide
on—not decide, but to recommend another director.
So, I commiserated with him. He didn’t like a couple of people that had been suggested. He
liked them, but he didn’t want them as the director. I guess I looked interested, and he said, “Well,
Tom, why don’t you do it?” I said, “Well, I’ll do it only if I can keep teaching. I don’t want to stop
teaching.”
I didn’t like being director, by the way. I didn’t like it because I ended up, like every dean,
dealing with personality questions, and personnel and budget, and I’m not interested in that sort of
thing. I didn’t like that part, but I liked teaching with John and Ralph, and that sort of reaffirmed my
interest in environmental policy, environmental politics, environmental issues and history.
Beck: When was this? Was this the early ‘90s?
Rainey: Yeah, that was early ‘90s. Actually, it was 1989. It was even before I went to Russia. So, as you
know, everything sort of gets mixed up, and it becomes a kind of academic soup. And sometimes it’s

17

nourishing, and sometimes it’s not. This was extremely nourishing in terms of my intellectual interests
and my scholarship.
So, we published—in the journal called Environmental Practice—an article on how we did it at
Evergreen—environmental education—at John’s suggestion.
Beck: That’s the journal that John later was the editor of.
Rainey: Yeah, he was, later, and I was a contributing editor, and I furnished not only a couple of articles,
and Tatiana got an article from Turkel, but I solicited several articles from mostly Russian colleagues that
I had met over the years in Moscow and in Kazan.
All of this confirmed my interest in environmental history, and in what’s happening in Russia.
And then, the current events of the ‘80s drew me back into the field. I actually did a series of opinion
articles in the Daily O on the Gorbachev reforms, what was going on and who opposed it and that sort of
thing. Brad Shannon asked me to do that. And again became extremely interested in scholarship and
publication, scholarship and presentation. I was the international lecturer for the Association of
Environmental Education one year. I gave lectures on Baikal, in particular, all around the country—at
Bowling Green University, at Boston College, at Bowdoin College, at the University of New Jersey at
Newark—six or seven places.
All of this interest heightened the tension of wanting to fulfill this agenda that gets larger and
larger, and demands—not demands, but requests – to publish something here, or do something on this,
or edit this within the journal, or that sort of thing, and teaching. So, I came out of being the MES
director, glad that I was not, and I was determined not to be—they asked the year after to be the head
of the faculty meeting. I said, “No, I won’t do it. I’m interested just in teaching and my scholarship.”
But that’s been a tension for me ever since.
In the meantime, I have an experience in Florida that further confuses and thickens the plot of
the personal narrative. [chuckles] My aunt dies, and leaves my grandfather’s house to me and my
sisters, and we decide to sell it. I go down, and my sisters and I meet in our hometown, and we clean
out the house. And I find a picture that’s right over there. This woman here was my grandmother, who
was never a grandmother. She died at 26 of typhus, leaving my father and my aunt, as young children,
just as you see them there. It’s this picture over here of my grandmother—no, this is my grandmother,
this little one over on the . . .
And I’m cleaning out my grandfather’s, I would call it not an Augean stable, but an Augean closet
full of stuff. And I always liked to do that sort of thing for my grandfather’s house, because it’s sitting at
18

the lap of my grandfather, listening to the stories about old Florida that made me a historian, I think.
And I find this picture, like this, down—no, I find it up, and I said, “I wonder who that woman is? That’s
the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.” And I turn it over and it’s my grandmother at 18!
[laughter] And that sent me on this quest, I guess—I refer to her as my muse now—to write a family
history. I have researched and written a family history that’s 750 pages long. [laughter] I’m having
trouble finding somebody that will publish it a giant monster like that.
And still, teaching as best I can, and I don’t think my scholarship took anything from my
teaching. If anything, it’s the other way around. But always sort of feeling that tension. As you know, I
retired—“retired”—in 2000, and most of the writing and research I’ve done on the family history has
been since 2000.
Beck: I know that maybe teaching takes away from time that you had for scholarship.
Rainey: Yeah.
Beck: But in what way would you say that your scholarship has enhanced your teaching?
Rainey: Well, I was going to get to that. It has led me to the conclusion that that old shibboleth about
scholarship improving teaching, and teaching improving scholarship, is true. The work I’ve done in
Russian environmental history has made me a better teacher of Russian studies. In fact, my scholarship
has made me a better historian. I think my scholarship has certainly enhanced my teaching.
Beck: In what ways, would you say?
Rainey: My scholarship has had the same effect on my teaching as teaching with other colleagues.
What I’ve learned from my scholarship, I’ve been able to apply in my teaching. And, as trite as it may
seem, it‘s made me a better historian; and the better historian I am, the better teacher I am. I’ve always
felt that.
And it’s made me see questions of causality in a different way; it’s made me see questions of
context of historical events in different ways. For example, the whole question of diseases in history
actually helps me discern any kind of deterministic, teleological theory of history that I ever may have
entertained, and believe essentially on the contingent and the unforeseen; that history is made by
human beings, and not by eternal forces, or by God. It also has helped me understand that virtually any
history that does not have an environmental component is incomplete. So, I’ve taught that way. When
I teach American studies, or I teach Russian studies, I always include history.

19

It’s helped me understand, too, the whole question of human conquest. We’re going to talk
about that in our program—we didn’t quite get around to it—is the biological sort of what we might call
evil and good in the biological—you know, what we are as creatures that are just this side of the
agricultural revolution, and just this side of the industrial revolution, and how, in some ways, we’re
Stone Age creatures with a thin veneer of civilization. [laughing] And that evolution matters. [laughter]
And fight or flight, biologically understood, is something that needs to be part of virtually every study of
war, or conquest, or immigration, populations that reach their carrying capacity with the technology at
the time.
So, I’m always sensitive to that in my teaching, and I’ve taught programs and issues and
problems that are enhanced by this interest, it seems to me, that is ongoing. At the not-too-tender age
of 81, I’m still curious, and still enthusiastic about learning these things, and it helps me teach. I think
probably that I’m going to taper off in the teaching, because I still have that huge agenda.
Beck: Right. Let me go back to your time working in the MES program.
Rainey: Yeah, sure.
Beck: You talked a little bit about some of the features of being a director in the MES program. But
what about teaching in it? What was your experience in teaching?
Rainey: I taught Environmental Ethics, and I taught, for a while, Environmental Education, which I don’t
like teaching about education. I really don’t like talking about process. I’m not interested in that
question. I respect people that are, but I’m interested in something that has content to it. And I’ve
always been interested, as you know, in teaching content and not process. I understand process is
important and it matters, but I didn’t like teaching about education. I want something I can get my
intellectual teeth into, and environmental ethics, I could.
So, I taught Environmental Ethics, and when I taught with John and with Ralph, we each sort of
taught our special interest. John and I taught environmental history. Ralph taught political economy as
it applies to the environment.
I guess the other area that I’ve always been interested in that I apply in everything is questions
of power and politics. I come from a political family, the only Republican family in Hardy County for a
while. [chuckles] My aunt Bonita and my grandfather, who were both postmasters, in turn, were very
political. First thing they did in the morning is the first thing I do in the morning, and that was the read
the paper and see what’s going on in the world—and now, go online to The New York Times or the
Washington Post. [laughing]
20

But I’ve always been interested in politics, and the older I get, the more I look at it as the most
interesting game in town. I was interested in environmental politics, so I encouraged the teaching of
environmental politics and policy, and we did more of that while I was director. I wouldn’t say we did
more of it, but the intellectual pull of our universe, while I was in the MES program, was not Tom Rainey
or Ralph Murphy, it was John Perkins.
John is amazing. I ended up thinking John was one of the most underappreciated people on this
campus. He was able to teach well, teach new things, keep current in several fields, and still publish.
He’s just published another book, on energy, at the University of California Press.
Beck: That’s right. I think I saw a notice of that.
Rainey: John is, by the way, on the way to the University of Kazan. He got a Fulbright, and he’s going to
be teaching American Environmental History at Kazan State University. It’s Kazan Federal now, under
the sponsorship of Tatiana. She just told me she was trying to get an apartment for him close to the
university.
Beck: Now, he came about 1980.
Rainey: About 1980, yeah.
Beck: As a dean.
Rainey: As a dean. He was a dean first. I don’t know what kind of dean John was. I met John for the
first time at Miami University at a conference. I think it was the conference of the American Society of
Environmental Historians, but it may have been the Environmental Education Association. But John was
charter member of several environmental education programs. He was a charter member, so he was on
a first-name basis with all of these people, and facilitated my entrance into that world.
What I’d be interested in doing, as much as we could, if we ever did the ancient world again, is
the environmental issues.
Beck: Right.
Rainey: I don’t think the Roman Empire fell because of lead in their water system, but nobody has
written—a guy by the name of Hughes at the University of Denver has written a fairly good book on
ancient ecology, but it’s too deterministic for my taste. [laughing] It’s how the Greeks stripped the
peninsula.

21

Beck: Right. There’s that, but one of the hypotheses I’ve heard that obviously didn’t cause, but perhaps
contributed to the fall of Rome in the West, was the environmental stresses in Central Asia that led to a
cascading effect of peoples moving westward.
Rainey: Yes, carrying capacities were reached, but they were not reached necessarily in the Roman
Empire. They were reached in Central Asia. Right.
I thought, too, it might be interesting to try to apply to the ancient world Alfred Crosby’s
approach of ecological imperialism, the push-pull of it, of both immigration and conquest. Because, in a
sense, immigration to the New World was conquest— in a very large sense. I did a program with John
Baldridge called Conquest East, Conquest West. We did a comparative study of the Euro-American
conquests of North America—and the Russian conquest of Siberia. But just came into my hands a very
good environmental history of China, which I’m very much interested in. Again, lots of things that we
thought were European actually originated either in Mongolia [laughing] or China. What is it that
pushed them off?
Beck: Right. So, maybe shift gears a little bit. You mentioned that you retired in 2000, but “retired” as
having “scare quotes” around it, because it’s really—
Rainey: Well, I’d style myself up to this point as a failed retiree, and I’m thinking maybe that it’s time
that I—because there’s still a lot of stuff I want to do in my publication and scholarship. Again, John’s
the example of this.
In some ways, I think of Chekov and Modern Dramas as my Swan Song, but I trust that won’t be
so in most ways. But I’ve managed to publish enough, and satisfy my drive. [chuckles]
Beck: But, since then, you’ve been teaching quite a lot in Evening and Weekend Studies.
Rainey: I have. Oh, yeah, I really like that. I’ve liked it for a number of reasons. Most importantly for
me is that I have been able to learn from my colleagues—you, Susan Preciso.
Beck: You taught with Mark Harrison a couple of times.
Rainey: Yeah, I’m very interested in film as sort of cultural items, and I’ve taught American cinema, and
I’ve taught something on Westerns as conquest narratives. And I taught Russian film, Eastern European
film.
So, I have a lot of interests that could, I suppose, lead to sort of superficiality. [laughing] What
happens is I have a lot of intellectual interests, and a lot of cultural interests that sort of drives me to dig

22

deeper and deeper in each of these, so I’m not just a . . . I’m looking for that word that we use for
someone that’s sort of amateurish.
Beck: A dilettante?
Rainey: A dilettante. I’d like to transcend that, but in some areas I am a dilettante, but in some areas
I’m not. Those areas that I teach helps me not to be a dilettante, because I learn about it; I teach with
people that teach me about it. I’ve learned all I can.
Beck: You said that there’s some things that you’d like to teach on your own, some Russian short
fiction?
Rainey: Russian short fiction, I would like to do something, and I’m just not sure. One of the problems
in me continuing to teach is I’m fairly expensive, and they are very, very budgetary—the only thing I
worry about for Chekov is they might just decide that I’m too expensive for an under-enrolled program.
And my sense of what’s happening now is that they are extremely—because of the plummeting—I don’t
know if it’s plummeting, but the declining enrollment, extremely sensitive about that, and they’re going
to cut people where they can.
Beck: Well, they did have to re-base the budget at a lower target FTE. That’s a pretty big thing.
Rainey: I think increasingly that if I wanted to teach, I wouldn’t be able to teach, because I’m too
expensive. There are things I want to teach. You know, I want to teach. I would like to teach something
on Russian-Chinese relations. I’d like to teach more on China. I’d like to do a comparative of Russian
and Chinese environmental history. I’ve got this wonderful book on environmental history, and it would
require at least an eight quarter-hour program. I could teach that on my own, or with somebody that
was interested in doing it. So, there’s a lot of Russian stuff now that I would like to teach.
Because, again—and this is a habit of a lifetime that I don’t seem to be able to escape—is that if
I’m intensively researching or reading something, I feel like I ought to be able to teach it, or I want to
teach it. And I have a certain compulsion right now of what I can add to what I see to be a great crisis
that we’re involved in now is I can help people understand the Russian side of it; that that would be my
contribution.
I can sign petitions, I can contribute money, but I’m not of the marching kind anymore, and I’m
not of the demonstrating kind anymore. So, I’m interested, once again—and I’m doing a program for
seniors called Putin’s Russia, Russia’s Putin in the winter quarter, in addition to if I’m teaching the
Chekhov program. So, I have a lot of things in my specialty area again that I’m interested in. And I’m

