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Identifier
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TougasJoe
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Title
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Joe Tougas Oral History Interview
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Date
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11 November 2022
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18 November 2022
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Creator
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Joe Tougas
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Contributor
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Susan Fiksdal
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extracted text
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Joe Tougas
Interviewed by Susan Fiksdal
The Evergreen State College oral history project
November 11, 2022
FINAL
Fiksdal: I’m with Joe Tougas on November 11, 2022. This is Susan Fiksdal. We’re going to begin Joe’s
oral history with Evergreen. But we’re going to start, Joe, with your youth—where you grew up,
something about your parents, and any major influences you had as you were growing up.
Tougas: I was born in Otter Tail County, Minnesota in a town called Pelican Rapids. People don’t believe
that, that I was born in Pelican Rapids, Otter Tail County, Minnesota.
Fiksdal: It’s a beautiful name.
Tougas: When I was six months old, in the middle of the winter, my parents decided to move from
Minnesota back to Seattle, where my mother grew up. I tell people, “After six months of Minnesota, in
the wintertime, the whole family knew it was time to head west.”
Fiksdal: I can believe it, except that it’s a terrible time to move. Snow, ice.
Tougas: That just indicates how desperate my parents were to get out of the Midwest. We lived on
Queen Anne Hill. I attended Catholic grade school and high school in Seattle, first on Queen Anne Hill,
and then Capitol Hill.
What’s significant about that period of my life is that it was very religious oriented, specifically
very devout Catholic. And the fact that I had nine siblings, and we all were indoctrinated into
Catholicism, is significant.
One part of that was that this notion that was very common in Catholic families at that time was,
first of all, that you should have lots of children. Then, from those children, at least one, maybe two,
would be given to God, either as a priest or as a nun.
I had an aunt who was a nun, an uncle who was a missionary priest in Japan. Another brother
who went to the seminary and stayed in the seminary for a year before going off to make his fortune in
other ways.
Fiksdal: Where were you in the family?
Tougas: I was the second.
Fiksdal: Oh, so the pressure was on.
Tougas: Yeah. It was obvious from early on that my older brother was not priest material, shall we say.
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[laughing] But I was. I was very conscientious and very devout. Gradually, I got infected with evolution
and science.
In elementary school, I had this desire to consolidate scientific knowledge and Catholic doctrine.
I was really interested in evolution, and about where exactly did monkeys stop being monkeys and
become humans. Of course, I had my theories.
But the important part was that I found myself in college having to really make a choice between
the doctrines of the church—at that point, I would say, Gonzaga—and then the Jesuits, I think,
influenced my own thinking, specifically demonstrated that you could use your mind in the face of, or in
addition to, Catholic doctrine.
I was there for three years at Gonzaga from ’67 to ’70. At that time, the counterculture was in
full swing. The Summer of Love, I hitchhiked down to San Francisco with some of my college buddies.
We stayed in the Haight-Ashbury just in the middle of that rebelliousness. One result of that was I
dropped out of Gonzaga after three years and went to live on a commune.
Fiksdal: Oh, my goodness! This is very radical. Now I need to ask, did you end up at university because
that was an intended path all along? You did well in school. You just went? Or did your parents go to
college, and they wanted you to go to college? Or other reasons? I shouldn’t just say those two.
Tougas: Right. The choice of Gonzaga was interesting. I didn’t really know much about Jesuit education,
but I had the impression that Jesuits were very smart, and you could, on the basis of your intelligence,
find a place where you could explore important questions. At the same time, there were plenty of
radical priests. There was all kinds of turmoil in the Catholic Church because of the Vatican Council, and
the fact of the cultural changes that were happening.
I had a big idea about myself, and I found a place there at Gonzaga where I could really work on
those conflicts. One priest in particular that was really influential on my thinking was a Jesuit. He wrote
the letter for me to get out, to get conscientious objector status. Because that war was also . . .
Fiksdal: . . . hanging over you.
Tougas: Yes, so I was able to get that designation as a conscientious objector. Then I needed to arrange
my own community service for two years as part of the deal for conscientious objectors.
