Nancy Taylor Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

TaylorNancy

Title

Nancy Taylor Oral History Interview

Date

20 December 2016

5 January 2017

24 February 2017

28 February 2017

Creator

Nancy Taylor

Contributor

Sam Schrager

extracted text

Nancy Taylor
Interviewed by Sam Schrager
The Evergreen State College Oral History Project
December 20, 2016
FINAL

Begin Part 1 of 3 of Nancy Taylor on 12-20-16
Schrager: Okay, Nancy. Here you are sitting at my kitchen table, in my home in Olympia. Thank you for
making the trip down.
Taylor: Good. I’m excited to be doing this. Been thinking about it a lot. Didn’t do any preparation in the
sense of writing anything, but I read things over, and I relived, and nostalgia. That was fun.
Schrager: So can we start with a little background about your parents, who they were and how they got
together, and then how you fit into the picture?
Taylor: How I fit into the picture. Well, I am a Washingtonian. I am steeped in the State of Washington.
My grandparents on both sides were here when Washington became a state in 1889. One set of
grandparents came from Denmark; homesteaded, or sort of homesteaded, in the Renton area. And my
father’s parents lived in Kent, and my grandpa was a doctor. So the families were part of the KentAuburn-Renton Valley from 1889.
So I’m from here. And in fact, when I was hired at Evergreen, I was one of the few people that
was local. Almost everybody that was hired came from somewhere else. But I came from here. I was
born and raised in Kent. I think Susan Fiksdal was another local. And that mattered. That mattered to
me, I think, in coming to the College.
My parents—I was thinking about it today in terms of what they cared about, and what they
taught me. Education was primary. My mother was one of seven children from a dairy farming family.
She was in the middle, and she went to Washington State College, and her father sent her $10 a month
to go to school. That was all he had, and education mattered more than anything. Mom got a job, and
she managed to get through college and became a teacher.
My father went to Stanford. His father was a doctor, and Daddy went to Stanford Medical
School. The story goes that my grandfather sold his life insurance in order to put him through school.
So education was paramount. I think I decided to be a teacher when I was in fourth grade. And
I never changed. It was clear what I was going to do from fourth grade on. I changed what I would

1

teach and where I would teach, but that I would teach was never in doubt—I mean, I used to teach my
cousins. We used to set up school in the house, and I was always going to be a teacher.
The story about that, I still remember Miss Masanga, my fourth-grade teacher. I wanted to
teach math. I wanted to teach fourth grade, and then, every year, I wanted to teach the next grade. But
at some point, I wanted to teach math in high school. And when I went to Stanford—I think I told you
this story—I was required to get my advisor’s signature on anything to take a class. I had taken all the
math I could at Kent-Meridian High School, which didn’t include calculus, because it was just an ordinary
high school. It was an okay high school, but nothing special.
And I got to Stanford, and I said I wanted to do math, and my adviser said, “Girls don’t do math.”
And I said, “Well, I want to do math.”
“I won’t sign it.” I was furious. So then he said, “You should do French,” because I had had Latin
in high school. “You should do French.”
“I don’t want to do French, I want to do math.”
Then he said, “Well, you should do German.”
I said [laughing], “I don’t want to do German. I want to do math.”
And then, I went to some places, and I couldn’t get into the math classes without the signature.
Then I was going to do Russian, but I couldn’t get into Russian without a signature. I could get into
German, so I took German.
But I will never really forgive Stanford for that. It changed the way my life went. In retrospect, I
think, well, I wouldn’t have been an expert in math. I wouldn’t have become a mathematician. I would
have taught math, and that probably would have been boring. So it was all right. But it’s funny that
that’s the way they did things in 1959. I’m sure that’s not true today. [laughing]
Schrager: Speaking about Stanford—you went there, your father had gone there?
Taylor: My father had gone there. My sister had gone there. Kent-Meridian High School was a little, I
guess not so tiny, but I think 13 percent of our graduating class went to college of any sort, not counting
beauty school. One person went to Whitman; one person went to Scripps; a few went to the University
of Washington; a few went to Washington State; a few went to Western.
When my sister, who’s four years older, when she went off to Stanford, my father had to go to
the high school and help the high school figure out what she had to do. The idea of taking the SAT exam
was foreign, nobody did it. They didn’t know anything about it, and yet, Stanford required it. And so Pat
got the school beginning to do that sort of thing. That was in 1955.

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When I was applying, our class was known as a pretty good class, there was some help. I
thought I would go to Pomona. I applied to Pomona, Stanford; and they always said you needed a
backup, and my backup was the University of Colorado for some reason, I don’t know why.
And I got the acceptance from Pomona first, and I called up my father and I said, “I’m going to
Pomona.”
And he was excited, but he said, “Wait! Wait till you hear from Stanford.”
And I was going to Pomona, but by the time I got admitted to Stanford, I was going to Stanford.
And it was a good decision, but there was a lot of subtle pressure. But my sister was there. She was a
senior when I was a freshman, which was wonderful. That helped.
Stanford was hard for me. I mean, my dad said, “You don’t have to be a giant, colossal olive.
Just be a large.” [laughing] That was his comment about going to Stanford. Because, you know, you
meet smarter and richer people, and more sophisticated people. I was a little girl from Kent. It was a
shock to the system. I did all right. I didn’t do brilliantly, but I did all right. I made good friends. It
served me well.
I knew when I was there, I always knew I was going to teach. That never wavered. And I went
four years to Stanford, and then I went a fifth year and got an MIT, to teach. I was in a very smart
teacher education program. I went to school for the first summer right after I graduated—full-time—
and then I started teaching in the fall.
It was an internship program, and I got paid. I got paid $2,000 for the year, which covered the
tuition, about. We had classes at night. It was mostly an internship, where you had a seminar to talk
about what in the world was going on, what you were teaching. It was sink or swim. I had a super
master teacher, who I credit with—that’s how I got through.
I was teaching seniors Government in Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, California. The
students were 18; I was 21. It was terrifying. Stanford didn’t give me that much support, but the man
that I taught with was super. There was another student from Stanford in the same high school, we
both lived in Palo Alto and we drove together to this school; he was teaching U.S. History and I was
teaching Government. It was a team-taught program. It actually prepared me pretty well for what I
ended up doing. It was one of the things that, when I started teaching at Evergreen, people said, “Well,
you’ve had some experience.” Because I had. It was a team of three people teaching Government, and
a team of three people teaching U.S. History, and we all were in the same sort of pod. So that worked.
I did that for a year, and got my master’s degree in teaching. I taught one more year at that school after
getting my teaching credential.
3

I was a history major almost by default. I was a history major because when I became a junior, I
had taken so many history classes that I’d almost satisfied the requirement, so I took a couple more
seminars, and that was it. I fell into it. I didn’t decide, particularly.
Probably the most influential thing that happened at Stanford was going to Stanford in
Germany, which was a program started about 1958 or so. It was the first one of the Stanford overseas
programs. Eventually, Stanford had programs everywhere, but Stanford in Germany was first, and then
Stanford in France and Stanford in Italy. It was six months at a Stanford-based site. The one in Germany
was in a little town called Beutelsbach, by Stuttgart. We didn’t have anything to do with German
students. Now, they’re very different. Now, they’re at the Sorbonne, they’re in Berlin.
And you applied, and you went to this program. You paid normal Stanford tuition, normal board
and room and everything, and that covered it. Scholarships applied, so students that were worried
about the draft, all of that didn’t matter. You were a regular student. So it was a way of going to Europe
without jeopardizing that sort of thing. I think there were 60 in the class. It was a funny thing for 60
students to go 3,000 miles or something to make friends.
We had German professors and we had Stanford professors—mostly Stanford professors. We
all took the same classes. There was quite a bit of travel. And those are the Stanford people I’m still in
touch with. That was significant, that six months. It was my junior year.
The funny thing, Stanford originally admitted students to this program based on grades, and
they got the totally wrong people to come. Because they’d get people that would go, and they would
just sit in their room and study. They wouldn’t do anything, and they didn’t take advantage of it. So the
University learned that they had to do something; they had to choose different students, because it
didn’t work. By the time I went, there was a special application. I was in Group Eight, so that would
have been the fourth year, because it was a six-month deal.
Schrager: What year?
Taylor: ’62. January of ’62.
Schrager: Let’s talk a bit about this period after college, and before Evergreen. You were right on the
cusp of the ‘60s.
Taylor: Mm-hm.
Schrager: A little before the dam broke.
Taylor: A little before, yeah.
Schrager: But you also were there afterwards. And since you were—what?—you were in California for
much of the time?
4

Taylor: Some of it, yeah.
Schrager: And you were back in Washington sometimes?
Taylor: Certainly ’63—isn’t ’63 Mario Savio in Berkeley? I graduated in ’63, and certainly civil rights was
in the air. I remember reading a book called [The Negro Revolt by Louis Lomax, black man—about civil
rights. And Soul On Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver; we all read those books as a senior. I can remember that
much.
Then I was teaching. I taught for two years in high school. I certainly remember the Vietnam
War and the assassination of President Kennedy. I remember feeling a responsibility to my students. I
remember going to Berkeley. There was much more action in Berkeley than in Stanford—certainly
there, and in San Francisco. But I remember going to Berkeley. My brother-in-law was in the Business
School at UC-Berkeley, He was married to my sister, they lived in Berkeley, so I would go there. So that
was the consciousness about it.
In terms of women, that wasn’t an issue. I don’t remember anything about women that early.
There were issues about women when the College opened, when Evergreen opened. But that’s 1970.
Was there much talk in 1963?
Schrager: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique.
Taylor: Yeah. Well, yeah, I remember Betty Friedan. I remember . . . who else? After the Fall. Arthur
Miller; Susan Sontag. There were others, but I wasn’t very conscious of it until the late sixties. I was
certainly aware of NOW and the women’s movement by then.
Schrager: You were a young woman.
Taylor: I was, yeah.
Schrager: You were in your twenties . . .
Taylor: I was in my twenties.
Schrager: . . . and figuring out what you were about, then.
Taylor: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s at that stage, but certainly by the time I got to Evergreen,
opportunities for women were growing. I mean, Joe Shoben, the Vice President for Student Affairs,
went through the files of people that had applied to Evergreen and pulled out all the women, because
he wanted to hire women. So there was definitely a recognition that the College needed to hire women,
and that they needed to hire African Americans, and they hired . . .the first minority person they hired
was Native American.
Schrager: Was this Pauline?
Taylor: No. Mary Hillaire.
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Schrager: Oh, Mary Hillaire. Of course.
Taylor: She was the first one. I guess Rudy was hired before she was, but she was one of the first
faculty. She didn’t come the first year, she came the second year. But she had been hired and deferred
for a year.
Schrager: Why don’t we go to your first contact with Evergreen, and how you wound up being in Joe
Shoben’s file?
Taylor: Okay, so after I taught high school for a couple years in California—I don’t know why, it’s just
that opportunities were everywhere—I decided that I wanted to move to Boston. Where that came
from, I don’t know. But I got in my car, and I said, “I can’t stop anywhere where there’s not water.” I
drove from Seattle. I’d finished the school year in California; had gone home and spent the summer
with my family; and then I got in the car and I drove to Boston to look for a job.
I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have an idea. I had applied to some schools to teach in Boston, but I
didn’t get a job, but I got some leads. So I drove to Boston to look for a job, and I applied around at
schools. And I applied at WGBH television, which is the educational station there, and they had a
program for teaching in the schools. It was a big consortium; it was Massachusetts, Rhode Island,
Connecticut. It was a whole thing. They taught via television in the schools; everything from French to
science to field trips to whatever. It was a huge thing. It was called the “21-Inch Classroom.” This was
in 1964.
I got hired to do something called the field representative of “21-Inch Classroom.” So for two
years, I drove to every school district in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, and helped them
set up how to use these programs on television, and find teachers. So I did the research to find
somebody that would then come back and be at Channel 2 and do the programs.
It was great. I was super-enthusiastic. I drove all over the place. I talked to lots of people.
Some of the programs were really good; some were really horrible. The program was sponsored by the
school districts, so they paid into it. And Channel 2, the Boston station, was particularly good. That’s
where Sesame Street started. A guy by the name of Chris Sarson was doing lots of stuff for kids. Julia
Childs was there, and we used to go and eat her food when she cooked it. It was a great job. I met lots
of people, and it was sort of leading-edge at that time. And it was an opportunity.
I did that for two years. I lived in Boston. Loved it. Made good friends. People said Boston
people would be standoffish. It wasn’t true. I have godchildren, the children of friends from that time.
Boston was a wonderful place to live. I lived right downtown, because of the Channel 2; it was an
exciting place. So I did that. Probably that had something to do with my getting a job at Evergreen,
6

because it was the kind of experience that put me out in the community. Then, you know, you could
just do—I think kids today have no idea of how—I think, especially for women—how much opportunity
was there.
So then I came back to Seattle with a friend from Boston. And we came through San Francisco,
and then I went on to Seattle; my friend stayed in San Francisco, and about a month later—it was
Christmastime, I guess—I went to California, just looking for a job, you know? You just could do that.
It’s just amazing when I think about it now. And I was hired at a place called the Far West Laboratory for
Educational Research and Development. I think there were 13 of these labs in the country. They were
sponsored educational research places. And there was one at Berkeley. It was housed in the Claremont
Hotel. It probably had 30, 40 people working for it, and they did research.
I was hired to do model, in-service teacher training for K through 12. It was televised programs.
We did everything from how to improve discussion teaching in the fourth grade—I remember that was
one. How to get kindergarten children to accept delayed gratification. We had all these programs, and
we’d have classrooms, and we’d teach. And then I would take these programs out to the school
districts, and we would sample them. We would teach teachers—it was all in-service teacher training
stuff. There were some parts of it that were boondoggle, and some that were good. But, again, I was
the liaison with the schools; I was the one that was finding teachers, and going out and teaching.
I would take these huge—I mean, this is real simple—I would take gigantic video machines that I
barely could lift, and bring them into the classroom, because we would video record the teachers; and
then, we hired Berkeley students to code the tapes to see if the teachers were improving. I remember
this one, it was: Could you improve a discussion format in junior high school? The coders had to count
how many times the teachers redirected a question, or how many times they called on different people,
or they didn’t call on people, or how many times the discussion went from one student from another. It
was all coded, and Berkeley students coded these things.
Anyway, so that’s the sort of thing—I did that for two years. Lived in San Francisco and
commuted to Berkley, which was good. It was the right way. It was fun. And it was while I was doing
that that I applied to Evergreen. This letter from Joe Shoben is when I was living in San Francisco, and
working there. We met in Berkeley.
But in 1970, my father got sick. He had cancer, and it was not good. I wanted to be home. So at
that point, I learned about Evergreen from articles in the newspaper. Dean Clabaugh was the only
person, and maybe Malcolm Stilson—maybe those two were the first people working for the college. I
don’t know. I knew about it from the newspaper that there was going to be this new college. There was
7

this argument about whether it would be in Longview, whether it would be in Olympia. But then it was
settled that it was going to be in Olympia. The state bought the land, and the college was run out of the
Legislature, I think. I think Dean Clabaugh’s office was in the Legislature, and Malcolm Stilson’s was in
the old brewery. I think McCann was one of the early ones, and probably Dave Barry and Joe Shoben,
the three Vice Presidents. Dave Barry was the Academic Vice President; Joe Shoben was the Student
Services Vice President; and Dean Clabaugh was Finance Vice President.
That was all in the spring of 1970, and this letter is dated April 22, 1970. Joe Shoben went
through the files looking for applications. And I had just written a general application: “I’d like to come
work at this new college.” I mean, I wasn’t talking about teaching. Wasn’t thinking I could teach. I
didn’t have a Ph.D., I didn’t have an academic discipline, but I thought I wanted to be involved in the
College.
So he found these letters, and there were a couple people that got jobs this way. I mean, he just
went through the files. And the story goes that somebody—I think you’ve probably heard of this
woman from Larry, too—her name was Claire. Claire was the person in charge of faculty hiring; not the
person, the paperwork person. Claire Hess was her name. There were 9,000 applications for faculty for
the first year of the College. Nine thousand. They had put an ad in the New York Times, so Claire was
processing these 9,000 applications.
But my application, I was not in that pool because I just had sent a general application: “I’ll do
anything you want.” And so Joe Shoben came to Berkeley to meet with me. Listen to this convoluted
sentence—I have to read this sentence, because it’s just so bizarre. He’d sent a letter, or called me, and
said that he wanted to pursue me. I don’t think I had a job at this point, but maybe I did.
Dear Miss Taylor,
Wanting very much to capitalize on the talents that you could bring to Evergreen, I have been troubled by our
difficulties in appointing the appropriate kind of senior administrative officers who should play a considerable role in devising
the initial policies for our Office of Admissions, and in staffing it.

Do you know what that means? I have no idea what that sentence means. But then it says:
I should like very much to discuss some of these matters with you, and to outline for you the circumstances under
which we are presently operating in this crucial planning phase.

Then he goes on to say:
As it happens, I’m going to be in Berkeley and I’d like to meet you at the Durant Hotel.

Which I did. And then he offered me a job—this is in April—and he says, “Come in September. I
don’t know what the job will be.” But he’s in Student Services. And he talked about things like Financial
Aid, Registration, Admissions, Dean of Students. All that. But he didn’t have the team at this point. He
8

was looking for a group of people, and then he was going to decide. One of them was Larry Stenberg.
One of them was Dave Brown, who ended up to be Director of Admissions. I think Perrin Smith might
have been there. I think he was Registrar. And Larry Stenberg was not called Dean of Students, but he
was the closest thing to that. So, by September, he had put together those people. But I don’t think in
April he knew who he was hiring.
And I ended up being Admissions Counselor. In 1970, I was 27. So my job was going to be—and
you can see from the things I’d done before, it made sense—I was going to be the traveler, the traveling
salesman, which, I mean, if you looked at my resume, it fit. So in September, I arrived to be Admissions
Counselor.
Dave Brown, who came from Howard University in Washington, D.C., was Director of
Admissions. He was a very nice and supportive man who never understood the College. I read—in one
of the things in here, that I collected—a description of what I did when I went out to the schools. And I
talk about Dave Brown—we went together a lot. And I had to sort of mop up after him because he
didn’t know how to describe the place. He didn’t have an instinctive feel for what he was doing. He was
nice, he was supportive, but he wasn’t the right person for the job. And he quit, or was eased out—I
don’t know how, what the story is; it was smooth, whatever it was—in like not even two years, and he
became head of the United Way in Thurston County, where he was perfect. I mean, he had no
educational crusader in him. That’s not what he was. So he couldn’t describe the place in a way that
made sense to people.
Schrager: I want to hear about what this world was like for you. But before we talk about that, I’m
curious about what the place seemed like to you when you first arrived at that particular juncture, in the
fall of ’70.
Taylor: Fall of ’70.
Schrager: When you got here, what were your first impressions, and what sticks with you about it?
Taylor: Yeah. Okay, so September 1, I arrived. Well, maybe I had driven down one time in the spring
before, but I arrived. There were three trailers. There was a lot of mud. You came in off of . . . I don’t
know what the road is, I can picture it.
Charlie McCann’s office was in an old industrial building of some sort. It was blue tin. And he
was there, and Rita Sevcik, Rita Brackenbush, was her name then. And then there was a trailer for the
faculty—there might have been three trailers there; these were temporary buildings. The trailer for the
faculty had offices for the 17 planning faculty; then there was a smaller trailer that had the three deans
and some other offices; and then there was the Admissions/Registrar trailer.
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But there was a funny belief—probably a Joe Shoben belief, but it was shared—that they
shouldn’t isolate people in the right place. I mean, like you shouldn’t put all the Student Services staff
together, and you shouldn’t put all the deans together. They did put all the faculty together, but the rest
of the people were all mixed up. So my office, at the beginning, even though I was working in
Admissions, my office was in the Deans’ trailer. And the Librarian—one was in the Deans’ trailer and
one was in the Student Services trailer. What they wanted was mix-up. They wanted—deliberate—
people to be mixed up. That didn’t last too long, because you had to be near the people you had to
work with. So eventually, I moved over to where the Admissions was.
As I say, there were the 17 planning faculty already hired by the time I got there; and there were
probably 20 other people, in Business and Student Services; and the three deans; and Charlie; and Dave
Barry, the Provost; and Joe Shoben. Those are the ones that were there.
Schrager: Did you feel welcomed? Did you feel embraced? Did you feel distant?
Taylor: I felt incredibly excited. The spirit was—people were running on adrenaline. There was
tremendous excitement. The faculty were meeting. There was this one sort of conference room; the
faculty were meeting every day to try to figure out what in the world to do.
And the faculty was a funny mix because the Deans—Merv Cadwallader, Don Humphrey and
Charlie Teske—had hired people that they knew. They hired some people that just showed up. I mean,
Dave Hitchens just was driving around, and he showed up, and they hired him. I remember that one.
Jack Webb, I think Charlie sort of picked him up out of a list of people. He was not known to anybody.
There was the Old Westbury group. There was a small Reed group. There was a San Jose State group.
There was an Oregon group because of Don Humphrey.
So the planning faculty was sort of cobbled together by who they knew. They might tell you a
different story, but when I looked at them, they didn’t represent disciplines or departments or anything.
They represented educational excitement. So, like the biologists, they were all environmental kind of
people. I mean, they had Larry Eickstaedt and Bob Sluss. If you were going to only have 17 people, and
you wanted a range, you wouldn’t hire those two. But they did, because I think they were looking for
people that had their eyes open and wanted to do something different; and it didn’t matter about what
they knew so much as what they wanted to do. So there was these groups.
The first thing that I did that was part of it was to figure out the admissions criteria. We sat in a
group with the President, the three Vice Presidents, the faculty, a few other people, talking about who
should come to this college. We came to the conclusion that it was to be an all-comers’ place. It wasn’t
to be exclusive. You had to be in the top half of your class, and you had to write a letter saying why you
10

wanted to come. I don’t know if we even used the formal State application. We might have, just to
collect information. But you had to write this letter, and you had to be in the top half of your class. That
was it.
Schrager: Was that an easy decision to come to, or did that take a lot. . .?
Taylor: I can’t remember much argument about it. I can remember arguments saying that they wanted
it to be first come, first serve; they wanted people that wanted to come. If you wanted to come, you
should come. And you had to come on faith. You didn’t come because you wanted to be a biologist or a
dentist or a forester. You had to just want to come to this place. And it was very easy, even to get over
the top half of your class rule. If you weren’t in the top half of your class, but you wrote a good letter,
you’d get in.
So we were full by, I think, December 15. What that did was it meant that it favored people that
heard about it. It favored [chuckling] a group of experimental college junkies. So we got people from
Prescott, we got people from Reed, we got people coming—I don’t know if it’s true, but the story was
that the biggest cadre of students were faculty brats. People heard about this place, so we got a lot of
kids whose parents were teaching somewhere. I don’t know how many, but there was some of that. So
we made these policy decisions, and I don’t remember there being much argument about that. It was
labor-intensive, because we read all these applications, because the main thing was this letter that you
had to write. I can remember endless reading.
I tell this story—I think I told you before—about this meeting that we were in. I was the only
woman in the circle, because I was the only woman—there were no women on the planning faculty, and
no other women in Student Services. The only other women in the whole college were secretaries and
administrative people, like—I don’t know what Rita was called then, but she was certainly recognized as
a woman that was significant. But there were no others.
So the men were talking, and that’s when Charlie McCann looked right at me and said, “The
trouble with these meetings is that there’s no one taking notes.” He looked right at me. And I think it’s
the first conscious obstruction thing I’ve ever done. I took my clipboard and I put it under my chair.
Very unlike me, but—there was something that didn’t sit right. I think it was the first recognition that I
wasn’t going to make coffee, and I wasn’t going to take notes as an obligation. So somebody else took
notes.
I grew to really respect Charlie a lot, but there were lots of issues about Charlie. He’s pretty
conservative in some ways; other ways, not. But anyway, in terms of women, he was not a leader in

11

recognition there. I don’t think he was a leader in recognition of affirmative action either. That wasn’t
where he came from.
So we had these meetings. The faculty had meetings. But very early on—I mean, right away—
we wrote this catalog. So we had a document. I think you probably have seen that first catalog. I think
it was green, and it said something about “A College for Change” was the line, and it just described the
place. It had no curriculum. It just described this place, and it was small. And it said, “Take a risk,”
basically.
And that’s what I took out to the schools. Right in September—I mean, I barely knew what I was
selling—I was out in the field, because applications were going to come in, soon. I went to every high
school in the State; I went to every community college in the State; I went to shopping malls; I went to
Indian reservations; I went to Yakima to the community centers. I went everywhere.
And then I joined what was called the Admissions College Team, which is made up of all the
colleges in the state. We would go together, and present at schools. Ordinarily, schools in the State
only open up the school for an admissions team that’s coming from all the colleges at once. If you’re at
Yakima High School, you don’t want Western coming, then Eastern coming, because it just makes it
hard. So we went as a group, and then they would have little meetings, and students could choose
which schools to go to. They made an exception for Evergreen allowing us to go alone. So I went on
those joint ones, but I did everything alone as well. And every day, I would do two or three schools, and
I would take a member of the planning faculty. There were 17 faculty, and all 17 went out.
The fun thing was that we didn’t know what we were doing. Nobody knew what they were
doing. But everybody had a dream, and everybody’s dream was different. So for instance I went with
Bill Aldridge, who was spectacular. He had a wonderful voice, and he had a kind of charismatic thing
about the way he presented a pretty free-for-all kind of college. I mean, you can come and do anything
you want here. That was him. And he just had people eating out of his hands.
And then, I would take Beryl Crowe, and he would do something totally different. And Richard
Jones, and Bob Sluss, and Byron Youtz, and Will Humphreys. All these guys would—Rudy Martin, Dave
Hitchens, and Bob Barnard. Do you remember him? He did technical stuff. He was doing self-paced
learning and science stuff. Richard Brian. Richard Brian was one of my favorites. I probably traveled
more with Richard Brian than anyone, because he loved it. And he saved Admissions in a lot of ways.
He was a wonderful guy.

12

That’s how I got to know the faculty. And it’s because of that that I was included. It was
seamless between staff and faculty in the terms of how I was treated, because I got to know all the
faculty, because we did all this driving, and all this crazy description.
And it was 17 colleges. Maybe by April, there was a clearer sense. In September people didn’t
know. I think maybe the decision about Coordinated Studies—maybe Larry told you when that
happened; it might have happened before I got there, I don’t know—the famous line about “If it’s good
for 100, it’s good for 1,000.” But we didn’t know. Nobody knew how it was going to be. Nobody knew
about requirements. We knew about the admissions criteria, but that didn’t really separate anybody for
who should apply.
Schrager: So was your rap about the College—you must have had your own.
Taylor: I had my own.
Schrager: And did you—was it a corrective, or a supplement to the others, to the particular person you
were with?
Taylor: Well, sometimes. My view was probably closest to Merv’s, because we spent a lot of time
together, and because he had a model in his head based on what had been happening at Old Westbury
and San Jose. And Bob Sluss had that same model, and Larry Eickstaedt. So there was a group that had
a more clarified view of what they were presenting; that it was non-disciplinary—it wasn’t even
disciplinary, it was non-disciplinary; it was team; it was what Merv would have called “moral
curriculum.” It was about citizenship in a way, about being solid citizens; about what you needed to
know to function in the world.
That was in contrast with Fred Tabbutt, Byron Youtz, Sid White maybe; some other people that
didn’t really have that same notion of non-disciplinary. They were seeing interdisciplinary, but they
weren’t seeing non-disciplinary. And then, the Richard Jones and Bill Aldridge, and a group that was
much more individualistic.
I don’t know if I corrected anybody. They just told what they imagined. And the consequence is
big. You can see the consequence is big, because September, the next year, when students come,
they’ve had a different entrée, they’ve had a different story. I was just reading something of a student
who lives on Bainbridge Island, who I now know, who was in, I think, my second program. I went to
Bainbridge High School, and she remembers my coming to school. And she says, “I came to Evergreen
because I understood what you said and I wanted it.”
Faculty didn’t go with me all the time. A lot of times they did, but a lot of times I was doing it
myself. And I suspect what I described was the most logical. [laughing] Because that’s the way—I
13

mean, I made it clear—I probably made it up, but I made it clear—I could see that this is what you’re
going to do. And I’m sure I didn’t say it’s a free-for-all. But I talked about personal attention; I talked
about integration of subjects; I talked about close faculty-student contact; I talked about evaluations; I
talked about wanting to learn. All of that, I’m sure, is what I did, because that’s the way I think.
Schrager: But multiple stories, each reflecting the vision of the individual faculty member makes
complete sense to me.
Taylor: Well, yeah . . .at that time. And, because it was so possible. There was license to create
something new. And everybody was sincere about—well, educational reform is too formal—but
everybody was sincere about believing that the university system had gone awry, and that we needed to
make it better. They just had different ideas about how. But every member of the planning faculty was
a crusader. I mean, everybody was excited about doing something that they thought was going to
change the world.
That’s why that year was so exciting. It was—and the first year of the College, that came home
to roost. Because when you’re just talking about it, anything’s possible. And it didn’t turn out to be
possible, and I think Merv particularly, he got really soured by about the second year, because he saw
that his dream was going away. But everybody saw their dreams going away, because there was not
one dream. And it turned out to be more Merv’s way than I think he would have ever imagined, but it
was a lot of compromise; and the compromise meant—whenever you have compromise, you know, you
don’t get the best, but you get something that doesn’t die. [laughing]
But that was fun. And the way the faculty and staff—I mean, Larry Stenberg was very much a
part of this. Some more than others. Larry was. I was. Dave Brown wasn’t so much. Dave Barry wasn’t
so much involved. But the social life was non-stop. I mean, people were talking the College 24 hours a
day. And very few people—I don’t know when Oscar [Soule] came; he probably came the second year—
Oscar was one of the first that really cared about the community of Olympia; and Russ Fox, and Carolyn
[Dobbs]. Even though their kids were in school, most of the faculty were absolutely wedded to the
College. They may know their neighbors, but there was just no reach-out.
There was a group called ECCO, Evergreen College Community Organization, which was made up
of people in Olympia that were in support of the College. It included people like Bernice [Youtz], Jess
Spielholz. Do you remember him? There were some people that were just solid citizens in Olympia, and
some people that were associated with the College; mostly not people that worked at the College, but
people that were associated somewhere. And that group was pretty active.