23

always interested in ancient and medieval and Renaissance history. I’d really like to teach something on
the Renaissance and Reformation, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And if it doesn’t, it won’t be
the end of my life. I’ve got lots of other things to do.
I’ve got seven invitations now to do this—I won’t say it’s a canned lecture, because it’s in the
can, but I’m constantly revising it—called “Putin’s Plan to Make Russia Great Again.” So, that satisfies
my performance drive. [laughing] You know, I’m a frustrated actor.
Beck: Getting back to Evening and Weekend Studies, how would you compare your experience teaching
in Evening and Weekend and days?
Rainey: That’s a good question. Let me talk a little bit about the content, and some concerns I have,
and why those concerns are better satisfied. I think we’re doing a better job of teaching the humanities
in Evening and Weekend Studies than they are in the full-time curriculum. Part of it’s because people
haven’t been hired. To me, the fact that we only have one or two—we only have two, really—
professionally trained historians in the full-time curriculum means that I don’t see that much history is
taught.
This is something that David Hitchens and I talked about a lot, as he lay dying, really. I spent
Thursday afternoons with David the whole time he was on hospice. We talked about this. In fact, his
wife turned the recorder on for some of these conversations. I just don’t buy it that someone that’s not
trained in philosophy or literature or history can teach at the college level history, literature or
philosophy. I hear people say, “I’m teaching this, and all I have to do is a little bit of history on it.” But I
don’t buy that.
I have several concerns that I’ve talked about before, but the major one is the decline of liberal
arts at this school. This was the liberal arts school. It is no longer a liberal arts school. It threatens—and
I fervently believe this—it threatens to become, as Kirk Thompson said, the best community college in
the country. It’s hard to do advanced work now here of any sort. So far, the deans that have been in
charge of our end of it have been equally concerned.
Beck: Is that in Evening and Weekend Studies?
Rainey: Evening and Weekend Studies. What you and I have done, or what I’ve done with other
faculty—with Mark and so on—just convinces me that we are carrying the flag in Evening and Weekend
Studies for liberal arts.
Beck: Yeah.

24

Rainey: Consciously doing it, but actually doing it by the teaching we’ve done, and will do. And I’m glad
Andrew Reece is back teaching what he knows in the European program that your dad used to do, and I
send students to that all the time that are full-time students.
But the way I perceive our students, in a sense, we get a lot of students that don’t find what
they want or need, even for teaching. They can get it in Evening and Weekend Studies, because we
offer it in Evening and Weekend Studies. So, most of them can fulfill the endorsements. I’m not one
that believes the endorsements drive the curriculum. They don’t. But we have a lot of students that
want to be teachers, and there are going to be more jobs for teachers in this state because of the
McCleary decision. And we’re not doing our part in providing the kind of endorsements that they need
in order to teach social studies, literature, writing, and those things that we do best in the humanities.
We are literally, I think, the Dutch boy with the finger in the dike, the dike of rank, contemporary
utilitarianism that we need to provide background for people to get technical jobs, essentially, and not
do critical thinking. I see that as the major threat to our education.
Beck: Yes, nationwide.
Rainey: Right, nationwide.
Beck: What do you suppose it is about Evening and Weekend Studies that allows that?
Rainey: I think, first of all, the people that are actually in it. And I think structurally, we’re more like a
humanities, we’re more like a liberal arts college than the rest of the curriculum has become. It’s
become, as far as I can see it, and talking to Patricia Krafcik about this a lot recently—someone else I’ve
really enjoyed teaching with—as far as I can make out—now, I understand that my understanding of
what’s going on in the rest of the curriculum is not near as good as yours, or Susan’s, or anybody in
Evening and Weekend Studies—most people in Weekend Studies.
But I don’t know whether it’s the faculty that’s involved or what it is, but there’s more planning
along specialty-area lines. And, I think, frankly, that in culture, language and text, it’s the biggest bunch
of anarchists on the campus, and they have not been able to assert themselves in the hiring process to
replace people that have retired or died or so on. We could cite that for every area of the liberal arts, it
seems to me. They’re doing better in the sciences. They may be doing better mathematics, I’m not
sure. But the people in Evening and Weekend Studies already are interested and concerned about the
decline of liberal arts, much more so, it seems to me, than what I’ve seen in the rest of the college.

25

I mean, that’s my perception. But my perception, I understand, is skewed, as it is in some ways
on the current crisis, because I haven’t attended these horrendous faculty meetings, and I haven’t read
all of these ad hominem attacks. I tried, and I just couldn’t stomach it. And, because I don’t have to, I
don’t. [laughing]
I guess the way I would style Evening and Weekend Studies is that it’s the rear guard for the
humanities. It’s the rear guard.
Beck: Yeah. There’s some questions that I’d like to talk about, some other areas.
Rainey: Sure.
Beck: One thing that we’ve touched on a little bit that I’d like to talk about—and maybe we can end
with this today, and then open up some new cans of worms next time—but you’ve talked about
pedagogy, and anybody who’s taught with you knows that you are a lecturer par excellence, and that
you’re a strong believer in lecture. Now, I know you’ve already said a little bit about that, but I’m
wondering if you could say more about what you see as the central value of lecture, particularly in an
Evergreen interdisciplinary team-taught program.
Rainey: I believe this comes from my experience, as much as anything else, in team teaching. My
perception—and I don’t believe it’s subjective, I believe it’s as accurate as any—my perception is that
the programs that have worked best for me, and worked best for the students, have been programs in
which you have three or four people that are responding to the readings, and responding to whatever
the level is of the students, and they’re teaching their content, their subject, and using the lecture then
to integrate the themes of the program. I have never taught in a program—and would not teach with
somebody—that does only workshops. Frankly, there have been experiences that I’ve had that have led
me not to want to teach with somebody, because that’s all they want to do.
I think there is a place for workshops, but I think that workshops have been oversold at this
institution. And, in some ways, I see it, when there is not a lecture series, as faculty irresponsibility to do
only workshops. In fact, I am on the verge of thinking that it’s a form of laziness. I don’t mean that for
people that I have a lot of respect for, but when I’m in a program when a person wants to do that, I urge
them to lecture on their topic. The students want to know what I think about history. They want to
know. They want a narrative that helps them integrate the reading and the seminar discussions. And
some of my favorite colleagues in Evening and Weekend Studies think I’m an old fogey, because I keep
insisting on lecturing. But I do it because I think it’s something the students need. If they don’t need
lecturing, why do they need a book?
26

So, my lectures, I always taper to the reading, and taper what I think to be the level of
understanding of the students. Every lecture I give is a new lecture. Every lecture I gave in the Pacific
Rim Rivals—eight lectures—are the result of the latest scholarship, the latest analysis of China and the
twentieth century, of Russia in the twentieth century, and so on. So that’s where my scholarship—
continuous scholarship—comes into play. So, I’m not giving yellowed lectures. They are changing, like
I’m constantly changing this presentation. I think those that think all we should do is workshops
because that gets the students involved in their own learning, yes, it does. But I think the combination
that works best is a modest amount of workshops around certain kinds of puzzles that they encounter in
the text; seminars in which I say virtually nothing; and lectures that highlight certain things in the book,
and tries to give them a narrative of—mostly, I’m a storyteller. I come from a long line of storytellers,
and mostly the stores that I tell are true and non-fictional—some are imaginative non-fiction.
And I think the proof is in the evaluations we get from our students. Virtually every program
I’ve been in with Evening and Weekend Studies—particularly with students that are a little older than
those in the full-time faculty—have complained that there’s not enough lecturing. Now, it would be
immodest for me to say how positive mine are. They are. My evaluations have been uniformly positive.
The other thing, it seems to me, that’s important about lecturing—and I see this in your
lectures, and I see this in the lectures of other people I’ve worked with—Byron and so on—I haven’t
seen all that much in other colleagues in Evening and Weekend Studies—is, as much as anything else,
it’s the enthusiasm for the topic that is demonstrated by a good lecturer that sparks the interest of the
students. So, I guess what I would do to prove my point, and the reason I think lecturing is important, is
read the evaluations that I get from students.
Beck: Because there’s a lot of current thinking these days that goes the other way . . .
Rainey: Yeah.
Beck: . . . what would you say to those who say that lectures are essentially passive learning for
students; that they encourage students simply to think of themselves as empty vessels that are receiving
knowledge from faculty, rather than active learners who can actually engage with and work with the
material? What’s your response to that line of thinking?
Rainey: I think it’s nonsense. I think it’s like saying, “Don’t read a book, because the book is written by
somebody who knows something about this topic.” I think it’s utter nonsense, and that categorizes me
as an old fogey. [laughter] And I certainly have not experienced that in any program that I’ve been in,
that I’ve got a bunch of nudniks in front of me that are just listening to what I say, and that I’m sort of—
27

but, in part, it is true. In part, listen, I’m a Lockean on this. It’s a blank sheet of paper. And I think it’s, in
some ways, irresponsible to expect students to struggle on their own to understand a complicated issue,
a complicated idea, or a complicated subject. I think it’s irresponsible. So, I don’t buy that. I just don’t
buy that philosophy.
Beck: Yeah.
Rainey: And, again, ask the students who have worked with me on that, that I encourage discussion; I
sometimes pose some questions in seminars; I encourage students to challenge my ideas. I’m not just
saying, “Sit there and listen to what I have to say, and write it down on a test,” or anything of the sort.
Beck: It sounds as though you’re saying that the lectures are paired with, perhaps, questions-andanswers sessions after, but even more with seminar, where the students engage in interactive
questioning.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: So really, it’s about having a lecture series along with seminar questions.
Rainey: Seminar and, I would say, a modest number of workshops. But never as a substitute.
Beck: Good.
Rainey: And, you know, I’ve had students complain to me about faculty that I know to be very
intelligent, very dedicated faculty that did nothing but do workshops. I’ve had students—particularly
older students, but younger students as well—that complained in a couple of programs in Evening and
Weekend Studies.
Beck: One of the things I’ve heard is that by not lecturing, one of the things the faculty do is protect the
answer. That is, they have a particular answer on a particular problem or issue . . .
Rainey: Right.
Beck: . . . and if they were to lecture about it, then it would be out there in the open to be discussed.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: By not lecturing on it, they’re protecting their answer from open challenges.
Rainey: I would agree entirely with that. I agree. And I still firmly believe that in a program with two or
three faculty—well, I’ve had recent experience. And I won’t name names or anything of the sort, but I
have recent experience where students have complained to me about my fellow colleague—about my

28

fellow teacher, who does workshops—that it does not help them integrate the themes of the program
as well as a lecture does.
Now, that means a different kind of lecturing, it seems to me, than I would do—that I did
somewhere else. But I don’t see how two things can happen. How students can understand
complicated political, economic or social issues, and what the current thinking is on that of people that
have studied those issues, and written things based on empirical investigation, and interviews and sorts
of things, and synthesized them. It’s the synthesis of the themes. I don’t see how it can be done with
workshops alone. I see how it can be done, because I’ve seen how it’s been done in programs when you
have all three faculty members lecturing on their topic, constantly integrating the themes, constantly
voicing an opinion, or giving another view on something that I’ve lectured on. I’m not talking about just
one lecture. I’m talking about two or three lecturing in a program from their expertise. To me, the
workshop thing is another attack on expertise.
Beck: So, it’s really a weaving together of several different lecture series. Right?
Rainey: Exactly.
Beck: In a coordinated studies
Rainey: And also for an individual, I don’t see how students can learn anything important about, let’s
say, Russia—Russian culture, Russian literature and so on—without a lecture series, and just do
workshops, and just do readings, and just do seminaring. They flounder around, I think. This is the
feedback I get. Now, maybe people are telling me this because they think I’m a good lecturer, and they
think that somebody else ought to be lecturing about their particular topic. But I would say this. The
more experienced you are—the more you’ve had experience, the more you’ve read and the more
you’ve written and the more you’ve done and the more you’ve researched—all of this goes into a good
lecturer.
Beck: Good. That’s the main thing I wanted to talk about with respect to pedagogy. I guess there is a
question I have about—now, you said that you’ve learned a lot of substance from your colleagues.
Rainey: Yeah.
Beck: A lot about their specialty areas.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: Have you learned anything about teaching from other colleagues that you’d like to talk about?