Fiksdal: Is that full-time or part-time work?
Tougas: It was catch as catch can. After a couple years, they just wanted to know that I had done it.
There was an alternative school in Spokane that was part of the radical underground, so we had an
arrangement with them.
But the actual time spent doing that work was in parallel with my joining a commune, so the
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commune became the launching board for me to do the conscientious objector stuff, and also to declare
my own independence and my radical self.
Fiksdal: Somehow, I didn’t connect the fact that you were still in Spokane in a commune. Spokane and
commune don’t go together for me.
Tougas: Right. It gets even more complicated because I got the basic assignment to do the
conscientious objector service, but the place that I really wanted to be was at a commune in Olympia.
That commune was called Cold Comfort Farm. You may have heard of it.
Fiksdal: I have.
Tougas: Bill Richardson was the owner. It continues to exist, not as a commune but as a farm and as a
basis for the retail business, Childhood’s End. I ended up there in that commune. There were people
from Spokane who had moved. Bill was from the Grays Harbor area.
I dove right in and became a full-fledged member of that commune. Then had a child, the first
year on the commune was my son, Morgan. That gave me a sense of doing something productive in a
counterculture way. But I knew early, probably while I was still at Gonzaga.
I knew from very early on, even when I was at Gonzaga, that I wanted to be a philosophy
professor. I got to know a bunch of people at Evergreen, including different faculty members. I didn’t
get around to finishing my bachelor’s degree at Gonzaga for about 10 years.
In the meantime, I was doing this sign business, earning a living as a sign painter, and being
active in a lot of social change organizations, social justice kinds of things, which was just in Olympia,
there was a lot of that going on.
Fiksdal: Starting.
Tougas: At that point is where my history merges with the Evergreen story, the Olympia story. I
graduated from Evergreen in 1984.
Fiksdal: Such an important year. [laughter]
Tougas: Yeah.
Fiksdal: I’m sorry, but who did you study with in that last year? Do you remember?
Tougas: Oh, yeah. Jean Mandeberg had a program called the Towers Project that was about public art,
and in typical Evergreen fashion, we made public art. I don’t know if you remember, but Jean
Mandeberg designed these two large, metal sculptures, like 12 or 14 feet high.
Fiksdal: I do remember.
Tougas: The pair was divided. It was a town and gown kind of commentary, so one of these sculptures
was right next to the rotunda building, and then the gown one was down by Capitol Lake. It was
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permitted for six months.
Fiksdal: That’s amazing she got that in 1984.
Tougas: Oh, yeah. It was very impressive. It was great to be part of it, too.
Fiksdal: And you all worked on it?
Tougas: We all worked on it. We all learned welding. We all learned safety equipment. Grinding. The
metal shop got a real workout, because not only were we doing these two large sculptures, but each of
the students had their own sculpture projects that we were working on. It was ideal.
Fiksdal: Of course, I need to know what sculpture was.
Tougas: I did several that were satires on—I was reading all kinds of books about sculpture, plus I was
doing sculptural stuff. I still had the sign company, so I was doing a lot of woodworking, metalworking, in
connection with the sign business, which then fed into my own work.
Fiksdal: You were already a 3-D thinker, now that I’m thinking about that.
Tougas: Right.
Fiksdal: That worked out really well. That metal shop only allows 13 people in it. There must have been
more than that in your group.
Tougas: I think that was before they got so picky about that. [laughter] You needn’t share that.
Fiksdal: That’s interesting to know.
Tougas: Who’s the guy who used to run the metal shop? Was it Doug Hitch?
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Tougas: Doug was a pretty much you do it and then you ask permission later kind of a guy. [laughter]
Sorry if that is incriminating evidence or anything.
Fiksdal: No, it’s great news about Doug. He was a great person.
Tougas: Right. The Towers Project was fall and winter, and then I needed one more quarter, so I did a
contract with Beryl Crowe. That was my challenge about bringing my philosophy into my work, and
somehow connected it with the sculptural stuff.