14

But other than that, at least the way I saw it, it was pretty isolated. There were a couple of
faculty—Jack Webb, who made a point of spending time with the high school. He was kind of isolated in
that, but he did it. He went off to the high school and got to know the teachers. Very few people did
that. So that was kind of funny, I think.
End of Part 1 of 3 of Nancy Taylor on 12-20-16

15

Begin Part 2 of 3 of Nancy Taylor on 12-20-16
Taylor: Okay, so here’s one more story. I was in Spokane. It’s cold, so it must be February, because I
can remember there was snow on the ground. And the story was, even then, that the College was not
going to be ready. And there was already a tanglement in the Legislature. I think maybe the Boeing
crash had happened? I don’t know. But anyway, the big ambition—we were going to grow; we were
going to have 1,000 students a year for 10 years. That was the original idea. And they built the
underground heating system for 10,000 students. I mean, they had all this underneath. They had all
this planned. One thousand students a year, we were going to grow. So the first year, we had 1,000;
the second year we had another 1,000; and then we leveled off in growth. I think we’re now to five
[thousand] or something, but we never could have done 1,000 a year. And we knew we couldn’t do a
1,000 a year in terms of faculty hiring even then.
But I’m in Spokane talking to Spokane high school kids, and the word is out that the College is
not going to open at all. It’s going to be closed before it starts. And Merv goes down to some button
shop, and he gets green buttons that say “Evergreen Lives.” And he FedExes me 500 buttons, and I go
down to the bus station, and I pick up the buttons, and I spread them all over. “Evergreen Lives.” And
some of those buttons are still around. I remember saving them, and giving them out very judiciously.
That story, about not opening, kept going and kept going. And in the fall, when we finally did
open, the story was we were not going to open. And Charlie McCann was adamant: “We are opening.
We are opening on time.” And in order to open—the buildings weren’t finished. The offices were still in
the trailers. The library wasn’t finished. The dorms weren’t finished. Nothing was finished.
And so every team—and the teams were bigger; they were five people, six, maybe even seven—
Individual in America had seven on its team. I was on a team with six—Human Development had six. I
think the smallest one was probably Rudy’s Contemporary American Minorities. I think there were only
three in that.
But every team had to be rental agent and house mother. And we had to find housing for all our
students; we had to pick them at the airport. We had to do everything. We had to figure out where we
were going to meet. So I can remember just being on the telephone saying, “Well, what time is your kid
coming in?” And, “Where?” And, “I’ll take him to this house.” And so people all over Olympia housed
students. They were spread everywhere. And every team was doing this.
We decided to take Human Development—I’ve jumped way ahead on the stories—but we
decided to take Human Development to a sixth-grade camp outside of Walla Walla in the Blue
Mountains. And it turned out, the very week that we needed to be there was the opening of hunting
16

season, so we issued every student a bright vest and a hat, so they wouldn’t be shot. [laughing] That
was just one of the things.
Bob Sluss, who was famous for doing crazy things, hired a chef, who was an alcoholic, and he
cooked horrible food. And we got over there, and it was freezing cold. We went by buses—and the
students, they had been in private houses for a little bit, but then we took them all over. And we had
class, and it was freezing cold, and so I remember Ranger Rick said, “Boys over here, girls over here,”
and that didn’t work. And then it was so cold that the kids just went and got the mattresses out of all of
the cabins, and brought them to the central area, where there was a cook, and there was food in there.
It was just wall-to-wall mattresses, and that’s where they slept, because it was cold. This was a sixthgrade camp, and it was October. [laughing]
I remember, we were reading; we had seminars; but I would say instead of being a bonding
experience, it was pretty disastrous. At the end of the year, the students had put that out of their
minds. It wasn’t a good thing. We survived, but it wasn’t a good thing.
And we came back 10 days later, and the buildings weren’t open yet. Still nothing open. The
student dorms were not finished, but they took the furniture that was going to go in the dorms and they
put it in the Villa Capri, which is that housing development on the corner of Division and Harrison, right
near there. And they just took over most of those apartments. It was pretty new, and they weren’t
rented, so they put in the College furniture. We arrived back from that camp, and that’s when the
students that were going to live on campus moved into the Villa Capri, and they were there for a couple
months.
But the big deal about that was a girl by the name of Velena Whitman, the only AfricanAmerican in the group, was not allowed to move into the Villa Capri because it had a restriction. Merv
lived in the Villa Capri at that point, and he screamed. It was a big deal. And, of course, she moved in to
the Villa Capri. But that was just one more telling incident.
So then we met for about several weeks; we met at the Legislature. We sat at the Legislative
desks in the House of Representatives. And the faculty sat up in the front, and that’s where we had
classes for, I think maybe a month. Different programs—Willi Unsoeld’s group did trailblazing, trail
recovery, up at Mount Rainier. I think they had 140 students, because that was a seven-member team.
Other people went to churches; they went to other camps; they were everywhere, all around. And the
faculty was responsible. We did it.
The college opened on time, but it didn’t open with a building. It’s just hard to describe,
because there was so much energy, and people were working so hard. And not that everything worked
17

beautifully. I mean, that business of going to Walla Walla, people just blocked that out of their memory.
It was horrible. It was cold. It was unpleasant. The food was bad. Everything was bad. The students
didn’t talk about it as this wonderful time.
I think, Willi’s program did. I mean, that was a good one. And Larry Eickstaedt’s, his program
was called Experimental Design or something like that. I don’t know where they went, but I think that
was older students, and I think that was a success. Some of them were more successful than others.
Okay, but I need to back up because—
Schrager: Yeah. You want to back up to how you got involved with Human Development? How you
became a member of the faculty.
Taylor: Yeah, that’s it. See, I got to know Richard Jones pretty well, and I got to know his wife, Susie, I
became friends right early on, and I would travel with Richard. Each program had a sort of a key
designer. This was Richard’s program, called Human Development. And Richard recruited Bob Sluss
from the planning faculty--so it’s kind of unusual to have two planning faculty on one team—and he
designed it for, he thought, five people. Sort of the model was five, but then it didn’t turn out exactly
that.
His idea was Human Development. He wanted a practical part of Human Development, so he
wanted every student to have an internship of one day a week that they wouldn’t be in class on campus.
They could be working, or they would be volunteering in some human service agency in Olympia. And
there would be what was called a “self-study seminar” that would go along with that internship, where
they were observing; and then the next day, there was a seminar of students to talk about that as part
of the program. There was also a book to be read, and writing. As I remember, that first year we had no
lectures. We had a night of film, but we had no lectures. It was all just reading a book, and writing, and
this self-study seminar and a seminar based on the internship.
So Richard wanted to hire me to locate all the internships. He just wanted me to be sort of a
half-time staff person to do all that. What else I would do, he wouldn’t know. But for the life of him, he
didn’t think I was going to be on the faculty. He just needed—he watched what I did, and he said, “Well,
she can do that.” And so that’s what he proposed.
And I think it was Don Humphrey that said, “We’re not going to have second-class faculty.” The
whole idea was you were either on the faculty, or you weren’t. There was no rank. You got paid by
experience years. That was it. There were no divisions. And so if he wanted me to do the internship
administration, he had to accept that I would be a member of the faculty on the team.

18

I think Richard said, “Fine,” not thinking for a minute that I would make it. But I was hired as a
member of the faculty because he wanted me to do that. And the covenant for the program is that I
would teach half-time. I would have one seminar. In those days, you had two seminars of 10 students
each, and you doubled up on the work. But I only had one. However, the only thing I didn’t have was 20
evaluations. I had to read all the books. I had to do everything for that, and participate in everything in
the program, and locate, supervise and troubleshoot 125 internships. So that was my job. And the idea
was that the other faculty would help, but they never did. They never did anything with internships.
So I found the internships. And it was only sort of a good idea on Richard’s part. Some of the
internships were good. A lot of them were in schools; police stations; Morningside; Buckley. Some were
a little bit far away; with social workers; with a funeral director. I mean, it was everything, because I had
125. That’s a lot to find. And you had to get people that would buy in to do this, and it was work for the
people, the supervisors. And it wasn’t really clear what in the world they were going to do. But that’s
what I did.
And some of them were very good, and some of them weren’t so good. And they lasted all year.
And there was some trading around, but basically, they all had to have an internship, and they all did.
And we did this, internship seminar and a self-study seminar once a week. And I think we had a book
seminar just once a week, and we had a writing piece.
But I know I did the internship well. The rest of it, I was really a fish out of water. I mean, it was
painful. I mean, it was not successful, in my mind. I was terrified. I didn’t have any training. Here I was
teaching a program that’s basically psychology, and you know me well enough to know, I don’t have an
awful lot of affinity or respect for psychology. I mean, it’s just not where I am. And so, when I was
reading all new stuff that I never had any training in, and didn’t really connect to—and I was 28 years
old, and I was incredibly intimidated by Richard Jones.
Bob Sluss was my savior. Bob was terrific. Chuck Pailthorp was sort of a puppy dog around
Richard. He just sort of worshipped what Richard was doing. I don’t think now he would say that And
Eric Larson didn’t have a clue about the program or what he was doing. He was an anthropologist, and
that’s what he was wanting to do. And then Nancy Allan and I were thought of as one person. It was
sort of Dick, Bob, Chuck, Eric and Nancy. But there were two of us. And to this day, Nancy and I are
confused by people.
Two easy names—Nancy Allen, Nancy Taylor—we’re one person. And we were timid, and we
were women, and we were not paid attention to, and we were not helped, and we didn’t help each
other. We talked about it even after that one year—that there should have been a kind of sisterhood,
19

but it didn’t happen. We were just so much struggling. I mean, Nancy didn’t know what to do. She’d
had more experience, but her academic training was in Spanish and in literature. She didn’t have it
either, in terms of what we were teaching.
And I remember she had Willi Unsoeld’s son, Reagan, in her seminar. And she had a horrible
time. It was a very difficult program. I remember people didn’t want to be in my seminar particularly.
They loved Bob. Bob, you know, just his sort of gnome-like way. I had his students, we shifted seminars
after the second quarter, I guess. And everybody wanted to be in Bob’s. That couldn’t happen.
So it was a big struggle for me. And I don’t think the team was all that—it wasn’t so good. I
probably said two sentences in faculty seminar for the whole year, and Nancy Allen said maybe three.
And the guys just didn’t—just passed us by. They didn’t know; they didn’t pay any attention.
Schrager: Insofar as what works well in programs at Evergreen, the idea that everybody gets to
contribute their expertise, and it is the different fields that come together around these questions and
themes, that notion of the relationship of interdisciplinary and disciplinary study seems to have been
absent in that program.
Taylor: In that program, the only way it was present was the psychology and biology, because of
Richard and Bob. It was Richard’s program. It was absolutely his design, and Bob bought into it. Now, it
was non-disciplinary in the sense that it wasn’t a psychology major. If you look at the books—we read
literature, we read evolution, we read psychology. I remember we read Erik Erikson, we read Loren
Eiseley, we read [Joyce] Cary, The Horse’s Mouth. I can still remember. We read some good stuff, and
we were supposed to put it together, but that first year, in my mind, isn’t what we began to call, in a
year or two, “Model A Coordinated Studies.”
Because what you’re talking about is called Model A Coordinated Studies. And it is a program
that has a theme, and a question. And it takes multi-disciplines to address the theme and the question.
And you need disciplinary range in the faculty in order to ask those different questions. So there had to
be a theme. And if you jump ahead, the person that is absolutely the best one of anybody, I think, of
anybody I’ve ever taught with, is Hiro [Kawasaki]. Because Hiro goes into a program with a question
that he doesn’t know the answer to. It’s genuine. And it’s big. And it’s interdisciplinary. And it’s there
every day. That’s Hiro. And I don’t know anybody else that does it as well as he did.
That was always in Merv’s idea, but it wasn’t across the board. And it came to be known as
Model A. Have you ever heard that phrase?
Schrager: No, I’ve never heard Model A. What was Model A?

20

Taylor: Model A was just the primary one. This is the seminal program. This is the way it should be.
And Richard Jones stood up and said, “And it should have four”—at least four faculty.
Schrager: But he [Jones] was not talking about Model A.
Taylor: But he’s not talking about Model A. Merv was talking about Model A.
Schrager: So you’re saying, then, that there were different ways of approaching planning a program and
conceptualizing a program.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: So maybe we should back up a bit, and just go over what Merv’s conception, as you
understand it, was. Because you alluded to the story of the acceptance of it.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: And I’d like to hear your version of how that happened.
Taylor: Yeah, and . . .
Schrager: And why that became Model A.
Taylor: Well, I think it must be Merv’s name, Model A. But Merv Cadwallader had done a program in
San Jose, and probably at Old Westbury, and it was called Athens and America. And it was a nondisciplinary moral curriculum that dealt with the ancient Greeks and modern America. And it was about
political obligation and duty; and it was about understanding community; it was about your role in the
world, as a citizen. And you come to that by reading Great Books—philosophy, history, literature,
religion. And it’s almost a Great Books theme. That’s what he did in San Jose.
When he came to Evergreen, he had the dream of having some programs to do that, that would
be basically social sciences-humanities programs. They could have history of science, but that’s what
they would be. He thought maybe 200, 300 students would do that, and the rest of the College would
have departments, and would just be like any other place. But there would be this little, special thing.
And then there became a kind of a conversation about, “Well, that makes that special, and what
about the rest?” And at that point, Don Humphrey says, “If it’s good for 100, it’s good for 1,000.” As
soon as he said that, he changes everything. Because all he does is accept the structure. He doesn’t
accept the content. He says, “Okay, we’re going to have teams; and we’re going to have
interdisciplinary programs; we’re going to have full-time; we’re going to have no grades; we’re going to
have narrative evaluations.” All those things. But what you do within the frame of that team is anything
you want.
Well, it turns out some things can be taught that way better than other things. And we’ve been
struggling with that ever since, because that structure was accepted, but the content wasn’t. And the
21

content couldn’t be, because the content was limited to social science, maybe; or it was a Great Books
curriculum, basically. And as soon as you started doing Human Development or . . . whatever . . . Time,
Space and Form—that was Sid White’s one. Or Causality, Freedom and Chance—that was Will
Humphreys’s first program. There were eight programs at the beginning. Man and Art was one. The
Individual in America, that was Will Unsoeld’s, with seven [faculty]. But people then, they had a design,
and some of them worked like Model A, and some of them didn’t.
Schrager: Interesting. So when Larry talked to me about his thinking, coming out of Old Westbury, in
part, it’s clear that he saw ethics as a central dimension of science.
Taylor: Mm-hm.
Schrager: And in that sense, he differed from a number of the science faculty, who viewed it as an addon. Maybe Sluss was similar. . .
Taylor: He and Bob. And Byron [Youtz] and Fred Tabbutt were not there. I think Larry and Bob were
the ethical part, and they were not coming as scientists. Byron was both. Fred Tabbutt was definitely a
scientist, and Fred Tabbutt was the earliest one to have trouble, I think. And then people like Bob
Barnard, I don’t think they bought into it. And I wonder where Don Humphreys was. Because he’s
instrumental in all of this, because he’s the one who says—but he just sees the structure, I think. I don’t
know. What did Larry say about that?
Schrager: He spoke about a split between most of the science faculty, who had their own retreat to
plan, I believe during the planning year—he was describing it—and himself and Sluss as two who didn’t
want to join that discussion . . .
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: . . . because they felt it was in conflict with, and maybe even intended to undermine
interdisciplinary studies as the heart of the College.
Taylor: Yeah, I think that was true. And Byron was the leader of that, I’m pretty sure, because one of
the early, early papers that Byron wrote was “Can we do upper-division science at Evergreen?” He
wrote a paper on that. “And to do upper-division science at Evergreen, you have to have lower-division
science taught. And can you teach lower-division science in Coordinated Studies?” And there was a big
argument about that.
And people like Bob and Larry didn’t care particularly—but other people were saying, “Well, Bob
isn’t teaching science,” or, “Larry’s not teaching science. They’re teaching science as ethics, or science
as practical, but they’re not teaching chemistry.”
It’s an honest argument, and it’s never been solved. It’s never been solved.
22

Schrager: I asked Randy Stilson for Richard Alexander’s writing, at David Marr’s request, because David
remembers Richard wrote a significant piece in terms of the arguments about the curriculum. And what
Randy came up with was a piece by Richard about upper-division literature. An extended argument
about how you could have upper-division literature at the College. I don’t know if that’s an attempt to
bridge this difference?
Taylor: Maybe. Maybe it was. I don’t know. I know I remember that with Richard. Yeah, I don’t know.
But it never got solved.
There was also, very early on, this argument about full-time, or rather, how do you teach foreign
language? How do you teach music? How do you teach a skill, a definable skill, within these Programs?
And early on—early, early on—there was a 12-4 proposal.
And there was the thought of two colleges. You’d have the Coordinated Studies College and
then you’d have the Course College. That was second year, maybe. There were those discussions.
Schrager: And so there were challenges to the coordinated studies model, the full-time approach, from
the beginning?
Taylor: Oh, yeah, I think so. I see the College as proposing this ideal, and people bought into the
structure—not the content, but the structure—and tried to fit round balls in square holes, or whatever.
And that from the beginning to today, it’s been a struggle to, “Can you hold onto it?” You know, you get
proposals. “Oh, it’s too difficult.” “Oh, it doesn’t work.” “Oh, that means I can’t do this.” And it’s a
struggle, and it has been a struggle since October of the first year. And it’s amazing that it stayed, and it
stayed because the structure still works. And the full-time—well, the full-time, that’s what’s really being
tested right now, I think.
I think the fear that if you do the two colleges, you’ll lose it. It’s sort of a slippery slope
argument. If you stop doing the full-time, if you start having courses more than we do. That’s why they
started the thing about you had to have an umbrella contract. You couldn’t take four courses; you had
to have a contract that embodied—embedded—four courses. I don’t know if that happens still, but
that’s what you had to do, because they didn’t want somebody, without advice, just being able to do
four isolated things with nobody trying to make them make sense together.
Anyway, I don’t know where we ought to go from there.
Schrager: How about we talk about both the question of student-faculty relationships, and student
experiences of the first year? Which then, of course, continue in the second and third year.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: That seems important to me.
23

Taylor: Some things about that. You know, it starts with faculty having close connection with students,
because the first thing we did was we housed students. [laughing] We take care of students. And, early
on, it’s everybody’s first name. I mean, that, in 1970, was big. Charlie McCann was Charlie. Everybody
was first name. I don’t know how that decision happened, but that’s the way it was.
The first week of the College, when people came, I remember we had a party at Eric Larson’s for
all his and my students. Richard Jones had parties for all his students at his house. We were [snaps
fingers] pretty tight. And I had potlucks at my house four or five times a year with the students.
Seminars—the seminar would come to the house. We all did that.
And it was all first name. And there was a lot of talk and tension about what the relationship
should be; about the younger faculty wanting to be friends with the students. And I remember having
conversations with Chuck Pailthorp about that, because he was pretty young, and there was friendship.
And Richard Jones, he was sort of a leader in this, and this was significant to me, because he was the
one that talked about natural authority. It’s not friendship—and I understand it in terms of it’s what
happens in high school, or any teacher. A second-year teacher is better than a first-year teacher
because they have a different eye. [chuckles] It’s about being able to be respected and have authority
from students, and somehow, making that happen. It’s not about friendship, it’s about natural
authority, about respect. And that’s the relationship that should—I remember Richard talking about
that endlessly.
But the students and faculty —there was a lot of friendship, and a lot of on-the-borderline
relationships. [chuckles] I can remember, we went off—this would be the second year, when I was
teaching what was just called Western Civilization, and I was teaching with Mark Levensky, Thad Curtz, a
woman who’s wonderful, whose name was Karen Syverson, who was a classicist—and in a wheelchair—
and she taught Greek. But we went off to Spirit Lake, before Spirit Lake blew up, to this wonderful cabin.
We had to go there by boat, so everybody was captive. I don’t know how good a retreat it was, but
there was a fair amount of marijuana there, and faculty were involved. I wasn’t. I was too naïve; I didn’t
have anything to do with it ever, and never have, but that was just me. But it was widespread.
Widespread. And I think that was common across the campus. I think it was everywhere. I don’t know.
But, I guess that was the ‘70s. I don’t know. I don’t know if that was unique to Evergreen.
Schrager: No, it wasn’t unique to Evergreen, I’m sure.
Taylor: I don’t think it was unique to Evergreen.
Schrager: But the reduced distance between faculty and students surely was unusual, the degree to
which. . . .
24

Taylor: Yeah. And I read a lot of student evaluations of me that are in these books, and they all talk
about friendship, and they all talk about it in glowing terms. There’s some about “You were more of a
friend than a teacher,” there’s some of that. But it’s mostly about “I felt closer to you when I . . . .”—and
I can remember so many, so many cases where we were counselors as well as teachers.
One of the students, I wonder what’s happened with her, she was super-strong student. She
was from New York City. She’d had a tough life. And she was raped on the trail going from the Library
to the dorm the first year by a total stranger. And she came knocking on my door, 1 o’clock in the
morning. And that’s who she turned to.
And that was not unusual. People turned to faculty because we knew the students. So you
were expected, and mostly wanted, to be involved in that way. So you were on, it was 24 hours a day.
And everybody knew your telephone number, knew where you lived. And you were there. At some
point, people would say, “No.” But that was a couple years, I think, a couple years down the line. At
least, all the teams I was on, there was a close relationship, and that was what was expected, and that’s
what the students expected. I don’t know if it was good, but that’s what happened.
I look at the names of these students, and I know them all. I mean, these are students from
1970 up to ’75. I know them all. I knew the ones in my seminar best, but I knew everybody in the
program. And I read about those students, and I can picture them. I know. That still happened, but the
first years, it’s clearer in my mind. The best seminar I ever had was two years before I retired, and I
remember all those students. So it does go on. But the first year—maybe it’s me, but I bet that’s true of
most people.
Schrager: The characteristics of the students who were coming to Evergreen at the beginning?
Taylor: I think there is some difference in the sense that the students that came at the beginning agreed
to a risk. What’s happened now is just because of the culture. They didn’t come for a career or for a
job. They came here because they wanted to learn, I mean, in a passionate way. They would all say
that. And I think it was true.
The consequences of that—I think I told you once about the March breakdown the first year.
You know, the students came and said, “I want to come because I want to learn, and it’s going to
wonderful”—and then, they’re faced with themselves saying, “You know, I’d rather go to San Francisco.”
Or, “You know, I don’t want to read that book.” Or, “I’m not doing it.” And then saying to themselves,
“It’s all my fault.”
So the students got in a position where, because the burden to learn was all on them, and then
they got—at least this is the way I saw it—they couldn’t get themselves out of that rut, because they
25

wanted to learn and they didn’t think anybody should require them to learn. But they weren’t learning.
And the whole notion was widespread, because there were no requirements, and faculty couldn’t figure
out how to change that. So students weren’t writing papers; they weren’t reading; they weren’t coming
to class; they weren’t doing anything. There was a significant number. There were some, of course.
And there were students that were upset with other students. And there was nastiness.
I mean, it was unhealthy. And come March, we were going to have a big college-wide airing.
And it was all set up, and it was going to be in the Library lobby, and people were talking about it. And
then it snowed, and the College was closed for three days, because of the snow. You couldn’t do
anything.
So, at that point, the College opened up again, and I say it’s like Shakespeare’s idea of “time
out.” That three days had sort of gotten people to think. And I know in Human Development, when
they came back, they were required to write papers. I mean, we made program-wide requirements.
You didn’t have a choice. And I think that probably was across the board, but I know it happened in
Human Development. And that helped.
And from then on, you don’t have requirements across the College, but programs had
requirements. They even had tests. And up until that time, you couldn’t do anything like that. It was
just a common acceptance. So that was kind of funny.
Schrager: With the first cohort of students to come, they had to go through this process of facing
themselves and their learning. I associate that with what we want students to do at Evergreen.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: But this is a deeper level, because it sounds like the faculty hadn’t figured out how to do this
themselves.
Taylor: Well, the faculty—everybody was too idealistic. It was a philosophical position. Everybody
thought—or people thought—that if you made it possible, if you gave them the opportunity, they would
come. And they did. It’s not that you have to have grades or competition, but you do have to have
structure and expectations. You can see that evolving in the College, where you start naming
expectations; you start naming covenants; you start setting out, “This is what you need to do.” Because
at the beginning, it was so wide open, and I think that’s the Dewey in the philosophy. The tension.
Schrager: Explain that.
Taylor: It seemed like the tension between the individual and people will learn what’s necessary to
learn at the time that it becomes necessary. Dewey—kind of you give people the opportunity, or
something comes up, and the curiosity will be there because of the situation, and then they’ll learn, and
26

then you just follow that. And I think Richard Jones represented that more than anybody. And that in
contrast to what the moral curriculum people were saying, was that it needs to be prescriptive, and
clear. Not that it needs requirements, but you need to have goals and expectations, and set them out.
The College has moved, I think, further away from Dewey. I’m not sure, but I think, in most programs.
We want students to be self-motivated, and to come because they want to learn. But that
doesn’t mean that you just give them a blank slate, and assume that they’re just going to figure it out.
Schrager: It sounds like there was an enormous leap for the faculty in the first year of teaching having
to do with the realization of the importance of requirements within programs.
Taylor: I think so. There might be other programs, that talk about it differently, but that certainly was
true for Human Development. Maybe Chuck Pailthorp would have a different idea, or Nancy Allen. But
I’m sure that was true for Human Development. And you can hear it in the self-evaluations that the
students write.
Schrager: Do they realize the faculty were learning as well?
Taylor: They do, and some of them resent it. Some of them blame the faculty because that’s who they
turn to. They had two choices. They blame themselves and said, “I came here to want to learn, and
now I don’t want to and it’s all my fault.” And it’s much easier to say, “Well, you know, it’s their fault.”
Schrager: Right.
Taylor: Which, in a sense, it was. It’s a huge risk. I mean, I think the early students were asked to take a
huge risk, and a lot of them were willing, and a lot of them did really well. But it doesn’t work for
everybody. And that used to be the line when you talked to students, you’d say, “Evergreen isn’t for
everybody, so figure it out and it might be for you. But Evergreen isn’t for everybody.” And that used to
be a common—in high schools—“Evergreen’s a good school. Evergreen’s a great school. But it’s not for
everybody. You’ve got to be self-motivated. You’ve got to know what you want.”
And we used to argue that that wasn’t the case, but you have to have a bit of blind faith that
you join something that gives it the structure. You have to have that faith. And then you have to throw
yourself into it. It’s not that you had to know what you wanted. We used to argue that. And I think
that’s still true.
Schrager: In deciding what you were going to do the second year, and putting together the program
that you did the second year coming off the first year, can you talk about that?
Taylor: Well, yeah. And it’s not a good story.
Schrager: That’s fine.

27

Taylor: It’s not a good story. The first year, I had this internship hook. And I think if you’d have talked
to Richard, I think he would have thought I was nuts; I would be gone. Human Development was a twoyear program, but I left after one year. I left on the grounds that it wasn’t content that I was
comfortable with. I am much more wedded to content than process, I think. I want to teach something,
not just teach. And Human Development was teaching, it wasn’t teaching something. And the best
thing I did in Human Development was teach writing. That’s where I felt I had the most confidence,
because I was willing to spend the time. I don’t think the other faculty were willing, but I really spent
time with students with writing.
So the second year, Richard Brian originally was going to do a Western Civ program of some
sort, and I joined. And then something happened that he left it and I don’t know what he did, but he
didn’t do that program. And Mark Levensky was a new hire, and was hired to do that, Thad Curtz, Karen
Syverson and me, and it was called Western Civ.
Well, when I think about it, even then, but when I think about it now, to move from the model
of Richard Jones as teacher, which I never could really connect to, to the model of Mark Levensky as
teacher—and here, no matter how you see this, I am an apprentice teacher. I mean, I’m thrown into a
world that I don’t know. I’ve done teaching. I don’t have a lot of self-confidence, and I certainly don’t
think of myself as a university teacher. So I’m in a training situation, at best. But Richard didn’t do any
training. He didn’t take that responsibility. Bob Sluss did a bit, but Richard didn’t. And Mark Levensky is
totally in another world. And his style—I remember the first seminar with him, we were reading The
Iliad, and he came out at the break and he said, “We’ve spent the whole hour on one word—‘wrath’.”
And I just looked at him, and my eyes rolled, and I said, “Oh, I’m going to have trouble with this one.”
[laughing] And I never felt confident, although at least I was reading. There was content in the
program.
But, I was only in that program for one quarter, fall quarter. The program was actually pretty
good; it did some wonderful things. At the end of the year, it did something called the “Mother
Project,” and they had all the mothers come. I mean, they did some fantastic things. But by then I
wasn’t in the program.
Second quarter, a group of students that were interested in the local Legislature in Olympia, had
formed what was called “Citizens Action Network,” called CAN. In those days, curriculum was generated
on the spot. We didn’t have a catalog published ahead of time. Every year was planned for the very
next year. And this was a group of 18 students that wanted to understand local government. And the
deans said—they needed a faculty advisor. I don’t know how I was named—Ed Kormondy maybe, I
28

don’t know, or Merv or somebody—I was asked if I would do it, because probably enrollment in
Western Civ was not full. I don’t know.
So I did. And it was fantastic. I spent all my time in the Legislature working with these 20
students, whose mission was to understand local government and to involve Evergreen students in local
government. So they had news reports; they lobbied; they had students go to the Legislature for
different things. It was a pretty good program. And a couple of those students ended up being elected
officers. I remember Eleanor Lee, she was a Senator for a long time. Anyway, that’s where she started.
They were slightly older, but they were interested. And I knew almost nothing about it, but I
learned. When I’ve talked about my career at Evergreen, and thinking about it, I was an apprentice, and
Evergreen was my teacher. I mean, I just could never have imagined being able to do what I did,
because people trusted me, and I did it. I didn’t do it well at the beginning, but that program I did well,
and the students were just delighted that they got somebody, because they couldn’t do the program
without somebody. So they accepted me absolutely, and then we figured it out.
And we read good stuff. I found things that we should read. I don’t know if you know the book
called The Dance of Legislation, or something. It was written by, not Magnusson, but a clerk working for
Magnusson, and it was how a bill becomes law, but it was the case of doctors getting their tuition paid if
they would offer to work in rural Washington.
Anyway, we read good things, and the students worked hard, and it was a big success. So that
was winter quarter. I don’t know what I was going to do. But spring quarter the second year, there was
an admissions crisis. We didn’t have enough students. Dave Brown must have been fired, or left—I
don’t know how—but Ed Kormondy came to me and said, “Will you be Acting Director of Admissions?”
Addendum: Spring 1973 there was big upheaval at the college. Enrollment was down, there was a
budget crises and the legislature was talking of closing the college down. Dave Barry (Provost) and Joe
Shoben (Vice President for Student Affairs) were both laid off. Ed Kormondy was appointed Provost.
Both Byron Youtz and Merv Cadwallader were considered for that job. Charlie McCann made the
appointment with no college wide involvement.
So spring quarter the second year, I moved back to Admissions, and I ran Admissions for the
next six months because they needed me. Richard Brian and I basically did it. I don’t know how; Richard
and I were together. We read all the applications, I managed the office, and it was a mess, and the
morale was horrible, and things were all fouled up. And I straightened it up. So that was the spring
quarter.

29

Then, at that point—you might have heard this story of the rotations of deans? There was a
group of faculty that believed that the power structure of Evergreen was too set. And it was led by
Chuck Nisbet—early faculty, insecure, whatever, I don’t know, but the dimensions of power. So the idea
was the deans had too much power, and so the deans should rotate into the faculty. And so Merv said
he would be the first to rotate out of dean. Actually Don Humphreys was going to leave the Dean’s Area
first, but he had a heart attack and Ed Kormandy became Dean. This was before he became Provost.
And LLyn DeDanaan, I think she might have been the one that rotated in. Or Oscar? Correction: It was
Oscar that rotated in first and he was especially responsible for faculty hirind. And soon, Rudy, and
Willie Parson. Charlie Teske was the third one to leave, so Merv left first. Each year, one would leave.
And that’s how the rotation of deans started.
So then, the third year, I taught with Merv, and Richard Brian and Linnea Pearson. So there
were four of us, and we taught Democracy and Tyranny, which was a program based on Merv’s old
Athens and America idea. And it was a Model A Program, and it was good. It wasn’t as good as it should
have been. I became more confident, and Merv paid a lot of attention to me. Richard Brian got
divorced that year, and fell in love with a student, and was pretty absent during the whole program. We
sort of covered for him. He was . . . somewhere. So Merv and I were working double time because we
were covering for him. And Linnea Pearson, who was a linguist, and was hired—I don’t know, this is not
the sort of stuff that needs to be on the record, maybe—she was hired because of Leo Daugherty. They
had been a couple, but by the time she came, they were no longer a couple. And she had a real difficult
time with authority, and with Merv. And she was very, very unhappy. She left shortly thereafter.
You know, teams matter. Teams matter. But the content was clear, and the students were
good, and we did have a community, and we did work hard. And if you read through, you can see how I
became much more confident in what I was doing. So that was the third year.
And then the fourth year, Merv and I taught again—that was Two Cities of Destiny—with Carol
Spence—who’s a psychologist, who’s a friend of mine in Seattle; she’s still around—and Gil Salcedo.
And that program was one of the best ever, I think. That one had a strong theme; we had good
readings; I was much more confident. I was the coordinator of that program.
And by the fourth year, I had recognized, and proven, that I could be a teacher. But it took that.
I mean, it was iffy. They first two years were pretty iffy. I wasn’t confident; I wasn’t happy; I was in over
my head; I didn’t have confidence.
Schrager: How do you understand what changed you from a novice to a confident teacher over those
years.
30

Taylor: Well, it was an apprenticeship. I credit Merv a lot, because he had confidence in me. And I
credit that I was teaching with a theme that I could buy into and understand, and learn. In a sense, the
students that were having trouble in Human Development because it was all over the place were like
me; and the students in Two Cities of Destiny knew full well what we were doing, because we knew
what we were doing. And my sense, my tolerance for chaos is not as great as some other people’s. To
the extent that I have an academic training, it’s in history. And one thing does happen after another.
[laughing] And when I was teaching once with Bill Arney, who said, “Well, it doesn’t matter that Homer
came before Aeschylus.”
And I said, “Yes, it does.”
But when people are willing to just say—as Richard Jones says, “Well, it doesn’t matter that
Elizabeth was not Catholic.” Queen Elizabeth was not Catholic, and it does matter.
“Well, you know, I don’t necessarily know truth, but I know when something’s false.”
So, when you have a program that’s based not on content, it drives me crazy. I can’t do it. And
so I think finding that out, and then being in a place where I could do it, and explain it to students, and
that students got it, that made it. I just gained confidence. And I just always loved seminars. And once I
figured it out . . . . And I think, as I read back on what was going on in these notebooks, you could see
that I got better and better at it. And I was better at it than somebody like Mark Levensky, or Merv, or a
lot of people that didn’t know how to be in a seminar. They only knew how to tell people stuff, and be
too directive. And I figured that out.
Schrager: Is that inability to reach students where they are with the questions that they’re asking—is it
about being responsive to them that makes the seminar work? You can look at this one way and say,
“Well, it’s because you are bringing your sense of history to your teaching in a very non-dogmatic way?”
Or it’s something else that has to do with your interpersonal relations, but not necessarily psychology.
Taylor: Well, turn this off for a minute, and let me see if I can find this, because there’s this one
statement that’s clear what I say. . . .
End of Part 2 of 3 of Nancy Taylor on 12-20-16
Begin Part 3 of 3 of Nancy Taylor on 12-20-16
So this is about Nancy Allen coming to the program—it must have been Democracy and Tyranny—and
what context, I don’t know, but she came to give a guest lecture. And her guest lecture was about
mothers and daughters. And Richard Alexander had come the week before to give something, and he
gave this sort of authoritarian, big-picture, sort of know-it-all. Richard’s presence is always really strong.
And Nancy came the next week, and I have this entry in my notebook about how worried I am.
31

It’s about teachers as entertainers; and that Richard had been entertaining, and Nancy had been
heartfelt and timid. And it was about gender roles. It was about, would the students be able to see
what Nancy had given, or would they want entertainment? And the students were sort of 50-50,
because the students all respond. And it was about gender, and it was about women, and it was about
teaching. And the students grappling with what they saw in Nancy, and wanting to value her, but not.
So there’s an interchange between my writing, and then the students writing back to me about what
they think about that issue.
And then I write about the difference between my mother and my father as a result of that—
and I looked to my father as the guide, and my mother as the support. And we go through all of that; so
then the students start writing back about mothers and fathers. So it’s a fascinating exchange, but it’s
about gender only in the sense it’s about tradition; it’s about dealing with the stereotypes.
Schrager: It’s also you raising it for the students. You’re bringing them to a level of awareness, and
maybe many of them wouldn’t have been thinking about Nancy’s presentation in this way if you hadn’t
called their attention to it.
Taylor: Yeah, I think that’s true. But I’m defending Nancy, and I’m feeling . . . You can see that I’m
defending, and worried about how she’s going to be perceived, and how she’s going to be treated. And
having some of the same feelings myself, although [laughing] at one point, one student says, “Well, if I
really want to know something, I’ll go talk to Richard Alexander, but I’d just as soon not have him in my
seminar.” [laughing] So they could see through it. Some of it.
But I think that was an issue, women in teaching. I think that’s an issue about whether women
can have authority. And that was in my mind, and it was certainly in Nancy Allen’s. Nancy and I talked
about it a lot.
The beginning, there were eight women hired in the first year to teach out of the 40-some
faculty, or 50. There was Linda Kahan, Carolyn Dobbs, Carol Olexa, Peggy Dickinson, Betty Ruth Estes,
Nancy Allen, me, and LLyn DeDanaan. I think that’s eight. And there were none in the planning faculty.
Now, there is a story that I really need to get fleshed out. When LLyn Patterson—LLyn
DeDanaan—became dean, which was probably to replace Merv—I think it would have been the third
year—she had a lot of support to start with. And then she didn’t have a lot of support from the other
deans. Life was tough for her. She was going through a personal change. I think she maybe came out
at that point, and she changed her name, and she was having, feeling no support. And the women
faculty—at that point, there were more, maybe there were 30—we all got together, and we met at
Nancy Allen’s house, I think. And there was this huge women’s solidarity meeting with LLyn DeDanaan.
32

I’m sure she remembers it. I don’t have the full story of it, but I remember it being a pretty big turning
point.
Because women’s consciousness-raising stuff started, I think, probably about 1972 or 1973.
Somewhere in there. And Gloria Steinem is somewhere in there. And it was felt pretty soon on the
campus, but I don’t think there was much done. But LLyn being the first dean was a breakthrough. And
her not getting support, or not feeling support, from the other deans and from the College, and being
stuck, and there was this big meeting, and all the women came. The women on the faculty—might have
been 30—were all there. I just remember that as a time that everybody saw the need, and was there. I
think maybe Betsy [Diffendal] was involved. Maybe Maxine [Mimms].
That’s a story that should be . . . I would like to hear what LLyn De Danaan—because it was all
around her. It was around giving support to LLyn. And it all had to do with women, not harassment
necessarily, but, recognition and empowerment.
Schrager: You talk about Nancy and you being on the same team, and not being able to connect as
women at that first year.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: But in the interim, between then and when you were describing this event with LLyn, things
must have changed, the more women who were on the faculty . . .
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: . . . the more sense there would be.
Taylor: Yeah, but see, now, I didn’t teach—well, I taught with Carol Spence—the interesting thing about
that is she’s a psychologist. She works for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research. She left the College
after about six years and she’s worked at Fred Hutch ever since. But she was a psychologist that taught
in psychology programs. She taught with Maxine.
And she was a wonderful person, but I called myself the “little girl from Kent” and she was the
“little girl from Ohio.” And she had not much sophistication. She went to Ohio State. She was well
trained. She had a Ph.D. in Psychology, but she didn’t have confidence either. We taught Two Cities of
Destiny, and I know that by that time, I knew what I was doing, and felt comfortable enough that I could
help her. And so we had a bonding that lasts to today, because she hadn’t read this stuff, she talked
about the “little girl from Ohio getting cultured.” She hadn’t read Shakespeare. She didn’t know it. So
she was in the same boat I was in, a little more willing because she was a little older by that time, a little
more confident. But there was support. I could give her support. And I was really conscious about that.