29

Rainey: [Chuckles] Yeah, sure. I’ve learned from you, and I’ve learned from other colleagues, including
Bret Weinstein, the power of PowerPoints. [laughter] And the concern I have about PowerPoints I’ve
overcome, and that was that we pander to students that are pelted—and part of this is self-inflicted—
pelted continuously with images without content, images without narrative, images that don’t require
reflection, don’t require contemplation, don’t require critical thinking. And a good PowerPoint will do
that. It won’t depend only on visuals.
And yours, I always use as an example. It has a lot of content. And philosophy is hard to teach.
[laughing] It requires a lot of content, and it requires a lot of analytical—you have to know this before
you know that, and this helps you understand this, and this context will help you understand this better.
And I’ve seen PowerPoints that don’t do that, but a good PowerPoint, I think, can bridge that lack of
reflection, close analysis, narrative development that a lot of students are lacking because of the culture
they’re in. Does that make any sense?
Beck: Yeah, it does.
Rainey: So, I’ve tried the workshops thing. I’ve seen people do it well, and I’ve seen people do it in a
way that allows students just to not engage in very deep thinking about a particular topic.
Beck: Yeah.
Rainey: The other part of that is that I think a good lecture—again, we talked about this—a good
lecture from a faculty member not only shows content, but it shows critical thinking. How they deal
with evidence, how they deal with narrative, how they critique a point, how they critique an idea. And a
good lecture, it seems to be, is the best model for a good paper.
Beck: I’ve seen that in your lectures, thinking about the lectures that you’ve given in the Classical World
regarding different theories of explanation as to why the Western Roman Empire fell. Or, why Sparta
had such a different course of development from other Greek poleis.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: And what I recall from those lectures is that you offer forward several different explanations that
are current in the literature and that have presented in the literature, and then offer critiques of those.
So, that does seem to model a particular way of doing good critical thinking about history. And, in
support of your ultimate conclusion, as I recall, was never one grand theory to explain everything, but
drew upon several of the different elements that had been proposed.

30

Rainey: Right. Just one other example of this in a recent experience, where a colleague did a number of
workshops on this, that and the other that were helpful in terms of skills—writing and so on. Gave two
lectures. What the students remembered about what this person said—the other part of this, Stephen,
is people invite me to talk about Putin because they want to know what somebody who has studied
Putin all of their life, and Russia all of their academic life, understands and thinks about the situation
now as they would read a book, as I said. And this is the shortcut to reading that book. [chuckles] I
always end with book suggestions. And in this one particular case, several of the students that were in
this person’s seminar said what they remembered most about this faculty member is the excellent two
lectures that he gave, and some things that he had said in seminar.
But the students want to know what we think about this. Why are they taking Russian history if
they don’t want to understand what a Russian historian thinks about it, and says about it, and how he
analyzes Stalin, or a particular issue? Again, I think it’s a way of teaching by example.
Beck: Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe what we could do is stop for today.
Rainey: Sure.
Beck: And then, there’s some topics that I’d like to talk about next time. Just to mention a few, I’d like
to talk a little bit more about the union hard card campaign that you were involved in in the ‘70s.
Rainey: Sure.
Beck: And then, maybe connect that with the formation of the current union.
Rainey: Yeah.
Beck: I’d also like to talk about just some involvement—
Rainey: I will say this about the union now. We need a union now more than ever, because the
administration is in total disarray now.
Beck: Also, I’d like to talk about some of the major political events at the college over the years.
Rainey: Oh, sure.
Beck: Maybe something about the efforts to close the college, Olander’s administration.
Rainey: Sure.
Beck: And then just some reflections on Evergreen in the past, looking back on your whole career. Is
there anything else that you were hoping to talk about, and your concerns? I want to be sure we have a
chance to—
31

Rainey: Right. So, do we need two more sessions, Stephen?
Beck: Let’s see how it goes. I think we might need two more. It really depends. But certainly, we
should meet Wednesday.
End Part 2 of 2 of Tom Rainey on 8-7-17

32


Tom Rainey
Interviewed by Stephen Beck
The Evergreen State College oral history project
August 9, 2017
Part 1 of 2
FINAL

Beck: This is Stephen Beck. I’m back with Tom Rainey on August 9, and back in Tom’s living room. Tom,
last time we covered a fair bit of ground, and I think there are some questions I still wanted to ask you.
A couple of things about some of the controversies that came up over the years. But you mentioned,
early on, that you were involved in the hard card campaign for the union, bringing the union to the
Evergreen faculty back in the ‘70s.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: How did that come about? What were the main motivations that led you and some other faculty
to push for a faculty union then?
Rainey: There were a couple of aspects of that. One was another one of the crises we faced, not of
enrollment or that sort of thing, but of legislators who were very vociferous about closing the college
and turning it into this, that and the other. My perception, and the perception of a number of faculty
members—David Marr and a couple of others—not Rudy, Rudy was not involved in it really, but David
and Matt Smith and a few others —we felt that somehow, the administration at that time was not fairly
representing the faculty.
It was at that time, I think, that we discovered that we were being paid, with a workload that
was, I thought, bigger than, say, someone that was at Western or Eastern. We were not making
comparisons with faculty at WSU or the University of Washington. But we were falling behind, and we
continued to fall behind. So, just in a conversation that David Marr had with a representative at a
conference of AFT that couldn’t understand why we weren’t creating—we had all these concerns, and
he was talking about them, and why didn’t we create a union, and offered to come and talk to us about
it.
At that time also, I was involved in pushing to have some kind of, not faculty senate, but some
kind of faculty body where we discussed those issues and those problems—the curriculum standards
and those sort of things—that are the purview of the faculty and not of the staff. I just thought we had
to have a separate voice. And at that time, as you probably know, there was opposition on the part of
1

faculty—like Willi Unsoeld, which I understood—that felt that that would not be equitable as far as the
staff and other people; that we should all be one voice.
But it also had to do with my perception of the structure of the school. I had taught in three
schools before—Duke, the University of New York at Buffalo, and the University of Arkansas—and they
had strong faculty senates, which were the representatives of the faculty and the faculty voice. So, the
way I perceived—the term I used for the school at that time—it was like Plato’s Republic, with
electricity—they really did have a hierarchy, not within the faculty so much, but a hierarchy—and that
we needed a stronger voice as a faculty on questions of benefits and salary and that sort of thing. And I
didn’t feel at the time, as a number of other faculty did not feel, that the administration—I will not
name presidents or anything of the sort—was pushing our interest or representing our interest.
So, that was one factor. And I felt that, yes, we should have a union. The major concern of a
number of faculty that was opposed to that was that would put us in an adversarial position with the
administration, and I argued not necessarily. That would just give us a voice that, in a sense, is
institutionalized.
So, Peta Henderson and David—David wasn’t very much represented in the actual structuring of
the union—a number of us joined the AFT. The major problem, as we discovered, was that, unlike the
community colleges—I almost called them junior colleges, that’s what they were called in New York
when I was there—unlike the community colleges, where the faculty with similar experience levels were
being paid more, they were already unionized. So, most of the people I met around the state were from
community colleges, particularly the Seattle ones and Yakima and so on.
I think the other thing that’s back of that is that I was at institutions where, if it had not been
during this tumultuous time of the ‘70s—early ‘70s and late ‘60s—if we had not had a strong faculty
voice, we would have had dictatorial presidents that were essentially telling us what to do. I sort of
experienced that at the University of Arkansas, which was an institution they wanted a football team to
be proud of.
But the problem was that we didn’t have enabling legislation, and so much of the struggle was
to get enabling legislation, which was from all AFT chapters. And we nearly got it. We missed it by one
vote in the senate.
So, the AFT’s representative that we had then suggested that we see what the real faculty
concerns were, and that the best way to do that is to do a hard card campaign. Now, we could not have
organized a union without enabling legislation—that was the perception then—and we did. And 62
percent of the faculty signed up. Even a couple of the deans were, at that time . . . and I think one of our
2

saving graces then, and later, was that the deans actually did come from the faculty. So, it was not
aimed at autocratic deans or anything of the sort. It was largely a perception that we should speak for
ourselves through the union, on benefits, on compensation, everything. So, it was, for me, an act of
faculty sovereignty and autonomy, and a union would give us that autonomy.
At the same time, I was agitating for something like a senate, without the structures even, but
the procedures of a faculty senate that I had experienced at Duke, for example. There were a lot of
people that felt the same way. I’m not quite sure if they had felt differently if we weren’t, again, in one
of these crises that we seem to be periodically. We’re like the five dynasties of China, I think—
consolidation, crisis, revolution, consolidation and crisis and so on. We were going through this almost
cyclical experience here.
I guess the other reason I mentioned that, to put the crisis around—at least bracketing—what
we were doing, is the one we’re going through now, not really with the exception on what’s happened
on the questions of equity. That was not an issue then. I hope I’m not sounding jaded, it’s just the latest
crisis that we’ve had. So, that was the general circumstance.
When we didn’t get enabling legislation, and it was not possible really to set up a chapter and
have anything to do meet at Spud and Elma’s and have a few beers, then people just lost their interest.
Actually, we had a budget, people paid dues, and so ultimately, when it got down to about 10 to 15
people, we just decided to dissolve the group. The question was what to do with the money? Peta set it
up as a fund—I think she was our secretary—Peta set it up as a fund that any faculty could, as a union
would have, any faculty could call on if they needed some support for anything that happened within
the school of a legal nature. So, that’s the general circumstances of it.
Beck: How long did that last from the time . . .?
Rainey: Oh, I would say mid-‘70s to early ‘80s.
Beck: Early ‘80s? And that’s pretty much when it—
Rainey: Yeah, we disbanded in the ‘80s.
Beck: And then, of course, the enabling legislation for the four-years came through in the early 2000s, I
think it was.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: Were you involved at all in the organization of the current UFE?
Rainey: No, I was not.
Beck: You retired by then?

3

Rainey: Well, I retired nominally. I’m a failed retiree, as you know. [chuckles] But I retired nominally in
2000. I had a heart attack and a stroke, and my perception of it is that I retired too early now, but it
seemed like the right thing to do at the time, because I didn’t know how I was going to recover from
those, and I recovered quickly. Good genes, I guess.
Beck: Yeah.
Rainey: I recovered pretty quickly, and have been teaching some ever since. [laughing] So, I wasn’t
part of that. I encouraged it, and I think I was one of the first people to join. I remember, when the
staff—was it two years ago, three years ago?—when they were not represented yet by the union.
Beck: I think it was two years.
Rainey: It was the housing people.
Beck: Student Support Services Union.
Rainey: Right, Union—when they were having trouble getting recognition here, they called on me to
talk about these earlier efforts, and why I thought all of us needed a union. I’m still a very strong union
member. [chuckles] I say “strong” union member. I don’t take much action.
Beck: But strongly behind the union.
Rainey: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, there was that notion then that I could not quite understand when
I came from Buffalo [laughing] of, why, we’re all just one, big happy family here. We’re glad to be here.
This is a wonderful experience for all of us. And I felt that way, certainly. Immediately accepted, not
only even on trial, the notion of us not having ranks at that time was great. I particularly liked the fact
that we had rotating deans. So, I personally not feel threatened in any way by speaking out on things, or
I didn’t feel the kind of pressure that I felt when I was an assistant professor, for example, at Duke, and I
had to see what the senior professors were doing.
So, the faculty were very welcoming, and the staff were very welcoming, and we had a kind of
rude egalitarianism that I thought was very good. But at the same time, I began to see that each of us,
because of our working conditions, have different needs, and we need some united voice to express
those needs.
Beck: One of the arguments that I’ve heard over the years against faculty unionizing is that faculty
academics are professionals, and professionals don’t unionize.
Rainey: It that right? The AMA is not a union, is it? It doesn’t lobby for doctors? Virtually every
professional organization in this country has some sort of collective representation, some collective
body that lobbies for them, and that protects their interest, and sets up professional means.
Veterinarians do the same thing.
4