33

And then I didn’t teach with women for the longest time; and then, at the end, I only taught
with women. It’s sort of interesting that way. But I taught with Leo [Daugherty] and Gordon Beck for
several years.
Schrager: Larry [Eickstaedt] mentioned, I believe the second year, there was a gender studies program.
Taylor: Oh, yeah. Nancy Allen and Ron Woodbury. It was called Sex Roles.
Schrager: Was Betty in that?
Taylor: Betty Kutter, Ron Woodbury, Bonnie Greenhut, and Nancy Allen, and Nancy was the
coordinator.
Schrager: And Larry said that he got a lot of flak for that from male faculty. “What are you teaching this
for?”
Taylor: Was Larry in it?
Schrager: Larry was in it.
Taylor: Larry was in it. Oh, okay. Well, yeah. There were some women that were more on that edge.
LLyn DeDanaan was, certainly. And Nancy Allen would have called herself a feminist before I would,
probably. Because Nancy was involved in that. Huh. I didn’t realize Larry was.
Schrager: He’s proud of it.
Taylor: He’s proud of it. Yeah. I think it was a pretty good program. “Sex Roles” and something. It had
another title to it. [chuckles]
I did Social History of Women the fifth year—yeah, after Two Cities, I did a group contract called
The Social History of Women. The big battle was whether men should be allowed in it. And they were. I
think there were two men and 20 women, something like that. And it was all right. It was a good
program.
Schrager: When you say “battle,” this was among the students?
Taylor: Yeah, whether they should be allowed; whether the men who wanted to sign up for it should be
allowed. But they were, and they were fine. It was okay. But that was a time of conscious-raising
groups all over the place—1974, I think, or ’75.
Schrager: So you were responding to these interests among the students and in teaching this.
Taylor: Yeah. And you also see—I mean, in the Democracy and Tyranny, we have two books by women
in the reading list. We have Sappho, a poet from Ancient Greece, and we have Ariel, a book by Sylvia
Plath. Those are the only two books by women about women in the curriculum. That’s 1972. And I
don’t think there’s any program that would do that now. Even the next year, there’s more—I mean, you

34

worked harder, and Social History of Woman, was almost all books by women. So that happened pretty
fast. There was a recognition.
Schrager: In terms of the difference of female and male students in the way that they responded to
Nancy Allen or to the women’s issues, and with each other in terms of seminar?
Taylor: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, you could find out quite a bit from what these students say. And
that Democracy and Tyranny program, the two seminars that I remember the most are those two on
Sappho and Ariel. I could play back those seminars.
I remember, the Sappho one, we divided the seminars, we divided the men and the women to
read the poems. And the men were furious, and the women were absolutely over the moon. And the
women’s seminar was so heartfelt. And that’s ‘72—and the men were mad, they were jealous, they
were “Why couldn’t we be there?” And the women students just [laughing] said, “Do your own thing.”
I remember there was one fragment of Sappho’s—have you read her poetry? It’s pretty
moving; it’s pretty wonderful. And there’s a Mary Barnard translation of it that’s the best. She’s from
Vancouver, actually. And there’s this one fragment “Pain penetrates me drop by drop.” Well, the
students figured out—the women figured out—that that was menstrual pain. And when they figured
that out, they just thought that it was the best thing in the whole world! [laughing] And they told the
men this, and the men didn’t get it. [laughing] I mean, I could play that back as if it were yesterday.
And the other one was with Ariel. There’s some absolutely powerful Sylvia Plath poems, and
they’re hard. And I can remember that seminar going on like three hours, because they wanted to stay.
I don’t remember if we split women and men on that or not. But there was a hunger that I can sort of
name as being about women.
Schrager: Well, that’s a good place to stop.
Taylor: Should we quit?
Schrager: Yeah, maybe.
Taylor: It’s 4:00.
Schrager: Yeah. I think it’s good to stop when—
Taylor: Yeah, it’s good to stop now. And I don’t know if you want to look at any of this stuff, but I wish I
could find that one piece, but I don’t know where it is.
Schrager: We’ll find it.
Taylor: I’ll find it.
End of Part 3 of 3 of Nancy Taylor on 12-20-16

35


Nancy Taylor
Interviewed by Sam Schrager
The Evergreen State College oral history project
January 5, 2017
FINAL

Begin Part 1 of 2 of Nancy Taylor on 1-5-17
Schrager: I’m looking at your Democracy and Tyranny— in particular, that program—I see this very
close connection of personal and intellectual. The writing that the students were doing, that you were
doing: your writing combines the two. And I’m struck by that as central to the way that you and some
other faculty were approaching teaching and learning at the beginning.
Taylor: Yeah, it struck me, too, as I looked back on that. It was deliberate. We decided, for writing, we
would require this notebook of five pages a week. I think it might have been Mark Levensky that started
that, although it didn’t happen in the same way teaching with Mark, —at least, I don’t have the
notebook from that year.
But the idea was the more you write, the better a writer you will be, so it didn’t matter what the
students wrote about. And it was to be a journal. It could be about the book, but it wasn’t required to
be about the book. What I realized, as I wrote in this notebook, as I read, especially the two years when
I was pretty faithful: I can’t believe I wrote five pages every Sunday night, sat at the typewriter and
wrote five pages every Sunday night for two years. That’s pretty incredible. And I have it.
You’re right, there’s a lot of personal writing. I’m surprised at how personal it is. And then the
students all wrote back. We were trading. I made two copies, and I traded with somebody every week.
And the students didn’t quite know what a notebook was, and I didn’t quite know what a notebook was,
and so it sort of evolved. There is a lot of personal stuff.
But the other thing that I was struck by—and I’ve always said that Evergreen was my education,
and in so many ways, in the best sense of the word education; figuring out who I am, and what I know
and what I want to know. The whole intellectual discovery comes through in the notebook, in part
because every book I read in those two programs, somehow, with the students, was connected
personally. You start reading about The Iliad, or you read about Machiavelli, or you read Malory, or
you read Dante—every entry in here is talking about how the book impacts me personally. So that the
intellectual content was—it wasn’t about learning it for a history test. It was really internalizing. And
I’m just amazed. Many of the Great Books, I had not read. Some, I had some background. So I just let
1

them speak. And, by the journal, I talked about them, and then the students. And so the writing fed the
seminar, but it wasn’t required.
I want to read you something, because I found this thing about being a teacher. Did you read
that one?
Schrager: I don’t think so.
Taylor: Well, this one, I’m—in some ways, I feel so naïve about it, because it’s that I would write this
stuff, and I did. So this is February 22, 1975. So it’s The Cities of Destiny year. It’s the fourth year. The
insecurity that I had the first two years, in terms of seminar, and in terms of my relationship with
students—I don’t know that it’s gone, because it never leaves—but I’m very different with the students
than I was early. And I read this, and I say to myself, well, I did do a good job. And there’s a confidence
that you can read in this. It’s kind of long, but it is surprising to me that I wrote this. I’ll just read it,
because I think it’s worth reading, although I’m kind of embarrassed by it, in a way.

During the curry dinner at Jane’s on Thursday night. . .

And, just aside, we had potlucks all the time. I think they were stopped by the time you came,
but we had potlucks two or three a quarter with every seminar group. That was just a part of all
programs, and certainly all mine. So . . .

. . . Sam asked me a very serious and innocent question. I was surprised by my inability to answer it. His question
was, what does it mean to me to be a teacher? Then I started to read Castiglione’s treatise on the perfect courtier.

See? Here we are.

And these two things made me want to define the perfect teacher in some way or other. I fantasized about carrying
on a dialog, Castiglione-style, with Merv and Gil and Carol and Mark and Thad, but that seemed like a bigger project than I could
tackle on a Sunday afternoon. So, for the present, I would just like to set down some very rough ideas on what I think are the
qualities of the perfect teacher.
First of all, the teacher must be able to play a multitude of roles. Different students learn in different ways, and need
different things. So the perfect teacher must be able to respond to those different needs. First and foremost, I see the teacher
as the motivator. The goal of any teacher must be to encourage, and succeed in getting students to have the desire to learn.
Then the task of teaching how to learn is easy.
Another role of the teacher, the most conventional one, is that of dispenser of knowledge. That is, a teacher must
know enough to be able to help students acquire that information.

2

Then I see the teacher as counselor. The teacher must be able to recognize that a student is preoccupied with vital
questions, and that these questions cannot be ignored if the student is to be expected to concentrate on specific materials.
Along with this role comes the role of teacher as diagnostician. The teacher must be able to know why a student is unable to
learn. The teacher must be able to distinguish between problems of skill and problems of a psychological nature.
The teacher must take students seriously. She must be patient with setbacks. She must be able to be satisfied with
slow progress, yet she must instill in the students the desire to work, and the feeling that the work can be done and is
worthwhile.
All these things make a teacher as much a psychologist and friend as an instructor. The word “teacher” denotes a
special relationship between two people. It must be a positive relationship, or the job can’t be done. It is different than the
word “instructor,” which denotes nothing personal or professional; which denotes detached, disinterested scholarship.
The teacher also has the role of student. She must always be willing and interested in learning herself. In fact, she
must be the model student. She must provide her students with the incentive, direction, courage and willingness to learn.
Under what conditions do students learn most efficiently, most happily and most effectively? That’s the question
that must be constantly asked. The teacher must be the model. She must show by her own example how much she values
education; how much joy she gets from learning; and how important it is to put forth extreme effort to get as much out of life
as possible. The teacher must show, by example, that education is a lifelong process; that it doesn’t end with formal schooling.
She must teach students how to rely on themselves for continual learning. She must teach independence, self-discipline, and
the ability to get rewards from within.
The more I write, the more overwhelmed I get. I think the clue is being able to do all these things well is in a teacher’s
own development. The teacher must understand herself. She must feel confident in her ability to cope with the world. She
must be secure enough that she can turn her attention towards others. She must be human and humble, and yet stoical and
confident. She must be willing to forsake her own difficulties in order to deal with a multitude of problems and questions each
day. Yes, she must not misrepresent herself. She must be honest and open. She must live life as it is.

Isn’t that amazing? I mean, I still would say it’s true today, but I would never write it in such a
sort of vulnerable way, I don’t think. But that describes what I was trying to do.
Schrager: It describes you as a teacher, who has been interested in that role in your life since you were
a child. A fulfillment of the potential of what that means in the way you are articulating it.
Taylor: Yeah, I think it was probably easy to come up with it, because it was who I was hoping to be.
But that I would set it down in that way to the students, and then they respond. That just surprised me
that I did that in 1975. [laughing]
Schrager: Wasn’t that what the college was about?
Taylor: That is what the college was about. And in one of these journal entries, I say:

I ran into my friend, Leo, the other day, and we had this conversation.

And it’s in the journal. And it says:
3

And he says, “Students are sure different now than they were in the ‘60s.”

And that’s the conversation. And that in the ‘60s, it was all free-for-all relevance. The tone of
the students, he says, at that time, was very different; and that the students now are so much more
serious.
And this is four years into the college, and he’s talking about a comparison between the first
year of the college and four years into the college. I don’t know if it was a reflection more of faculty
from the ‘60s, or rather, students were really that way. But by four years in, the recognition that
students did want to learn something. It wasn’t just all about—the word “relevance” was sort of the
word of the first year. And it wasn’t the Richard Jones style of “It doesn’t matter what you teach.
You’re just really teaching self-study.” That was Richard. It was all about the students. It wasn’t about
learning anything. It was about learning something, but it was all about learning who you are. That was
the theme of the program, no matter what program it was. It was all “look in the mirror.”
At least, four years later, the college isn’t talking that way anymore. Now, I don’t know if that’s
only the difference between Richard Jones and Leo, but it’s certainly the difference between the Human
Development program and every other program that I ever taught. [chuckles]
There’s an interesting program history of Human Development, and it quotes one student in a
self-evaluation, sort of “I’ve had the best year of my life. It’s not that I’ve read a single book. I just have
looked at myself, and figured out who I am.” And that was the model. That was the goal. And, by four
years, that wasn’t the goal.
Laura Schrager: Well, I have a question, since it’s no longer on.
Schrager: I can turn it on. But is it going to be a question about the college?
L Schrager: Well, a little bit. Because we, at Reed, were connected with The Learning Community. And
this was stimulated by a rejection of how conservative and traditional Reed College’s education was.
Taylor: Yeah.
L Schrager: But what we, as students, saw in the faculty that were attracted to that, is a personal
immaturity, and a desire to engage with, some envy of what us younger. . .
Taylor: The faculty were. . .
L Schrager: . . .that were attracted to the learning community. I mean, some of them were serious
about it, but a lot of them were basically interested in exactly what you were talking about. I really
don’t want this recorded, I’m just curious about it—whether what you’re describing was just kind of an
4

evolution that some people who came to teach at the college, you know, wanted to be free; you know,
had these repressed, whatever; things that they had and hadn’t been able to work through . . .
Schrager: . . . as academics.
L Schrager: Yeah, as academics.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: Having a split academic . . . .
L Schrager: Yeah, and then, after doing it for a while, they responded to the fact that actually the
students wanted to learn things. I know we felt, Sam and I, we looked at these teachers like, well, we’ve
done that.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: Just to give a context to this, Nancy—we were seniors, they were some of our favorite faculty.
And we were invited to join in their discussions. . . .
L Schrager: Right.
Schrager: . . . when they were trying put this together. We’re talking about Kirk Thompson . . .
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: . . . Howard Waskow.
Taylor: Don’t know him.
Schrager: It was the Reed faculty—a number of them were leaders in the liberal wing in the faculty.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: And my teacher John Roush, who was my seminar leader freshman year—really kind of
taught me how to think about seminars—was peripherally involved. And he had worked at the Carnegie
Foundation for a couple of years in that period, and got The Learning Community money to start as an
alternative school in Portland, with some faculty leaving Reed, not necessarily being fired, to try this, or
consider it. So the conjunction was faculty who were very disappointed in their professional experience
as academics, with students who had already gone through the late ‘60s—that was us. And we already
had the co-op living; and I met Laura, really, in a communal house.
Taylor: So what year was this?
Schrager: ’69-’70.
Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. And see, ’70 was when we started.
L Schrager: That’s what I was saying.

5

Taylor: And there were some faculty that that describes, absolutely, and some programs, like Richard
Jones. The most popular program the first year, hands down, was something called The Individual in
America. That was Willi Unsoeld’s program.
Schrager: That would have been the one Pete [Sinclair] was in.
Taylor: Yes, Pete was in it. There were seven faculty in it. The students that wanted into Mind and
Body, a couple of years later—and it was just packed with people—they wanted to look in the mirror,
that’s what they wanted. And the faculty in that program were really serious—Willie Parson, Peter
Elbow, They wanted to do brain chemistry; they wanted to do very academic work. And there was a
complete mismatch with the students. Whereas in Individual in America, the match was perfect,
because the people that wanted to do that were teaching that, and the students that were there—I
mean, that program was very successful. And I don’t, I mean, they did some reading and writing, but
they did an awful lot of stargazing.
Individual in America. That was Willi Unsoeld’s program, and Bill Aldridge, Pete Sinclair, and
people named Carol Olexa, Earle McNeil, Peggy Dickinson and LeRoi Smith. There were seven. There
were 150 students in that program. Because that program was so popular they decided to split and
have two programs. One called Human Behavior was for the upper division. So they split; they only let
first-year students into Individual and America, and the older students, they put in Human Behavior.
And that’s Richard Alexander and LLyn Patterson’s program.
But anyway, there were faculty doing that. Richard Jones, in Human Development, was that
way. Bob Sluss was in that program, but wasn’t so much. Although [chuckles] Bob writes to me and
says something like, “Well, you were caught between Richard the psychologist, who wanted people to
understand who they were, and Merv, who wanted to teach people facts that led toward action.” And
there was a split between those two pieces of advice that I was getting as a first-year teacher, and not
knowing which way to go. And Bob said he [chuckles] was more on Merv’s side, but he was perfectly
willing to be with Dick Jones for that first year.
This was all in a conversation about what you do in seminar, and what kind of a seminar leader
you should be. And I was, in my early instinct, much more directive than those people that were trying
to let things sort of all hang out. And Bob said what he learned was silence is the teacher, and he wasn’t
directive. And when I got a bunch of Bob’s students in my seminar, they wanted Bob’s way, which was
totally non-directive. And I found, in the end, a compromise. I never was the let-it-all-hang-out kind of
person in seminar, but I wasn’t a high school teacher either. I somehow found the compromise.

6

Let me see if I can find this letter. Here is the student. This is a student that Richard Jones says
is emblematic of the first program.

After being brainwashed for 12 years into thinking I was learning by regurgitating exactly what was put into me; that a
sterile and lifeless paper was a good paper; that to put myself into my writing was wrong, it’s hard to suddenly change in three
quarters, but I’m trying. I now have a starting plan, and I plan to use it. I’ve learned in three quarters what I was struggling to
discover for 12 years, that learning can be meaningful and fun.
My year at Evergreen involved more personal than academic development. Besides the normal adjustment of living
on my own for the first time, and adjusting to a new environment, I was forced to face some deep and longstanding personal
problems. With the help of some of the faculty, I’ve been able to understand myself. I would have liked to have learned more
in my first year of college. On the other hand, coming to Evergreen, and being in Human Development, may have saved my life.

Taylor: You can see where that’s coming from, huh?
Schrager: Mm-hm.
Taylor: And if you had 150 students like that . . . And we had, in that first year, something called a selfstudy seminar, which had no text, except for the student’s life. So no wonder it was hard. I didn’t know,
I mean, I wallowed around.
We had that, and then we had that internship, where all the students were spending one day a
week in some social service, human service—at a school or a church or a prison or something—where
they were supposed to be observing something having to do with human development. And then we
had a seminar that was based on self-reflection about the internship, which also was self-discovery. And
then we had a book, but if you read this discussion, the book is pretty incidental. And there was no
theme through the book, I mean, it was just a range of books.
Schrager: So this program was very much on the same end of the scale as you were describing with
Individual in America. The text is secondary.
Taylor: The text was secondary.
Schrager: And your own self-development primary.
Taylor: See, and this is Richard Jones’s sentence: “In short, it was the kind of introduction to college
that most of us would wish for our own children.” This is the faculty speaking. “But when we reviewed
the year in terms of the program’s design features, we tended more often to frown than to smile. It
brought from one of us the metaphor of a surgeon, who is glad his patient recovered, but who is more
concerned with the shortcomings of the operation, which helped the recovery to happen.”
Schrager: So Jones is pushing for the value of the self-discovery, but not in relation to the text.

7

Taylor: See, I turned that around. Because by the time, when I’m reading the Great Books, or looking at
books—Merv always used to say, “The book is the teacher.” I was looking at the books as the entrée
into self-discovery. And reading this, I’ve got these two years of pages of writings. That’s what I used
the books for. And because the books leant themselves to that theme of self-discovery, in a way, it
worked.
L Schrager: For me, I feel like that that is a lot of what your first years of college are about. However
you frame it, you know, you’re kind of discovering yourself. And I don’t know whether the first years at
Evergreen, how much of your student population was lower division, early college. Which is where, I
think, whether you do it formally in a classroom setting, or, as at Reed, you do it outside of class . . .
Taylor: Yes, that’s right.
L Schrager: . . . so in some ways it’s not at all inappropriate to have open-ended classes in the
beginning, I think, for students, especially if that’s what they need.
Taylor: But there might be different ways of learning. Well, the goal is the same in either case. In one
case you look at the mirror; in another case you look at a book. But the goal is the same.
Early on, the faculty assumed—and this is not a flaw, it’s just a reality—the faculty assumed all
students would be full-time, 18 years old, and interested in education, in a broad way. That was an
assumption about the student body. Well, the student body wasn’t that; and increasingly it’s not that.
The first year, it was more that, the first couple of years. But by—you said to talk about the admissions
crisis—by the spring of the second year, there was already a worry about admission, and about the
curriculum not being established, and about older students, and about part-time students. It was
already there in two years, a recognition that, you know, if you’re going to get older students, if you’re
going to get students from the town—I mean, there was already the Olympia town problem—this kind
of curriculum of navel-gazing or self-discovery wasn’t going to be appropriate to everybody.
And some people wanted to come and learn math and French, and they didn’t want to do any of
this other stuff. The tensions about what’s good for 100 is good for 1,000 in coordinated studies was
already challenged by the second year.
Schrager: So there was a falling off in applications?
Taylor: There was a falling off in applications by the third year. And there was also the economic thing,
you know, when in Seattle, the billboard came up: “The last person to leave Seattle, please turn out the
lights.” Because, the college was going to be 1,000 students a year for 10 years, so it was going to be
10,000 students in 10 years. And in the third year, we had 2,000, and we were lucky to have them.

8

And nobody wanted to grow that fast, because we knew that to do something as different as we
were doing, faculty development couldn’t happen. You couldn’t get the faculty to buy in. You couldn’t
get that many students willing. The pull towards a conservative standard college was pretty great.
Charlie McCann was president for six years, I think. And Dan Evans was named president at
Christmastime six years later—I’m pretty sure that’s the date—and a complete surprise to everybody.
There was a little committee, but there wasn’t an open search.
He had just finished being Governor, and they just said, well . . . And in one way, it was brilliant,
because the college was having serious PR problems, and Dan Evans gave a legitimacy that nobody else
could have given. The faculty was upset, as typical Evergreen faculty is upset when they don’t like the
process. If you looked right at them and said, “Well, do you like the result?” most of them would have
said, “Okay.” But they didn’t like that they weren’t involved, and they didn’t like the process. I mean,
that’s a Seattle thing—that’s an Evergreen thing.
But one of the first things that Dan did, with Byron as Provost—they were a perfect team; Dan
always admitted he had not a clue about the academic side of the institution. He learned the party line.
He learned to talk—and Byron was the academic leader, and they were really good friends. But one of
the first things that happened was that the curriculum was established two years ahead of time, from
that moment on.
Always before, we created the curriculum in June, or April or May. There was a catalog, and
there was a supplement. And the supplement came out in the late spring, so nobody knew what they
were signing up for, for the next year. That’s one of the reasons why they said we weren’t getting any
students. See, the beginning students were told, “Have faith.” And they said, “We do.” So it didn’t
matter that they didn’t know what they were signing up for, because that would be okay.
But by six years, people said, “You know, I want to know what I can do, just not something like
that. I want to know exactly what I’m signing up for.” And that’s when the catalog came out two years
in advance. I think it was about ’76.
So back to your thing, I don’t know if it was the faculty that were the ones driving this, or
whether it was students. But by 1975, I think, things had changed. Still, I mean, I think it’s still true
today that a freshman going to college is interested in getting themselves educated in a big way, in the
sense of figuring out “Who am I?” I mean, that’s still the question, whether they do it by studying
chemistry or studying in psychology or talking with their friends at midnight, I mean, that’s what they’re
doing the first year.

9

But I think the difference might have been the early years at Evergreen, people tried to deal
with that head-on rather than through another means, like through reading and writing. [laughing] I
don’t know.
Schrager: You mean dealing with it as the point of the program . . .
Taylor: Yeah. The theme of Human Development the first year definitely was “Who am I?” Maybe,
“What does it mean to be human?” But basically, it was “Who am I?” That was never the spoken theme
of any other program I was in. It might have been for some, but it wasn’t for any other program I was in.
Schrager: So the Democracy and Tyranny program was the moral curriculum?
Taylor: That was the moral curriculum.
Schrager: It was Athens in America, and it was full of texts that you engaged, both intellectually and . . .
Taylor: . . . and personally. I don’t know how you would say the theme, because we used to say that
having a question that couldn’t be answered, but could be sought after, was essential to a good
program.
I remember a program that I taught with—did you know Brian Price? Well, Brian Price and
Sherry Walton and Don Bantz and I, and it was called Making American Selves. And the question was
“What does it mean to be an American?” And that was absolutely on the table every day. We read a lot
of fiction, we read history, we read sociology. And we read a lot of books by women, books by
immigrant communities, memoirs. It was a really good program. In terms of a program that held
together, that was one of the best. And it was a lucky group of students. I mean, I can still remember
those students really well, and that was probably about 1978 or ’79, somewhere around there.
And we went on retreats. In fact, I ran into one of the students from that program at Powell’s in
Portland maybe five years ago. That was a memorable program. But partly, it, I think, did answer the
question of “Who am I?” for those students. That was there. But the question was “What does it mean
to be an American?” And there was text. There was a lot of text. And there was a lot of personal stuff.
And I think that was a Core program, when Core programs separated out from everything else.
It was before annuals. So that was all 18-year-olds, probably.
A couple other programs—I don’t know, we’ve skipped around—but the essential thing that
held the program together, that big question, the program I taught with Rita and Lance Laird.
Remember him? This was not too long ago. It was called Enduring Stories. And the question was “How
do stories help you define your life?” Or, “How do stories help you find the truth?” And that program
also, even though it was really hard, because the texts were hard, because we did a lot of religion, with
Lance, and that’s the program where we read the Koran, we read the Old and New Testament, we read
10

The Iliad, we read some Native American texts—you would have had fun in that program. It was really
hard work. But that had a question that worked.
Or the question—when I taught with Hiro [Kawasaki], in the Japanese program, and it was called
something like Cultural Transformation in Modern Japan, or some big highfaluting name. But the
question was “Could Japan be modern without being Western?” And I’m still thinking about that, and
Hiro was thinking about that. And we never had the answer to that. But it made us define modern and
Western. That was a wonderful program. The students, unfortunately, weren’t as interested and
serious as the faculty. [laughing] But it was fun. I learned so much from—Setsuko [Tsutsumi] and Hiro
and—when you were in Japan, did you meet Takashi Tohi?
Schrager: Yes, he’s a good friend of ours.
L Schrager: Yeah.
Taylor: Yeah. I just heard from him. I just got a card from him. But he was great. He had no clue what
he was supposed to be doing, but he’s an instinctive teacher.
Taylor: He’s a badminton teacher. He’s totally in to sports.
L Schrager: We saw them (Takashi and Kazuko) when we were in Japan last spring.
Taylor: Oh, really?
Schrager: They took us to dinner.
L Schrager: Yeah, it was pretty magical.
Taylor: They are just wonderful, wonderful people. We had a great year, and Takashi and I were one.
We had three seminars—Setsuko’s seminar, Hiro’s seminar, and Takashi and I had a seminar together.
So I did all the orchestrating, and he did all the dancing around. When we did book seminars, he read
them, but it was hard for him. But he did all the Japanese teaching, and he was just a natural. So I just
orchestrated it, and he did it. It worked, I think, really well.
Schrager: Maybe we could talk some about these teachers. You mentioned Hiro, and how skillful, and
how important he has been to you as a teacher: who you learned from and what you learned.
Taylor: Well, I taught with Hiro, I guess, three years, three times. He came pretty early. But the thing
about Hiro—when I talk about what makes a teacher, he was so genuine in his interest in learning. I
remember having a faculty seminar with him, reading Moby Dick. He’d never read Moby Dick. This is
Hiro, pretty young, reading in another language, Moby Dick. And it was long—and his questions, and
the way he approached it, was just totally different. And the seminar was fantastic, because he was so
genuine in his determination to understand. And that’s just the way he approached things, and this
business of having a question that he didn’t know the answer to. I mean, he never taught “This is what
11

you’re going to teach.” He taught “What do I want to know? Now, let’s read all this stuff and try to
figure it out.” So it wasn’t giving knowledge; it was learning. That’s just the way he taught. But he was
so genuine about it, and he was so smart. And the students always just—he had something special, and
you watched him. I learned so much about specific stuff, but just by seeing how he approached the
world.
Schrager: A genuinely open question. You talk about open questions, but deeply unresolvable, and
deeply important at the same time.
Taylor: Yeah. And, see, this question about “Can Japan be modern without being Western?” You’d
think, well, that’s okay. But it’s really an interesting question if you think about it in the state of the
world. That worked. He was also crucial in something called Love and Work. That was with—we taught
that together; he was in that program, wasn’t he?
Schrager: Yes, he was.
Taylor: Yeah, he was. Yeah.
Schrager: With Stephanie Kozick.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: I didn’t stay for spring quarter. I was there for the fall and winter.
Taylor: Yeah. That was a hard program because, again, its question probably wasn’t clear enough, so
the students sort of wallowed a bit. Although we did have one wonderful project. Do you remember
the couples’ project?
Schrager: Mm-hm.
Taylor: And that worked really well, because it was couples. And most often, the couples had
something to do with work, but they were couples, so the question worked.
But the other one that I did with Hiro before that was something called Form and Content. And
Form and Content was not a good title, because it was way too open-ended, but it was really 19th
century—that’s what the texts turned out to be—with David Marr, Chuck Pailthorp, Hiro, Judith Espinola
and me. That was a really good team.
We were a lot more serious than the students, unfortunately. We had a big battle with the
deans because we lost students, and we didn’t have enough students. I think by spring quarter, we had
like 40 students, and we were supposed to have 80 or 90 or something. But the college was down in
enrollment, so there was not much justification for making us toe the line in the numbers.

12

But that was—I don’t know what the question was that year, but that’s when we read Moby
Dick. We did American and European and music. Chuck Pailthorp did a lot of music. But Form and
Content, that was the theme, which wasn’t really a question.
Love and Work was sort of the same way. I think pretty soon, people stopped doing programs
that were connected with “and,” because that was just a topic, it wasn’t a question. So if you have Love
and Work, you have Form and Content, you have War and Peace, you just have a subject. You don’t
have a theme, or question it turned out. So people stopped doing that, I think, after a while.
Schrager: Shall we talk about some other faculty that were important to you?
Taylor: That’s okay.
Schrager: Leo [Daugherty], you mentioned.
Taylor: Leo. Yeah, I taught with Leo more than with anybody else. I probably taught with him six or
seven times. I think we became friends first. The first time I taught with him was Shakespeare—Richard
Jones, Leo, Peter Elbow and me. It was the year before Fritz [Levy] and I got married. And Fritz came
down to lots of the program stuff. It was Shakespeare in the Age of Elizabeth, and it was fun. That was
a fun program. We read 32 plays or something that year. And we read English and European history,
but mostly English history. And then the students did quite a bit of performing. We didn’t do any
performing for an audience, but they did quite a bit of performing.
It was funny, because Peter Elbow knew about Shakespeare, and Leo knew about Shakespeare,
but they were coming from medieval studies. Richard Jones knew nothing about Shakespeare, but that
didn’t matter. He wanted to do it, and he worked hard. I had just spent a year at the University of
Washington doing English history, and I was interested in the context, the history part; and Fritz was
coming and helping to do that part.
Richard Jones didn’t have any respect for history. And it was so funny, because he’d give a
lecture, he’d give this big, blown-up thing, which all was based on an assumption that was false. He did
this big thing about Queen Elizabeth as Catholic. Well, there’s no evidence whatsoever that she was
Catholic, but he built his whole lecture on that. Or, he would build his lecture on something that hadn’t
happened yet, I mean, some piece of history that he put in here. It was very odd. But he was doing the
psychological thing; chronology didn’t matter.
Leo was in love with stories, but always prided himself in not remembering plots. So he said he
could never figure out—you know, it didn’t matter—he could never figure out, in Midsummer Night’s
Dream, what happened. That didn’t matter. [laughing]

13

And Peter Elbow, that’s a funny thing about the college’s hiring. Peter Elbow, Leo and Pete
Sinclair all were medievalists. I mean, we had two Chaucer specialists. The hiring was bizarre, if you
cared about coverage. If you cared about people, it was fine. It was good.
But Leo was—again, he had a relationship with students. Students absolutely loved him,
because he was so willing to take risks, I think, and to just do and say outrageous things, and then live
with it. And I don’t know what he did, but he was just fun to be around, and he was creative and
outrageous, within some context.
We always said about Leo is he could get people to write better than they could think. He got
people to use writing to think, but he’d get students to write papers that they had no business being
able to write. I never could figure that out. But he just was a master at getting people to engage in
writing. And he was an editor.
Have you ever taught Peter Elbow’s style of teaching, where you just let it all go? He’d say,
“Okay, write 10 minutes. Now, pick one sentence; throw the rest away. Now, write.” His idea was you
cook before you edit. You just get it all out there, and then you throw most of it away, but then you
clean it up. And sometimes he didn’t clean it up. It’s all there. And so that was his writing.
And Leo would do grammar workshops. And at the end of the time, Leo’s people were writing
more creative stuff than Peter, and I never figured out why. Because Leo, I mean, he would tell
students, “Look, you never learned grammar. Your writing’s horrible. You don’t know the difference
between a noun and a verb. If you want to learn to write, come and we’ll do it.” And he just did it, you
know, Grammar for Dummies. And everybody loved it, and wrote. He did write a little book, I think,
about it, Leo did. So he was a master. And partly it was his personality, I think. He was a guy that you
could say teaching is an art. It wasn’t what he learned about. He just—teaching is an art. So he was
one of my favorite guys.
So I taught Shakespeare with him. Then I taught Great Books with him maybe four times. And
every time, it was different books.
Schrager: You talked about Sluss.
Taylor: Bob Sluss, I only taught with him once, and it was the first year. Probably without Bob, I would
have collapsed. Because Bob had great faith in me, and was kind of this gnomish guy that was support.
Bob knew a lot about insects and ladybugs. He knew his field. And he was interested in doing
other things, but he was grounded in what he knew. And he always used to say, about writing, he didn’t
have a clue what to do. The only thing he knew was to respond to students’ writing seriously. So he
wrote more to students than the students wrote to him. I mean, he’d get a paper, and he would write
14

five pages back to the student. He wrote and wrote and wrote. And he didn’t correct; he just engaged a
student in whatever—he took them seriously. Whatever they were writing about, he would write back,
these long things. Because he said, “Well, I can’t correct their papers. I have not a clue.” And he wasn’t
a very good writer. But he said, “I can take them seriously.” And that’s what he did. He would write
back. He always took them seriously. Although he was one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. But
he took students seriously.
Schrager: Funny how?
Taylor: Funny. I mean, he just would do crazy things. I mean, he’s the one that hired the alcoholic to
come on the retreat, and it would be all right. I mean, he’d get lost. He was just a funny guy, in a
wonderful way. He just took life as a game.
Schrager: And it sounds like he took you really seriously.
Taylor: He took me seriously.
Schrager: Maybe more seriously than your other faculty?
Taylor: Yeah. I mean, that first year, Richard Jones ignored me pretty much, and I was intimidated by
him. And Nancy Allen and I should have been sisters, but we were too preoccupied with our own
struggles to help each other. But Bob was the one that was there. He was. Who else?
Schrager: Well, you talked about Merv [Cadwallader].
Taylor: And Merv, he believed in me absolutely. Well, he was the coordinator of Democracy and
Tyranny, and that’s where I really came into my own, and probably Two Cities. Charlie Teske, who was
part of that program in a tangential way; he came and did madrigal singers—he wrote an evaluation and
Two Cities. By that time, I was probably the heart of the program; not in terms of content, but from the
students’ point of view. And Merv was the one that helped me, I think. I can’t imagine my gaining the
confidence that I did without him.
And that Democracy and Tyranny was a really rough year, because Linnea [Pearson] bailed, and
didn’t like it. And Merv was too much a father figure for her, and that was disastrous. And Richard
Brian got a divorce, and he married Dorothy, who was a student. So the program was a mess. And Merv
and I held it together, because we had these two sort of absentee people. And I worked really hard,
and, yeah, I think that’s the year I came into my own.
Schrager: And you say that in Two Cities, you were. . . .
Taylor: In Two Cities, my style was probably more accessible to the students than Merv’s, and so I
became sort of the heart of the program in terms of what we were reading and what we were doing,
and the whole social scene. And students turned to me rather than Merv, I think, because he was—
15

Merv is a preacher’s son, and he was too directive, I think, in the way he taught. It was just different
than the way I taught. And he wanted it worse than I did. He wanted the program to be a success, and
he was driven. And it was somewhat counterproductive, I think. I don’t know.
Schrager: Richard Jones, you also mentioned as an important figure.
Taylor: I wouldn’t be at the college without Richard Jones, because he’s the one that hired me to begin
with. And Merv said that Richard didn’t think I would succeed, but I never felt that from Richard. And I
told you that story last time—“If you’re going to teach, you’re on the faculty full-time.” So I was hired
that way.
Schrager: It seems to me that Richard Jones is also driven in his desire to have Human Development be
a certain kind of program. And in that sense, Merv and Richard seem parallel.
Taylor: Well, they’re parallel, but their philosophy of education is diametrically opposed. Just totally
opposed.
And then there’s another thing about Richard that . . . I don’t know what to make of. One of the
values that he said about a teacher is scarcity. He thought teachers should not be accessible. They
should teach, but he was one of the ones that was opposed to—well, some people might call it
friendship. Early on in the college, all these potlucks and accessibility, and the students—if you read the
student evaluation of me, I was always available. Always available. And that was a good thing. Richard
thought that was a bad thing.
And Richard, as a psychologist, he did these special workshops for faculty about how you could
be counselors to students. And one of the principles was that would be the best thing for a student
would be that if a student comes and is in trouble, you don’t stop everything and take care of them. You
make an appointment to see them next Tuesday at 3:00. And I could never do that. But that’s what
Richard believed. He was going to turn people into psychological counselors, and he said, “You don’t
stop everything if someone’s in trouble. You have faith that they’re going to be able to get through it
say, ‘I’ll talk to you next Tuesday at 3:00.’”
Where are you on that?
Schrager: No, I’m for now. I’m very much a responder to students, what they present.
Taylor: Yeah. I just—I couldn’t do that.
Schrager: It’s about the moment of encounter.
Taylor: Yeah. And the odd thing is that, in terms of teaching—like in a seminar—for Richard, the now
was what it was all about. You know, if something comes up, in the Dewey sense, there’s no better time
than dealing with it right now. But in terms of personal counseling, that was not where he was. So I
16

don’t know. I never thought about the contradiction, but there is a big contradiction there. But he talks
about scarcity.
So who else should . . .? I said Nancy Allen.
Schrager: Nancy Allen.
Taylor: Nancy Allen and I . . . Did you read the journal entry about my mother in here? So I start
writing a journal entry about my father, which I’m really glad to have it, because it’s a description of my
father that, you know, I cherish, and I don’t know that I would have written it down—
And then Nancy comes and does something about mothers and daughters as a lecture, in a very
Nancy Allen kind of timid way. And at that point, I say, “Why in the world am I talking about my father?
I should be talking about my mother.” So then there’s an entry about my mother as sort of role model.
I don’t know about the chronology of this. Maybe soon after Nancy came and gave that
lecture—and this was also the time of Gloria Steinem, and women’s lib and consciousness-raising
women’s groups. And in the program, I started having women’s meetings, and I think that comes right
after Nancy was there. And Nancy, to the extent that we’re feminists, she’s more of a feminist. She was
closer to those issues early on; and then she’s the one that the next year is going to do Sex Roles with
Larry. And so I think Nancy makes me much more conscious of women’s issues. And we should have
done more at that point.
But in terms of the students, for several years then, on, we had women’s groups that met at my
house. And they didn’t have an agenda. They weren’t doing the program, although they were from the
program. It was just women who wanted to talk. It was consciousness-raising. And when I think about
it, I think there was a lot of it going on in the college that was not organized, but it was a recognition of
this movement. That’s when LLyn DeDanaan became a dean, and there was a support group for her.
I’ve been thinking about what the response about women was. There was a big women’s
conference in, I think, 1977. I don’t know if you would remember that. It was in Houston.
Schrager: Before my time.
Taylor: I think Evergreen wasn’t a part of the national scene, but it certainly was there. And I credit
Nancy with a lot of that, for me. I didn’t teach with another woman for quite a few years.
Schrager: So with Nancy, it was a conscious recognition on her part. . . .
Taylor: Yeah. She was much more wanting—I mean, her wanting to be in Sex Roles, and take that
leadership—it was an intellectual as well as a personal issue with her. With me, it wasn’t. Although—
that’s wrong—because the year after Two Cities, the program I did was called The Social History of

17

Women. And the year after that, I taught something called The Ajax Compact. Have you ever heard
anyone talk about that?
Schrager: No.
Taylor: That was a terrible name. It was started by a slightly older than college-age woman. Her name
was Mary Moorehead, and she wanted a program for women returning to school. And she called it The
Ajax Compact. Now, I don’t think she knew anything about who Ajax was, Ajax in Greek myth. What she
thought was it was Ajax cleanser. So it was Ajax, and then Compact. These were women words.
And for my program, the title was changed to Re-Entry Women or something eventually. When
I taught it, with Helena Knapp in 1977 or ’76, we had 50-some students. They ranged from age 20 to 60.
Most of them hadn’t written anything but a Christmas card forever. Except for the young ones, they
mostly had children. I think for the biggest majority, their youngest child had just gone to first grade.
And they were all insecure, and they were all coming back to school. And Helena and I did this—it was
like a Core program for women. We didn’t allow any men in, although I don’t think any men applied.
It was a huge, huge success, in the sense that it got students—got women—confident. I think it
was just one quarter. Half-time. We had a morning group and we had an afternoon group. And at
noontime, we had a common lecture. Because there were 50 students, and so we had two seminars in
the morning; then we had a common lecture of everybody; and then two seminars in the afternoon. It’s
an interesting model.
And then, most of those students went into a regular program after that. It was a re-entry. Lots
of support; lots of social activities; lots of food; lots of consciousness-raising. And it was an interesting
group of people. Some of them had maybe dropped out of college. Some of them had done nothing,
had no confidence at all. And the age spread was huge. I’ve thought about that, because it was in the
newspaper and I have a news clippling. So 1976, the fall of 1976. Do you know this person, Virginia
Painter? She’s still around.
Schrager: Sure, my neighbor.
Taylor: Yeah, she’s the head of State Parks, I think, or something.
Schrager: Yeah. She was right down the road from me.
Taylor: Oh, she was great. But anyway, she did write the story for the Daily Olympian.
Schrager: Do you remember how you decided to do this?
Taylor: Well, this person, Mary Moorehead, had done a sort of preliminary one, with LLyn DeDanaan, or
LLyn Patterson, the year before, and there were only 10 students. But she got the name, and she
started it. And maybe LLyn came to me, or somebody, and said, “Why don’t you do this?” That’s still
18

when we were just creating the curriculum, in the spring, for the next fall. And then I invited Helena,
who wasn’t on the faculty at that point. And we advertised it. It was announced in the newspaper, and
we had meetings to get people to come. And, again, this was a time when enrollment was down. And
this was another group that we could meet. I’m sure it was a half-time. Eight credits.
Schrager: Well, it was half-time, does that mean that it was largely local?
Taylor: It was all local. And it was re-entry women. It was a way for people that were scared, that
didn’t know whether they wanted to do it or not. And it was a reach-out to the town. I think that’s
where the idea came from.
Schrager: Were they then special students? Or were they enrolling as Evergreen students?
Taylor: I think they could be either. I don’t know that the distinction was very great. If they applied,
they got in. But they could do half-time. And that was just starting, that you could do part-time.
Because there were no evening programs, then.
Schrager: And this was the beginning, then, of Helena’s teaching career?
Taylor: Maybe. She had been working in counseling, in the Counseling Office. And a job came up, and
she didn’t get it. It was one of those times when, you know, there was some pretty difficult personnel
things. I remember writing a letter in support of her, but she didn’t get the job. I don’t know why, but
she didn’t. And I think she came then and did this. And then, she was hired to do the part-time thing
once that got started, but that was a few years later. She was one of the first of the permanent halftime, one of those first eight.
Schrager: To round out the faculty that you had mentioned as being important to your own learning
and development, there’s Jin [Darney].
Taylor: There’s Jin. She comes much later, in the ‘80s or something. We taught Shakespeare together,
with Don Finkel. And when she was in the first year of being dean, she was supposed to be teaching in a
Victorian Studies program with Susan Preciso and Janet Ott and me. Even though she was dean, she did
all the faculty seminars in that program. And then Jin and I just became the best of friends. I don’t
know what I can say about her teaching that got my respect. It was our friendship. We had a good time
teaching together.
Don Finkel and Bill Arney and Kirk Thompson and Sandie Nisbet and I taught together in a
program called . . . I don’t remember its name, it had to do with classics. It was another one of these
programs that was built chronologically, but Bill Arney didn’t believe in chronology, so he was also one
that says, you know, “Homer can be affected by Aeschylus.” I mean, it’s just one of these things that

19

always boggled my mind. Because he didn’t care. You know, you could have Machiavelli speak to Plato.
I mean, it was all right with him. He didn’t care about that.
That was almost the worst year that I had at the college, except for the first one. And the
problem was, even the students called these three guys—Kirk Thompson, Don Finkel and Bill Arney—
“the roosters.” They were just so outrageously male, and bad. And Sandie Nisbet and I—the students
all came to our rescue, because we were treated horribly. Sandie was treated horribly by Kirk, and I was
all right with Kirk. I was treated horribly by Bill Arney, and Sandie was all right there. And Don Finkel
was fine, but in that context, it wasn’t good.
So, it was just horrible. And then, in the middle of the year, Jessica—what was her name, who
was the good friend of Helena and Rob’s, the family?—Kelso, died in a Christmas accident. It was just
horrendous. It was an automobile accident, with two students. She was with a student. She was a
freshman. And it was just overwhelming to the program, to the family, and it put a damper on the
whole program. So that year, that was horrible.
So about three years later, Jin and Don and I decided we can teach together. Don was a totally
different person when we taught Shakespeare together. It was wonderful. Because he was wanting to
do Shakespeare. He was a psychologist, but he was wanting to do Shakespeare, and he was willing to
work very hard. He wasn’t the same person that had been one of the three roosters. The students even
called them the roosters.
Schrager: Was that the program that Bill and Don wrote a book about later?
Taylor: I think maybe it was. They had a conversation. They were good friends. I think their friendship
might have stopped after a while, but they were good friends. And then, it’s out of that time, I think,
that Don wrote his book about “Teaching with Your Mouth Shut,” which he worked on that year. Which
was super—it had a huge impact on everybody’s teaching that taught with Don. In a good way. You’ve
read that book, probably.
Schrager: I actually haven’t. I never taught with Don, so . . .
Taylor: Well, it really, really worked. But it partly worked because he was such a true believer. You
know, he knew it would work if you did it. Lots of people couldn’t do it because it was so prescriptive.
And it took a lot of work to do these workshops, the Finkel workshops. They are really carefully
designed, if they work.
And I got pretty good at them. What it does is it just drives students to a certain understanding.
And if that’s what you want—they’re not open-ended at all; they drive you. [laughing] And I remember
doing one with some Platonic dialogs, and at the end, students say, “I got it. I got it!” Because there
20

was no teaching, it was all the workshop. The students had to do this, this, this, this and this, and write
down this. And they had to do it in groups of three, and they had two hours to do it. It was all
prescribed. And for certain things, it was perfect. But lots of people didn’t like it.
But a lot of people then tried to do something that ended up either to be, you know, a really
high-school-like horrible worksheet, or wasn’t designed tightly enough to do anything. So they were
hard to do. But Don had such clear ideas. He wouldn’t give any lectures without reading them. All his
lectures, he wrote out verbatim, and then read. Because that’s what he believed about a lecture. There
was no exchange, he just read.
He had some funny ideas. [laughing] But he was a good teacher. And that Shakespeare
program with him was good, except that was when he was sick; at the end when he was sick. And we
had a student who was so good and so responsible that when Don was sick, that student took over his
seminar for the whole quarter. Did everything but the evaluations, I think. I don’t think he got paid, but
he just did it. He was very, very good. James something.
Schrager: Let’s take a break.
Taylor: Let’s take a break.
End of Part 1 of 2 of Nancy Taylor on 1-5-17

Begin Part 2 of 2 of Nancy Taylor on 1-5-17
Taylor: I don’t know if you want to do that one. Or we could do Kobe.
Schrager: Why don’t we start with that story, since you’re thinking about it? I think it’s important to get
these inflection points, these critical moments; ones that you know.
Taylor: I wonder when I wrote this? It must have been in about—yeah, January 1975:

This hearing board finds unanimously in favor of the petitioners in the dispute over John Moss’s appointment to the
dual position of Director of Personnel and Auxiliary Services. We find that Dean Clabaugh violated the spirit of the affirmative
action policy by his failure to take specific action, as required by that policy. We find that Mr. Clabaugh created a new position,
which had no incumbent, and that John Moss, the incumbent for a position which no longer existed, was selected to fill the
vacancy, without compliance with W.A.C. 174. This constitutes a violation of the letter of the affirmative action policy. We
therefore reverse the appointment of John Moss as permanent Director of Personnel and Auxiliary Services, and recommend
that his title be changed to Acting Director, while a search is conducted, which complies with affirmative action policy.

21

That was the hearing. And I was the faculty representative, with Steve Herman. It was my only
time I ever worked with Steve Herman, and he gets an A+. He was really good on this committee. And
somebody named Dan Swecker, who is from Chehalis—he was in the Legislature a little while later—was
a student, I think. Max Smith was the police officer, who was the representative of the staff and the
union, I think. He was a wonderful police officer; served the college well.
Schrager: So what’s the story?
Taylor: The story is, I was called to do this. We met, and we did careful research. We talked about it as
a committee. We were the officially named hearing board. We came up with the ruling that Dean
Clabaugh had violated—it was a grievance, that John Moss had been given this appointment, and he
was supposed to be the Affirmative Action Officer—and he had no qualifications for being Affirmative
Action Officer, and it was a slap in the face at affirmative action. His job was going to disappear because
there was downsizing. This job was created, and he moved into this job; and Dean Clabaugh put John
Moss into this job that he was not qualified for, in order to save his job, basically, is what happened.
And the ruling that I just read, we agreed on unanimously. It was an official COG document
sanctioned hearing board—COG is the Committee on Governance, so it had it all spelled out what the
rules were. This was one of the first hearings, first grievances, under the COG document that had come
up. And so it was sort of a trial thing. Was the COG document going to hold weight, or was it not?
There was conversation in the college from the very beginning that in order for people to believe in the
COG document, it had to be challenged, and it had to win. And this was an early case. There were other
faculty cases. But the idea that the legal agreements that the college had made, would they be upheld?
And this group did all the formal rulings. We took a lot of time, a lot of care. It was a really good
committee. And it found in favor of the challenge, and that—I just read that— John Moss should be
“acting.” Dean Clabaugh took it to the Board of Trustees, and the Board of Trustees reversed. It was, in
essence, the failure of the COG document to carry the day, and John Moss was given the job.
People were furious. It was a statement that inside maneuvering was valued over policy. Not the
irony, but the added burden, was that it was about affirmative action, the very thing that they were
trying to do. It was within COG’s document for Dean Clabaugh to take it to the Board—that was the
appeal—and Charlie McCann supported him. It was one of those things that undid Charlie. It was just a
place where it shouldn’t have happened. I don’t know what precedent it set, but it certainly was one of
those things that, what people didn’t want to happen was that the Board of Trustees would overturn a
decision by the community that had gone through all the proper things, and by just personal
achievement.
22

It would be interesting to hear what Steve Herman would say about it. But we were unanimous.
And if you look at the people, it was a pretty cross-section of the community.
Schrager: Did an individual or a group bring the complaint?
Taylor: I don’t know. I don’t know what the charge was because I don’t have the preliminary thing.
Schrager: This does raise the issue of affirmative action, and how the college looked at it in the early
‘70s.
Taylor: Yeah, there was not an affirmation of it. so here’s another. The Advocate Office campus
hearing board:

Closed deliberations of the campus hearing board are not specifically prohibited according to any law, statute, or
executive order currently in force. Since the deliberations were closed, observation by any party would be denied.

Then it goes to the Trustees, and they overturned it. I don’t know who brought it. But the issue
stays alive, there becomes an Affirmative Action Officer that would report directly to the President. And
that, I think, might have happened under Joe Olander. Or sometime. But it was much later. Paul
Gallegos had that job. See, this Affirmative Action Officer was going to report to Dean Clabaugh, who
was the business side of the school. But when we finally do get an Affirmative Action Officer—it was a
different title but something like that—it was directly under the President.
Schrager: When you say that it undoes Charlie McCann, is that the loss of faith in him by the faculty?
Taylor: Yeah, loss of confidence in him by faculty. And there were lots of things about Charlie that
made—I mean, it’s interesting because, I think, the history is being rewritten. Because now, people
speak, Charlie was perfect. Charlie was the best person for the job. And the thing about Charlie was
that, when he quit being President, and he came to teach, his confirmation about believing in teaching
at the college was so solid—by him. I mean, that’s what he wanted to do, and he did it. The college was
not used as a steppingstone for him to get anywhere. He wanted to teach at the college he founded.
And that got him enormous respect.
It was hard for him, because Charlie was not a true believer in lots of things that the college did.
The big evaluation system was set up by the college the first year. So we did evaluations of each other;
evaluations of students; students did evaluations of us; we did evaluations of the program; we did
evaluations of the deans; the deans did evaluations. Evaluations were just, from the very beginning, just
overkill evaluations. And the President was to write an evaluation, and people wrote evaluations of the
President, and it was all upfront, not only evaluations, but conferences, and face to face.

23

And Charlie’s self-evaluation the first year was one sentence. And people wrote back to him and
said, “F.” I mean, he just didn’t do it. He just didn’t do it. And when I taught with him maybe seven
years later or something—I taught a Great Books program with Charlie—he was wonderful to teach
with. But he had the most difficult time writing evaluations. It was just temperamentally and every way
not part of who he was. So, his evaluations were always really short. He was uncomfortable having
evaluations conferences with students. That was not what he wanted, what he felt comfortable doing.
He was a great teacher. But he had a lot of trouble as President, partly because he led by
negative. He’s the one that said, “No grades, no departments, no this, no that.” And he had very high
standards. He was not interested in affirmative action. He wasn’t interested in women’s issues, for
sure.
I wouldn’t say he was bumbling, because in a way, he was brilliant. He would go to the
Legislature to speak about the budget, and he would wear his Irish plaid red pants, and his face would
just get bright red, and he would speak about the college. And he was usually there at the same day as
the President from the University of Washington, who was arrogant, flagship, we deserve all the money.
And the Legislators, early on, just said, “It’s such a relief to have this guy who seems to be
speaking from his heart, who’s just sort of bumbling along, and says, ‘You know, we just need your
help.’” And we would get money. [laughing] And the Legislators would talk about how arrogant the
University of Washington was, and how refreshing it was to have this sincere man who came, and would
get his Irish red face. You know, you can just see him.
So he did very well with the Legislature. But he wasn’t a natural politician. And he provided
absolutely no academic leadership. Except he had standards, but he wasn’t creative about anything. I
don’t know. But in the end, everybody praises him, because he got out of people’s way. He let it all
happen. He didn’t take control, but in retrospect, because he didn’t have an idea of his own, he let it
happen. I think that’s the reading people have.
Schrager: When you say “high standards,” what do you mean?
Taylor: He’s an elitist, I think. Although he came from Central; he was head of the English Department
at Central. But . . . this might be completely wrong: he doesn’t seem like he was all that interested in
educational reform. He was interested in a college that would have high standards and ratings. The
thing that he was the most appalled by—he used to talk about an underwater, basket weaving, Chinese,
lesbian student or something—that was the worst. [laughing] He didn’t want the flailing around. He
wanted . . . you wouldn’t call it traditional, but I’m off base because I don’t know how to describe it. By

24

high standards, he wanted a college that had academic high standards, I think. At the end of each fiscal
year, if there was any money left over, he gave it to the library to buy books; that was his priority.
Schrager: It sounds like he had high expectations for people in the work that they did.
Taylor: He did, he did. He did have the value that, if you leave people alone, and expect them to do
good work, they will. And he always said, “I’m not a teacher. I have no idea what it means to be a
teacher.” But he was an excellent teacher, and he was an excellent teacher because students walked
into that room; they knew that he had high expectations; and they delivered.
And when I first knew Fritz [Levy], and because of my relationship with Fritz, he was kind of the
interpreter of Evergreen to the University of Washington. People would say, “Well, what is this?” And
because he knew me, people got more respect for the college. And somebody in the English
Department called Fritz and said, “What do I do with this student who wants to get into the graduate
program?” And Fritz said, “Who wrote his evaluations?” And the guy said, “Somebody named Charles
McCann.” And Fritz said, “What does he say?” “It’s very glowing.” And Fritz said, “Admit him.”
[laughing]
Charlie did a program, a group contract, once on Spenser. And Fritz said it was a graduate
program. I mean, you wouldn’t find five programs like that in the country, what he was doing with the
students at Evergreen, who were undergraduates. And students figured that out. If you were really
serious, and you signed up with Charlie, and you worked hard, it was good.
And that’s the way he thought everybody should be. And that if you just had that expectation,
people will deliver. And maybe, by having that faith and that confidence, and staying out of people’s
way, maybe that was a key.
Schrager: And if they don’t deliver, then was he capable of acting and calling them on it?
Taylor: I don’t think so. I don’t know. With students, they would disappear, I think. There was no feel
good fuzziness, you know, warm and cozy kind of feeling with him. But the students had tremendous
respect, and so they self-sorted, I think. I don’t know about the faculty.
Schrager: Well, there was frustration on how he treated people he was working with.
Taylor: Yeah. But I know if you talk to somebody like Rita Sevcik, she had absolute admiration for him.
Schrager: One more thing. You started the negatives.
Taylor: Mm-hm.
Schrager: Do you consider that negative, or—
Taylor: Which negative?
Schrager: Well, the idea of the negatives. Those were his ideas.
25

Taylor: Those were are his ideas—I mean, the no grades, the no rank, the no tenure, no departments.
But the problem was it was hard to form a college based on all the no’s. And that’s why, at some point,
somebody came up with the Five Foci.
Schrager: Matt Smith
Taylor: Yeah. See, and that’s several years later. But it was all the no’s: We’re not going to have
departments; we’re not going to have grades; we’re not going to have . . . you know, it was all the no’s.
And there was no affirmation. And Matt Smith is the one, in the first self-study, I think. But that’s five
or six years later, isn’t it? And that’s after Charlie is no longer President.
So I think people thought that he didn’t provide any leadership. But in retrospect, they think it
was great, because it allowed things to happen in a more organic way.
Schrager: Can we talk some about your governance work?
Taylor: I was involved in governance and in being a solid citizen of the college from the very beginning.
And it was partly because, since I started in Admissions, and then I got to know all the faculty; and then,
within two years, when I was teaching, the Admissions Director left, and I was called to be Acting
Director of Admissions, so I got back in.
So I knew the runnings of the college, and I knew the academic side of the college, and I knew
most of the people. And I think one of the first more academic leadership things I had was when Will
Humphreys was Dean, he put together a kind of kitchen cabinet, an academic advisory council or
something, which I was on. So I was close to what was going on in the college from early times.
And then—I don’t know what the order of this is—I served as chair of the presidential search
committee that hired Jane Jervis. I served as Chair of the Faculty during the time of Joe Olander, which
was tense. Just a little side thing about Joe Olander. First of all, I was terrified to be around him—like I
would never get in the elevator with him, just the two of us. You just wouldn’t do that. And whenever
there was anything that you wanted to talk to him about, you would take somebody else with you. And
when you’d get any decision, or understanding, you’d write it down and make him sign it right then. I
mean, this guy was a loose cannon. [laughing] So I was Faculty Chair during that time, and so that was
not an easy time. . .
Schrager: Maybe we ought to talk about your being Faculty Chair, and in relation to Joe Olander, and
that period, and we can talk later about Jane.
Taylor: Well, I don’t what more I have to say about Joe. That was a really difficult time, because Joe
was unsupportive of the faculty. And he just did things outside. Like he would want to hire people
without going through the process; he made an arrangement with Edmonds Community College to do a
26

Japanese program, without any faculty support. That got rejected but he was just out there doing stuff.
You never knew what he was going to say, and he had no idea about the college.
I remember having him over for dinner. I was, I think, one of the few people that invited him to
dinner, just to try to educate him about the college, because he didn’t know. But people had big
grievances. The deal for me was, you know, I just didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust him personally, and I
didn’t trust what he was doing. But the fact that whenever you got him to do something, you had to get
him to sign it right there, that shows what the confidence was.
And you know how we got rid of him finally? We got rid of him thanks to Dave Hitchens, who
was just on a roll about trying to find the goods on him. And they found out that he had lied about his
resume in a petty little way. I mean, he didn’t have some degree that he said he had from someplace,
and that was enough. Because the Board of Trustees were all supportive of him. They couldn’t admit
that they had made a mistake. And they finally . . . there was one member of the Board that hid
documents. They found them in the trunk of her car. [laughing] It was a pretty crazy business. But
Dave Hitchens, he was a detective. He was the one that got the information to get rid of him, and then
Joe was sort of run out of town.
Schrager: How did he get hired in the first place?
Taylor: Well, there was a regular search committee, and Ken Dolbeare was chair of the committee. And
Ken had a hard time ever saying that he made a mistake. But he came from El Paso, Texas. I think we
learned, after that, that when you hire somebody, [laughing] you do a lot more searching. I know when
I was on the committee to hire Jane, we hired a legal consultant to do a background search, because if
we had known things about Joe Olander before, he wouldn’t have gotten hired. But they didn’t do
enough research, and El Paso didn’t say anything.
Schrager: Did he have the charisma that won over faculty?
Taylor: Mm-hm. Well, yeah. He was a real talker, and he was a . . . well, sort of a slick guy. I don’t even
know what his academic field was. He had a master’s in English, and he had . . . I don’t know, maybe
business. I don’t know what it was. But his credentials didn’t hold up.
Schrager: So he followed [Daniel] Evans?
Taylor: Well, Evans left because he was appointed Senator. And I think Schwartz was in between, was
acting. And then, there was a regular full search for Olander. And I don’t know how many years he was
there. Maybe three? I don’t know. I mean, that’s find-out-able. And there’s a lot of documentation
about this that I shouldn’t be talking about, because I don’t remember.
Schrager: Well, it’s more the feeling.
27

Taylor: It was a feeling. The faculty were totally distrustful of him, and from pretty early on. And, as I
say, I remember inviting him to dinner, but basically, he had no friends on the faculty. He didn’t. He just
didn’t connect. I suppose there were some people that were supportive of him. I think Ken Dolbeare
tried to for a while, and the Trustees supported for a while.
And I remember going—there was a man named Herb Gelman, who was a lawyer from Tacoma.
Have you heard that name before? He was a Trustee. Jeannie Hahn and I went up to talk to him, to tell
him what was going on, and he listened. But it took the Trustees quite a while to figure out that they
needed to pull the rug. There was a woman that was just bound and determined not to face reality.
She’s the one that had documents that she hid in her car.
Schrager: Incriminating in some way?
Taylor: Yeah, that she wouldn’t release. But once they found them . . . yeah. I can’t remember her
name.
Schrager: There was—I do remember, because I was a visitor at the time when Olander fired Patrick
Hill, that there was that tension.
Taylor: Well, I think that probably was the final thing that got Dave Hitchens going. I’d forgotten that
he fired Patrick Hill, but, yes, that was—because they just, they philosophically never got along.
Schrager: Both committed to multiculturalism.
Taylor: Yeah. But I don’t know what the ins and outs of that were. Then who came in after Patrick?
Patrick was an interesting case, because Patrick—were you there when he was interviewed? People just
thought, this is the man. Patrick talked too much, and he was consultative to a flaw, but he understood
a lot of the college, and then people thought that this was a really good match. And I think he was hired
before Joe.
Schrager: He was.
Taylor: So then when Joe was hired, they were just in direct . . . they were going in opposite directions.
And he didn’t get any support. And Patrick wasn’t a very good leader in the sense of follow-through,
because he just wrote and wrote and talked and talked and wrote. But his heart was in the right place.
But somehow, I don’t know what the essence was, but he was fired. And I think Rudy Martin was the
one that was really upset by it. Rudy went to bat for Patrick. But a lot of people tried to go to bat for
Patrick.
Schrager: And then, I think, Russ Lidman was . . .
Taylor: Oh, then Russ.
Schrager: Acting Provost.
28