Beck: So, basically, you consider that line of argument . . .?
Rainey: I don’t buy that at all, never have. We’re workers. And part of the ideology of professionalism
has been that you’re not. That’s a way to separate. In some ways, I thought that having our union—and
I encouraged staff, at that time, to form their union—is a way that equals who have different needs, and
different working conditions, and different working atmospheres, could achieve a kind of
egalitarianism—that’s why I’ve always supported the staff unions—and egalitarianism with teeth in it.
The union, I don’t believe, has been divisive, as far as the staff is concerned. They led the way in
unionizing, and I was very much approving of that.
To use the old saw, my perception at Evergreen is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. And
if it’s many wheels united together squeaking, it has more power.
I think the other thing that I’ve always felt, I assume that any relationship is a political
relationship; that power has something to do with that relationship, and if you have an institution of
higher learning that has an administration, they answer to a board of trustees. Since the great examples
at Wisconsin, with the creation there of the whole notion of academic freedom, and collective faculty
organizations that protect it, was that AAUP protected academic freedom.
So, I frankly see a union as another way of expressing our academic freedom, or defending our
academic freedom. If we don’t have that, then what do we have in the way of encouraging inquiry,
sometimes unpopular inquiry, into difficult social, political and economic problems. I think that the
stronger the collective voice, the greater the academic freedom. I’ve heard the argument to the
contrary, which I don’t think has happened in faculty unions at all around the country. I don’t think that
the WEA dictates to me.
B: Let me ask about some other tumultuous times at Evergreen, and your experience with those. You
mentioned that there were the times in the ‘70s when various legislators were trying to close Evergreen
down.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: Any particular recollections of that period, other than just the fact that they were trying to do
that?
Rainey: I would link that, I think, to community perceptions as much as anything else. The perception
of many people in this county, and in South Sound until Dan Evans became President—Dan was our
President at a very important time in our development, it seems to me, and I’ll say something about
that. But the perception that many people in Rotary, for example, in Kiwanis—the business community
here—was very much like that of Hamilton Farms; that this was a crazy place with all these anarchists
5

and homosexuals and weird people. But the community was more conservative then, because
Evergreen had not worked its way with Evergreen faculty here.
I joined Kiwanis specifically because I wanted people to understand in the community that we
were not that weird, and that we didn’t have two heads, and we could talk with reason and so on. Oscar
did the same. Charlie did the same, joined the Lions Club. So, I thought we should join, and participate
in community affairs in a way that would, I guess, allay the fears and the negative perceptions of
Evergreen.
That was, I think, a continuous crisis, in a sense, that we didn’t have a lot of support. We didn’t
have a lot of students coming from high school in the county to Evergreen, because of what I considered
to be false perceptions. The dynamic of that is that at the same time that we had that reputation, we
had a lot of faculty—Byron [Youtz] and Rudy [Martin] and a number of us—that were [sighs] beginning
to firm up, let me say, our educational philosophy. And much of that educational philosophy was a
philosophy that recognized that we had academic standards, that we had expectations of our students.
So, this was a tumultuous period for us, as we are sort of defining ourselves, and what it is we do at
Evergreen, and why we do it and so on.
A number of us ended up, I would say, far away from the Summerhill model—I would say that—
and from what I would perceive as the anarchic model. We’d have discussions like authoritative and
authoritarian. I consider myself authoritative, but I’m not an authoritarian. That gets back to a
discussion we had before about why it is I lecture. I am an authority on Russian, European and Eurasian
affairs and studies, and if somebody wants to learn about that, they can learn it from me, and they can
learn it from other people.
So, I wanted to convey the fact that we weren’t all that strange, that we had high expectations,
many of us—I think most of the faculty. The scientists figured this out a long time ago at Evergreen, and
they organized themselves in much the same way that they are now. It’s interesting when you talk
about a crisis of identity or anything, it’s only been in the humanities that we feel that [laughter], not in
the sciences or environmental studies here. They’ve known what they’re about, and have known how
to set the standards for students and so on.
I guess I would call it an antagonism between perceptions of what the school was like, which
some people still have, and the State. What’s changed that, I think, is the fact that Evergreen students
have graduated; decided to stay here; they liked this area. There was a time when every county
commissioner except one had been a former student of mine. We had Greeners in the Legislature, we

6

had Greeners in political office, and we had Greeners who were stealing the internships from the
University of Washington, in the Legislature, and in the Governor’s office and that sort of thing.
That was our sort of continuous crisis of trying to decide who we are and what our standards
were, and at the same time, try to convince people in the state. And I could see the change after about
15 years. In the State and the Legislature, we had defenders, so it made voices to close the school that
would come from yahoos, I don’t know, I won’t say where because I may have a student who might be
offended if I talk about their hometown.
That’s still the case, that’s still the perception, clearly. You read it in the newspaper from time
to time. But again, Dan ended that crisis period. I wouldn’t say Dan did much at all for the curriculum—
he shouldn’t have, that’s our business—or that sort of thing. Dan was very supportive of the way we
were teaching. And Dan sort of looked at the school as his baby, because he fought with the Legislature
initially that it would be a different kind of school. It would not be like all the rest of the schools.
But Dan could play hardball. He’d go to Kiwanis, or he’d go to some meeting and say to town
people here—City Council and Chamber people—he said, “You want to close the college? Do you
understand what that would mean in terms of loss of income in this community? Do you understand
the multiplier effect?” [laughing] That’s the way Dan did it, and so Dan was, in some ways, as a
President, our best representative. Charlie was good. I’m not saying Charlie was bad, but Charlie is not
Dan. Charlie is an academic.
Beck: Dan was a three-term Governor.
Rainey: And a damn good one. I haven’t voted for a Republican, but I did vote one time for Dan.
[laughter] I mean, even Brad Owen, who just retired as Lieutenant Governor, was one of the people
that was after our hide. But their charges about the school began to seem, as some public opinion
began to shape, as ridiculous.
Beck: A little later in Evergreen’s history, there was another President we had.
Rainey: Joey O.
Beck: Yeah.
Rainey: Broadway Joe, we called him.
Beck: What was your experience with him? There’s a lot of controversy around—
Rainey: I did not have any particular personal bad experience, but I have a perception of him that I
would share — you talk to three people, you get three different opinions about Joe.
Joe’s way of dealing with the faculty and the institution was to divide and conquer, to divide and
rule. I don’t even know if he was aware of that. I do remember one time that he reminded us of his
7

Italian background. I asked Joe after he did that, “Is it the Mafia side that you remember, or is it the
Renaissance politics part of being Italian?” One of my favorite novels is Pär Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf,
where a dwarf does all the assassinations while the duke maintains this outer visage of munificence. So,
he was very divisive, I would say. There’s no particular act that I could point out that was terrible,
except his dismissal of Patrick Hill.
But, I must say, he succeeded, because there were defenders on the faculty right up to the time,
people I never would have expected would have defended Joe. And when David Hitchens and Craig
Carlson got the dope on his real credentials, rather than what he had said his credentials were, which
was the start of the unwinding of him, so that eventually, the Board of Trustees had to do something
about the situation. But we were sort of constantly at each other, largely, I think, due to the way he—it
was certainly a crisis. I remember the faculty meeting, when some colleagues—some of whom I respect,
some I don’t—some colleagues attacked David and Craig for exposing these credentials. Because Joe
was very clever at making deals with “I’ll get money for you to do this,” “I’ll get money for you to do
that.” So, he had his defenders, but I think he had a very destructive—it took us a long time to recover
from him.
But I didn’t have a personal vendetta against him. Some faculty did. But the joke that went
around after [was] that Joe made more friends for Patrick than Patrick made. Not that Patrick was
Machiavellian or anything like that, but Patrick had this maddening—and I hope Marie never reads this
—I like Patrick and Patrick liked me, so it’s hard for me not to like somebody that likes me. But he’d go
to, let’s say, Mark, and say, “I’ve been talking to Tom about this, and he thinks we ought to do it this
way.” Then he’d go to me and say, “I’ve been talking to Mark.” He was an Irish politician. And I liked
Patrick, but some people were really turned off by that.
What was good about Patrick is he did push this whole notion of a learning community. So, he
had pedagogical ideas, and he supported the way we did things, and suggested refinements and that
sort of thing. But I ended up not [laughing] entirely trusting what he said.
Yeah, Joey O. was very destructive.
Beck: Do you think that the whole divisiveness that developed under Joe had any lasting repercussions
on the faculty?
Rainey: Absolutely. Absolutely did.
Beck: What were those lasting repercussions?
Rainey: Well, I will just use one example, and that is my dear, departed good friend, David Hitchens.
David was so, not shattered, but he was so disappointed with this faculty meeting. This was a faculty
8

meeting much like the faculty meetings I’ve heard that have happened recently. [chuckles] Because, I
guess, Joe had supported the Tacoma Campus, or something like that, one faculty member got up, and
attacked David particularly, as being a white boy. “This is white boy’s concern,” because actually, he had
supported the Labor Center. Joe did support the Labor Center, and got money for the Labor Center, and
he got money for the research center that was set up, the Public Affairs Research Center [that is, the
Washington State Institute for Public Policy].

So, he would do this. He acted like a Renaissance

prince, in that sense. But finally, it just didn’t work for him. So, David never went to another faculty
meeting, nor did Craig. David hunkered down and taught his programs. I taught The South with him
during that time, and Looking Backward.
Bit by bit, crisis by crisis, with faculty taking different positions on it, it was divisive for the
faculty. We didn’t have quite that camaraderie, that level of trust for each other, after. That’s what Joe
did. So, it was divisive. I think it was. And there are other examples of that.
Beck: Can you think of any right now?
Rainey: Well, I’d have to name names, and I don’t want to.
Beck: Okay. But other faculty, it sounds like, felt as though they were no longer able to trust some of
their colleagues as a result of it.
Rainey: Yeah. Which is kind of precisely what I think Joe, consciously or unconsciously, was up to.
Beck: He left sometime in the early ‘90s it must have been?
Rainey: Yeah.
Beck: I wasn’t in the area at the time, so I’m not sure exactly. What was the college like, I guess, for the
next near-decade until you retired?
Rainey: After?
Beck: Yeah.
Rainey: I view the ‘90s as the period when, despite some of these divisions and lack of trust and so on,
as the golden years for Evergreen. The best years.
Beck: Why is that?
Rainey: Maybe my experiences. [laughing]
Beck: Okay.
Rainey: The best years, where, certainly for me, we had worked out in Language and Area Studies the
sequence, where I was teaching the Russia program every two years. We were doing all this. People
retired and we could hire someone. Andrew had to retire just before he died, and so it was not hard to
hire somebody to replace him immediately.
9

My teaching experiences then were uniformly great. There was an individual crisis here or
there, but, again, other people will tell you other things about it, but the ‘90s were the best years for
me.
Beck: Was that when Pat Krafcik was hired, to replace Andrew?
Rainey: Yeah, Pat was hired to replace Andrew.
Beck: And you taught in the Russia program with Pat a few times?
Rainey: Six times. Andrew, five times. Andrew and I created the program. Maybe it’s in the ‘90s I
finally had worked out my way, and other faculty had worked out their way, to easily teach in faculty
teams. Every once in a while was a real rub and a blowup and so on, but it didn’t seem to be as—we got
used to each other in the 20 years.
Mark Levensky put it this way. He was talking to Rudy, and to Pete, and to Beryl, and we were
talking at the dinosaur table, and [he] said, “You know, the good thing about where we are now is
that”—there were about 10 of us there, a big group—“any of us would be able to sit down and put
together a program in three hours.”
So, there was trust within the faculty, but it was not with the whole faculty. It was with the
experience that you’d had with teaching people, the respect that you would have—for me—for their
intellectual heft and their curiosity, and their willingness to transcend their disciplinary—but keep their
discipline. One of the things that I remember that we talked about is hiring people that had experience
with interdisciplinary teaching, which was good. But I remember the argument—I think it was Merv
who made it, I certainly made the argument—that teaching interdisciplinary program without people
that are strong in their disciplines is an oxymoron.
Beck: You have to start with disciplines before you can be interdisciplinary.
Rainey: Exactly so. You take a problem and you look at it from a historical standpoint, or an
evolutionary standpoint, or cultural standpoint. That sort of thing. That, to me, was in the best
programs that I’ve taught.
For example, when I taught a program with Byron called Discovery, Exploration and Empire,
Byron gave a series of just absolutely brilliant lectures about the scientific revolution—Newtonian
physics. Bob did the same, mostly on insects. Bob gave a lecture one time on wasps that would bring
tears to your eyes. [laughter]
I don’t know, in some ways, I felt good about myself that I’d reached a level of excellence in
teaching, and knowledge of everything I was teaching, and the joy of learning new things. And all of it
applying back to history. Every interdisciplinary program that I taught in, from what I learned from my
10