Taylor: Yeah. And I don’t think he was very popular, but he sort of patched things up. And who was
Provost when Jane—Barbara [Leigh Smith]. Barbara must have come in after Russ. The Jane years are
high water years, I think. Was that when you came?
Schrager: Mm-hm.
Taylor: Yeah. Because Jane and Barbara were absolutely a team. And they had strong values, and they
knew what they were doing. And Barbara, she was really a leader in lots of ways, and had a lot of
respect. Got people to do a lot of work. And Jane was good.
The story about Jane: There was just an honest . . . this is the way any search would want to
turn out. We had a full search. It was a big committee; there were like 15 people on the committee;
and it was hard work; and we had like 350 applications, and we read them all. And there were two
Board of Trustees members on the committee. They were non-voting, but they were full participants.
Lila Girvin, who was from Spokane—have you heard that name?
Schrager: Mm-hm.
Taylor: Her son is the one that did Evergreen’s logo, the line drawing. Lila is just a wonderful person,
and in the first reading, she read Jane’s application. And she came to me and she says, “I found her. I
found the right one.” And then we read these 350, and we kept coming back, and Lila says, “We’ve got
her. We’ve got her.”
This was a totally open search. Nobody was in the pool that was known by anybody, so it was
good in that sense. And it was unanimous at the end. We had four or five interviews on campus, and it
was just unanimous. According to the Trustees, we were not to rank order, but we did anyway. You
know, there was always that.
But, everybody agreed. The faculty agreed, the Trustees agreed, the committee agreed. And
we were lucky. And she proved herself, I think. She was here eight years. If we’d have figured out how
to have been kinder to her husband, she might have stayed. But she was not the kind of person that
was ever going to pull any kind of rank, or any demands, to get her husband hired. So he never was
hired. And he never had anything to do. He sort of taught adjunct a little bit. And he finally got a job at
Columbia, and they left.
So that was an issue where the college had principles and it wouldn’t bend, and she had
principles and she wasn’t going to bend. And it didn’t work out for them. I don’t know if she would
have stayed, but she might have.
Schrager: So what were the qualities of leadership of hers—

29

Taylor: She was pretty new. She was Dean of the Faculty at Bowdoin College; she was a historian of
science; she’d graduated from Radcliffe—Harvard—and she had pretty strong stories of fighting her way
as a woman, fighting her way up academically, that people resonated to, because she had not had an
easy academic life. I think she’d gone back to school late, and she had been discriminated against, and
she had huge stories to tell about that, which people respected. She’d taught, but had gone through the
administrative ranks at Bowdoin, I think, pretty much. I don’t remember where else she was.
She didn’t know about Evergreen, except for what she read. I mean, in a small way, she wasn’t
like somebody that had been an Evergreen junkie that had followed—like Patrick Hill, he knew what the
college was. And there were other people that had sort of—well, George Bridges had followed
Evergreen from the beginning. But she wasn’t in that position at all. She was interested.
The other thing that she was really interested in, which she didn’t know at the time, was she got
very invested in Native Americans and in the Native American program. And the Longhouse was built
during her time. And she didn’t know anything about Northwest tribes. I think, in some ways, that’s a
bigger contribution than anything else. She just threw herself into understanding and supporting Native
Americans. I don’t know if people know that, but I remember that.
And she was also open. We had book group at her house, at the President’s house. She was
open to people. She had a lot of friends on the faculty, and didn’t isolate herself. And she and Barbara
[Leigh Smith] got along really well, I think. It was sort of the women’s ruling the college days. I don’t
know how many deans were women . . . Jin [Darney], and maybe Betsy [Diffendal]. There were a lot of
women—Rita Cooper. Do you remember Rita Cooper? There were a lot of strong women around at
that time. I bet more than 50 percent of the upper . . . Ruta Fanning—all those people were there
during Jane’s time.
Schrager: Who was in the book group?
Taylor: Jean Mandeberg. Janet Ott. Some people that were not from the college. It was all women. It
was just a regular book group. We just read . . . met at people’s houses, and she was included, and
when it was her turn, we met at her house. I think it was a smart thing for her to do.
Schrager: And she was a real academic.
Taylor: Yeah, history of science is what she did.
Schrager: Which is different then than a number of Presidents that [unintelligible 00:41:45].
Taylor: Yeah. I don’t know how much she published. But she was a teacher, and she did history of
science. But I don’t know, if you looked her up, if she’s written a book. I think she might have moved
into administration early. She wasn’t real young, I don’t think.
30

Schrager: Maybe you might say something about Barbara, and how you see her as an administrator at
the college.
Taylor: Well, Barbara is interesting. I have very positive things about Barbara. Didn’t always, but I have,
in retrospect, lots of positive things about her.
Barbara came to the college in the late ‘70s. Actually, I was on sabbatical, I think, when she
arrived, maybe I was at the U[W]—’78 maybe. And she came as Budget Dean as a start, from the
outside. And early on, the idea of anybody coming into the deans from outside was a taboo. It was all
supposed to be within the faculty. And apparently—well, I think, specifically—they decided that there
was nobody qualified to be Budget Dean. And I think Rob Knapp was turned down as being unqualified,
which was rather odd because, you know, people had been Budget Dean that didn’t know anything, and
they learned it. But there was some notion—
So there were two deans hired, Barbara, and then John Perkins, from outside. And they were
hired as deans, not faculty. They were hired first as deans. And Barbara started out as Budget Dean,
and then moved to Curricular Dean within a year or so. And then I think that’s when John was hired,
and he was Budget Dean.
Barbara had taught in traditional political science departments. She had a Ph.D. in political
science or something. I’m not even sure about that. Her focus wasn’t to teach, and she never taught at
Evergreen except the first quarter when she arrived. And when she left being dean, people said, “Well,
she should serve. She should teach.” But she was given a sabbatical. And she never taught, but she was
an absolute crusader for coordinated studies. You know that, I suppose. She started the Washington
Center, and she put us on the map as the college that did this innovative stuff. Without Barbara,
nobody would know what Evergreen did. She never taught in a coordinated studies program in her life.
(This I now know is wrong: she taught with Peter Elbow, and two others in a program when she first
arrived and says it was extremely important to her understanding of the college.) She became the
biggest advocate around.
And she was president of the American Association of Universities. Two national organizations, I
think she was president of. And she got funding for the Washington Center and the other Service
Centers
It was clear when I was a dean and she was Provost, she had her finger on what the college was
doing. And she was a hands-on manager, or leader. All the deans had meetings with her every two
weeks about what we were doing. And she came to deans’ meetings. And I think she had good
relations with the other side of the college. I think she held the college together intellectually, and she
31

was a manager, so she could do it. And we haven’t had that since. Don Bantz absolutely couldn’t do it,
and it sounds like there isn’t that leadership now. We have a new Provost coming. We’ll see.
Schrager: So she started as Budget Dean, but then she became . . .
Taylor: . . . then she became Curriculum Dean.
Schrager: And then she became Curriculum and Hiring Dean.
Taylor: Yeah, maybe the Hiring Dean wasn’t separate then. And then she became Provost, and she was
Provost for—what, six years, something like that. Or maybe even more. But she never taught. I think
that’s the funny thing.
Schrager: When you say that you didn’t appreciate her for some time, what was the tension for you?
Taylor: I can’t even remember. Because when I was dean, we got along fine. Sometimes in a deans’
meeting, you had arguments, but she was up on things. She knew what was going on, she knew what
she believed in, and she pushed hard for it. Sometimes you agreed and sometimes you didn’t . . . There
was this tension that how could she know what she’s doing when she had never taught, because that
was just an odd thing.
We used to argue that when a new President came—like when Joe Olander came, and when
Jane Jervis came—they were required, their first year—or suggested, and they all did it, Les Purce did it,
too—that they associate with a team for the year to learn about—Barbara never did that. (This is
incorrect: she did teach with a team when she first arrived and valued that. So I think there was some
notion that, you know, how could she know what she was doing? But actually, she did.
And there has been a culture of retreats at the college since the early days, and Barbara
absolutely bought into that. She wanted retreats. She knew how to have a good time. She knew how
to get people to do things together. The only time I’ve ever been to New Orleans, she insisted that the
deans go to a meeting at a university—an administrative meeting or something—because she wanted to
take us all to New Orleans. And we went to the meetings, but then we had to go do all this stuff in New
Orleans. She just knew how to have a good time. So the college retreats, she always wanted to have
people doing stuff together. She believed in that. And people now try to do that, but they don’t set a
model that gets people to show up, I think.
Schrager: I was impressed by how she got the faculty to reorganize from specialty areas to planning
units. That year that she had that agenda, and made it happen.
Taylor: Yeah, I’d forgotten all about that. Because the whole deal of even specialty areas, it was a
gradual evolution. I have to think about that. I’m sure I had strong opinions at the time . . .

32

Schrager: Well, when I think about her and academic leadership, I saw that up close, and she pulled it
off.
Taylor: She pulled it off.
Schrager: She got the entire faculty to meet and figure out how we were going to reorganize.
Taylor: How we were going to reorganize. Yes. The other thing she really did well is she used to run the
Hiring Priorities DTF, which is a really tough job, and she did a good job at that. Because there’s always
tensions about playing one off the other.
Schrager: She seemed hard on the humanities to me.
Taylor: Yeah, she is.
Schrager: As a humanities faculty, I was . . .
Taylor: Yeah, I think that’s true. I think the college has been hard on the humanities faculty since the
beginning of days. At the beginning it was okay. And then, if you look at hiring, humanities have
increasingly lost. I don’t think we have an American historian at all now. I think we have one historian,
period; maybe two, one Russian and one French. That’s it. But not to have an American historian . . .
Schrager: Right as we speak, Stacey Davis is in Denver interviewing at the American Historical
Association meetings. And Nancy Koppelman, if she’s well enough, is flying out to join her.
Taylor: Well, Nancy is an American historian.
Schrager: American studies, historian as her main.
Taylor: Yeah, so it’s wrong. So has Nancy been sick?
Schrager: Yeah, she’s just getting over a cold.
Taylor: Oh, okay. So there’s . . .
Schrager: . . . there’s hope.
Taylor: . . . there’s hope. Well, that’s good, because I just—because since Michael Pfeiffer left, we
haven’t had one. And then David Marr, and Rudy [Martin]. Yeah. We did have some, but now . . . okay.
So that’s good.
Schrager: You have to go, Nancy, so we’ll pick this up next time.
Taylor: Yeah, okay. We’ll pick it up next time. Because we need to talk about Kobe. We need to talk
about my time as dean.
Schrager: Right. And your research as an historian.
Taylor: We need to talk about my book.
Schrager: And some of your favorite stories that you haven’t told yet.
Taylor: Okay. Yeah, there’s a lot of little stuff there.
33

Schrager: Being a true believer, which you mentioned when we first talked.
End of Part 2 of 2 of Nancy Taylor on 1-5-17

34


Nancy Taylor
Interviewed by Sam Schrager
The Evergreen State College oral history project
February 24, 2017
FINAL

Taylor: Did you ever teach with Charlie McCann? I only did it once, but it was quite an experience,
because he was not a very public person. What he wanted to do more than anything else was just read.
He didn’t want to process it; he just wanted to read. And his idea about seminar was, he said, “I don’t
know how to teach. I just read.” And he made all the students just read. And they worked harder than
any students. He got students to work amazingly hard. And when they’d come to the University of
Washington, Fritz—because people knew Fritz knew Evergreen—people in the English Department
would call up and say, “What do I do about this student?”
And Fritz said, “Who wrote the evaluation?” And if they said Charlie McCann, and it was good,
Fritz said, “Admit him right now.” Because he had such high standards.
Schrager: So what would happen in seminar if they just read? Would they just talk about it?
Taylor: I guess they just talked about it. But he didn’t lead. But somehow, he set an expectation and a
seriousness that you just came prepared.
Schrager: Why don’t you just tell me about the Milton, just so—
Taylor: Have you turned this on?
Schrager: I just did.
Taylor: Okay. So, yeah, this is a good story. This is in the program Great Books and Great Questions, or
Great Questions and Great Books. Anyway, with Charlie and Gil Salcedo and Gordon Beck, and it was
the Great Books program of the year. I ended up coordinating it, and not feeling at all like I knew what I
was doing, but because David Marr was supposed to do it, and he became dean.
We read a big chunk of the Bible. We read a lot of Greek stuff, and then we read a big chunk of
the Old Testament, and then we read the New Testament, and we read Dante. It was a standard Great
Books thing, except for a lot of the Bible.
And when we got to Milton, about April, Charlie McCann stood up and said to the students,
“You are better prepared to read Milton than any other student in the United States,” or something like
that. He said, “You are freshmen, and you have read absolutely everything that Milton’s going to refer

1

to. You’re ready.” And it was true. It was the first time I’d ever read Milton. And the discussions were
good, and students were quite proud of themselves. It was probably the hardest book of the year.
Schrager: And it was built on the Bible?
Taylor: It was built on the Bible; it was built on Dante. It was a really good intellectual program. The
atmosphere, the faculty bonding wasn’t as good as some of the other programs. There was no social
element in this program, which I always insisted on—and that’s not the atmosphere that was created.
But the intellectual atmosphere was really good.
And David was my dean, and he came. I always used to write letters of self-evaluation. I always
used to write them as a letter, rather than a self-evaluation. I think Leo taught me to do that. And
sometimes I would write them to the team, and sometimes I’d write them to a dean, and sometimes I’d
write them to my sister. It didn’t matter. But it meant that I had an audience that I was writing to,
rather than just an abstract thing. And that year, I wrote to David, because, I said, “You’re responsible
for this.”
Schrager: Would you be interested in talking about the books, since we started there? We can come to
this at the end, or we can just start with it.
Taylor: Last night, I typed out all the programs that I had been in; and 28 teams over the time that I was
teaching, 28 different teams. And I taught group contracts maybe three or four times, and individual
contracts maybe twice. And I was in the Library one year for two quarters. But mostly, I taught
coordinated studies in teams, preferably at least three and four. I mean, that was my career. That’s
what I did. And so I wrote them all down last night, and counted up all the people, just to see; just
because I wanted to have a record of that.
And I was saying earlier that it seemed like every program—lots of books I would have known,
or gradually, they wouldn’t be the first time read, although there were always books that I had never
read. I used to say to people, when summer came, “Oh, such a relief.” I don’t have to read a book that
weekend. Because every weekend, I was reading a book. And lots of times, it was something that was
totally new.
But it seemed like every team, every year, a book stood out. And I just thought last night about
books that stand out. And I didn’t look back at any programs or anything. It’s just they still stand out.
And they’re a big array. It’s not what you’d normally think. Emily Dickinson, for some reason; we were
reading Emily Dickinson and for some reason, I did more than just read it; I decided that this was
important, and it’s “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” I mean, it’s still—I don’t know poetry, I don’t know
Emily Dickinson very well, but that year, I spent—
2

And I connect all of this with the best side of faculty development. Because, how many people
are so lucky in their career to spend—what?—40 years learning. It’s better than going to graduate
school. And at Evergreen—well, for me—it was not like being a graduate school student and digging
deep into one thing. It was easy to call it dilettante-ism. It was breadth. But I got to read all these
different books in all these different fields, and get myself educated in a way that you don’t in graduate
school. I mean, you learned to become an anthropologist, but you don’t have the opportunity to read
the breadth of stuff that we did.
So I just wrote down some books. The first one was [Tzvetan] Todorov, because he just died.
You know who he is? I read that in a program when I was teaching with two community college
teachers at North Seattle Community College. It was called something about exploration, and it had a
lot to do with South America. It was stuff that I had no idea. And we didn’t have very good students,
and we didn’t have very many students, but we read Todorov. And it was tough, and it left an
impression. So when he died, I said, “Ah, I remember reading that.” And I never would have read that.
So that was one.
Tennyson, I said earlier, In Memoriam, which Susan Preciso wanted to read. And, again, you
know, Tennyson is something that you don’t think you’d read. But there it was.
And that same year, my favorite book of all time, Middlemarch—I’ve probably read that six
times, and it’s very fat. Maybe I’d read it before. But if you ask for my favorite book of all time, that’s it.
Schrager: And why?
Taylor: I got lost in her story, and . . . I don’t know. I haven’t read it for a while now, but I could go back
and read it. You get so irritated about her relationship with Casaubon and with what—have you read it?
Schrager: Yes, in college.
Taylor: And for students, it was a slog. It was hard. Some of them really took to it. But that program
that both Tennyson and Middlemarch come out of, when I think about that program now, I cannot
believe we did it, and I cannot believe a program doing it today. And it was the year that the Supreme
Court Justice Thomas was interviewed, because I remember students were just really upset about that.
Schrager: Anita Hill.
Taylor: Yeah, Anita Hill. And students were furious. But in that program—1994 or ‘95—we read about
10 Victorian novels. We read Bleak House, we read Middlemarch, we read a Wilkie [Collins],
Moonstone, we read Wuthering Heights, and then In Memoriam. And then we read Darwin, and we
read history—industrialization; stories about health. Janet Ott was in it, and so we did a lot of history of

3

science. The students all did a major research project—a big one. And they were reading all these fat
novels. Vanity Fair. I mean, they were all like 600 pages. And they did it. And the group was strong.
I wish I could remember the name of those two students. One was named Rhonda, and the
other one might have been Christina. They were two very smart women. One was from Shelton, named
Rhonda, and she ended up working in the State Legislature. Pretty conservative; coming to Evergreen
because it was close, and she could live at home. A little bit older. But really willing to work. And then
this other person, who had blue hair; was a hippie; was very smart; was totally on the other side of the
political spectrum; from California. And she ended up going to St. John’s graduate school.
And they met, and I remember having a conversation with Rhonda. She says, “I just can’t
believe I can be friends with somebody with blue hair.” But they absolutely bonded, and loved it. In
fact, I saw Rhonda maybe five years later, and she still remembered. They didn’t stay friends after they
left. But it was about these big novels that they were reading.
That was a good program. And that was another program that I ended up coordinating, because
Jin Darney was supposed to be the coordinator, and she became dean. But she decided that even
though she was dean, she wanted to be in this program. She read all the books and came to every
faculty seminar. That was just what she wanted to do. So we didn’t lose her. And that’s why Susan
Preciso was hired, because Jin left.
So it was Susan and Jan Ott and me. And Jan Ott was way in over her head in the literature and
had to really struggle, because it was so much reading. But she did the history of science. And we did
statistics, because the idea was statistics was started in the nineteenth century, so we found a way to do
statistics. That was a strong program.
So, other books. Willa Cather, My Antonia. The problem with that book—I love it, and I was so
invested in it, and in loving it, and the students didn’t like it, and they just blew it off because it was too
slow and too unexciting. I taught that with Helena Knapp with a group of reentry women, the Ajax—
Schrager: You mentioned that.
Taylor: Yeah. And it just didn’t work, even though I wanted it to, desperately. And whenever I was in a
seminar where I really, really wanted—I liked something and really wanted to have a good conversation,
I would work too hard at it, and it wouldn’t work. Did you find that true, if you were too invested?
Schrager: I hadn’t thought about that.
Taylor: That was one case, but it’s still one of my favorite books. De Tocqueville. You just got so much
mileage out of de Tocqueville whenever we read de Tocqueville. It’s a memorable book and strong
book, but that wasn’t one of those ones that sort of came out of the blue, you know, because I would
4

have pushed it. And same way with Machiavelli. When I taught with Merv, when we did Two Cities, we
read Machiavelli, and we read Castiglione. You know?
Schrager: Yeah.
Taylor: Do you know the word sprezzatura?
Schrager: Yeah, but I don’t remember what it means.
Taylor: It means that you can do something brilliantly but effortlessly. So, if you were a gentleman, you
could play music, or you could dance, or you could ride a horse, and it looked like you just were gifted
with this skill without doing anything. And, in fact, you would have spent hours and hours and hours
training. So it’s a very strong compliment. It looks effortless, but you know behind it, it has hours and
hours of work. That description, from Castiglione, has always stayed with me.
Schrager: What context was this book?
Taylor: That was Two Cities of Destiny, when we were reading about Florence. And we read
Machiavelli, we read [Giorgio] Vasari, we read some economic primary sources about the Medici, we
read about Michelangelo. We started with Dante, the book On Government. We didn’t read Divine
Comedy, we read On Government, which was a very good book to read because you could—it was a
political science book, basically, and you could work through what it was. I remember the seminars on
that were good.
Then here’s another book. Don Quixote, we read the whole thing. It was with Nancy Allen, and
it was a program called Great Books in Context, or Classics in Context. We started with Antigone, and
then we read the French Antigone and a Spanish Antigone, and the students wrote their own Antigone.
The theme was how a book would be seen in different contexts. And that was the one I chose, and then
Nancy chose Don Quixote. We read the whole thing. And this was a program for first year students.
Another thing I wrote down here was a bunch of students that I remember. Well, I’ll take a little
detour here. There was a student who was a basketball player from Long Beach. Can I give names, is
that all right?
Schrager: Sure.
Taylor: Well, his name was Tuggy. His name was Trelton, actually, but he went by Tuggy. And it was
the year—1997 or something—that Evergreen decided to have a league basketball team, and
deliberately went out and recruited. And we got five or six African-American men from Los Angeles who
came to Evergreen. And they were freshmen; they were all 18 or something.
They had no understanding of the college, or Olympia, or why to come here, but they were
recruited, and they were given money. None of them had money, so it wasn’t a basketball scholarship,
5

it was just need-based money. And they arrived, and were put into programs without—in a way, I think
it’s one of the most—it was unethical what the college did.
So they started playing basketball, and we had—Nancy Allen and Argentina Daley and I had this
program called Classics in Context, and we got three of these students. Now, what in the world was
going on in any advisor’s mind or anything that would put these students in this program that was going
to read Antigone in 10 versions, Don Quixote; and then the third book of that quarter was Jack London,
because Argentina had chosen Jack London; so short stories and Martin Eden? And then I don’t know
what we did the next quarter.
But these students were not prepared, and it covered topics that were completely out of their
interest. So Tuggy was in my seminar. Nice kid, very good basketball player. And about the third week
of the program, the students—it was regular seminars, but they had to do historical background stuff for
what was going on, and they had to do reports. It was a planned-out program, like most, and they had
to do quite a bit of writing. And these three women teachers. And we got along pretty well, although
we hadn’t done much planning before this all started.
And I had conferences with everybody, which I always did after a couple weeks, and Tuggy came
in and he wasn’t doing anything. He wasn’t doing any research, he wasn’t reading the books; he didn’t
have a clue, and he wasn’t doing anything. And we had a very, rather frank conversation. And I said—I
can just remember the words—I said, “Tuggy, are you in college or aren’t you?” And he left, sort of
hanging his head, and he came back the next day and he said, “I’ve quit the basketball team. I’m in
college.”
And he started to work. And we worked really hard, because he didn’t have skills. I met with
him and we worked on writing, and we would figure out—I remember he did something on [Marcus]
Garvey. We figured out something so that he was able to do something that was more interesting. But
he did some research on Don Quixote, and he ended up getting full credit, and the students in the
program respected him, and he liked the seminar. The people, I mean, it was pretty welcoming. And in
January, he joined the basketball team again. So the whole winter and the whole fall, he was a student.
And he stayed in the program for the length of the program. The students went to the
basketball games. Nancy and I went to, I think, every basketball game. They were good. They won
some games. He ended up graduating in four years. He then went to Europe as a basketball player.
Didn’t like it. Came back. And I’m still in touch with him. He wrote to me about a year ago, or more
than that, and said, “Do you remember me? I want to go to graduate school. Will you write me a letter
of recommendation?”
6

He had gone back to Long Beach, and then helped start an Upward Bound program at Long
Beach Community College, and had been working there for like 10 years. And he decided he needed to
go to graduate school in counseling, to do a better job in his job. So he was applying to Long Beach
State to get into—and now, that’s where he is. I heard from him not very long ago. And he’s one of
those huge success stories, and it was all because I said, “Are you in college or aren’t you?”
And he remembered. And when I wrote the letter of recommendation, I told this story; and I
guess it worked because he got in. But I said, “You remember that?” And he says, “Oh, yeah, I
remember. I remember.” Anyway, that’s all because—I remember the book, Don Quixote.
And then, here’s another book. When we were teaching Cultural Codes, and we read [Clifford]
Geertz’s story about the cock—what’s it called?
Schrager: “Notes on a Balinese Cockfight.”
Taylor: Yep. And I think we must have read some other stuff by Geertz.
Schrager: You read his essay “Thick Description.”
Taylor: That’s right, yeah.
Schrager: Those are his two most famous—
Taylor: And I’d never heard of him before, and then I read some more. And so when I wrote my book,
[Cousins in Love: The Letters of Lydia DuGard, 1665-1672] there’s this sentence, and it’s all because of
you and Clifford Geertz. Yep. Oh, from “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Because I say:

However, as Clifford Geertz has said, the self is constructed within a network of social values and relationships.
Reading Lydia’s story involves uncovering at least three codes in this network—the code of accepted women’s behavior, of
family and kin relationship, and of romantic love.

So the whole introduction is all based on your introducing me to Clifford Geertz. So that was
good.
Have you ever read Kokoro?
Schrager: With you.
Taylor: Yeah. Did we read that in . . .?
Schrager: It was with . . .
Taylor: . . . Cultural Codes maybe.
Schrager: It was either Cultural Codes or Love and Work.
7

Taylor: It wasn’t Love and Work, because we didn’t do anything with Japanese, did we? Because
Setsuko was teaching in Cultural Codes, so I bet it was there. That’s such a great book. So that one.
Schrager: What is it about that book that it sticks with you? I loved that book myself.
Taylor: I loved that book, but it’s such a captivating story. Nothing happens, but you cannot stop
turning the pages, because you get into the mind of this man. And it is one of those stories where
there’s three points of view, and so you come to some conclusion, and then you read another point of
view and you have to come to the totally different conclusion, and then you read another and you have
to come to the totally different conclusion. So it’s one of those like The Bridge Over the River Kwai,
where you realize the point of view. We got a book group to read that, and everybody likes it. And it
tells you a lot about Japanese culture, and then about [Natsume] Soseki.
I don’t know if we want to do more books. They’re hugely different. Wallace Stegner, Crossing
to Safety Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. Moby Dick. I read Moby Dick with Hiro [Kawasaki] and David
Marr. That’s where my respect for Hiro just went through the roof. He had never read it before, and his
ability to cut through things in a different way was memorable.
Now, Wallace Stegner, I think we read in Love and Work. Crossing to Safety. Yeah. Erik Erikson,
I read in the very first program I was in, Human Development. I didn’t like it much, and I never bought
into it. But the thing about these programs, it forces you to become familiar with stuff that you would
normally not read. So it’s all part of getting educated. Invisible Man, did I read that with you?
Schrager: Likely. You were in Cultural Codes with me.
Taylor: Yeah. And David Marr. I think that might be his favorite book of all time.
Schrager: I thought of him more than once.
Taylor: Yeah. And then another thing that has to do with faculty development and Evergreen is: In
college, I never took a Shakespeare class. Ever. And yet, if someone asks me, “What do you know
about?” or “What did you teach?,” Shakespeare comes to my mind first. And I have taught Shakespeare
nine quarters—so three years—where I’ve done nothing but read Shakespeare. And I’ve read
everything Shakespeare wrote. And then, because of the connection with Fritz, I’ve spent so much time
at the Shakespeare meetings that are in Stratford, which happen every other year, and I’ve probably
gone to 10 meetings. So I know lots of Shakespeare scholars, and I’ve been to lots of meetings.
And so it’s through teaching, and through connections, that I have become a scholar of
Shakespeare, to the extent that I am of anything. I think that’s sort of odd and lucky, and a pretty good
thing. I first taught Shakespeare with Peter Elbow in 1975 or something. It was a program called
Shakespeare and Writing, and Peter, as a writing teacher, believed in lots of writing. He believed in, he
8

used to call it “cooking,” I think. He wasn’t very interested in the editing part; he was most interested in
the getting it out part. And his belief was you’ve just got to write and write and write, and then you’ll
find something good in what you write. Whereas I also taught with Mark Levensky, or with Fritz, and
their style of writing is you do all your editing in your head, and when it gets down on the paper, those
precious 10 words are there, and they’re done. Once it’s on the paper, you don’t edit because you’ve
done all the processing. And Peter is the opposite.
So the program was called Shakespeare and Writing, and the belief was if you read good things,
it will have impact on your writing. So every student had to write 15 pages a week, and we read two
plays a week, and we talked about the plays and we talked about the writing. It kind of worked, but that
was my first—I had not read much Shakespeare before. I had done a few plays, done a few things, but
not much. Those early years, I was out on a limb most of the time. And I probably wrote the 15 pages a
week, knowing me—that’s what you did, you did everything—and it was memorable.
And I went back, and the next thing I did was teach Shakespeare in the Age of Elizabeth, with
Peter and Richard Jones and Leo Daugherty. It was a year-long program, and we read 30 plays, I think.
And we did a lot of history, we did a lot of religion.
Then I did Shakespeare another year, with Jin Darney and Don Finkel. And then I did another
quarter with Hilary Binda. Do you remember her? And then my last teaching at Evergreen, in 2008, was
called Playing Shakespeare, and Fritz and I did it for just one quarter. So it’s fun to think about how, just
through the luck of choosing, so that I am comfortable with Shakespeare, which, if you’d asked me that
in 1971, wouldn’t be possible.
Schrager: Shakespeare is how central to Fritz’s professional life?
Taylor: It’s not central, but in about 1980 or something, he was invited to the Conference at Stratford,
which is an invitation-only—about 200 people come—and it was during the fad of Shakespeare studies,
where historicism was coming in. And every scholar of Shakespeare would take some historical incident
for their first paragraph, and then they would go from there to the play.
And Fritz was sort of the “make history true.” He was the truth-tester. Because people were
doing stuff that historians looked askance at. They were using history for their own literary purpose. So
Fritz became the one that truthed people about history. So he had a role, and he was respected.
And then, once you get invited to that meeting, you get invited again. So we’ve gone, and I
could tail on. But I was the one teaching Shakespeare; he wasn’t. [laughing] So then I had connections
with all the people that were there. And we’re still friends with all those people. But it is not really
what he does. He’s read a lot, and when we taught together, he always came to it as a historian.
9

Actually, there’s sort of an interesting story about that program, 2008—my last program—as a
post-retirement contract, and so we just sort of showed up, and we were given a seminar room, or an
office in the Seminar building, and didn’t have much to do with the college. It was a very different kind
of teaching. We had pretty good students, and we did two brilliant things that made it work. Because
Fritz was leery, because he didn’t feel like he was an expert enough. He was coming at this differently
than I. Always was.
I learned, from teaching with Hilary, about performance. And it wasn’t that we required
students to perform, as a full play, but once a week, we had this thing. It was called the “Hundred-line
exercise.” We gave groups of students—like four or five students—a hundred lines, and another group
of students that same hundred lines, so we had little teams. And they had to prepare those hundred
lines. They didn’t have to memorize them, but they had to prepare them. They had to block out the
scene; they had to understand what it was; and they had to then—one group would perform it, and
another group would perform it, and then the program would critique it.
And it meant that students figured out what was going on. I remember there was one about
Richard II or something, where they had to throw the gauntlet. And when they read it through, they had
no clue what was going on. And then they figured it out, and they got a glove, and they performed it.
And there were just like eyeballs. People got it. And it was just showing that through performance.
So we did that. It was the favorite part of the program, so we did that every week. And we
would choose the hundred lines, where there was something that they had to figure out. And usually, it
wasn’t a soliloquy, it was something where they had to act. That was one thing that we did that was
brilliant.
And the other thing, because nobody had seen Shakespeare performed—you don’t go to a play
in Olympia, and most students had never seen it performed—so we did a lot of film. And neither Fritz
nor I had a background in understanding film, but some of the students did. And so there were a couple
of students that became sort of the leaders—I learned a little of this from Caryn Cline, because I worked
with Caryn Cline once. It’s multitasking. Students were much better at being able to figure out what
was going on in the film in terms of the director and the camera and the music and the acting, and how
the text was changed because of the film. Maybe we saw five different versions of the opening of
Hamlet, all on film. And that was good. That was my last teaching, in 2008.
Schrager: And you were still improvising.
Taylor: Still improvising.