colleagues, made me a better historian. I don’t hear that anymore. It may be out there, it may be
experienced by people now, but I don’t hear that as much as I did then.
Beck: I wanted to raise another conception of interdisciplinary programs, just to hear your response to
it. You’ve said that interdisciplinary programs need to begin with faculty who are strongly grounded in
their own disciplines.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: There’s another view that I’ve heard; that really, disciplines themselves are decrepit, and we
really need to not worry so much about being grounded in disciplines, but rather bring whatever it is we
can to the table from whatever area of study there is out there, and focus on a particular theme. But
nobody needs to be grounded in any particular discipline. We could read some sociology, we could read
some sociology with some psychology, find a good psychology book. We could read a history book, and
as long as all of the faculty are committed to studying a theme, wouldn’t that be good enough?
Rainey: Well, all I can tell you, Stephen, is that I would not want to teach with a person that has that
philosophy. I would not want to teach with that person, because I wouldn’t think I could learn anything
from them. I’m looking for a word of someone that knows a little bit about everything, but not much in
depth about anything.
Beck: The jack-of-all-trades idea?
Rainey: No, there’s a better word for that.
Beck: Dilettante?
Rainey: Dilettante! That’s dilettantish. That would be my view of it. I certainly would not want to
teach with somebody in that program, and I would say I’ve got 45 years of teaching interdisciplinary
studies, and I’ve only had one failure in that time, in terms of working with somebody, or what I’ve
learned from them, and I trust what they’ve learned from me. I don’t see how you could learn anything
about a current social program, for example, without understanding how it developed, which is to say,
from a historical standpoint. So, for that reason, I must say that I don’t buy what I hear. “Well, all
you’ve got to do is read a book, and anybody can teach history, anybody can teach literature.” And, I
confess, this might reflect that I am becoming an old fogey.
For example, in our current hiring, there is no substitute for hiring a professional historian with a
Ph.D. that has studied historical methodology, has a strong specialty area in it, has studied
historiography and philosophy of history, and all the things that we study in graduate school. So, I just
don’t buy that at all. Furthermore, I don’t think the students would buy that. [laughing] I think for
students, in terms of teaching by example, historians do look at things in a slightly different way than a
11

philosopher or something. But taking a problem or an issue or something and looking at it from various
perspectives, and trying to elucidate it from various disciplinary perspectives, I think, leads to a higher
understanding of it. As I once joked to a student, I came to Evergreen to discover I had academic
standards, and they’re very high. [laughing] But that’s one of them. I would not want to teach with
somebody like that, but that’s very dilettantish.
Beck: Good. After the golden years of the ‘90s, you retired.
Rainey: Yeah.
Beck: And you’ve been in Evening and Weekend Studies pretty much since then. We talked a little bit
about that last time.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: In looking back at the whole of your career, what stands out to you as being a particular success
at Evergreen, something that you’re particularly proud of at Evergreen?
Rainey: I’m very proud of the Russia program, and I’m very proud of what we’ve done in Environmental
Studies. I’m proud of what small contribution I made to the MES program. And I used to be proud of
Political Economy, but for reasons that I talked about last time, I’m not so proud of that anymore.
What I’m . . . I don’t know if pride is the word, but . . . I’m very happy about the way I’ve spend
my 45 years here. And I’m like an old horse in the traces, in that sense. One thing I’m actually trying to
break now, in preparation for real retirement [laughter]—when I stop teaching—is that the way I teach
is when I teach something I’ve never taught before—for example, what I just taught, Pacific Rim Rivals—
it’s an opportunity that I actually like exercising in Evening and Weekend Studies, where I’m really
partially retired, so I have a long time to prepare for that. For example, when we taught The Classical
World, I must have read 20, 30 books on that. All of my life since I was an undergraduate, I’ve read in
order to teach. I’ve read in order to understand things. Now, entering my not-too-tender eighties, I’m
wondering how I’m going to do.
I’m proud of the students that I’ve been associated with. As I’ve said before, if I have any
chance of immortality—I’m not a believer, and when I die, the screen goes dark. That’s it. But if I have
any chance of immortality, it’s in the minds of my students. And the things that I’ve written, but in the
minds of my students. Things I’ve written will be quickly forgotten, and in a couple of generations, too,
my students will not be my students.
But for the 45 years that I’ve been here, I’ve never been more than two years separated from
students. I’ve filled in for Rob Smurr and I did a series of lectures I’d never done quite like that on Stalin,
because that was the program Territorial Expansion in his program. Most of the students there had not
12

known that I had been associated with a Russia program, so they were not sure why this big fellow
coming in talking about Stalin knew what he was talking about. [laughing] So, each time sort of created
anew.
I’m very proud of Bob McChesney, and I’m very proud of Tom Wilkerson. But teaching has been
my life, and I’m very happy that I’ve spent my life teaching, and I’m very happy that I’ve spent my life in
scholarship, and I’m very happy that I’ve spent 45 years at Evergreen teaching.
Beck: Did you happen to have Matthew Frye Jacobson as one of your students?
Rainey: I think so. I’m beginning to . . . yeah. Somebody came up the other day at a political thing and
said, “Tom, what you said in So-and-So changed my life.” And I said, “And your name is?” [laughter]
Beck: Well, Susan and I used part of his book, Whiteness of a Different Color, in our program this past
year. He was an Evergreen student, a little ahead of me. I think he was here in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s.
He went on to get his doctorate at Brown in American studies, I think, basically history.
I know that when we were talking about doing these interviews that there are some things that
you were thinking about with respect to the future of Evergreen you wanted to talk about. What were
you thinking about? What are your thoughts about Evergreen’s future?
Rainey: Well . . . I’m not sure. I mean, I . . . I’m not sure how Evergreen will pull out of this current crisis.
And I don’t have any great ideas to confer to anyone about how to do this. I don’t.
Beck: You mentioned to me that you had some concerns.
Rainey: I do have concerns, and the concern come from the incident in May. We were talking earlier
about my estimation—and, again, I’m not interested in indoctrinating students. What I’m interested in
is helping students to become critical thinkers. As Hemingway says, developing in students a “crap
detector”; that when they hear an idea or an ideology or a view, they know it’s crap because there’s no
evidence to prove it. It’s somebody’s idea, and they’re trying to sell me something—an idea, or some
ideology, or something of the sort. Skepticism in the best sort of way. I’m well-named Thomas, I guess.
I’ve been a skeptic all my life. Not a cynic, but a skeptic. And students that know something that they
can talk about, eventually with some authority, or know something that will help them understand how
the body works, or the psychology of fascism or something like that. But to give them writing skills,
thinking skills, critical thinking skills, and the only way we can do that is to have an institution of free
inquiry.
That incident, I think, to me, was the greatest danger that I have seen at this institution
everywhere, where a faculty member was shouted down, called names, and something beyond ad
hominem attacks. And these were ad hominem attacks on a faculty member. That is destructive to the
13

community, it seems to me, because it has caused in a number of faculty—not this one, because what
do I have to lose about saying what I think about everything that’s gone on? I know there are faculty
here, I’ve talked to faculty here, that are afraid to say anything, because they’re afraid to be labeled as
homophobic, or labeled to be racist or sexist or something of the sort. What has been created here by
this incident is an atmosphere of fear and self-censorship. You can’t have free inquiry in a situation like
that.
I guess I’m a left-leaning liberal, if I’m anything. And I’m conservative in some things [laughing],
but I guess what I see—and this may be, I hope not, the coup de grace—but this has raised the issue
again, it seems to me, in the minds of citizens in this state, of the usefulness of Evergreen and the
Evergreen method. Because it was supposed to be, in some ways, the freest place, where students and
faculty and others could express their opinion freely, without being attacked physically, or without being
attacked verbally. I just don’t see that anymore. I don’t see that kind of freedom of inquiry that we had.
That’s my biggest fear for the future of Evergreen. I think it’s had such a pernicious effect that people
are wondering; “I’m not going to send my child there.”
I’m a white person, and still have relics of racism, because that’s the way I was raised, and I have
struggled with it my whole life. I freely admit that every once in a while, there’s a little wrinkle of that
that comes up in my thinking. I don’t think it’s ever occurred in my classroom.
But Evergreen has now joined the great polarization, it seems to me, of opinion. Right here, it
happens. I think that incident, in particular—building up to it, it was happening in the faculty, but it
went public. That incident went feral, and I think it’s done serious damage to Evergreen. And will
continue.
Beck: I want to just touch on that a little more. One line of thought is that, well, yeah, there was a lot of
anger and a lot of shouting that students of color were doing during that incident. That’s coming from
the experience of being excluded, and being discriminated against throughout their lives. And then to
come to Evergreen and find it to be continuing there, some would say that this is actually an expression
of well-founded anger and frustration. What are your thoughts about that?
Rainey: [Sighs] All I can say to that is I think that they have done their cause more damage than they
can possibly imagine in the way they did it.
The larger thing—and this can be recorded—we are facing, I am absolutely convinced now, we
are facing the greatest constitutional crisis and threat to what little democracy we do have, what
freedoms we do have. And we do have a lot of freedoms. If this were South Africa, they would have
been shot down, of course, before what happened in South Africa with the . . .
14

I am frankly looking at this with the largest political spectrum I can, [and] what has happened, in
my opinion, is that identity politics, whether it’s on racism, whether it’s on homophobia and homosexual
rights—which I absolutely support, as every sane person I know does—or sexual equality. I’ve got a wife
and children to prove—a half-black grandson to prove—that at least I’ve been able to get over some of
my sense of entitlement that I had as a white boy from the South. [laughing]
Identity politics is dividing the left at a time when the left should be united, or try to unite
themselves, at least in the face of this danger, and it’s not. What I see identity politics as doing is
factionalizing any possibility that we can face this crisis against what I see as creeping fascism. And that
is the larger question; that is the larger struggle. If that side wins, it will be a blow to everyone who’s
struggling for their racial identity be recognized, for every equity issue to be recognized. And it’s there.
It’s there on the faculty. It’s there on the faculty. I mean, people that disagree with what happened are
just as important for the unification that’s necessary to give some kind of voice to that.
Now, I am somewhat heartened by the large demonstrations of women, the large
demonstrations of gays and lesbians, and the demonstrations against the racist policies of authority.
But what I see it as doing is playing into the hands of Jeff Sessions and people like him, so that he can
stamp out as much as he’s able to do—if he’s got the backing of the Legislature, which he may have—to
restrict voting, to restrict all of the progress that we’ve made, and we have made considerable, it seems
to me.
I grew up in a society where there were separate bathrooms. My hometown had a sign as you
came in, as late as 1942, where I grew up—and I loved my hometown at that time—“Nigger, don’t let
the sun set on your back in this town.” That was the way I grew up. That’s the way most of the South
was. And when people tell me that there has not been made any progress towards dealing with racial
equality since then, I just say, “As a historian, I see that as a monstrous lie, and an exaggeration of their
particular position.”
And I understand. I have a half-black grandson who’s more black and African-American than he
is white, and he identifies himself with that. I would join the struggle to keep the fascists from doing
what they’re doing for my grandson, as much as anything else, and for my Hispanic nieces and nephew.
So, I see it as I understand it. But I watched just such politics—single-minded, single-identity politics—
destroy the left during the ‘60s. And the result was Richard Nixon. That’s my view on it.
Beck: Well, and you can admit that there’s been progress, without admitting that we’ve achieved
equality, that we’ve achieved equity.

15

Rainey: Far from it. Far, far from it. But what they did to Bret [Weinstein] in that moment—and believe
me, I have supported virtually nothing that Bret’s done since then—but what they did to Bret does more
damage to their position than anything else, because it has alerted, it seems to me, those people in this
state that have some positions of authority, who are taking the position that that was an infringement of
free speech. And it was.
So, what I’m saying is, yes, Martin Luther King knew how to do this struggle. Right? But they
don’t have the power to do more than do the shouting, and they won’t get the power when they drive
away possible allies to their struggle. And I consider myself an ally to that struggle.
Beck: Yeah, good. I wanted to ask you about some other concerns that you raised. You raised a
concern about the liberal arts at Evergreen as well. What is that concern?
Rainey: Well, the symptoms of that concern, I should start with that. Okay? As people in the
humanities have retired or died, they have not been replaced. Part of that I understand because of
budgetary restraints, and declining enrollment and that sort of thing. But the other part of that is what I
perceive of some of the solutions proposed at the national and at the local level, that you have to
prepare people just for the jobs that they may have. The problem with that is that the jobs that they
have now or they can get will not be the jobs of the future.
Only liberal arts, broadly defined, can help a student develop the kind of critical thinking, the
kind of problem-solving, that they’re going to need for jobs that they don’t know what will exist. So,
preparing people to be part of the great cybernetic revolution, the jobs that a technical school is
preparing them for may be gone by the time they get out and go to work.
The larger problem is that the jobs just aren’t there anymore, because they’ve been exported
elsewhere. But I still believe that we’re not in the business just to prepare people for jobs and
employment and so on. We’re preparing citizens, people that have critical faculties so that they can
understand when they’re being lied to, when they’re being manipulated. And I don’t see a technical
education as doing that.
There’s this great line in Harry Braverman’s book about the difference between German
education in the nineteenth century and American and British education based on utilitarianism, as he
puts it, by rule of thumb. At the time that the Germans are developing the best theoretical physics and
theoretical chemistry, it has no immediate application, but eventually will. And it made Germany able
then, in the late nineteenth century, to leap ahead. Without the war, Germany would have become a
major rivalry to the United States as an industrial power. And it’s largely because of their respect for
philosophy, their respect for literature, their respect for theoretical excellence, and developing ideas
16

that didn’t have immediate application. So, what we are doing is reverting to the worst aspects of the
American educational system, in the name of anti-intellectualism.
Beck: It’s reverting to the utilitarian, purely practical.
Rainey: Purely practical, right.
Beck: And you see that at Evergreen?
Rainey: I see that at Evergreen because there are two areas that are in serious trouble at Evergreen,
liberal arts—now, it’s not the same as it was at the University of Florida and most schools where I was
an undergraduate. You had schools of arts and sciences, and the sciences were there and there were
the rest of us, in history and philosophy and so on. The best of the scientists would also have to take
humanities—all of them had to, in the College of Arts and Sciences—and it’s in the humanities that they
learned critical thinking.
Now, they learn empirical thinking in their science, and how you judge the validity of a
statement, a scientific statement, or the validity of a scientific discovery, or a scientific theory or
something. So, they learn essentially to be skeptical about that. But I see that in serious decline at
Evergreen. And, you know, the immediately past Provost, I thought was supposed to be working on
that, but I think that was just nominal.
The other area I’m terribly concerned about is language and area studies, and it’s for the same
thing. Now, the science programs at Evergreen, it’s almost as if we have the two cultures that were
talked about at Evergreen, so far as I can tell, in Environmental Studies and the sciences, M to Ois still
one of the best interdisciplinary preparations for anything you’re doing in geology, or anything in the
hard sciences. They seem to be just fine. It’s in the decline of humanities at Evergreen that most
concerns me, because that’s what helps, I think, our students to develop the kind of knowledge and
critical skills that they need.
Beck: Particularly in area studies and the languages, you see it there?
Rainey: Right.
Beck: Here’s a softball for you. What’s so important about area studies and languages?
Rainey: Well . . .
Beck: I know you spent 45 years preparing to answer that question.
Rainey: Oh, that’s easy. Donald Trump and born-again nationalists in the United States
notwithstanding, this is a global world, and we don’t have a universal language yet to communicate, and
I hope we never do. Language and area studies help students study different cultures from themselves,
and that ends up leading them to maybe critical thinking about some of the things they were taught
17

about their own culture and their own society. Language studies are important for communicating with
people. They make global citizens. Now, there are people in this country that are not interested in
global citizens, but only in parochial citizens, so to speak.
We live in a world, if we don’t understand what’s happening in China, and if we don’t
understand what’s happening in Russia, we only understand half as much as we need to know to
become a good citizen, voting for a particular person to be President of the United States. And the
current crisis that we have, I think, is an excellent example of an affirmation of what language and
cultural studies will do for a person, will help them do. I’m just sorry that I didn’t start Chinese about
[laughing] . . .
Our students will have to function globally, in a global economy, and language and area studies
prepares them for that, whether it’s Latin America, as the Mexican Americans continue to take back the
territory that they lost in 1846 [laughing] in the southern part of the United States, now English is the
universal business language, but people better learn Chinese, they better learn Russian, and they better
learn Spanish, in this country, if they want to function well, it seems to me, in a global economy, and in a
global society, which is what we have.
Beck: Were there other concerns? I remember you mentioned several things.
Rainey: Is that enough on language?
Beck: If it’s enough for you. I’m interested in hearing anything you have to say about the importance of
area studies. It’s certainly something I have a strong belief in.
Rainey: At the very least, our enemies, of course, can be friends. I was opposed to the Vietnam War;
most difficult decision I made in my life, because I was a proud veteran—I am a proud veteran—of the
U.S. Navy, and my time in the Marine Corps and so on. I think the war was a mistake. It was a terrible
war. It divided American society. And Vietnam is now one of our major allies in Asia.
And a knowledge of Russian history, a knowledge of Russian foreign policy, I can’t convey to
large crowds enough that they need to know, to be an informed citizen, about what Russia’s up to now.
But the big one is China. The big one is Asia, and if our students don’t learn about Asia and China, and
China’s ambitions, and China’s economic power, they’re not going to understand the dynamics of the
twenty-first century, the international and global dynamics. So, once again, we pull, like a turtle, our
heads in, and say we’re just interested in fortress America, and what’s happening here. And the
elephant of China will step on that turtle and smash it.
Beck: I think you said something the other day about learning Russian; that is was only once you
learned Russian that you felt you could really understand Russian history.
18

Rainey: Right.
Beck: I’m assuming that that has something to do with the way in which the Russian language frames
perception and knowledge.
Rainey: Yes.
Beck: Is that fair to say?
Rainey: Well, there’s two parts. The older I get, the more I love my own language. I love Shakespeare.
It’s Shakespeare for the language for me now, for me; not just for the content, but Shakespeare, like
Russian writers of the nineteenth century, plumbed the depths of every possible human condition or
circumstance, or human experience. Language helps you do that, too. Knowing your own language
does that. In a strange sort of way, I did fine in literature when I was in high school, and I learned how
to write the language fairly well in graduate school and in undergraduate school. But I didn’t know
English grammar until I studied Russian. [laughing] I didn’t know what a nominative case was.
There are two things that I’m beginning to do. I read a little Russian every day. I’m beginning to
do algebraic problems, and I’m even reading a grammar book. And all of this is sort of fighting off
dementia. [laughing] I’m sort of convinced the more active I keep my mind, the longer I’ll be here, at
least not just in spirit.
Beck: But learning Russian helped you to understand English better?
Rainey: Oh, it helped me understand English better. And the spillover is this, from language studies to
the humanities, the serious study of literature of any people gives you the best avenue of understanding
the inside history of a people, as studying mythology does in studying the ancient world, and studying
their language and their literature.
Beck: You also mentioned a concern about advanced study at Evergreen.
Rainey: Yes. I guess I should repeat this for the tape, if I haven’t done it before. I remember a
conversation that I had with Kirk Thompson after one of our endless discussions about advanced
studies, and how we were going to do it. Kirk said that Evergreen threatened to become the best
community college in the state, and there are two barriers, it seems to me, to doing advanced study at
Evergreen. They absolutely do it in the sciences here at Evergreen. In Environmental Studies, they do
advanced work, and language and culture study, I see as a way to do advanced work.
But the way we thought about doing it, and the way we actually did it, in my estimation, was
with group contracts. But that gets at one of the major problems I think we’ve had with advanced
studies. Advanced studies are, by nature, more selective, taken by students that want to know
something—American history, Russian history, something of that sort, or philosophy in more depth.
19

That means that if you hold that study to the strict ratio we have, the student to teacher ratio that’s
been opposed, essentially—then you may have six people that want to understand ancient philosophy,
but you couldn’t run the program. You couldn’t teach it.
The language studies programs have been well-enrolled, for the most part, I think. But in other
areas, if you wanted to do advanced work, we’d have to do it in such a way, it seems to me, that you
subsidize it with a lower ratio of students to teacher. But if it doesn’t get a certain number now—
certainly in Evening and Weekend Studies, I think in some ways, we do some advanced work. The way
we taught The Ancient World, it’s advanced. The way I teach Pacific Studies, it’s advanced. But I think
we have to suffer, and we’re up against that, because we’re cutting back on faculty now because of the
enrollment. That means, in my experience, that the deans and the Provosts will be stricter, if it’s
perceived that this particular program will not get 22 people to the one faculty member, or 42 to 48 to
the two faculty members, you can’t do it. I know that to be a fact because I’ve tried a couple of times
with things. My programs have been generally pretty well enrolled, but it was cut. An intensive study,
for example, of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the study of the Reconstruction is absolutely
essential in understanding that the promise of emancipation was not realized in the United States. We
had eight good people, but it was canceled.
Beck: So, you think that the way around that is that the college needs to have more flexibility around
enrollments in the upper division programs to allow upper division work?
Rainey: Absolutely.
Beck: One way that people have tried to do advanced work is to have all-level programs or multi-level
programs, where there might be part of the program that would make possible advanced-level work.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: In your experience, has that sort of thing been successful?
Rainey: No. Also, not looking at this strictly from a union standpoint, it’s a form of what they call in the
cotton mills “stretch out” for the faculty.
Beck: What does that mean?
Rainey: It means that you’ve got to spend more time with a smaller number of people, and at the same
time, do what you’re supposed to do in other parts of the program. It’s a form of stretch out, as I see it.
Beck: Really, it’s basically unsupported faculty work.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: It’s an ongoing problem at Evergreen.

20

Rainey: It is, and I don’t see how it’s going to be solved. That’s another reason why I’m not so sanguine
about our future.
Beck: The last area you mentioned when we were talking the other day was that one of your concerns
is the routinization of charisma. What do you mean by that?
Rainey: Well, I was a Marxist for about a year and a half, but I’ve always been a Weberian since I read
Max Weber—Max Weber—talking mostly about religious movements. There are two parts to this, two
sources of wisdom, at least as far as I’m concerned. The other one is Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and
the Fox. And there’s a great study of the German Social Democratic Workers Party by, I can’t remember
his first name—Michael—but he was a student of Weber. But Weber’s argument about bureaucracies—
and I see this absolutely in the Russian Revolution, and certainly—certainly—in the Chinese Revolution,
and with Christianity and so on—is that mass movements based on charismatic leaders, or charismatic
visions, or that sort of thing, in two or three generations, become bureaucratized. Routinized.
That happened to the Catholic Church. That’s one of Luther’s major problems with the Catholic
Church. It became less spiritual and more political, largely because this bureaucratization occurred. And
it happens with labor unions in the United States. It happens with virtually every mass movement. If it’s
successful, every revolution has become routinized in this way. So, you eventually end up with an
institution where the actual function of the institution is less important than the perpetuation of the
bureaucracy that’s created. And I see a lot of that happening at Evergreen over the years.
The other thing that comes from routinization is the series of what I would call “institutional
noes.” It almost verges on undermining academic freedom. One of the institutional noes is that you
cannot run a program if it doesn’t have an enrollment at a certain level. I don’t whether this is the
impingement of State laws, or regulation, or that sort of thing that have pushed this institution into
what I consider, and what some faculty consider, an excessively bloated administration. Frankly, one of
my major concerns about creating a vice president for this, and a vice president for that, and some of
these newer initiatives to deal with equity, is what it means is that administrators will be hired at a
higher price, and they need then staff to help them with that. That’s where the money goes. That’s
where the money goes. That means that you can’t subsidize with a lower student ratio. It means all
sorts of things.
The other aspect of that for us as faculty is that we have become our own secretaries, we have
become our own organizers. I finally agree with Patrick Hill that the continuation of the evaluation
process that we have is largely a bureaucratic relic. So, if there’s two cultures at Evergreen, it’s the
administration and the faculty. They’ve kept up well with salaries; we have not. What happened in
21

Russia in two generations after the revolution is the creation of a post-revolutionary bureaucratic elite,
whose major concern was keeping their jobs, and expanding their bureaucracy, and I see that as
happening at Evergreen, and it’s very disturbing to me.
It’s why, in some ways, I was sort of halfway—not all the way, I want to say—that seemed to be
one of Bret’s early concerns, which was opposed by a group that engaged in riotous behavior; that will
create now more administrators; that—as a Board of Trustees friend who will remain nameless, and
should—said, “It seems that what we have is a series of administrative fixes to something that cannot be
fixed by creating one more office, or one more vice president.” That’s what I mean.
Beck: So, growth of the administration.
Rainey: The growth of the administration, and the fact that the charismatic vision—which, there was
never a unified charismatic vision. There were a lot of charismatic visions. But, you could at least
dream. Right? [laughing]
Beck: Yeah.
Rainey: It was easy then to approach other dreamers amongst the faculty and say, “Let’s do this.” It’s
much more difficult to do now. You could say, “Let’s do this.” It might require going out and talking to
some loggers. I mean, you have to go through a whole office now that says okay to that.
As I say, some of that may be imposed by the State, it may be imposed by Federal government
in the kind of way we get money, and that sort of thing. I understand that, so I’m not saying it is a sort
of pernicious conspiracy to create a bureaucracy. I just think it happens. It certainly happened in China.
In a sense, that’s what the terrible, terrible thing that Mao dreamed up called the Cultural Revolution
was all about [laughing] was to attack the bureaucracy, was to loosen the bureaucracy. By making that
criticism, I should also add that I think it’s pretty much inevitable in any charismatic movement.
Beck: Bureaucratization.
Rainey: Yeah, routinization.
Beck: I’m hesitant to end on a dark note. [laughing]
Rainey: Okay.
Beck: I’m wondering what . . .
Rainey: I guess I could maybe say this. I consider myself an Evergreen success story. Had I stayed at
Duke, or had I stayed at Buffalo, I would have been able to teach Russian history, Balkan history,
European history. I would not have been exposed to minds like yours, I would not have been exposed to
minds like Bob Sluss, or Byron [Youtz], or Rudy [Martin ] or that sort of thing, and learned so much that’s