10

Schrager: That’s great. Well, I’m thinking maybe a good next topic would be your work as dean of
hiring and faculty development. Those two went together for you. Right? That’s still what it is.
Taylor: Oh, yeah, that’s still what it is. Yeah.
Schrager: Faculty development of others seems interesting to me. We’ve talked quite a bit about your
own development.
Taylor: So, yeah, I was hired—in 1999, I think—to be dean of faculty hiring and faculty development. I
had applied to be dean once before, and at that time, I had applied to be Core dean, which made a lot of
sense. I was turned down. I was, I think, a little bitter about it, because there was politics involved in
the appointment. I’m pretty sure I could have done a better job.
But anyway, so then I applied, and the job was faculty hiring and faculty development. When I
got that job, and throughout the time, I realized that’s the best dean’s job. It’s absolutely the best
dean’s job. You’re not telling people “no” very much, and I made a point of being very involved with the
faculty, and that was part of it. It was not about money. So anyway, it was the best dean’s job.
And the deans’ team, at that time, I think, was unusually good. At least it was unusually
compatible. Jin Darney, John Cushing, Susan Fiksdal, Bill Bruner, and I started. And eventually, Susan
was replaced by Russ Fox, and Lee Lyttle was in the Library after Bill Bruner, I think. And Don Bantz
replaced John Cushing in the last year. And Barbara [Smith] was there as Provost for two years, and the
third year was Enrico—what was his last name? I don’t even remember. I think he’s gone in
everybody’s mind. However, I do have a story about him that was significant for me.
So anyway, Barbara was quite wonderful, in terms of dean direction and dean help. I met once
a week with her. And she was very supportive of me. She once told me that she was surprised, that I
took to being dean faster than anybody else that she’d been around, so it was natural what I did. And it
was natural because I was just doing it. I don’t know. I guess I was just prepared because I’d been there
long enough.
But the first year, I think we hired eight or nine people. And the second year, maybe 13. And
the third year, maybe 10. Something like that. So it was pretty heavy hiring. The first year, I think, the
number—one of the things you ask is about multicultural. The pressure was definitely on to hire faculty
of color. And I think, out of the first group, six of the seven or something were. And the next year, I
think 11 of the 13 were women. And how that happened was just organic. There was consciousness,
but there was no controversy particularly—well, maybe with a couple of exceptions.
And I guess, in some ways, the story doesn’t have a very happy ending, because lots of those
people are gone. They didn’t stay. Some very good ones did, but some left. And more people of color
11

left than not, I think. In some cases, maybe they were—you take somebody like Babacar [M’Baye], who
did a good job. But he came not knowing what he was coming to; and in the end, I think, decided that
he didn’t want to be in a place that did education innovation. I think he’s at Bowling Green or
somewhere now, or Purdue or something.
He was so funny. I called to offer him the job, and he said, “Wonderful! I’ll take it.” I had had
enough of a relationship with him over the phone, because he asked a bunch of questions, like “What
should I wear?” Or, “What’s going to happen?” He just didn’t—this was new to him.
So I said on the phone, “It’s customary to wait a day or two. Go talk to your family, and go talk
to your advisor. Go think about this. The offer’s not going to disappear tomorrow. You don’t have to
say ‘yes’ right now.” And the next day, he called back and said, “Yes!” But I think just the idea that he
would be offered a job was just mindboggling. And he did a good job for a while, but then—and there
were some others that were similar to that.
So faculty hiring was like a machine. I mean, I had wonderful Deborah Blodgett, who was in the
dean’s area as my administrative assistant. We had a smooth operation, labor-intensive. I did discover
that if you want to have a successful hire in an area where the people—the faculty itself—are at odds,
you absolutely have to put all camps onto the committee. You can’t get a committee that’s going to hire
one that they’ll all agree with, but you can get support if everyone is involved. It was particularly true
with the Art History hire, because there were just camps. And I think that with Comparative Religion.
You’ve got to put the controversy upfront, where it has to get solved at that level, rather than
bring somebody in and then have people from the other camps complain. There were a number of
cases like that, where the job description was broad enough that it could bring controversy. It wasn’t
clear. But I was pretty successful at getting those groups to function. I was also totally aware that I
didn’t have much power at all. The committees did have quite a bit of power, and the faculty had quite
a bit of power. The dean had no special power in that, and I don’t think people realized that, but I had
no special power. I guess I could have eliminated somebody, but I couldn’t choose.
But then, we had to have two hiring committees. Two hiring DTFs were operating at the same
time. I got one of my very smart ideas, I thought. I just had to pick somebody to run the other
committee, because we had double, and I was running one. One year, I asked Carolyn Dobbs to do it,
and she was a natural. I mean, she’d done that sort of thing. The next year, I asked Clyde Barlow. And I
didn’t know Clyde very well, but he was perfect, and he did the job, and that was good.
So that was going on. And the faculty development part was not what I even knew about. I
came in as faculty Hiring Dean. That’s what I was thinking of. But for Barbara, the development part
12

was the most important. And Barbara really guided and helped. She had been doing so much with the
Washington Center, and I worked with the Washington Center. There was a woman named Janine. Do
you know who that was? She worked with Emily . . .
Schrager: Lardner.
Taylor: Yeah, who was Emily Decker at that time, and she had taken over for Barbara, and she worked
with Jean MacGregor. Janine wasn’t a particularly creative person, but she was a management person.
And at that time, summer institutes were free-for-alls. There was a little bit of money, and the faculty
were asked, “Propose a summer institute. We’ll support as many as we have money for. And let it go.”
So these institutes: go walking in Mount Rainier, go read five books, go paint. And some of
them were fantastic, and some of them were boondoggles, I think, fair to say. But there was really no
logic. It was just faculty support, with a little bit of money. You got $100 a day to go hiking at Mount
Rainier and meet your colleagues, or whatever. Some people thought that was the best one that ever
happened. So, you know, there was all over the place.
So I then inherited the idea of summer institutes, and any other kind of faculty development.
And I did two or three things of significance, I think. I felt a big obligation to new faculty, so the faculty
that I had hired that year—I organized the first new faculty retreat, which went Port Ludlow. It was the
first year of Les Purce’s presidency. So, as a new person, he came; and then, he came to every one after
that. He loved it. It was three or four days. Matt Smith had designed something for new faculty before,
which was on campus; and we did the Matt Smith plan, which was really a self-introduction kind of
orientation. We did that on campus, and then we left, and we went to Port Ludlow. And Barbara paid
for it, and Barbara came, and all the deans came. And it was hugely successful.
And we did a version of the design-your-own-program thing that the Washington Center had
done, where people were in groups and they had to design a program, and we did a lot of selfintroduction. I remember Nancy Murray talking about it, because she went through it the next year.
And when she became dean, she said, “I’m going to do that again.” But she was leery about it at first,
that it was going to be too touchy-feelly kind of thing. But it was, I thought, really successful. And we
did that then for all three years, and I think Rita Pougiales continued it.
Unfortunately, in my mind—but this, I can see how it would change—by the time Rita was doing
it, staff people felt left out, because it was just faculty. And it changed from a retreat of orientation to
the faculty culture to an orientation. So the Admissions person would come, financial aid would come.
And it was, you know, one hour of this and one hour of that; and get to know the librarians, and get to
know all the people. And it was changed from we did it at Port Ludlow one year, and the next two years,
13

we did it at Lake Quinault—which was significant because it was far away. Then it was done at
Alderwood, and it was an hour away, so people came for an hour and left. And the whole thing
changed. Not bad; different purpose. And what I had designed, which I thought had a different purpose
and was really useful, died.
But that was one thing I did, and Barbara absolutely supported, and there was money to do it.
And the new faculty, they were not just new faculty, but were teamed up. So there was as many old
faculty as new faculty. Everybody had a buddy. And I remember George Freeman and Betsy Diffendal,
they were the social chairmen, and it was so funny. It was just wonderful, the sort of the group spirit,
especially the two at Lake Quinault, when George and Betsy took on the challenge of making the group
cohere.
So that was one thing of faculty development that I did. Then the new faculty I met with at least
once a month all through the year, so that they became a coherent group. It was especially effective the
second year, with people like Nancy Murray and Martha Rosemeyer. And there were lots of women in
that group. And the new one-year hires were included, which I thought was important. So it wasn’t
just—it was all teachers, everybody that was new.
And then, a sidelight to that—and I credit Greg Mullins, but it was sort of Greg and Lance [Laird].
And it was because they were living in Seattle, I think, and they started a group called the “New and
Nearly New.” Do you remember that? It was about faculty development. It was, how do you be a
faculty member at Evergreen when you don’t know what’s going on? And so it was “New and Nearly
New,” and it met pretty regularly, both social and specific tasks. I know we met about writing
evaluations. I think Greg’s motive was, how do you figure out who to teach with if you don’t know
anybody? So it was about teams; it was about, how do you form teams? So it was putting people
together so they’d have a chance to find out what common interests they had. So that happened all
through the time, but it started my first year as dean, and then it went on. And I supported those.
And then, the summer institutes. I convinced Barbara. We did this deal. [laughing] I convinced
Barbara that the most effective faculty development would be program planning, and that we ought to
pay people to do program planning. And she thought that was something that the faculty should do on
their own. So we made a deal that people could have a week’s worth of program planning time, but
they all had to show up for the first hour and do something collaboratively, like it was about writing or it
was about conflict resolution, or it was about something. So there was an hour, and then, you could go
home. But you had to come for the first hour, and then you could go and do planning together. And
you couldn’t just be a team that went to the beach together. You had to come, and then you had to
14

come back at the end of the day, and do something. That was Barbara’s requirement, making it a little
more official. I think that part of it died, but when I was there, that happened every year. And it was
very popular.
Schrager: I remember it happening, and being really grateful to you that you pushed it, and got that to
happen. Because it made a big difference.
Taylor: It made a big difference for teams. And my team, we always did it. Because you’re going to do
it anyway, and to have it be a little orchestrated, and force your team to be together and do it, it meant
for better programs.
Schrager: Well, I think, to be remunerated for it is symbolically really significant.
Taylor: Yeah. And it was only, I think, it was first $100 a day, and then it was $125 a day. So we did
that, and that started out the first summer of when I was dean. And I don’t know if it still goes on. I
don’t think it does, because I don’t think, after Barbara left, I don’t think the Provost had faculty
development in mind, to this day. I don’t know how much faculty development is going on.
But I didn’t know very much about faculty development—I still don’t—but I read quite a bit, and
then I went to a number of conferences. Jin and I went to conferences, and Barbara, at that time, was
president of AAU, American Association of Universities or something. And there was a big meeting in
New Orleans. And she was president, so she insisted that Jin and I and, I think, all the deans went, to
support her, but also just we went.
And then she says, “Well, you know, when you go to these conferences, you learn a lot of things.
But we’re in New Orleans!” [laughing] And so she would insist that we went to music, we went out to
fancy places to eat. We just, this is what you do. So, as Jin said, she taught us how to go to
conferences.” [laughter] And Barbara loved retreats. She had a good sense of humor. She loved
retreats—and I think those are gone, too—and so she was always pushing faculty retreats.
But also, faculty development, as dean, there were two major initiatives that I did. One was the
September Symposium, which happened on 9/11. It happened in 2001. It was scheduled for 9/12-1314, and it was in Tacoma. Did you go to that? And after 9/11, there was some thought that it should be
canceled. We decided the opposite; it’s the last thing that should happen. It shouldn’t be canceled. We
should be together.
And it was in Tacoma, which was my idea, and was really smart, because it was a good venue,
and it was Tacoma’s new building. They got to show off. It was a real conference. We had art, we had
plenary speakers and we had other speakers. That was 2001. So I think maybe that was Enrique’s
[Riveros-Schäfer] first year. Yeah, because he was supposed to give a talk. And at lunchtime, there was
15

opportunity—we made it so that—I remember Terese [Saliba] did something. There was political stuff
that happened because of 9/11, and a fear of what was going on. But also, the number of people
involved, it was huge. And everybody got paid, because it was before the 15 th of September. And I
remember even retired people came, and people got to share their work. And it was good, I thought. It
was very professional, and people liked it, and people attended. And then, because it was on 9/11, that
put a different twist to it.
The year before, the thing that I had done was in honor of Don Finkel. I did a huge Finkel
workshop. And Peter Elbow came from Massachusetts, and, I think, about a hundred faculty
participated. It was huge. It was in the Longhouse, and everybody designed a Finkel workshop, and
tried it out on other people. And everybody was given Don’s book, I think. Barbara paid for that, and
everybody got paid. And lots of people attended that. Did you do that one? It was good. And there
was a student that worked in the hiring office whose name was Jessie Fries-Kraemer, and I was in
England during the whole summer, and so I came back and she had planned it. I mean, she had done all
the legwork for it.
And it was in the Longhouse, and it was for a week. And people came and they worked. I
remember the one I did, I did with Peter Elbow, and with Thad Curtz maybe, and it was on Montaigne’s
essay on friendship. So that was another thing. I don’t know if anybody does anymore Don Finkel
workshops. But that was useful.
So, that was faculty dean and faculty development.
Schrager: So with the dean role—the hiring part of it—I have this idea in my mind, from my experiences
with faculty hiring, that there were some committees that I would call politicized, and others that were
not. And I felt I had a lucky track record of being on committees that were not politicized. And when I
was on a committee that was politicized, I was keenly aware and disturbed by it. And I was asked, on
two occasions, to be an observer who, as an interested faculty member, go to the talks, and read the
files. Because colleagues of mine said, “This is a politicized committee, and I would appreciate it if you
would”—
Taylor: There were some. Art history was. And so the subcommittee, I think there were seven people
on the committee, because the only way you could keep it from being—it was politicized, but at least
you had all parties on the committee. And that one was pretty ugly. And I don’t—I heard later about
comparative religion, because we didn’t—we had Lance [Laird]—Lance had already been hired, so I was
okay on that one.

16

Well, I do remember another one. And I don’t know if people, in the end, would have said it
was politicized or not. The person that was hired was not who I would have hired. But they came to an
agreement, the committee did. That person’s still at the college.
Schrager: So does that distinction work for you? Do you think, as Hiring Dean, would you be aware,
when the process was going on, of how the committee was functioning?
Taylor: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I had to intervene. I don’t know what stories you’re thinking
of, but I don’t think they were during my tenure. Maybe they were. The art history one was the only
one I remember. And then there were other ones where it felt like people were being forced onto—
forced hires. And there were a couple that fortunately they left, because they were really bad hires.
Really bad hires.
Schrager: Forced hires in what sense?
Taylor: Well, in one case, there was pressure to hire because of wanting a minority candidate, who was
an applicant. Shouldn’t have been hired. He’s gone. He lasted one year. If he hadn’t lasted, I would
have taken him to court. I mean, he was violent and scary, and shouldn’t have been on campus. And
we got rid of him. But he was hired because he was the right demographic. He shouldn’t have been
hired. I don’t know any other case that that happened.
Schrager: Well, the one committee that I think of, from our conversations, the African-American studies
hire, which I was not a member of the committee but—
Taylor: When Babacar [M’Baye] got hired?
Schrager: Yeah. And a friend on the committee asked me to—
Taylor: In favor of Babacar or against Babacar?
Schrager: For Babacar. I mean, I didn’t go into the committee work with a commitment to any of the
candidates, but I attended all the presentations because . . .
Taylor: . . . because there was fear that it wouldn’t go that way.
Schrager: Right, that it was going to be preconceptions and entrenched positions, and so I—and I had
an interest in the hire, because whoever got the hire I hoped to teach with.
Taylor: Yeah, I don’t actually remember.
Schrager: Well, it played out, in the end.
Taylor: It played out. Yeah, I don’t remember it being controversial in the end at all. But the ones that
were, and will continue to be, more controversial than anything, I mean, when you got hired, that was
super-controversial. And hiring of the part-time people when they become permanent, that’s always

17

nasty, because it’s insider-outsider thing. Those were much more difficult than hiring people of color, or
hiring women.
Schrager: Well, for my hire, I was a full-time visitor, so I was an inside candidate, and I would not have
been considered, I think, if I hadn’t been.
Taylor: Well, sometimes it worked that way, and sometimes it didn’t. But those are traditionally really
hard. And I don’t have bad feelings in my mind, so I don’t think any horrible thing happened when I was
dean. But I know there were bad stories. [chuckles] But I don’t think in my tenure. I don’t know.
Schrager: How long were you dean?
Taylor: I was only dean three years. And I think I hired maybe 25 people.
Schrager: Had you had enough?
Taylor: You know, I think back on it, and I don’t know really why I retired, except Jin was retiring, and Jin
and I had been great partners, and it was hard to imagine being in the dean’s area without Jin. And I
guess, I think, I’d just had enough. And the next year, when I taught—well, I didn’t know that I was
going to teach that, but the next program I taught was wonderful. So I . . .
Well, and the other thing, Barbara was gone, and Enrique was not . . . doing a good job. He left,
I think, the next year. So the college was feeling iffy. And I think I just sort of bowed out.
Schrager: Did he stay one year or two?
Taylor: Two. I think he only stayed two.
Schrager: You said you had a story about him.
Taylor: Well, I had one really good experience because of him, indirectly. He was hired, and I actually
had been on the hiring committee, and I had not supported him. He was a real compromise candidate.
And I was on the hiring committee, and I was suspect of his resume all along. But that committee was
political and really split. Other people gave As and Fs to people, and then he was the C for everybody.
So he got hired. And it was a mistake. And people came to know that, and he came to know that. He
wasn’t a bad person, he just didn’t have any ideas. And his strategy was just to close his office door and
be uninvolved, basically. And whatever he chose to do backfired.
So one of the things he chose to do was to get involved with China. And he didn’t have any
faculty support for this, but he had a connection with China. And he and I got along fine during that last
year—we had regular meetings and whatever—and then I went off to sabbatical; went to Cambridge.
And he developed this relationship with this university in Wuhan, China. And he needed to have some
faculty go. And it was September, and they needed to go in October. It finally had come through. And
so LLyn De Danaan was retired, and I was on sabbatical, and Fritz was an outsider. Fritz was declared
18

and Evergreener, and LLyn and Fritz and I went. And we got our visas in two weeks. Enrique wanted
this to happen. And he had met this woman who was paying for it, who was Chinese; who ran some
private schools in China; who wanted a connection to get Chinese students to come to Evergreen. And
she was going to pay for them. And there was this negotiation, and it was very complicated.
And Evergreen finally said, “We will do something with your Chinese students, but we need to
have some support for those students. So you need to pay for an international advisor in the advising
office.” And that international advisor was going to be for all kinds of international students, but was
going to take care of these Chinese ones, and the Chinese were going to pay for it a hundred percent.
And they signed a contract to do that.
So then, we were sent to this university in Wuhan, Wuhan University of Commerce or
something like that. It was a great experience for me. It was totally out of the blue. One day I didn’t
know I was going to China, and two weeks later I was there. And we were teaching, LLyn and Fritz and I,
and we had 125 students or something like that between the three of us. The students were in a special
program that the college had set up, and that they were paying extra tuition for, that was to expose
them to American professors, and that was going to guarantee that they would be able to come to
Evergreen for a year.
Now, Evergreen hadn’t accepted any of this. Or, what we were told, is that the Chinese signed
something, and then they would begin the conversation. They don’t have the conversation and then
sign something. So they had told the students that this was all going to happen. The students’ parents
had paid this money. And the students were all serious students. They were all from one-child families,
so the parents were, you know. Half of the students were computer science students, and half were
business students. And we had them for one month. That’s how long we were there. We were actually
there six weeks, but we had the students for one month.
And the students were released from every other class. They just had us. We met from 7:30 in
the morning till 2:00 every day. And the students were wonderful. I mean, they were much better than
the Japanese students I had taught. They were much more gutsy, much more willing to try. Their
English somehow was better—not good, but better than the Japanese students. And where they had
learned it, I don’t know.
And we did this program called American Values, I think. It was about the development of the
West. The American Values and the West. We read the Turner Thesis as a start. And then, we did
trains and cars and computers. We did development of technology. We did a lot of things in a month,
and this group of students loved it. As I said, they bonded as a group. And our task was to teach them
19

Evergreen style. So we were to make it be a coordinated studies, where they met each other, and they
worked together in groups, and they had teams.
We had them do an action research project, where they had to go in teams, and tally
information about transportation in the city of Wuhan. So they tallied at five minutes to 5:00 and at 10
minutes after 3:00 or whatever. They had to go and stand at these overpasses and count the number of
three-wheeled vehicles and bicycles and trucks and buses. And then, in the end, these teams had to
present their recommendation to the transportation committee of the city council, and that was us.
And the students had computers, and they knew spreadsheets. Their English wasn’t so good,
but they took all this data, and they came back and recommended that the city do public transportation,
and get rid of three-wheel vehicles that were spewing pollutants into the air. Because the town where
we were, the kids knew, from their growing up, that pollution was so heavy in that town that they
couldn’t see the hills anymore that used to be right there. So it was all about environmental—
But anyway, we had fun, and we did a good job. And at the end, this wonderful Chinese guy
wanted to give Fritz silk pajamas. And we told him, “Don’t spend any money on us. Start a scholarship
fund.” And so they did, and we presented them a big check. And they wanted to take us out to dinner
and we said no, we wanted to have a party. And so the dean paid for drinks and apples and chips and
stuff, and we had a big party for all these kids. It was great.
And I’m in touch with two of those students. Fritz is in touch with one, a guy who went to the
University of Stockholm from China. None of them came to Evergreen. The program died because it
was never financially viable. The poor Chinese dean was left hanging. His group didn’t support him. I
actually met his boss in London. Anyway, the whole thing that Enrique had designed was a total
disaster. Total disaster. There was no chance that this was going to happen. But the idea was that they
were going to send 20 students a year, and they were going to get an Evergreen degree. But that was
never in the cards.
But I had a great time. And I went because Enrique needed to have somebody go. But the other
thing we should talk about is Japan.
Schrager: We should, but maybe we should take a little break, because we’ve been talking for an hour
and 20 minutes.
Taylor: Ooh, okay. So I’ve done the September Symposium, and I’ve done Don Finkel. The faculty
retreats.

Break
20

Part 2
Taylor: So I just want to add this to the conversation about faculty hiring, and being dean of faculty
hiring, and what are the things that I instituted. One was to get students involved in hiring. And I’m
pretty sure that I was the first one that got a student member on the Hiring DTF. And I also got a
student member on every hiring subcommittee, and they were full members, with voting rights. And
the student on the subcommittee was given a tiny bit of money. It was enough for everybody to go out
and have pizza, basically, or they could go to Dairy Queen or something. But they invited two or three of
their friends, and they took the person out to dinner.
And it kind of depended on the student how successful it was, but it was more often successful
than not. And the candidates loved it. It was always the candidates’ favorite thing, because they were
talking to students. And the students that I remember—I remember when Stephen Engel did it—they
took it very seriously, and were influential in who got hired. I mean, they spoke up.
So I thought that was a good thing. I don’t know if it always worked, but it worked more often
than not.
Schrager: I remember candidates saying to me how much they enjoyed going out the students.
Taylor: Yeah. It made it feel real. And I remember, with the Shakespeare hire, for sure—when
Elizabeth was hired—there was a woman that was really very good—I mean, she would have been fine
here, too—but the students just didn’t spark. And she got hired by Bowdoin or something. She got a
very good job, but the students just didn’t warm to her. It was pretty funny. But anyway, that was
another thing with faculty hiring that I did.
Schrager: So, Nancy, let’s talk about Japan. Tell me about Kobe.
Taylor: When we first started talking, I hadn’t really made the connection. But in my early years—I
mean, when I was a child—we had Japanese people living with us, because they were protected because
my dad was a doctor and had these Japanese nurses, and they were going to be sent away to the
internment camps. So they lived with us, and I can remember that. And then, my dad got them train
tickets, and they got out and went to Detroit. And we kept in touch with those people.
So my connection with Japan wasn’t brand-new. There was something in there. And, in fact,
when I was at Stanford, I did a special research paper on the treatment of the Japanese in the
Northwest. Because my father was a doctor, who went to the Japanese camps down in Puyallup when
they were taken, to take care of them. And my grandpa was a farmer, who always competed with the
Japanese. So there was this family thing about one side of the family was supportive and one side of the

21

family was threatened. So the whole thing—the Japanese connection—was pretty natural when I ended
up going to Japan.
The first time I went to Japan was for a Shakespeare meeting in 1991. Fritz was invited to give a
paper. And we flew to Tokyo, and there was an Evergreen student whose sister lived in Tokyo, and that
student was from Olympia, and she was a student that we knew; both Fritz and I knew her, actually.
And so her sister was visiting the family, so they just turned over their house in Japan to us, which was
pretty unbelievable. So we stayed in this house in a ritzy part of Tokyo, which had a tatami room and
the whole business. And the husband of this student’s sister had equipped the house with all the food.
I mean, it was quite a lucky thing. He was head of the Baring Brothers, before they collapsed, for Asia.
Anyway, so that was my first introduction to Japan. We stayed there, and we went to these
Shakespeare meetings. And then, we went on—we went to Kyoto, and we went to the pottery towns,
because we were interested in pottery even at that point. And we were in Japan for three weeks.
And we came home and said, “This is wonderful. We need to go back to Japan.” And so I
applied to go on the Kobe Exchange. And fortunately, I was turned down. And I don’t remember who
got it. Oh, I remember, it was Gonzalo [Munevar]. But it would have been too fast. So I applied the
next year and was accepted. So there was a delay of a year, which enabled me to learn some Japanese.
So I went to school in the summer, every day, for two months or something, down at the
Language School. Learned some Japanese—not much, but enough, a little bit. And then went to Kobe
in, I think, the spring of 1994. I don’t know why my situation was the way it was—the program was
called American Culture or something like that, and I had a huge class, like a hundred students. I don’t
know how many you had, but other people had like 20 or something, but I had like over a hundred. And
they were all first-year students, and it was an elective.
And I lived in the Jutaku, and upstairs lived Toshi and Hiroko Umeno, and they had just gotten
married. And they introduced themselves, and then the two of them came to class every day, to my
class, and helped. They were lifesavers. And Toshi taught me how to do the Xerox machine, and all this
stuff.
I don’t know what kind of teaching you did, but the teaching that I did basically was English. But
I had this range of students, some that knew no English, and some that were pretty good; some that
could read a page, and some that could read nothing, and some that could read five pages or something.
So I told the students that they would get credit if they came. Then I had to figure out, how do I know if
they’re there? So every day, I would figure out some ingenious way of collecting something from them,

22

so that I could take attendance without calling for attendance. And they didn’t catch on that I was doing
that for quite a long time, so it was fine.
But I would ask them things like “Write a Japanese proverb,” or I would do something, and I
would collect it. And they also had to do journals, and they had to write in English. And I had them do a
fair number of team—two people. And Toshi helped. And it was like you did, you’d teach only two days
a week for an hour and a half or something. And I would come home, and I’d say to Fritz, “That didn’t
work.” And then we would dream up something for the next time.
And I was prepared to do some things. Like I brought Jacob Lawrence slides, and we did this
whole thing about African Americans and slavery, and we did it for several days. And that was pretty
good. And then I showed the film about the Civil War. Anyway, I did some pretty good things.
And I had one experience that you probably had, too. I had a couple of seniors, and it turned
out they were off interviewing for jobs, and so they didn’t show up, and they didn’t come to tell me.
And so they weren’t going to get credit because they hadn’t been to class. But they were caught. They
were off interviewing for jobs. And so we had some runarounds with that.
But basically, I had a good time teaching. And then I had a great time with—did you know
Takako [Tanaka] and Yoko. You probably knew Yoko Matsuda?
Schrager: Mm-hm.
Taylor: And I had all the women faculty came to tea at the Jutaku. We just had a good time. And
because one of the very first things we did when we got to Japan, we went down to Kyushu and did a
trip before school started in the first of April or something. And both Fritz and I went over to the
president to be welcomed. And we were waiting for him to come in, and we were sitting in the office.
And when he came back in, Fritz and I were talking, and we said, “Oh, you have a Tamba pot.”
Well, the president was very impressed that we knew what that was, because we had just been
to these potteries. So at that point, we were pretty good, and we got even better, at recognizing the
pottery from the Six Ancient Kilns. So when I left the college, in July, I had a special present from the
president that was a piece of pottery from a local potter, which we still have. I didn’t see him. I saw him
the first day, and I saw him the last day, so that was fun.
Schrager: And you got to know the Umenos.
Taylor: And then Umenos came the next year. And so one of the things the Kobe Exchange did—I
mean, to me, it was pretty life changing, culturally, and friends—but I think Evergreen people that went
to Japan, and then returned, knew that we had an obligation to the visitors, and took that pretty
seriously---nearly everybody that was in the Exchange when the new ones came.
23

So we took maybe five or six couples to Lopez. We always did things with them. But with Toshi
and Hiroko, we had bonded, and it was like they were like our children. And so we spent a lot of time.
And when they were here was when the Kobe earthquake happened. And they almost went home, but
decided not to. And one of the reasons they decided not to was that Hiroko’s mother and father moved
into the Jutaku, to their apartment, because their house in the city of Kobe was destroyed and they had
no place to live. And the wonderful president of Kobe Shodai recognized that this was the time to not
follow rules, and he let students put tents up in the yard, and he let these parents live in the Jutaku. I
mean, he was good. He was helpful.
And so Toshi and Hiroko were told, “Don’t come home. There’s no place for you.” So they
didn’t, so they stayed. Toshi and Hiroko had a really good year at Evergreen, and when they went back,
they had their child, the first girl.
And that’s when they wrote and said, “Would you be good parents to our daughter?”
And we wrote and said, “We think you mean godparents, and, of course.”
And they wrote back and said, “But what does that mean?”
And we said, “Well, it means that we’ll give your daughter an American name. She’s welcome to
come visit us anytime she wants, and we will remember her birthday and Christmas.” [laughing]
So they said, “That’s fine.” So we did, and we have.
And then the second one comes along, two years later, and they said, “Well, will you be her
godmother, too?”
“Of course.”
So the first one was named Anna, and the second one was named Rebecca, and they’re Yuri and
Rie. And we were back in Japan before Rie was born, so when Yuri was about two. And then they were
in England when Yuri was about five Rie was two, so we saw them again. And then they came to our
house for Thanksgiving one year, out of the blue, when the kids were pretty small. And then we didn’t
see them for a little while, until Yuri got cancer. You know that story?
We got this very sad letter from Toshi saying, “We have family troubles.” Yuri was nine, and she
had bone cancer in her leg. And she was admitted to the hospital, and she stayed in the hospital for a
year. Toshi took care of the younger sister, and Hiroko moved into the hospital. And she almost died.
She had major surgery, she had chemotherapy, and she has an artificial knee and an artificial bone down
her leg. She’s now 21 and she’s fine.