22

been important to me as a person, and as a historian. That’s one of the reasons that I’m happy that I’ve
spent my 45 years here.
Beck: What advice would you have to faculty members of my generation, or younger than me? I’m not
exactly all that young anymore. [laughter] But what would you recommend to the successor cohort of
faculty to your cohort? What do you suggest we strive for, or do?
Rainey: As trite as it may seem, keep abreast in your discipline, because that’s one thing you have to
bring to the table is your knowledge of philosophy, to use you as an example. Take chances with
yourself. Open yourself to learn from other colleagues. That’s the best part of it, for me, of Evergreen,
my reflection. As I said, I’ve had the best of students I’ve ever had here, and I’ve had the worst. I taught
at Duke, and there were no bad students, because it was an elite school. It was hard to get in, so there
were no bad students. There were no C students. I trust that I’ve become somewhat adept at teaching
C students, Evergreen style.
I guess the last piece of advice would fit in with this other thing, and that’s the advice that
comes from Bertrand Russell—and that is where you said one time—whereas a dogmatist is dangerous,
a cynic is useless. I am not Pollyannish in my optimism. I’m not saying that. But I’ve always promised
myself—and this is not why I’m quitting school—that if I became cynical, I should step out of the
classroom. I have nothing to teach, and I’m not going to go before young people and spill my cynicism
on them. That is unconscionable, as far as I’m concerned. So, stay reasonably optimistic about the
future of Evergreen. But [laughter] illegitimi non carborundum —don’t let the dirty bastards grind you
down. [laughter] Every time I get a little bit cynical about the school—and sometimes I do, I confess it—
I talk to Oscar [Soule], and Oscar calms me down. [laughter] He calms me down.
But I have continued to teach largely because of my optimism about what we do in Evening and
Weekend Studies. Yeah, I would end certainly on a positive note. It has been a great experience for me,
and I am delighted that I spent my life this time. I didn’t get as much published as I thought I would, but
I’ve learned more about love, life and the American way. [laughing]
Beck: I just remembered a question that I wanted to ask you. This is as much for my own personal
curiosity as it is for recording for posterity. I heard a story, secondhand, about your role in bringing
what is, in effect, tenure to Evergreen.
Rainey: Yeah.
Beck: I can at least start the story, and maybe you can complete it. Apparently, it came before the
Legislature, I understand, the question of whether Evergreen faculty members had tenure.
Rainey: Right.
23

Beck: It might have been through the courts or something, but the word came through to the faculty
that it had to be something that the faculty affirmed, that they did not have tenure, and it needed to be
unanimous.
Rainey: Yeah.
Beck: The way I heard the story is you stood up and said, “Well, I’m going to make this a short meeting,
because I want tenure.” I don’t know if that’s true, but I wanted to see if you have a recollection.
Rainey: Yeah, that is. Well, yes. There are two parts to that. I never liked the designation of—we have,
essentially, a six-year up or out. If you’re not converted, you’re out. Anybody that survives that, I think,
should have tenure. And I think we should have tenure, not necessarily for any clear and present thing
that’s happening, but what could happen. With the atmosphere we’re in now, with the attacks on the
university by the right, I’m glad we have tenure. I’m glad. I think any faculty that gives up tenure is
idiotic and stupid, because the reason for tenure in the first place—and for the most part, I think this has
fulfilled its promise—is to protect academic freedom.
Let me use a kind of reverse example, and many of my younger colleagues would agree, and
many would not agree. If we didn’t have something like tenure, the President could dismiss Bret
Weinstein as an inconvenient problem for him. We’ve had certain examples, where we’ve had to hold
on to somebody too long. Jorge Gilbert is an excellent example of that. But tenure, I believe, offers a
certain level of latitude for a faculty member to say anything they want to say. Not yell fire in a crowded
theater, but within reason.
The other thing is that you have to understand that, in some ways, I’m a real traditionalist.
Maybe this is because of my Southern upbringing. Maybe it’s because I’m a historian. I don’t know. But
my ideal, if I could be anything else in the world, if I could choose a historical figure to be, I’d be a
Renaissance Pope, because I love the ceremony, and I love the dress. I would gladly give up the
designation of “member of the faculty” for “professor,” because I have something to profess.
I thought that that tilt towards egalitarianism was not good. So, I use the title now, “Emeritus
Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies.” The reason for that, as much as anything else, is you go to a
conference, or you want recognition of a paper or something like that, and you say member of the
faculty and they think you’re an adjunct faculty member or something like that. And because I frankly
like the title, and I think it fits.
But I am strongly in support of tenure, even though I knew I would probably, on the basis of my
own performance, never be fired. But I was denied tenure at Buffalo, and denied even a second
contract, because I spoke out against the war, and because I spoke out against inequality. I was arrested
24

in the largest civil rights demonstration that’s ever been done, in North Carolina. I’m a strong advocate
of civil rights. I saw, throughout the South, those people that were not protected by tenure that stood
up for civil rights being dismissed from their positions, so I’m strongly an advocate of tenure.
I was denied tenure for bad reasons. I had published a monograph and three major articles in
refereed journals, but it was purely political. But they could do it, and everybody that had involved
themselves in trying to get the police off campus, or trying to get the administration to back off on some
of the sort of draconian ways they were dealing with students at Buffalo, that was vulnerable did not get
renewed.
So, that’s the history that I came to Evergreen with, and I thought, as long as we didn’t have
tenure, we would be vulnerable to any shift in the political winds. Tenure will probably protect both
faculty involved in our recent fracas. And rightfully so. I don’t think either one of them should be fired.
Beck: When was this discussion about tenure?
Rainey: You know who brought it up? What started the whole discussion was Patrick Hill came back
from a conference somewhere, and the conference was about tenure, and about contracts and things
like that. There was a case, I think in Boston—and Patrick was Boston Irish, and almost never left
[chuckles] except to go to Stony Brook. I really liked Patrick, you know, but he was one of those people
you had to take a lot of time with when they stopped you. He’s the one that gave me the idea of
evaluations being bureaucratic nonsense.
He went to a conference there—and this is from a Provost, so I think that’s significant—came
back from a conference—Olander was the President then—and one of the discussions was about a case
where a group of faculty were denied tenure. And the case ends in some wonderful Massachusetts
Commonwealth State of court, said that a professor who had been in a job for a certain length of time
had a property interest in their job. That’s what started us to talk about it again, and discussing it again,
when Patrick brought that back to the faculty. He was the one that organized that. He was the one that
carried through on it.
Then, we redid the whole evaluation thing. I think the other part of that is to do an evaluation
with everybody every . . . was occupying 40 percent of the deans’ time, and to clean that up some so we
had some kind of cycle. At that point, it was decided that after two contracts, if a person was not
converted, then they were gone. If they were converted, they had tenure, and that’s how that worked
out.
Beck: That must have been in the late ‘80s.

25

Rainey: Yeah, late ‘80s. I give Patrick credit for birddogging that one and getting it before the faculty to
discuss.
Beck: I know you have to get going, and I should probably get going, too.
Rainey: Okay. Any other questions?
Beck: You know what? I can’t think of anything right now. I think I’ve gone through the questions that I
had for you. I wanted to see if there was anything else that you wanted to say before we end the day.
Rainey: I just want to thank you and Sam and Nancy to put the thing together. It’s long overdue. Just
one point. If I were 10 years younger, and not otherwise occupied, I would get back into this. David
[Hitchens] and I talked for years about writing a history of Evergreen. David Hitchens, the two
professionally trained historians, right? David was on the planning faculty, and David knew where all the
skeletons were buried, and it would have been great. David had the knowledge of the planning faculty
conflicts, which were immense; people that made enemies then that they never forgave. We talked
about that, as he lay dying, and many other things.
One, I urge you to put this in Sam’s ear. Somebody needs to talk to Joan Hitchens, because she
recorded some of that, and that’s the only thing you’re going to have on David. Plus, his records, and it
includes about a 50-page thing that he wrote about why he came to Evergreen. He talked about the
conflicts, particularly over art, and Sid White’s view and other views. I think that part of it needs to be
raked over a little bit by anybody that’s going to do a history.
The other part of that is why I think it’s splendid that you all are doing this. It’s that I had a
conversation with Chuck Nisbet. No two people could be so different as Chuck and I, but we taught very
well together, because we believed that things ought to happen on time, and you had to do some
planning, and you had to organize it, and had to hold people accountable.
About four years ago, he was through here, and we had dinner together. I told him that David
and I were thinking about working on this. He says, “You and David can’t do it.” I said, “What do you
mean, Chuck?” And he said, “You can’t do it because”—and he used this specific example—“you can’t
do it because you don’t know all the experiences of all the faculty. You and David will do it from your
perspective, but that won’t be the true history of Evergreen.”
So, I hope somebody in the future picks this material up. I don’t have time to do it, or I would
say I’d help do it. I’m trying to get Nina to write her family history.
The other part of that is that I have decided that I am going to write something about my
experience at Evergreen, as soon as I get this book finally out the door. I’m just going to call it My
Evergreen. [laughing]
26

Beck: I take E. H. Carr to heart on this. “The historian is always present in the history.”
Rainey: That’s right.
Beck: That’s just unavoidable. It’s as unavoidable as being human.
Rainey: That’s right. You have to be careful that you’re not a hero in your own novel, though.
[laughter]
Beck: That’s a point, yes.
Rainey: And that’s the tendency.
Beck: That’s true. Yeah, I think that’s one of the valuable things about the oral history project is that we
get multiple voices.
Rainey: I do, too.
Beck: If anybody ends up writing a history about Evergreen, it’s still going to be that historian writing it,
and it will be from that person’s point of view.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: But if that person does so responsibly, they’ll have to draw upon all the voices, and there are a lot
of different perspectives.
Rainey: Yes.
Beck: Thank you again, very much.
Rainey: Oh, you’re welcome.

27


Tom Rainey
Interviewed by Stephen Beck
The Evergreen State College oral history project
August 9, 2017
Part 2 of 2
FINAL

Beck: So, you think the way around that is that the college needs to have more flexibility around
enrollments in the upper-division programs?
Rainey: Absolutely.
Beck: One way that people have tried to do advanced work is to have all-level programs or multi-level
programs, where there might be part of the program that would make possible advanced-level work.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: In your experience, has that sort of thing been successful?
Rainey: No. Also, not looking at this strictly from a union standpoint, it’s a form of what they call in the
cotton mills “stretch out” for the faculty.
Beck: What does that mean?
Rainey: It means that you’ve got to spend more time with a smaller number of people, and at the same
time, do what you’re supposed to do in other parts of the program. It’s a form of stretch out, as I see it.
Beck: Really, it’s basically unsupported faculty work.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: It’s an ongoing problem.
Rainey: It is, and I don’t see how it’s going to be solved. That’s another reason why I’m not so sanguine
about our future.
Beck: The last area you mentioned when we were talking the other day was that one of your concerns
is the routinization of charisma. What do you mean by that?
Rainey: Well, I was a Marxist for about a year and a half, but I’ve always been a Weberian since I read
Max Weber—Max Weber—talking mostly about religious movements. There are two parts to this, two
sources of wisdom, at least as far as I’m concerned. The other one is Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and
the Fox. And there’s a great study of the German Social Democratic Workers Party by, I can’t remember
his first name—Michael—but he was a student of Weber. But Weber’s argument about bureaucracies—
and I see this absolutely in the Russian Revolution, and certainly—certainly—in the Chinese Revolution,
1

and with Christianity and so on—is that mass movements based on charismatic leaders, or charismatic
visions, or that sort of thing, in two or three generations, become bureaucratized. Routinized.
That happened to the Catholic Church. That’s one of Luther’s major problems with the Catholic
Church. It became less spiritual and more political, largely because this bureaucratization occurred. And
it happens with labor unions in the United States. It happens with virtually every mass movement. If it’s
successful, every revolution has become routinized in this way. So, you eventually end up with an
institution where the actual function of the institution is less important than the perpetuation of the
bureaucracy that’s created. And I see a lot of that happening at Evergreen over the years.
The other thing that comes from routinization is the series of what I would call “institutional
noes.” It almost verges on undermining academic freedom. One of the institutional noes is that you
cannot run a program if it doesn’t have an enrollment at a certain level. I don’t know whether this is the
impingement of State laws, or regulation, or that sort of thing that have pushed this institution into
what I consider, and what some faculty consider, an excessively bloated administration. Frankly, one of
my major concerns about creating a vice president for this, and a vice president for that, and some of
these newer initiatives to deal with equity, is what it means is that administrators will be hired at a
higher price, and they then need staff to help them. That’s where the money goes. That means that
you can’t be subsidized with a lower student ratio. It means all sorts of things.
The other aspect of that for us as faculty is that we have become our own secretaries, we have
become our own organizers. I finally agree with Patrick Hill that the continuation of the evaluation
process that we have is largely a bureaucratic relic. So, if there’s two cultures at Evergreen, it’s the
administration and the faculty. They’ve kept up well with salaries; we have not. What happened in
Russia in two generations after the revolution is the creation of a post-revolutionary bureaucratic elite,
whose major concern was keeping their jobs, and expanding their bureaucracy, and I see that as
happening at Evergreen, and it’s very disturbing to me.
It’s why, in some ways, I was sort of halfway—not all the way, I want to say—that seemed to be
one of Bret’s early concerns, which was opposed by a group that engaged in riotous behavior; that will
create now more administrators; that—as a Board of Trustees friend who will remain nameless, and
should—said, “It seems that what we have is a series of administrative fixes to something that cannot be
fixed by creating one more office, or one more vice president.” That’s what I mean.
Beck: So, growth of the administration.