24

But it was very scary. And in Japan, it seems that that kind of family catastrophe is not talked
about. So they had nobody to talk to, so they talked to us. So we had regular correspondence. A lot.
Every week. And we sent presents, and we sent support. It was very, very scary.
And when Yuri got out of the hospital in July—she’d been there for a year—the first thing they
did was all four of them came to visit, to Bainbridge. And it was a big family deal. And Yuri was very
much overweight, because she’d been in the hospital all this time. She’d gone to school. But she was in
remission, I mean, she was okay. Then, from that year on—she was 10—they’ve come every year. But
after the first year, the parents didn’t come, so just the girls came. And the last two years, only Rie has
come, because Yuri is now in university.
But we’ve been in touch all the time. We’ve been back to Japan three times, four times since, I
guess. I think we’ve been in Japan seven times in all. And we always stay there, and they’re like our
children. I think Toshi must be 50-something.
So that connection with the family is what’s made Japan special to us. And then I did another
year of teaching. I don’t know if you knew about that. Two years later, we went to Nagoya. When we
were in Kobe, Fritz was sort of the trailing spouse. He didn’t have any responsibility. But the college
was very confused and concerned, because here they had this professor from the University of
Washington, and they had to recognize him. And then they took a vote to decide whether Fritz would
be invited to the welcome dinner. Did this happen for you and Laura? We had a welcome dinner up at
Seishin-chuo at the restaurant, and the faculty had to pay for this dinner, so were they going to pay for
Fritz as well? And they had a vote and said, “Yes.” So Fritz was included in all sorts of things. And he
was invited to give a lecture or two. And Fritz did things for himself. He gave lectures at Osaka and at
Kyoto and stuff.
But when we went to Nagoya—one of the people from Kobe Shodai had moved to Nagoya City
University, and she invited Fritz to come. She invited us both to come, but she could only get Fritz a
major job, where he had a seminar or two, and I taught a couple of classes in English. So that was two
years later. So that was a different teaching experience, not as good as Kobe Shodai.
But, I don’t know, we felt very welcomed, and we soaked it all up, and learned. I mean, if you
want to have a faculty development experience that sort of opens your eyes to multiculturalism, that
did it. Didn’t it for you?
Schrager: Very much.
Taylor: Yeah . . . and I tried hard to learn Japanese. I had tutors at every place, and I tried hard, but I’m
not—but I did understand how the language is put together. I did that much. And we found we could
25

get around everywhere. And I have kind of a love-hate relationship with Japan. There are some things
that—I hate the food, which is too bad. I like tempura, but I don’t like sushi, and I don’t like kombu,
which is in everything, and bonito flakes.
Hiroko laughs and she says, “I’m making yakisoba, but I won’t put bonito flakes on it. No bonito
flakes, no bonito flakes.”
And the way they treat women. And we had a lot of conversations about that, because there
were women on the faculty. Takako had left by the time you got there. You probably didn’t know her.
Schrager: I didn’t.
Taylor: She’s wonderful. We’re still in touch with her. Now, she’s just retired, She is a Faulkner expert.
Serious. She’s written on Faulkner. And she looks like a China doll. I mean, she’s just this very pristine,
gorgeous, frail—looks frail, but not. But she’s very smart, and very dedicated and conscientious. Never
had any children, because that wasn’t the life of a professor. It wasn’t possible. And she is in an
arranged marriage, but the marriage is great.
Schrager: Where did she go when left?
Taylor: She went to Nagoya City University, because her husband had a major professorship at the
University of Nagoya, and so she wanted to live with him. We’ve been to visit them three or four times.
So there was something else I wanted to tell you about Japan.
Schrager: There were your pottery travels. And was Kyoto an important spot for you?
Taylor: Oh, yeah. Kyoto was—well, we traveled a lot in Japan, and we went to Kyoto. In fact, we’ve
been back and rented a . . . I never knew how to pronounce it . . . michiaya? A Japanese house? We
found a place where you—a woman that rented us a remodeled, little tiny house in the middle of Kyoto,
so we stayed there for a couple of weeks. That was two years ago we went back and just lived there for
a couple weeks.
We’ve had Japan rail passes and traveled all over. Everywhere. I say, I think seven different
trips we’ve made. When we were in Kobe, Fritz used to go to Kyoto for the day, because it was close.
And to Osaka. I didn’t go as much. Then we’ve been to Tokyo several times. And then we went to
Kyushu a couple of times. We haven’t been to Hokkaido, but we’ve been to Tohoku. That’s the
northern part of Honshu.
And we have friends that, again, she taught at Kobe Shodai, Akiko Ochiai. Did you know her?
She taught African American studies, and she has a Ph.D. from University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She
moved to the University of Sendai, and she was there during the earthquake and tsunami, and stayed
because she wouldn’t abandon them. She was in a high-rise apartment that was safe, but she had no
26

power, and sort of ate things out of a can without cooking them; and went to the university every day to
take care of students; and finally got out about three weeks after the tsunami. Now, she’s finally left
Sendai, and she’s got a job at Doshisha in Kyoto. So we’re in touch with her.
She’s married to an American religious Buddhist scholar, who is the only American to get a
tenured position at the University of Kyoto since—what was the guy’s name? Hearn? Who’s the
famous American folklore . . . Lafcadio Hearn. He’s the first one since him that has had a position at
Kyoto. That guy, Carl [Becker], is amazing. And they live in Kyoto, so we’ve been to see them.
So the connection with Japan is rich, to me. And then, because we had such a good time when
we were there, when I came back, I got to know Hiro [Kawasaki] more, and Setsuko [Tsutsumi] more.
And then, I agreed to teach Japanese studies. How I had the gall to do that, I just don’t know. Because
I—well, I guess, my whole teaching career, I was willing to put myself out on the limb, and the students
seemed to not—it seemed okay. I was one with them.
So I taught Cultural Transformation in Japan, and it was a year-long program. We had 60
students, and Hiro, Setsuko, and Takashi Tohi and me. Takashi and I were one person. So we had three
seminar groups, and Takashi and I were in one together. And I did all the reading in English, and I did
the seminars, and Takashi did all the Japanese teaching. And it worked fine. I mean, Takashi was a
natural teacher. I mean, he’s a sports guy, and so he just would do it. It was great. But he couldn’t keep
up with reading Tale of Genji, and all the literature and all the art we did. He tried, but he couldn’t do
that.
Schrager: But you were teaching with Setsuko and Hiro. You were well covered.
Taylor: I was well covered, yeah. And it was a good program. The students weren’t as good as they
should have been. Some of them were motivated by wanting to do manga or something. But some of
them ended up going to Kobe and Miyazaki.
Schrager: For someone who did faculty development as a dean, and experienced this yourself. The
importance of this exchange for the Evergreen faculty, and, I like to think, for the Kobe faculty, too. It
was very significant.
Taylor: Oh, yeah. I think it’s hugely significant, when you think about the best faculty development
experience I had, it was, with no question about it. And the Japanese program, I mean, I guess it’s sort
of on last legs right now, but it was at least 30 years, and that meant 30 people came here, and 30
people went there. That’s huge impact.
And when people went, a lot of times, people didn’t know what they were getting into, and they
were almost always converted to really taking it seriously, with a couple of exceptions. And the ones
27

that came here it was the same. They didn’t know what they were getting into. And oftentimes, the
people who were sent here were young. I mean, I can think of three couples that came here sort of as
their honeymoon. Kusinagi? Did you know him?
Schrager: Of course. I know him pretty well.
Taylor: I think they got married, and came. I think it was like their first week of marriage.
Schrager: I think they were married—they came here after we went there. They came the next year.
Taylor: Oh.
Schrager: They were married.
Taylor: They were married, but not for long. And Toshi and Hiroko were married only a year. They
were like 30 years old. And I think, basically, we treated them pretty well, because they treated us so
well when we got there that you just learned that, oh, okay, this is part of their culture. You’d better
reciprocate.
When I first went to Kobe, the first thing we did was a faculty retreat. And we went out to
someplace, I have no idea where it was. Fortunately, the teacher that taught Spanish, and Takako and
Yoko sort of took me under their wing. I’d been there a week, and they helped me, because it was all
going on in Japanese, of course. But I remember, when the teachers introduced themselves—this is one
of my first cultural lessons—they introduced themselves, and they would write their name on the board,
and they would tell us how it’s pronounced, because you can’t tell a Japanese name just by reading it;
you have to know how you read that kanji. I had no idea.
And then, already, it was quite clear that men and women are treated differently. Because the
men—there were only like four women at this place, and there were like maybe 30 or 40 men faculty—
they had all these gatherings afterwards, and the women were definitely set aside. So one of the things
I did was I invited all the women to come over. And nobody had ever done that before. The women had
never, never gotten together, never done anything. It was just pretty odd. There was one Chinese
woman with two young children, and I think all the other ones were married, but no children.
So what other things do we need to talk about?
Schrager: I think we need to stop, because it’s now after 4:00.
Taylor: Okay, I should go.
Schrager: We have another time on Tuesday.

28


Nancy Taylor
Interviewed by Sam Schrager
The Evergreen State College oral history project
February 28, 2017
FINAL

Taylor: So I want to talk about this travel fund that I’ve set up. About five years ago, I was writing my
will, and I decided that I wanted to do something for Evergreen. And what I chose was to set up a travel
fund for students that would pay for any student travel that is credit-generating. So it could be from a
program, or it could be an individual contract; it could be to South America or China or Alabama. I
mean, it’s a support travel fund. And I have given $25,000, and the interest will fund probably a
thousand dollars a year, at the moment, to just support people to travel.
And the reason I did that was just my own life. Probably travel and exposure to other cultures
had the biggest impact of anything that I did. It changes your perspective, it changes your point of view.
And students that I have met who want to go to Japan, or want to go to study French, or want to do
something, and it’s an economic burden; they just can’t do it. I was talking to somebody maybe a year
ago that was working in the bookstore, and it’s what she wanted to do more than anything else, but she
says, “But I just don’t have the money.”
So it won’t make a huge difference, but it’s the plane fare to get there. So that’s what I’ve done.
And the reason that Amanda [Walker] and I were in conversation is, what could we do to enhance it?
And that’s the conversation I want to have with Amanda. She says she has some ideas; I have some
ideas. Just letting it be known that it exists, people might add to it.
And a farfetched fantasy, I thought one of the things that I could do was to, if I had contact with
students—my students, from years ago—I don’t know how many the college is still in touch with, but
they’re in touch with a bunch. And I’ve had in—what?—28 programs, just go 28 times 50 and you get
1,400 students or something, is that right? Something like that.
Schrager: Be in touch with them . . .
Taylor: …just say, “Join me in supporting travel.” You know, you get people to send in $30 or
something. Whatever. So I’m thinking that we could do something just by making it known to enhance
it, so that there’s more support. And the more I think about the college, and its difficulties in trying to
do what’s right and not get bogged down in other things, the one thing that is constant, in my mind, is
support for study abroad, in one form or another. And it started way back when I was at Stanford, and I
1

did Stanford in Germany. And that made a huge difference. Spending time in Japan made a huge
difference—to me, personally. Just exposure to other cultures.
When I think of my own growing up, the one complaint I have of my parents is that when I was
about 14, they should have said, “Why don’t you go somewhere?” It could have been Italy, Russia,
China, Brazil. It wouldn’t matter. “Why don’t you go somewhere and learn another language?” And
that just wasn’t, in their eyes or in my eyes, coming from small town Kent—
Schrager: Did they travel out of the country themselves?
Taylor: No. I mean, my dad was a real adventurer, and he was in the war, so he had been in Italy, and
he’d traveled; he was in the Navy, he was in Singapore. And he had a vision of further away. My
mother, she was educated—she was a teacher—but she had no travel experience at all until she was an
adult. In fact, the first time she ever went to Europe was when I was in England and my dad was sick,
and they came to visit. I was already 35 or something by the time they traveled. Then they did travel
quite a bit. But small-town Kent didn’t have that as the—and the idea that you should learn a foreign
language, that just wasn’t there, and so I never did. And that’s a huge, huge regret.
So that’s sort of the basis towards the travel fund. And in my generation, I never earned all that
much money. Evergreen salaries have never been good. Fritz taught at the university at a time when
salaries weren’t very good. In fact, when he got promoted to full professor, he got promoted, but he
didn’t get any salary advance because it was a year when there were financial troubles. So he never was
paid anything like what he should have been. I mean, a historian that doesn’t bargain and try to see
where else they can get a job . . .
But, because of the stock market, and because of TIAA-CREF, we’re doing fine. And I look at
younger people and say, “Boy, did we live at the right time economically.” Because I think probably in
the ‘70s, buying power was the best it could be. It’s never been as high as in the ‘70s. And so we were
able to do more than—you’re just a little bit younger, so you maybe didn’t get the advantage that we
did.
But anyway, so there’s money. So, that’s what I did.
Schrager: It’s a great use of your money.
Taylor: I think it is.
Schrager: It’s a great way to donate to the college. And I’m impressed you came up with it.
Taylor: I think I came up with something that will be constant, will be there. For a while, I was giving
$1,000 a year, and then it turns out that if you give at least $25,000, it becomes an endowment, and

2

then it’s dedicated—up until that time, it’s just money that’s sitting there—and then it can be disbursed.
But this is the first year that it will be disbursed, so Amanda and I need to talk about that.
So I’m proud of it, and it’s something that I think is good.
Schrager: So, Nancy, let’s talk about your research, and how it developed for you, and how it came to
the writing of this really cool book, Cousins in Love.
Taylor: It’s a good story, I think. I was hired at Evergreen without a Ph.D., and without a discipline,
really. I had a B.A. in history and I had an M.A. in the teaching of history, and that’s it. And I was hired—
well, we told that story—I was hired just fortuitously, but I was hired with the potential and optimism
that I could be a good teacher. I wasn’t hired to teach history. And at Evergreen, in those days, the
discipline wasn’t major. In fact, those wildcard positions that you were talking about, while they may
have been in an effort to get a more diverse faculty, they were also a throwback to hire teachers, not
disciplinary-based people; hire people that could teach in core programs, and could do a whole variety
of things, but didn’t necessarily have a disciplinary point of view, or a crusade to teach chemistry or
math or whatever. That’s the way I was hired.
But I always felt an insecurity. I always felt that when people say, “Well what do you know?” or,
“What do you teach?” I should have a better answer. And so 1977—so I’d been teaching six years—I
decided to go back to the University of Washington to get an M.A. in history. And I was admitted, and I
knew that I was interested in European history, so that’s what I declared. And that’s where I met Fritz. I
was a student. I was a different kind of student than other students, because I was a whole lot older,
and I had a job, I was going back to a job. So it was different in that sense. But Fritz taught Renaissance,
Reformation and English history. So that’s how I met him. But the interest in wanting to be able to say,
with some kind of belief, that I was a historian was sort of fundamental to making that decision.
But I never did get the M.A. I went to school for a year at the university. I moved to Seattle, and
did it full-time. It was successful intellectually, absolutely. It was successful personally, because Fritz
and I, during that time—well, we got married a year later, but I met him in probably September. I’d
been there in the summer, and I met him in September, and we got married a year and a half later, in
June. But that was also the year my father died, and so it was a horrendous year emotionally, in lots of
ways. So I never did finish the M.A. I did all the coursework.
But out of it came this interest in women’s history. And the year after University of Washington,
I taught Shakespeare in the Age of Elizabeth with Peter Elbow and Leo [Daugherty] and Richard Jones.
And we had good students, and it was a great program. And because I had just done a lot of English
history, I could participate; I could bring history to the program. And if you look at my self-evaluation for
3

that year, I don’t credit myself with doing it very well, but if I hadn’t done it, it wouldn’t have been done
at all. There would be no history in that curriculum, because Richard Jones was a psychologist who
wanted to make up history, and the other two were literary people—Peter and Leo—who were
speculative, and were critics in philosophic ways, and so they just took the text. And the whole context
was in the program because of me, and I always felt that was good. But also, because that was the year
of Fritz and my romance, Fritz was totally integrated into the program. He came for faculty seminar, he
came a lot to participate, and he became very good friends with Peter and with Leo. I mean, he was
included.
And he gave lectures, and when we had a big Shakespeare feast—which was spectacular,
actually, one of the best all-program things I think I’ve ever done. It was a huge feast at a grange hall,
and we had people in roles, and Queen Elizabeth, and the whole thing. It was great. And Fritz was right
involved in that. So that sort of all rolled together.
And then, Fritz and I got married in June, and immediately had a year’s sabbatical in London.
And we had applied for the sabbaticals independently, of course, before we had even announced we
were getting married. You apply in November or something. And we both got sabbaticals. And my
research proposal—with Fritz’s help a bit in terms of formulating it—it was really experimental in ways
because he didn’t know what I’d find. But my research was to study 16th century English women’s
letters. And because of him, I met some interesting people, and one guy was a Tudor historian from
Stanford. And he wrote me a letter of recommendation, and in that letter he said something like, this
was an exciting project, and he had no idea how many letters were out there. And he gave an estimate.
Well, it’s turned out now—this is 30 years later—they found tens of thousands of letters. In the time I
was starting this, it was thought of in the hundreds. And how would we find them, and what was going
on?
So my research was pretty much on the edge. People hadn’t done it. So I had that sabbatical in
England, in London, and every day, I went to the British Museum—British Library, which was in the
British Museum—and went through manuscripts in the manuscript room, looking for women’s letters.
It was needle-in-the-haystack sort of stuff. Turns out that women in the 16th and 17th century were
taught Italic rather than what’s called secretary hand, which is what the men during Shakespeare’s time
would have been writing, the businessmen. Women were not taught that. They were taught this very
decorative, round, italic—which is what it is now—handwriting.
So when you look through family papers at that time, you just get a box, you get a manila box,
and it would have family papers in it. And it would be from mostly gentry—stately home kind of people.
4

And Fritz laughed about it, because he’d be sitting on that side of the table and I’d be sitting on this side,
and he could tell across the table if I’d found a woman’s letter. Because you go through these things
and then you see this italic, and almost always, it’s a woman. And they’re not categorized. You just say
“Skipton family papers,” then you look. And one of the things about women’s writing is that they will
very often say “Thursday afternoon.” “Dear Beloved Husband.” “Your Obedient Wife Abigail.” So you
have to figure out who in the world these people are. You have to figure out the date, because
Thursday afternoon isn’t very useful. And I found lots of letters. And at home I have stacks of letters,
because, well, those days, you paid for photocopies, or you hand-wrote them. But they were easy to
read. In contrast to secretary hand, which is hard to read, these are easy to read. So I spent that year
looking at letters, and looking at letters, and copying and whatever, and collecting. And I still have all of
those at home.
Ever since then, every other summer, we went to England, and I continued on this project. In
maybe ’81 or ’82 or ’83, I don’t know, Fritz and I took spring quarter off without pay, and we went to the
Shakespeare Folger Library in Washington, D.C., which is a wonderful research place. It’s got lots and
lots of primary sources, and it’s in a beautiful setting. They provide housing. They provide tea every
afternoon. It’s a very collegial group. I gave papers at the seminars.
And there was a woman who taught—she was a reference librarian and research librarian who
knew the Folger Collection. And she put me on to this series of letters, these Lydia DuGard letters, and
said, “Nobody’s ever done anything with these.” And they were in a box, not cataloged. So I cataloged
them—or helped catalog them, this Leticia Skipton actually did the cataloging—and copied them. And
then that’s when the research for the book started.
And there are 29 or 30 letters, and there was a couple of unusual things about these letters.
One is: almost all the letters that we found when I started were aristocrats, gentry; nothing below
gentry. I think that they found more and more now. There’s a man named James Daybell that’s really
done what I should have done. He’s published several books on sort of the totality of the letters
available.
Lydia’s letters are—she’s the daughter of a schoolteacher, and one of the things that I found is
that the level of literacy among women goes down the social scale further than was originally thought.
Because, while women weren’t educated very well—except in dame schools till they’re nine, but beyond
that, it was all tutors—schoolmasters’ daughters, ministers’ daughters, were often taught by their
mothers. It was not a class based on money, but a class based on education. So ministers and
schoolteachers educated their children, whether they were boys or girls.
5

And that was Lydia’s experience. So that’s why she’s interesting, because she’s a nobody. She’s
just an ordinary girl. But then, on the other hand, she’s not ordinary, because her parents die—her
mother dies when she’s 10 and her father when she’s 11, something like that—and so she moves in with
her uncle, and falls in love with her cousin, who goes off to Oxford, and then you know that story. They
eventually get married, and the husband writes a treatise on how it’s good for cousins-german to get
married. And the irony is, after she dies in childbirth three children later, and he marries a second
cousin, and then he writes a book on how good it is to have many children—and he has eight children.
Interesting guy.
But in doing Lydia’s letters, I gained the confidence and the belief that I could do history. And
that whole discipline of history, it’s manifest in there. And without publishing a book, and without
having that project—which took forever—I wouldn’t have sort of the identity to feel like I did history.
And I had a lot of help with people at the British Library, and friends—because we’d see them
every summer. I mean, this was a long-term project—I think probably 15 years from the first time I saw
those letters till the book was published—because I had to do not only the research to find out about
the letters, but then I had to do the research to find out about cousins-german, and I had to do a lot of
work about how you edit papers, and what you do. And the standards are incredible. And then, I got it
accepted by an English publisher, and they were going to print it, and then, I don’t know what
happened, but they sat on it for a couple years. And, at one point, I finally wrote and said, “I want it
back,” because they just sat on it. And just learning about how this all worked. But eventually, I got it
published—it was published by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, in conjunction
with the Renaissance English Text Society.
So that’s that story. And it wasn’t published until 2003, but I think I saw those letters first in
1983 or something like that.
Schrager: Can you talk a bit about how you developed your interpretation, the breadth of what you
came to understand about Lydia, her as a woman, and the large social historical perspective that you
had? Because when I read this, I was impressed by how rich your sense of her life—her inner life in
particular—was. And how did that grow for you as you worked?
Taylor: That was the fun part, because I spent so much time in her head. I don’t have all the letters to
show this, but she says that she writes once a week to her future husband, who is at Oxford. She says
she’s writing in code because she’s in love with her first cousin, and her uncle does not approve, and
she’s living in that household with the uncle. And the way the letters get written, and transformed and
sent, and it’s done by carrier, and it’s all public. And so her inner life is revealed in these letters, but it’s
6

secret. So there’s this big sort of mystery going on. I don’t have his letters, which is too bad, but I have
hers. She starts when she’s 15, and she gets married when she’s 21 or something.
So you have five years of letters, and you see her grow; you see her handwriting change; and
you see her interests change; you see her sophistication about the world, because she moves around.
One of the things that’s interesting is at some point she says, “I didn’t have time to recopy this letter.
Save it for me.” So one of the things that she’s doing is there are two copies. Every letter she writes,
she writes a copy. And you find out about her friends; you find out about her relationship to the family;
you find out about travel; you find out about what a girl can do and can’t do.
And, on the other hand, she’s representative of just an ordinary life, which, to me, that was fun.
You weren’t finding out about somebody privileged. She was privileged in the sense that she was—I
don’t think they would have used the term middle class at that time, but she lived in a rectory, and she
could read and write, and she learned to play the viola, and she traveled.
Then, when they finally got married, in her last letter, she says she can sign it Your Loving Wife,
because it’s known. But up until she does that, it has to be secret, because Samuel would get fired,
because you can’t be a fellow at Oxford and be married. And as soon as they find out, he is fired as a
fellow of the college, and he comes home. And at that point, we know that the uncle, Samuel’s father,
has to have approved, because they move back into the house. And eventually, he gets a job as a pastor
of a church, minister of a church. And they have three children, and Lydia dies in childbirth. And one of
the things I found was the will of the child that survives, whose name is Lydia—Lydia, her mother, dies in
childbirth—that daughter, Lydia, I have her will, and she also dies in childbirth.
Well, it was just fun. It was fun to experience her life. Have you ever read an American book
called The Midwife’s Tale? by Laurel Ulrich, I think her name is. It’s a wonderful book that starts out
with a diary of a midwife. It’s a kind of historical research that parallels what I did. She has a text,
maybe it’s 30 pages long, and she writes a book that uses that text as its starting-off point, and goes in
every direction she can about what was happening, about point of view, about religion, about
everything, that’s based on that short diary. And I have these 29 letters, and within those letters, you
can create a world. So it’s bigger than the 29 letters.
Schrager: I was particularly impressed by your tracing of their emotions, both of them—especially hers
because you know much more about hers. But the ardency of her love for him, its character, and then
in comparison to his, which you describe as less idealistic.

7

Taylor: Yes, he’s kind of a pedant. He’s loyal, he’s absolutely loyal to her, but he’s not a romantic, and
she is absolutely. “How could I love you any more?” It just goes on and on and on. It’s every letter. But
she’s also 16, 17, 18 years old, and is just head over heels. Yes, you see that. And, yeah, it was fun.
And the other thing that I said to you last week, I was writing this, or I was thinking about it,
when we did Love and Work together. And that’s when I read Clifford Geertz. And Clifford Geertz, in a
funny way, provides an anchor on how to see things. I don’t know. Have you read Hillbilly Elegy?
Schrager: Parts of it.
Taylor: Well, when I think about that book, if you think about it in Geertz’s terms—what is J. D. Vance
telling himself about himself?—you end up with more understanding. Because he even says, “Well, my
sister told me that what I’ve written is not true. But I left it in, because it makes sense to me. Even
though it wasn’t true, it makes sense because my memory includes that, and therefore, I think of other
things in that context.”
And that’s what I chose to do with Lydia; that her letters are really her telling herself a story
about herself. So that was really useful, to me.
Schrager: Yeah. And I think that’s at the heart of ethnographic interpretation.
Taylor: So maybe I made the letters an ethnographic study.
Schrager: Yes.
Taylor: I didn’t know I did that at the time, but that’s maybe what I did, rather than a historical study.
Schrager: Well, it is historical, though. It’s history of consciousness, really.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: It’s very personal. No, it’s great. To me, it’s wonderful that Geertz was helpful to you in that
way. Geertz’s work, that we’re interpreting their interpretations of their own experience. At the heart
of that is to understand, as best we can, their interpretations of their experience. That’s what places
him in the humanities.
Taylor: Sure.
Schrager: He’s drawing on humanities kind of understanding of how to approach the study of text.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: And that was the most important gift he made to anthropology, and ethnography more
broadly.
Taylor: Yeah. So anyway, so that works. So, see, here was a connection of you and of an Evergreen
program that got used, and made a difference in my work. So, that’s the give and take.

8

So anyway, I was proud of that book, and I still have some connection with people doing work.
I’ve gone to any number of conferences about women, and doing work on women’s letters, in England.
And now, there’s a whole field—that didn’t exist in the ‘80s—about letter writing, men and women.
And there’s a new Web site now, which I’m contributing to, that is trying to catalog all the women’s
letters in the 16th and 17th century. And it’s huge. It’s called WEMLO, Women’s [Women’s Early Modern
Letters Online] . . . It’s run by this guy, James Daybell, out of Southampton University.
Schrager: To draw this work into your teaching, in terms of you being the historian, insofar as there is a
historian in many of the programs that you taught, did you find that your teaching of history at
Evergreen over the years changed, and how it fit into your work as a faculty, that dimension for a
program for students’ understanding?
Taylor: I always tried to do that, and I had a lot of resistance—both my own resistance, because if you
read my self-evaluations, there’s a lot of talk that I should have done more, I should have done more.
And I never have truly felt that I brought a historic consciousness to the programs. I mean, I would insist
on historical context and perspective. But, you know, my identity is, I’m a teacher. That’s my identity.
I’m not a historian. When Fritz is asked, “Who are you?” He’s a historian. He’s written historical
monographs. He is a professional historian. I’m not. I am more of a historian than I was, but I am not.
And so I’ve always felt a bit guilty. And Evergreen, as a college, is terribly negligent. I mean, we
have been willing to be a college with one or two historians across the world. And if someone just reads
a history book, that qualifies. I mean, in any other discipline, it would not be allowed. But we have
maybe three historians on the faculty, as we speak, who are trained in history. It’s criminal. It’s
absolutely unprofessional. And I was always counted as a historian, which I sort of deserved and sort of
didn’t. But it’s only by stretching like that, or including people that are—I think David Marr was always
included as a historian. He did American Studies, or Rudy [Martin] did American Studies. That was okay.
Now, they taught history. Jeannie Hahn taught history, and was in political science. But I think
the only historians, I mean, Michael Pfeifer, and he left. Stacey [Davis]. Tom Rainey. Rob Smurr, who
did—it’s just very, very few historians. And I think they’re now going to hire an American one, is that
right?
Schrager: They are.
[Dog barking]
Schrager: Well, that gets, to me, to the heart of the weaknesses of the college, in terms of the quality of
the education that we were able to provide. If we can’t face the importance of certain fields of study
that are not being represented at the college, then we are denying our students the opportunity to
9

really learn those subjects. That’s in no way to suggest that you were not a great member of the faculty,
in terms of what you did bring as a teacher. It’s important to have faculty that have the breadth of
understanding that you brought to work. And it’s not defined by the fact that it is not history. History is
a part of it.
[Dog barking.]
Taylor: Yeah. No, I mean, it’s a tension that has been at the college since the beginning. And I
definitely was a beneficiary of the college caring about breadth in teaching. And I was also willing to not
have a narrow focus. I was willing to do a whole variety of things, and there were too many people that
aren’t willing to do that. So that’s one tension.
And the faculty that was hired at the beginning was hired not to get a range of subjects, but to
have a range of points of view, and dedication to teaching and to students. So in the first range of
people, we had five or six biologists, mostly environmental people. Nobody cared, because the college
was small; the whole point of the college was to do interdisciplinary work, it wasn’t to do coverage. And
thank heavens, because if you offer coverage, there’s no way you can do it, and you do it badly. You
can’t do everything. I mean, the University of Washington that’s called the flagship doesn’t do
everything.
So we were in a situation where you had to have a different philosophy about what you were
teaching. You weren’t going to offer that every language was going to be provided, or every discipline
was going to be provided. You had to offer what you could offer. And, because we did interdisciplinary
programs, and we were teaching writing, critical thinking, point of view, we were rich. We were getting
people educated. And from the very, very beginning that tension about how do you do advanced work,
was there. It was there in the articles that Byron Youtz and Fred Tabbutt wrote in 1972. Because how
are you going to prepare a chemist, how are you going to prepare a political scientist, or whatever—
advanced work in mathematics—unless you offer a series of courses that build? How are you going to
offer history if you don’t offer Latin? I mean, how are you going to do it? And we’ve never come to
terms with that problem, because if you say, “Okay, you’re going to have disciplinary possibilities,” then
the next thing is you’re going to have departments, and the next thing you have is Southwest
Washington State College. And that’s always been there. Are you going to stand for innovative, freer,
more responsive kind of education, or are you going to fall back on the 19th-century university?
Schrager: But you made a case here for the college needing, say, four or five historians. If the college
has four or five people in business, why wouldn’t it have four or five historians?

10

Taylor: It depends on what you want. I think having four or five historians is much easier to argue,
actually, than four or five business. But that’s because my point of view about what a college is. For me,
it’s about education, it isn’t about vocation. And increasingly, higher education in the United States is
about job creation. And Evergreen was founded not as that, but as a college that would provide
education. I mean, we’ve always been in a liberal arts tradition, of not preparing for jobs, but preparing
for critical thinking, well-spoken, good-writing students. And that’s how an interdisciplinary Core
program can work.
Now, if you have a belief that you have to prepare people for a job in business, now, we’ve
always argued—and I think you could, but I don’t think the world accepts it completely—that a wellrounded person is going to be better at doing business. And we used to argue that really hard for
people, like teacher training. It would be much better to have a four-year degree in general education
of some sort, and then do teaching credential as a fifth year. And I think that’s where the college came
down on that one. Because that argument, about wanting to teach teachers, started minus day one.
And Charlie McCann was the strongest negative vote: We are not a teacher institution. I mean, he was
absolutely adamant. He didn’t want to have a master’s degree in teaching. He didn’t want to have
anything to do with being a teachers’ college.
Schrager: What was the reason for that?
Taylor: He came from Central, and it was kind of an elitist notion in his mind, I think. He wanted people
to learn something, not learn to teach. When we finally did set up an education program, it was based
on that you had to have a four-year degree before you could enter the program.
So I think history is different than business. And I’m not sure if I agree with this—it reflects on
the college now—but early on, Fritz, when he first got to know the college—and he was kind of a sorting
point of view for the University of Washington, because once he got to know me, then he had an inside
look at Evergreen, and people then would ask him, and he was a defender. And he used to argue. He
said, “There is no better education than to go two years to Evergreen, and then transfer for advanced
work.” And that was exactly what Byron [Youtz] came up against, that he didn’t want people—and the
irony is—
Schrager: He didn’t want people to transfer?
Taylor: He didn’t want people to transfer, so there’s that tension. But the irony is that increasingly—I
don’t know if it’s true today—but increasingly, we were not getting freshmen and sophomores, but we
were getting transfers to come to Evergreen—where, in the early days, I think it was really clear, but
that the undergraduate first two years were probably our strongest. Now, I’m not sure that’s true. It
11

didn’t mean that you couldn’t do things junior and senior year, but it wasn’t as focused. The energy and
sort of the belief system supported the first two years better than the second two.
Although clearly, the advanced coordinated studies were some of the best that ever have been
at the college, and that was because you had students that were more prepared, and so you could do
these interdisciplinary programs that were rich and difficult and far-reaching. I remember one when
Rudy [Martin]—and maybe it was David [Marr], I don’t know—they did a program about war. And it
was upper division, and they had really good students. They had students that were strong, and so they
could do more in that program with juniors and seniors than they could have done with freshmen, just
because they had strong students.
But it has always been difficult to get big programs. And if you’re going to do a coordinated
studies that really is interdisciplinary, and wide-ranging, and has points of view, as Richard Jones used to
say, “You need to have four.” You need to have four faculty if you really are going to do that dream
program, where different perspectives are brought out.
Schrager: My gut feeling about that is three.
Taylor: You could argue about that, too. But there are very, very few four—
Schrager: That’s because of the dilution that happens if four people are having to share the pie. It’s just
harder to get depth.
Taylor: But it’s also harder to get the students. You know, I said earlier, I was in 28 teams, and I had
one team that was nonfunctional. One out of 28. But it is hard work. I read in one of my selfevaluations that was probably the year when I came back from my first sabbatical when Fritz and I were
married. And I write in my self-evaluation that I come late to this, but I am no longer willing to make the
college my life. Because for 10 years, the college was like my life, I mean, 24 hours a day. And I
expected that of every team member. And if they weren’t doing that, I was critical. And I recognized
that people had families and I didn’t, but faculty seminar was number one, and being there for students
was number one, and that was just what I did. And I did it with my heart and soul, until I got married.
And then, I was going to Seattle. I never moved to Seattle because I never thought I could do the job if I
weren’t here. But I got some insight [laughs] at that point that maybe there’s another thing, another
life.
But when the college opened, nobody believed there was another life. I mean, there were
probably more divorces right at the beginning. I mean, the college was demanding, in a way, not
because you had to, but because it was in the air, those first few years. Everything was the college. And
it couldn’t sustain that. And it took me a while to recognize it. And the way I taught in programs, and
12

the way programs grew after, say, 1976 or ’77 or ‘78—certainly when I came back from that sabbatical—
it was different, because you just couldn’t sustain it. It’s like the books you read about elementary
school teachers that go to a difficult area to teach, and give everything, and the burnout is two, three
years. Well, I think that’s what happened.
Schrager: So what you are describing is a shift institutionally, not just you? Do you think that by the
‘80s, faculty were slowing down—
Taylor: I think there was some slowing down, but there was also a degree of not the same kind of
commitment to team teaching, and to collaboration, sort of for health and surviving’s sake. I mean, if I
just look at what I did in programs—I don’t think you do a worse job, but you come more focused on
doing what the job is, rather than making the job be everything. Like those journals that I wrote the first
few years, I didn’t write those afterwards. I still wrote evaluations with all my heart, and I read papers,
and I read books every single weekend, and I was in teams, and I have students that are memorable.
But I wasn’t unreasonably putting my whole time and effort into the college. And I think that probably
was common.
I don’t think that’s the big story about the college, though. Well, I don’t know what’s happened
now, but I know that when I was dean, and I felt a huge obligation to new faculty, the biggest difficulty—
and actually, we talked about this at the beginning, when the college was going to grow too fast—the
biggest difficulty was to hire people, and then orient them, and help them, and teach them to be
believers in how to make it work. Because very few people out of graduate school were trained to teach
in this kind of a place. And even though, philosophically, they said, “Oh, this is just what I want,” when
they get here, their commitment to doing their research, and doing what they’ve been rewarded for in
graduate school for the last seven years, or whatever it takes, and then all of a sudden, you’re saying,
“Do something different.” And the whole faculty development business. I mean, I think that it’s hard.
And we went from 1,000 the first year to 2,000 the second year, and doing that. And then,
moving towards having, for economic and maybe just historic reasons, moving to part-time and evening,
and more fragmented opportunity. That happens.
So I think it’s, in some ways, just amazing that we’ve kept as honest to the original goals, if not
way of doing things, that we still have the same values as we started with. Which, I think, probably we
still do. But I hear, just by reading stuff now, that the tensions that have been there all along are sort of
boiling. And who knows where it will head?