2

Rainey: The growth of the administration, and the fact that the charismatic vision—which, there was
never a unified charismatic vision. There were a lot of charismatic visions. But, you could at least
dream. Right? [laughing]
Beck: Yeah.
Rainey: It was easy then to approach other dreamers amongst the faculty and say, “Let’s do this.” It’s
much more difficult to do now. You could say, “Let’s do this.” It might require going out and talking to
some loggers. I mean, you have to go through a whole office now that says okay to that.
As I say, some of that may be imposed by the State, it may be imposed by Federal government
in the kind of way we get money, and that sort of thing. I understand that, so I’m not saying it is a sort
of pernicious conspiracy to create a bureaucracy. I just think it happens. It certainly happened in China.
In a sense, that’s what the terrible, terrible thing that Mao dreamed up called the Cultural Revolution
was all about [laughing] was to attack the bureaucracy, was to loosen the bureaucracy. By making that
criticism, I should also add that I think it’s pretty much inevitable in any charismatic movement.
Beck: Bureaucratization.
Rainey: Yeah, routinization.
Beck: I’m hesitant to end on a dark note. [laughing]
Rainey: Okay.
Beck: I’m wondering what . . .
Rainey: I guess I could maybe say this. I consider myself an Evergreen success story. Had I stayed at
Duke, or had I stayed at Buffalo, I would have been able to teach Russian history, Balkan history,
European history. I would not have been exposed to minds like yours, I would not have been exposed to
minds like Bob Sluss, or Byron Youtz, or Rudy Martin or that sort of thing, and learned so much that’s
been important to me as a person, and as a historian. That’s one of the reasons I’m happy I’ve spent my
45 years here.
Beck: What advice would you have to faculty members of my generation, or younger than me? I’m not
exactly all that young anymore. [laughter] But what would you recommend to the successor cohort of
faculty to your cohort? What do you suggest we strive for, or do?
Rainey: As trite as it may seem, keep abreast in your discipline, because that’s one thing you have to
bring to the table is your knowledge of philosophy, to use you as an example. Take chances with
yourself. Open yourself to learn from other colleagues. That’s the best part of it, for me, of Evergreen,
my reflection. As I said, I’ve had the best of students I’ve ever had here, and I’ve had the worst. I taught
at Duke, and there were no bad students, because it was an elite school. It was hard to get in, so there
3

were no bad students. There were no C students. I trust that I’ve become somewhat adept at teaching
C students, Evergreen style.
I guess the last piece of advice would fit in with this other thing, and that’s the advice that
comes from Bertrand Russell—and that is where you said one time—whereas a dogmatist is dangerous,
a cynic is useless. I am not Pollyannish in my optimism. I’m not saying that. But I’ve always promised
myself—and this is not why I’m quitting school—that if I became cynical, I should step out of the
classroom. I have nothing to teach, and I’m not going to go before young people and spill my cynicism
on them. That is unconscionable, as far as I’m concerned. So, stay reasonably optimistic about the
future of Evergreen. But [laughter] illegitimi non carborundum —don’t let the dirty bastards grind you
down. [laughter] Every time I get a little bit cynical about the school—and sometimes I do, I confess—I
talk to Oscar Soule, and Oscar calms me down. [laughter] He calms me down.
But I have continued to teach largely because of my optimism about what we do in Evening and
Weekend Studies. Yeah, I would end certainly on a positive note. It has been a great experience for me,
and I am delighted that I spent my life here. I didn’t get as much published as I thought I would, but I’ve
learned more about love, life and the American way. [laughing]
Beck: I just remembered a question that I wanted to ask you. This is as much for my own personal
curiosity as it is for recording for posterity. I heard a story, secondhand, about your role in bringing
what is, in effect, tenure to Evergreen.
Rainey: Yeah.
Beck: I can at least start the story, and maybe you can complete it. Apparently, it came before the
Legislature, I understand, the question of whether Evergreen faculty members had tenure.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: It might have been through the courts or something, but the word came through to the faculty
that it had to be something that the faculty affirmed, that they did not have tenure, and it needed to be
unanimous.
Rainey: Yeah.
Beck: The way I heard the story is you stood up and said, “Well, I’m going to make this a short meeting,
because I want tenure.” I don’t know if that’s true, but I wanted to see if you have a version.
Rainey: Yeah, that is. Well, yes. There are two parts to that. I never liked the designation of—we have,
essentially, a six-year up or out. If you’re not converted, you’re out. Anybody who survives that, I think,
should have tenure. And I think we should have tenure, not necessarily for any clear and present thing
that’s happening, but what could happen. With the atmosphere we’re in now, with the attacks on the
4

university by the right, I’m glad we have tenure. I’m glad. I think any faculty that gives up tenure is
idiotic and stupid, because the reason for tenure in the first place—and for the most part, I think this has
fulfilled its promise—is to protect academic freedom.
Let me use a kind of reverse example, and many of my younger colleagues would agree, and
many would not agree. If we didn’t have something like tenure, the President could dismiss Bret
Weinstein as an inconvenient problem for him. We’ve had certain examples, where we’ve had to hold
on to somebody too long. Jorge Gilbert is an excellent example of that. But tenure, I believe, offers a
certain level of latitude for a faculty member to say anything they want to say. Not yell fire in a crowded
theater, but within reason.
The other thing is that you have to understand that, in some ways, I’m a real traditionalist.
Maybe this is because of my Southern upbringing. Maybe it’s because I’m a historian. I don’t know. But
my ideal, if I could be anything else in the world, if I could choose a historical figure to be, I’d be a
Renaissance Pope, because I love the ceremony, and I love the dress. I would gladly give up the
designation of “member of the faculty” for “professor,” because I have something to profess.
I thought that that tilt toward egalitarianism was not good. So, I use the title now, “Emeritus
Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies.” The reason for that, as much as anything else, is you go to a
conference, or you want recognition of a paper or something like that, and you say member of the
faculty and they think you’re an adjunct faculty member or something like that. And because I frankly
like the title, and I think it fits.
But I am strongly in support of tenure, even though I knew I would probably, on the basis of my
own performance, never be fired. But I was denied tenure at Buffalo, and denied even a second
contract, because I spoke out against the war, and because I spoke out against inequality. I was arrested
in the largest civil rights demonstration that’s ever been done, in North Carolina. I’m a strong advocate
of civil rights. I saw, throughout the South, those people who were not protected by tenure who stood
up for civil rights being dismissed from their positions, so I’m strongly an advocate of tenure.
I was denied tenure for bad reasons. I had published a monograph and three major articles in
refereed journals, but it was purely political. But they could do it, and everybody who had involved
themselves in trying to get the police off campus, or trying to get the administration to back off on some
of the sort of draconian ways they were dealing with students at Buffalo, did not get renewed.
So, that’s the history that I came to Evergreen with, and I thought, as long as we didn’t have
tenure, we would be vulnerable to any shift in the political winds. Tenure will probably protect both
faculty involved in our recent fracus. And rightfully so. I don’t think either one of them should be fired.
5

Beck: When was this discussion about tenure?
Rainey: You know who brought it up? What started the whole discussion was Patrick Hill came back
from a conference somewhere, and the conference was about tenure, and about contracts and things
like that. There was a case, I think in Boston—and Patrick was Boston Irish, and almost never left
[chuckles] except to go to Stony Brook. I really liked Patrick, you know, but he was one of those people
you had to take a lot of time with when they stopped you. He’s the one who gave me the idea of
evaluations being bureaucratic nonsense.
He went to a conference there—and this is from a Provost, so I think that’s significant—came
back from a conference—Olander was the President then—and one of the discussions was about a case
where a group of faculty were denied tenure. And the case, in some wonderful Massachusetts
Commonwealth State of court, said that a professor who had been in a job for a certain length of time
had a property interest in their job. That’s what started us to talk about it again, and discussing it again,
when Patrick brought that back to the faculty. He was the one who organized that. He was the one who
carried through on it.
Then, we redid the whole evaluation thing. I think the other part of that is to do an evaluation
with everybody every . . . was occupying 40 percent of the deans’ time, and to clean that up some so we
had some kind of cycle. At that point, it was decided that after two contracts, if a person was not
converted, then they were gone. If they were converted, they had tenure, and that’s how that worked
out.
Beck: That must have been in the late ‘80s.
Rainey: Yeah, late ‘80s. I give Patrick credit for birddogging that one and getting it before the faculty to
discuss.
Beck: I know you have to get going, and I should probably get going, too.
Rainey: Okay. Any other questions?
Beck: You know what? I can’t think of anything right now. I think I’ve gone through the questions that I
had for you. I wanted to see if there was anything else that you wanted to say before we end the day.
Rainey: I just want to thank you and Sam and Nancy to put the thing together. It’s long overdue. Just
one point. If I were 10 years younger, and not otherwise occupied, I would get back into this. David
Hitchens and I talked for years about writing a history of Evergreen. David Hitchens, the two
professionally trained historians, right? David was on the planning faculty, and David knew where all the
skeletons were buried, and it would have been great. David had the knowledge of the planning faculty

6

conflicts, which were immense; people who made enemies then that they never forgave. We talked
about that, as he lay dying, and many other things.
One, I urge you to put this in Sam’s ear. Somebody needs to talk to Joan Hitchens, because she
recorded some of that, and that’s the only thing you’re going to have on David. Plus, his records, and it
includes about a 50-page thing that he wrote about why he came to Evergreen. He talked about the
conflicts, particularly over art, and Sid White’s view and other views. I think that part of it needs to be
raked over a little bit by anybody who is going to do a history.
The other part of that is why I think it’s splendid that you all are doing this. It’s that I had a
conversation with Chuck Nisbet. No two people could be so different as Chuck and I, but we taught very
well together, because we believed that things ought to happen on time, and you had to do some
planning, and you had to organize it, and had to hold people accountable.
About four years ago, he was through here, and we had dinner together. I told him that David
and I were thinking about working on this. He says, “You and David can’t do it.” I said, “What do you
mean, Chuck?” And he said, “You can’t do it because”—and he used this specific example—“you can’t
do it because you don’t know all the experiences of all the faculty. You and David will do it from your
perspective, but that won’t be the true history of Evergreen.”
So, I hope somebody in the future picks this material up. I don’t have time to do it, or I would
say I’d help do it. I’m trying to get Nina to write her family history.
The other part of that is that I have decided that I am going to write something about my
experience at Evergreen, as soon as I get this book finally out the door. I’m just going to call it My
Evergreen. [laughing]
Beck: I take E. H. Carr to heart on this. “The historian is always present in the history.”
Rainey: That’s right.
Beck: That’s just unavoidable. It’s as unavoidable as being human.
Rainey: That’s right. You have to be careful that you’re not a hero in your own novel, though.
[laughter]
Beck: That’s a point, yet.
Rainey: And that’s the tendency.
Beck: That’s true. Yeah, I think that’s one of the valuable things about the oral history project is that we
get multiple voices.
Rainey: I do, too.

7

Beck: If anybody ends up writing a history about Evergreen, it’s still going to be that historian writing it,
and it will be from that person’s point of view.
Rainey: Right.
Beck: But if that person does so responsibly, we’ll have to draw upon all the voices, and there are a lot
of different perspectives.
Rainey: Yes.
Beck: Thank you again, very much.
Rainey: Oh, you’re welcome.

8



Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

RaineyTom_20170731_Transcript_Pt1.pdf

RaineyTom_20170807_Transcript_Pt2.pdf

RaineyTom_20170809_Transcript_Pt3a.pdf

RaineyTom_20170809_Transcript_Pt3b.pdf