13

Schrager: Can you say what those tensions are that you feel have been there all along that we haven’t
been able to resolve, and that now are maybe a higher temperature? Recognizing that you, like me, are
distant from the place now.
Taylor: I’m pretty distant. Yeah, I’m pretty distant. One of the things that has happened over time, and
I don’t know the answer to. The original idea of the college depended on the notion that we would get
full-time students, who lived on campus, or weren’t working very much—they were working like 15
hours a week. They were standard college students. We did not design something for a 1980s
population, or ‘70s population. So that’s the expectation. And the students that we had that were that
way, it was wonderful for them. The expectation, I think, was that these interdisciplinary programs
were appropriate to all students. I think, starting maybe two years in, there was a question about
whether that was true.
Now, it wasn’t a matter of whether it was the diversity of students. I mean, Rudy had a program
for Contemporary American Minorities the first year. And there was recognition about women, early.
So it wasn’t that, except for the answer was, “Yes, what we’re doing is appropriate,” rather than
listening to the notions that it might not be. So I think that’s been a push all along. And then, when the
college had a crisis about enrollment, and the answer was we need to be more responsible to local, we
need to be part-time, we need to have evening, we need to have courses, and we did it—a hundred
percent we did it—in order to get students, because we didn’t have enough students.
And it was a compromise, in terms of values. And that seems to be going on now, because the
real problem right now is we don’t have enough students. So is the answer to sort of dig deeper, and go
back to original values, and say, “Yes, if we told the story better, we’d get them”? Which, people have
doubts about. Or, if you change, are you going to throw out the baby with the bath? That’s the
problem, it looks like. And I guess the worry is that the traditional curriculum, in Evergreen terms, isn’t
responsible to a diverse student body—that’s one possibility—or isn’t responsible to a vocationdemanding, job-wanting student body. I don’t know which it is, but both of those, you hear about. I
don’t know.
But I think the tension of are you going to be on the leading edge of doing things flexibly, and
change—the very first catalog was about change. From the very beginning, there was this push about,
should we be a Southwest Washington state college? Should we have departments? Should we have
majors? Should we have grades? That was always there. So you always have to fight. And I don’t think
there’s push for that, but there certainly is push for disciplinary coverage. There’s push for courses.

14

Schrager: You were talking about the challenge for faculty development with new faculty being to help
get them to believe—and you used the word “believe”—in the potential of what they could do at
Evergreen.
Taylor: Yeah. The easiest story is—I don’t know if it still exists, but in the hiring DTF—you know this as
well as I—that when any potential faculty is interviewed, they always had to come up with a four-person
team and their dream program. And I’d say 90 percent of faculty hires think this is the most wonderful
thing in the world. I mean, everybody is excited about that question. And everybody is prepared. They
might not understand, but they are prepared, and they have fantasized about this. And they tell that
story. And the degree to which they can do that affect an awful lot of hires. That was an important
thing. If you didn’t have a twinkle in your eye in telling that story, you lost in the faculty hiring.
So then they get here, and for a while we worked pretty hard at the second year they were here,
they would teach their dream program. We worked pretty hard at getting people, to find others of the
faculty so that they could teach that. But one of the things that new faculty encountered from the
current faculty was “Oh, you can’t do that.” Or, “That’s not what we do anymore.” So there were mixed
messages right away. “Just don’t pay any attention to that. You don’t have to do faculty seminar. Just
come, and you can do whatever it is you want to do. And it might be a discipline, or it might be you can
just do your own thing. Just teach what you want to teach. There’s no--”
And my job as dean working with new faculty, was to counter that. It often happened because
their first assignment put them in that situation, so my job was to counter that; and then to work really
hard to get them to meet people that they would step out and do their dream program, or something
like that. But in some areas of the college, that’s just not there. We all know that.
And sometimes, the person, the new faculty, is strong enough, or stubborn enough, or lucky
enough that they’ll come out of it. Sometimes it takes a while. Do you know, maybe you know him . . .
Morisato is his name.
Schrager: Yes. Donald.
Taylor: Donald
Schrager: That’s what I thought you were going to talk about.
Taylor: See, Donald, when he was first hired, he was so excited about teaching English literature. He
was a research biologist—flies—and he came and he got really stuck in teaching biology. And I think he
was of two minds. He wanted to be stuck there, but he also wanted to do this other thing, and he didn’t

15

know how. And it took him—and some help, and some crisis—maybe three or four years before he
taught with Bob Haft, I think. Did he teach with you?
Schrager: No.
Taylor: But he taught with Bob Haft. He finally threw down the gauntlet—or somebody did, I don’t
know the story—and he stopped feeling like he absolutely had to teach Molecule to Organism every
single year, and do the coverage. And he started doing birds or art or something. And I have not ever
talked to him, so I don’t know what the real story is. But he finally did get out of that.
But I think that’s a problem. And when we hire people with a real clear disciplinary priority,
because that’s what the faculty wants, then you have two problems. Do they teach that in a very
narrow way, [laughing] or do they not teach it and go off completely? Which also happens. There’s still
that problem.
Schrager: I’m going to turn this off, okay? Take a break.
Taylor: Yeah.
End of Part 1

16

Taylor: So I was talking about a student named Max. My memory isn’t good enough to know even what
program it was in. But it was in a Core program, and we were reading classical Greek literature. So we
were reading something like the Bacchae or the Oresteia or Sophocles, or something. And I was on the
Board of Trustees as the faculty representative, or I was reporting a hiring, either of a provost, or maybe
I was working on Jane Jervis.
Anyway, I was giving a report to the Trustees, and I said, “Before I do anything, I just want to
read something to you. Just as a faculty member, I want to tell you what kind of college you’re in,” or
something. I said this to the Trustees. And then, I pulled out Max’s paper. And Max was a good
student. He was 18. I don’t know that he knew where he was going, but he was a good reader, and he
was working hard, and he was totally involved in the program.
And the week that we were reading some play, his aunt had died, and he wrote this journal
response about the relationship between his aunt and this Greek tragedy. And it should have been
published. It was a piece of writing that was so heartfelt, and so good—and I read it, and the Trustees
were dumbfounded. I mean, we all were, because it was just something special.
But what it showed—and I think all these students that I have—every example that makes me
remember them, it’s because something that they were learning had such an impact on their life. It’s
almost always that case, where I can tie a reading, or I can tie something that happened in a seminar, to
a student’s awakening of something—not just of a skill. And those are the memorable times about
students.
And there are students that are way back. I mean, I remember Maggie Welsh, who was in
Democracy and Tyranny, and she wrote—instead of Prometheus Unbound, she wrote Prometheus
Bound, and we ended up performing it. I can still remember it, and that’s 1973.
I remember Lynda Barry. Everybody knows who Lynda Barry is, and she was in Two Cities of
Destiny. And I remember, we were reading, her question was “I’m getting so tired of not knowing
what’s going on. Who came first? Christ or Charlemagne?” [laughing] And, I mean, she just wanted to
know what was going on. And it’s times like that that you just know what an impact you’re having, or
the college is having, on students.

17

That later group, Stephen [Engel] and Carolyn [Commer ] and Avery [Wiscomb] and Brook
[McLane], Monearr [Fatami]—there were five in that last seminar—I’ve kept track of them in the last 10
years, and they’ve all just done something fantastic that Evergreen started.
Schrager: And this was their first year?
Taylor: This is their first year, first seminar, and they were together. And I think Andrew will still talk
about those five, and Nancy Koppelman. It was just phenomenal. And it’s partly luck about a seminar,
but it’s also about a spirit, and a program that pulls them together. They’ll get up in seminar, and go out
and call somebody and say, “How come you’re not here?”
There was a program I can remember. This is Democracy and Tyranny, 1973 or ’74, and I can
still remember the students. Angie was from Yelm, Sheila was from St. Louis, Linda was from Los
Angeles, Maggie was from New York, and I think there was another local. And they became best friends.
And their eyes were just opened. That was a diversity of location, of how all these students that had
come together. And that summer, they all went to visit each other, across the country. And I’m sure
they’re still friends. And it was that kind of bonding, community, working together, where your best
friends at college are the ones that you’re spending time learning together, rather than your roommate
or something. It’s your academic work that’s tying you to friendship. And that happens a lot.
I could go on and on. I went through the programs, just the list of the 28 programs, and I can
remember students from all of them. But the programs that stand out, of course, are the ones where
the community really built. And that’s why the full-time, three-quarter programs—when they really pay
off is in June.
A program called Making American Selves; this was with Brian Price and Don Bantz and Sherry
Walton. That was sometime in the ‘80s, I guess. And we went to some local camp for the final retreat,
for three or four days. That was a thing that I often did at the end of those big programs. We would
spend the last week at someplace, and the students would do all the cooking, and we would have
seminars. And we’d read a book, and then the faculty would do evaluation conferences during that final
week. So you were writing and conferencing, and the students were seminaring and cooking. And I
remember having a big circle at the end. And there were four faculty, so there were 80 students. And
that program held together.

18

And we went around, and everybody spoke, including two Japanese students that had been in
that program for the year, Anna and Naomi, I think. Anyway, even the two Japanese students spoke, as
we went around the whole circle, of what had happened during that year. And you just wanted to cry,
because it was almost universal that this had been a significant educational growing-up. I just can name
those students, I could tell more and more about students, but I think probably not—I told you about
Tuggy last time, I think.
Schrager: Yeah.
Taylor: Well, and then there were students like the ones in the re-entry, the AJAX Compact.
Schrager: We did talk about that.
Taylor: We did talk about those, the women coming back to school. Then I remember Greg
Williamson—that was in Form and Content—and we read Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. And I
don’t know if you ever should teach that book, because it’s so powerful for young boys, young men. You
know what happens? He commits suicide over love. Greg came, and he was just devastated, because
he internalized the book so much to his life. So you have to pick up the pieces many times [laughing]
when you do—but it also shows the power.
So, you wanted me to talk about staff. Since I started the college as staff—well, I was extremely
lucky, because I was in on the big picture, and the staff and the faculty were so together on what we
were doing, there was no separation. Because my first job was to recruit the students, I took a member
of the faculty—of the 17 planning faculty—every day out. So the faculty all respected me. I was
included in all the parties, I was involved in all the meetings. My office was in the trailer.
So the early, early times, I think the separation between faculty and staff was really tight. I think
it grew apart, and I don’t know why. Maybe it was just institutional change. Early on, the faculty were
expected to do staff work, with the staff. There weren’t enough staff to do counseling, to do
admissions, so the faculty was involved in everything, and maybe that was it.
But gradually, then, we hired an academic advising office. There was probably a split that
happened. But one of the ways that staff was absolutely included: there was controversy about the
librarians—this was early, and I don’t know when. You could find the date. But there was a vote, or an
agreement, that the librarians would have faculty status. That wasn’t day one. But that happened.

19

And then, there was an agreement that staff should be entitled to write contracts for academic
credit. And that was important, I think, to recognize that there were people on the staff that were
perfectly capable, and enthusiastic, and wanting to do that work. They never got paid, but I think they
probably got release time from their work, maybe. So that was good. But I’m sure there’s still tension
between faculty and staff.
On the other hand, I remember secretaries from the first programs. The secretaries had an
enormous amount to do, because they had to type all evaluations, because we didn’t have computers,
and they were assigned to, like, three programs. But they were included with the students a lot more. I
remember Pam, my first secretary, she went on student retreats. She went with us when we went off to
Camp Wooten.
Schrager: Pam?
Taylor: It wasn’t Pam [Udovich], it was an earlier Pam. It would have been in 1971. I just remember her
name. But secretaries went with programs. Secretaries were included in programs. Secretaries often
were getting credit in programs. They did reading. And other staff, when I worked in Admissions, Sally
Hunter and Maureen [Karris]—Maureen was, I think, working for Larry Stenberg, but Sally was working
in Admissions. Sally had a memory that just didn’t quit. She had Social Security numbers of students in
her head. I mean, some student would arrive, just to check out the college, and she’d seen the
application, and she would remember. She was phenomenal. And she was included in everything, and
so was Maureen. That staff, the early staff, they were part of the project. And that probably didn’t last
forever.
The other staff, the college would fall apart if—it might still be the case, but when I was dean,
the dean’s staff, they were administrative assistants or, I don’t know. Betty [McGovern] and Debbie
[Waldorf] and Amy [Betz] and Debra Blodgett, those people that were in the dean’s area, who were
there even though deans were rotating, so they were constant, the curriculum wouldn’t have run
without Debbie [Waldorf]. And Debra Blodgett, who was doing hiring. I mean, they were just
indispensable. Or, if you talk to—somebody should do Rita Sevcik.
Schrager: John Carmichael wants to. Rita said no. He wanted to continue to encourage her.
Taylor: Well, Rita, she’s indispensable. I can understand why she doesn’t want to, because one of Rita’s
incredible traits is her absolute loyalty, and ability to recognize what was public and what was not; what
20

was private information. She was a fantastic supporter of whoever was President. I mean, she just
never, ever let anything slip.
But she was there from day one. I mean, she was Charlie McCann’s, and until she retired—
through part of Les Purce’s . . .
Larry Stenberg, who was the first maybe Dean of Students, but I don’t think we’ve had that title.
But, spectacular. And I don’t know ever why he left.
Schrager: When you say “spectacular,” why so?
Taylor: In terms of Larry Stenberg, he was a real charismatic person. But what he contributed, I
remember, he was very outspoken about women on campus, about service for women. He started the
daycare center. He just had a mind towards what students needed, and what he needed to push for.
And he was respected by people. He was young; he was probably my age when he was Dean of
Students.
Another person that was memorable was the Registrar, whose name was Perrin [Smith]. I can’t
remember Perrin’s last name, but he was a strong advocate for students.
Another one was the Chief of Police, the Campus Police, whose name was Mac [Smith?] . . .
don’t remember his last name.
Here’s a story. Now, I don’t know if this is a good story to tell, because it would get us in jail
today. There was a student, who came from Vietnam—I mean, served in the Vietnam War. Very smart.
Very unstable. What’s the stress . . .?
Schrager: Post-traumatic stress?
Taylor: Yeah. So he was in Shakespeare in the Age of Elizabeth when Richard Jones and Peter [Elbow]
and Leo [Daugherty] and I were teaching, so that’s 1979—’78. And the guy was smart, but he was so
skitzy. One time in seminar, he picked a fight with somebody who screamed about something having to
do with Vietnam, and he leaped across four rows of seats, and attacked this guy in the Lecture Hall.
And Richard Jones got a hold of him and said—and I think the police, this guy Mac, was called—
and Richard told Mac, “Go buy a bottle of Scotch, and meet me in my office in a half an hour.” Now, this
guy that was Vietnam veteran was probably 25 years old, and Mac and Richard and the student sat in
21

Richard’s office with a bottle of Scotch, and worked out the problem. And this guy, Richard counseled,
and helped for the rest of the year. And he graduated, and he went to the University of Washington and
got some advanced degree in English. And that decision of what to do was pretty unorthodox, but it
worked.
One of the things Richard Jones did early on was to teach the faculty how to be professional
counselors, what to do, because that was his vocation, that was his job. He knew how to do that. But
he ran seminars or workshops on how to be professional counselors to your students, and what to do.
And so I think he probably met with that guy—I remember his name, but I won’t tell it. And the police
were involved in that. And that guy Mac was good. He was very good with students.
That’s enough about the staff, I suppose.
Schrager: I do wonder about the police-student relations. That’s been an issue off and on.
Taylor: That’s been an issue.
Schrager: Was that an issue early as well?
Taylor: Well, it certainly was an issue—see, now, I think when Mac was there, there were no guns on
campus. And the issue about guns happened when Jane Jervis was President. And I can remember that
struggle. Do you remember that?
Schrager: Yeah.
Taylor: Because what I remember—and Jane supported guns, and her argument was she would rather
have Campus Police having guns than be in a situation where, when we had a college problem, we had
to rely on Thurston County. She would rather have authority over Campus Police than to rely on
Thurston County. And that was the winning argument. Nobody wanted to have the guns, but
apparently, there was no option. There had to be access to police with guns. And did you want to have
the person who’s hiring you had control over, or did you want to have Thurston County? Is that the way
you remember it?
Schrager: I don’t remember much about it. You remember it much more clearly than I do.
Taylor: But it happened during Jane Jervis’s time. And nobody wanted guns, but apparently, I don’t
know what the argument was, but that we had to have them. And so it was a matter of, did you want
22

Thurston County Police parading around, or did you want to have your own? I don’t know the
consequences of that. You know the case when the stalker came, and the girl was killed?
Schrager: Can you tell that story?
Taylor: Well, I don’t remember it well enough. I remember the name is Tissot, and she was being
stalked. And there was a law passed by the Legislature after she was killed, because one of the
problems was the stalker hadn’t done anything, so it was a catch-22. They couldn’t stop him until he’d
done something, and he killed her. And he killed her in the cafeteria at the college. And as a result the
law was passed—it’s called the Tissot Law—that allows a campus to forbid a student from coming on
campus if there’s a restraining order, if there’s a stalking order. It prevents a stalker from coming onto
campus. And I don’t remember. That was probably 20 years ago. That’s documentable. It’s just an
impression I have.
Schrager: Jane Jervis had to face the Mumia [Abu-Jamal], didn’t she?
Taylor: Yeah. Do you remember that?
Schrager: Well, I do. I was wondering what your recollection was.
Taylor: I was proud of her. The students have always, I think, from the very early days, chosen the
speaker, the graduation speaker, by vote. And they voted to have Mumia be the speaker. There was
probably some controversy, but it was a vote. And he, of course, couldn’t come; it was a recording. And
the policeman that he is accused of killing, his family came, and demanded that we not allow him to
speak.
And Jane said, “This is a free speech issue.” And the organization—the police and the students,
who were in favor of not having Mumia—managed a protest. They all turned around at some point
when the speaker was going on. But the speaker went forward. There was no incident. It was right.
And Jane explained it, and stood her ground, and I think it was the right decision. Do you remember
that?
Schrager: Mm-hm.
Taylor: Is that the way you remember it?

23

Schrager: Yeah. I remember walking in, as the faculty did, and being jeered by people who came to
oppose the speech—not students—
Taylor: No, no. The policeman’s wife that was killed.
Schrager: Supporters of the policeman.
Taylor: Supporters, yeah. They came, and they were allowed. And there was a protest allowed, but it
was silent. And the speech went on. And it was explained.
Schrager: Gary Locke withdrew from speaking. He was also on the program to speak.
Taylor: Oh, I don’t remember that part. I just remember Jane’s really principled stand. And that
seemed right.
Okay. Life after Evergreen? Shall we do that?
Schrager: Let’s talk about that.
Taylor: As much as Evergreen was my life—for what?—1970 to 2008, 38 years, it was really easy to
retire, and I’m surprised at that. Partly, it was we moved to Bainbridge, and so I was removed from
here. I’d always had this little house here. So then, after 2008, I rented the house, and I had no
presence in Olympia. Somehow, I kept my friends, and I kept my loyalty, but I didn’t miss reading a book
every week, and writing comments on 20 papers a week. I didn’t miss that.
And Fritz and I, for the first time in our married life, had a common house, and we had all our
stuff. And we had new friends, and I got involved in Bainbridge life, which has been a really good move.
So it was surprising. I regret that two hours means I’m not in touch with people. And I go onto the
campus now, and I don’t know many people. But even in post-retirement teaching, I didn’t feel a part of
the college. It’s a memory, and it’s a love, but life goes on.
Gail Martin and I once had a conversation about what do you do when you retire. And she said,
“Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to decide. It’ll happen.” And I haven’t looked back. I never
regretted it. So that’s good.
Schrager: What kind of activities on Bainbridge?

24

Taylor: I do a certain amount of service. I’m on the public library board, and now we’re doing a big
remodel project. In fact, tomorrow, I’m selling surplus furniture from the library. So I’m very involved in
the library. I work at the Food Bank once a week, and that’s put me sort of in touch with a kind of
community.
For a while, I tutored math in the junior high school, middle school, just for fun. That was good.
I haven’t done that for a while, but it just put me in a school setting. And it’s that feedback. I don’t
know if we talked about it the first time, of my always wanting to be a math teacher, and Stanford not
letting me take math. So I did a bit of that, so it was still there.
And Fritz and I have traveled a lot. We always used to go to England every other summer, and
then we had three sabbaticals in England, maybe four, so I know England well. But we started, even
years ago, we’d spend the summer in England in London doing research, and then we’d take two weeks,
and fly to Venice, or fly to Vienna, or fly to Florence. And rent an apartment, that’s our standard way.
And, now we’ve done it, instead of every other year, we’ve gone somewhere every year. And we just
made reservations last week to spend a month in Paris, and a month in London, and some time in the
Yorkshire Dales. We leave on the fifth of May, come back in July. And as long as we’re healthy, that’s
fun to do. Our pattern has gotten smarter—well, it’s actually what we’ve always done—to have a place
to live, so that you’re not a tourist, and you can get up in the morning and decide if you want to do
something or not.
But this will be the first time that we’re going to spend time in London, and not go to the British
Library. Because neither one of us have projects that take us to the library. I still have my library cared,
and we’ll go just because we’ve got a lot of friends there, and so there will be some reason to go look
something up. But that’s not our reason for going.
Bainbridge is a place with a lot of interesting people. The demographic is too old, but when you
dig deep on what people have done, it’s phenomenal what the life experience—you meet somebody,
and you find out, well, they worked in the State Department, or they taught something somewhere.
Lots of lawyers, lots of academics that are retired on Bainbridge. So it’s a rich place. Like any small
community, if you haven’t lived there for 30, 40 years, you’re not a part of it.
You’ve been to our house. It’s not the house that you would have expected us to buy, and we
didn’t expect to buy it either. The realtor said, “This isn’t what you described you wanted.” But it had
good spaces, and we’ve been real pleased. And the neighborhood has been wonderful. And you
25

wouldn’t expect it, because it’s in a kind of development on the golf course, with three garages—
because it’s expected to have a golf cart, and we don’t play golf.
And we laugh that we downsized into a bigger house. Because the house in Seattle was old—it
was built in 1905. And we had that house, and then I had my little house in Olympia, and two offices.
So we moved into a house that would hold all the books. We took the golf cart garage and made it into
stacks for books. So we made a separate room. We just made the place suit us. So that’s good.
So I’m glad to be living there. The reason, actually, we moved to Bainbridge, in part, was we
wanted to be under one roof. But my mother was still alive, and living on Marrowstone Island, and we
used to drive through Bainbridge all the time to get there. And she died in 2011, but we moved in 2005,
so there were six years where I could get to Marrowstone in an hour. And that made a difference to be
able to do that.
Schrager: How about Lopez and its place in your life?
Taylor: Oh, Lopez is just a wonderful retreat. It’s an escape. This was Fritz’s dream. He bought the
land, I think, in about 1965, and put up the shell of the house himself, with some guy that helped with
heavy machinery. And then he wired it and plumbed it. And then I met him, and then we put in the
hardwood floors, and we’ve put, I think, four different roofs on the place. It’s never been finished. He
keeps thinking I’m changing it from a cabin into a house, and he wants it to be a cabin.
But now, it’s got a washer and a dryer, it’s got new stairs, it’s got a porch. It’s different than
when you were there. But we were there last week for five days. And we did, maybe 15 years ago, buy
a propane stove, so it no longer has the big fireplace that salt rotted out. So we don’t smoke it up with
building a fire. You just flick a switch and it gets warm, so you can go in the winter. We usually go
Thanksgiving, Washington’s Birthday, 4th of July.
And we really do want to share it. I think I’ve taken every single Japanese couple that’s ever
been to Evergreen up there, just for fun. Toshi and Hiroko went. The Kusanagis went. [Takashi] Tohi,
that family went up there. It’s just a retreat. [Dog barking.] It’s not fundamental to my life, but it’s fun
to have just a little retreat. And anytime, if you want to go, you should just let me know.
But when I say it was easy to retire, and to put it all behind me. . . .Just having this opportunity
to have all these conversations. Evergreen really is a huge part of who I am. And I look back on it, and
just think how lucky I was. And it was timing, it was luck, it was hard work. But I look back on what I did,
26

and what I accomplished, and it all feels good. So for me, I just am hugely grateful that I had that life.
And I’m 75, but I’m not feeling 75. I don’t know what 75 means. I haven’t quit.
I can’t remember books I read nearly as well. I’m listening, right now, to the book Astoria.
Have you?
Schrager: I know of it.
Taylor: It’s good. But I read it last summer, and then a book group that I’m in chose it, so we’re going to
talk about it next week. And I have a recording of it, and I listened to it coming down here, and I’ll
listen—it’s 10 hours of recording—and I just read it last summer, and it’s like a new book I’m reading
now. [chuckles] So I look at people—I look at like the Supreme Court Justices—and wonder, they’re 80
years old. How are they doing that work? Because I don’t remember. And the thought of reading
student papers, and being up on it now, I can’t imagine doing it.
The thought of doing the work I did as dean, showing up and being responsible, I only knew a
hundred percent. I don’t know how to do anything halfway. And when people used to say, “Well, if
people got better salaries, or if they got some more incentives, they would work harder,” I only know on
or off, and it wouldn’t make any difference. And I worked as hard as I could, whenever I was working.
And I can’t imagine doing that now. Just cannot imagine it. But I guess that’s fortunate, because I’m not
doing it. [laughter]
Schrager: Any thoughts about the changing relationship of women to the college over time? We talked
in the first interview—
Taylor: Yeah, I don’t have any great insight. I personally think one of the strongest times of the college
was when Jane Jervis was President, Barbara [Smith] was Provost, Ruta Fanning was Vice President for
Business, and there were three or four women deans. I mean, the college was run by women, and I
think it was probably one of its healthiest times. [chuckles] So I think there’s a loss when there aren’t
women in leadership positions. I think women are stronger, sort of emotional caregivers of an
institution. And that certainly was true then. And, particularly, Barbara was the big thinker, and was
pushing hard. And I think we lost that when she left.
Other than that, I don’t know. I hear that there are more women faculty than men, but I don’t
know. In the early years, there were eight women in the first class of faculty, out of 50, I think. No,
there weren’t 50 faculty, were there? Maybe. So it’s changed.
I think women have been well regarded, and it hasn’t been a fight for women. But I might be
wrong. I don’t know how all the women feel. There was a strange time—this was maybe just my
impression, maybe not—but that gay women were welcome, and gay men were not. It was sort of the
27

notion, well, we can deal with one, but we can’t deal with the other. [laughing] And I don’t know if
that’s true, but I think gay women were hired, and welcomed, and given big responsibilities, without
concern, from early time. And I don’t know about gay men. Do you?
Schrager: Not as prominent in the college, when I first came.
Taylor: Yeah. Now, it’s definite. And the turning point came when the gay student organization was
given space, right across from the President’s office, or across from the Board of Trustees office. That
was the student hangout. And I don’t know if it was done deliberately, but there were comments about
it, and it was fine. The idea was that it was not going to be hidden. And that was probably more than 10
years ago.
Schrager: That is a turning point for gay men, or was it . . .
Taylor: Turning point for gay students. Yeah. And now, it’s—I mean, I don’t know how much of an
issue it is, but it’s certainly public, certainly a conversation that’s going on, to the point that people are—
there’s a controversy about it being overly done. That’s just what I hear.
Schrager: Well, I think there’s a generational awakening . . .
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: . . . for the Millennials, that that’s a level of acceptance . . .
Taylor: Thank heavens. Because, I mean, that did come—well, it came amazingly fast, actually. But
there was tension; there was certainly tension about gay marriage on campus before it became
accepted. Because there’s lots of examples.
The diversity issue that has surprised—not surprised me, but it’s just an observation—is the lack
of outreach to Hispanic students. That just has never seemed to strike people as something to be
assertive about. We’ve had Hispanic faculty—some. But there has been outreach to Native Americans,
there’s been outreach to African Americans, but not Hispanics. And I don’t if that’s just what I see, from
afar, or whether that’s really true. Do you see that?
Schrager: I think you’re right. And I don’t know why.
Taylor: I don’t know why. Well, I mean, we set up the Native American tribal program, with an
outreach. We set up an outreach program, campus, in Tacoma. But it never would have occurred to us
to do something, say, in Yakima.
We’ve hired, not by design but just by happenstance, some Hispanic faculty. I mean, [Cruz
Esquivel], Medardo Delgado], Gil Salcedo were there from early on, and there were other ones that
were. But we’ve hired Native Americans to service Native American students, and we’ve hired African
Americans to serve Tacoma, but we haven’t done that for Hispanics.
28

Schrager: There was a Latino/Latina position being hired right now.
Taylor: Oh, okay. That would be the first. I mean, not that that would be the first Latina, but the first
specific . . .
Schrager: . . . designated . . .
Taylor: Yeah. We’ve never done that before. We’ve even, you know, we’ve hired dedicated Japanese.
Schrager: Right. Well, talking about women as administrators, there’s also the program level, and the
way that women faculty are in programs, and where the male faculty are in programs. Of course, you
can’t stereotype this.
Taylor: You mean what programs they teach?
Schrager: No, in terms of the roles that they play. I mean, the way that programs are held together.
When you described the early programs that you were in, it sounded to me, in the early ‘70s, that you
were more attuned to social dynamics, and able to work with students, in some ways. Partly, you were
younger than the male faculty, but also maybe because you were more tuned into students.
Taylor: Yeah, I think that’s true, but it might just have been me. Because I remember when Jin Darney
was teaching something with Bill Bruner, [chuckles] and Bill was designated the “Program Mother”—not
Jin, but Bill—and he told the first-year students—it was a Core program—he says, “Okay, it’s time to
change your sheets.” [laughter] That was Bill. That’s a sort of a stereotypic notion, but the role of the
social cohesion has got to be played by somebody. And I suppose more often it’s played by the woman,
but there was a case where it wasn’t.
For a while, it seemed like I was the one woman and there were three men, or one woman and
two men. And then, at some point, I taught with only women. And I must admit, it was a huge relief. It
was much easier. You know, these stereotypes. . . .but you just could expect a kind of collaboration that
was different when three women were teaching together. It was just easier. And I don’t know why that
is, but it was for me.
And then, I was thinking about the teams. I taught with, well, a huge variety of people—huge
variety—so I didn’t settle on one. I taught with Hiro [Kawasaki] at least three times. I taught with Leo
[Daugherty] probably three or four times. Gordon Beck, I taught with three of four times. Taught with
you twice, didn’t I?
Schrager: Mm-hm.
Taylor: Taught with Setsuko [Tsutsumi] at least twice. I taught with Nancy Allen the first year, and then
I taught with her like 25 years later. And that was important, because when Nancy and I first taught, we
were so green, and we were so insecure, and we were so unhelpful to each other. And when we taught
29

the second time, it was like just a totally different experience. And at that point, we were friends. At
the first point, we were isolated.
Schrager: How did you see yourself as a seminar leader, in terms of your style?
Taylor: Well, actually, I read some self-evaluations about that. I think I grew to figuring out a role. It
was never automatic, and never easy. But I went through the stage of being really insecure, being really
directive, to learning how to have some inherent authority that I could display, just by being there, that
encouraged seriousness. But I learned that. I learned to signal to students that it was just unthinkable
not to be prepared, it was just unthinkable not to participate. And I always was the person totally
prepared, and sitting on the edge of the chair, waiting for a serious, exciting conversation to happen.
That was always what I signaled, I think, from the beginning. But I learned how to make that happen. I
don’t know, to this day, what makes that happen, but I got better at triggering it. Does that make
sense?
Schrager: Perfectly.
Taylor: Seminar was always my favorite part. And when Fritz and I taught together, he always laughed,
because I was never as secure as Fritz is about lecturing, or about command of information. I mean,
he’s a master at it, and he could do that. But he isn’t a good seminar leader, because he takes over.
He’s too concerned about making sure the students get it right, and get it all. And you can’t do that. I
mean, if you want them to participate, you just can’t do that.
And so seminar, for me, was the form that I liked. And I learned how to be a better participant
in seminar myself—both with student and faculty seminar. First faculty seminar, I don’t think I said a
word all year, in Human Development. And I think I went through that stage, too, where I then went
through the stage of faculty seminar, where I was demanding about —I would have questions . . . And
it’s sort of the same way I went through the stage about learning about lecturing, where, when I’d
lecture, I’d write it all out, because I was insecure. And then, I’d learn, eventually, to read, and then
trust what I knew, and be able to do it. And the same way with seminar, not to have to be so directive.
So what’s your take on seminar?
Schrager: It’s somewhat similar to yours. It’s a standard that I set, an expectation that I had. And a kind
of natural authority that, I think, developed, for me. Natural in the sense that it became more natural
and less something that I needed to externalize, something more internal.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: And I think our styles are somewhat similar.
Taylor: Are probably pretty similar?
30

Schrager: Yeah.
Taylor: When I first taught with Richard Jones, he had this whole thing about natural authority. And I
understood it, but it was hard to do. My first experience teaching was in high school, and the first year
of teaching, the students ran all over me. I was 22, they were 18, and class was American Government
The second year, I had a different look in my eye. And it’s hard to describe that, and when you’re
working with student teachers, which I did for a couple years, you can describe it, and you can try to
help students get it, but it happens through experience, and it happens through confidence. And you
can read all these books about discipline in school, and they don’t help very much. But you get the right
look in your eye . . . And, in some places, it doesn’t matter where you’re teaching, but it doesn’t work.
In seminar, it’s the same thing. It’s just that triggering of seriousness, and of commitment. And,
I think, probably in your case, too, I mean, students recognized that I was interested in them, and cared
about what they were saying.
Schrager: Yeah, being responsible to each student, and having some sense of them, and having a way
for them, an expectation of them, to be involved in some way in seminar. So that became for me, over
the years, finding ways to be sure that each student said something.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: Not only in seminar, but—
Taylor: No, I was good at that. And I can’t imagine being a stand-up lecture-class teacher at a university
that doesn’t know her students. I mean, every program I was ever in, within the first 10 days, I had
conferences with students. And I was pretty well known for knowing the names of every student in the
program within the first month. I mean, you’ll see that in my self-evaluations, or evaluations from other
faculty. They always say, “You’re the one that knows everybody.”
And I do. I’d just go around the room, and I always knew everybody.
End of Part 2

31



Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

TaylorNancy_20161220_Transcript_pt1.pdf

TaylorNancy_20170105_Transcript_pt2.pdf

TaylorNancy_20170224_Transcript_pt3.pdf

TaylorNancy_20170228_Transcript_pt4.pdf