I think whenever Beryl had an opportunity to shape someone’s education, his go-to starting
point was the archeological evidence for very early human uses of mathematics. He had this one
particular book that he apparently loved about the cave paintings.
Tougas: There was this particular book that Beryl thought was an amazing example of how human
beings can find evidence for earlier civilizations.
This book was by somebody named Marshack 1707, and Marshack had this theory that these
bones that were found in different caves had scratch marks on them, and if you looked at the scratch
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marks through a microscope, you could discern when those scratches were made and who was doing it.
They could find evidence of particular individuals who had a certain style of making these scratches, and
the numbers of the scratchers coincided with the phases of the moon.
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Joe Tougas
Interviewed by Susan Fiksdal
The Evergreen State College oral history project
November 18, 2022
FINAL
Fiksdal: This is Susan Fiksdal. I’m here with Joe Tougas for our second interview on November 18, 2022.
We’re going to go back in time a little bit to Joe’s first teaching experiences. I’ll just ask you to start
there, Joe.
Tougas: The first college-level teaching experience that I had was when I was in graduate school in the
PhD program at Irvine. They had a group of advanced graduate students teaching these little standalone
seminar groups with the students who were in the liberal arts track there. This was the second year of
graduate school. Usually, they would only allow people who were third-year, fourth-year, more
advanced, actually working on dissertations, but I was able to talk my way into one of those halftime
teaching position.
When I finished the coursework, [I] came back to Olympia with the idea that I would get
whatever teaching was available, but try to live in Olympia with my family. I was talking to people at
Evergreen, obviously, but also at Olympic College, and they had a branch campus in Shelton.
So, the first teaching I was doing during that time period was a conventional introduction to
philosophy for community college students. The first year I was doing that, I also was hired to teach a
four-credit class at Evergreen.
What’s interesting about that is I was teaching these four-credit classes—in a sense, the same
subject matter because it was called introduction to philosophy—but it was very, very different because I
was teaching at the community college and using a textbook that they had chosen. Then, with the
Evergreen class, I knew what I wanted to do, and because of the generosity of the deans, I was able to
say, “I want to do an introductory philosophy class, but I want to have it structured around dialog and
hands-on stuff, the practical application of philosophical principles.”
The community college class was about the history of philosophy. The Evergreen one was doing
philosophical work that connected with the students’ actual lives.
Fiksdal: That was exactly what your approach [was] to them all along, so that was really cool.
Tougas: Right.
Fiksdal: Was I the one that hired you for that class? Because that was a four-credit class. I remember
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coming in halftime.
Tougas: Yeah. The next year, I taught halftime. I think that was the point at which I was doing the
administrative work, the grievance officer stuff, which was also an interesting pairing because—I think
that when you hired me, it was to teach a business class.
Fiksdal: Oh, that was the very first—I threw you quite a challenge there.
Tougas: That was the first eight-credit half-time thing.
Fiksdal: And that was in Grays Harbor, so you had to drive there.
Tougas: Right. For a while, we were doing it on weekends—it was always a complicated scheme.
Fiksdal: It was always complicated. Some people argued that it was good to do one night, like a
Wednesday night, and then a Saturday. You may have done that.
Tougas: I think I did that at least once.
Fiksdal: But I didn’t remember it was the first course that I asked you to teach or halftime program, but I
remember looking at your resume and seeing, of course, you had the PhD in philosophy, which is terrifc,
but we desperately needed business, and you had owned The Sign Painting Shop for so long. But what
was great was that you were very flexible about that. You could have said, “No, I would prefer X.” But
you did it, and that was wonderful.
Tougas: And it was clear to me that whatever was offered, I would take.
Fiksdal: That’s probably true. [laughing]
Tougas: Which is that whole class of the Road Scholar—you pack up your stuff in a car and you go
itinerant.
Fiksdal: Until you have a permanent position, you were forced—okay, so tell me a little bit about those
early years in Part-time Studies. I think it was called Part-time Studies at the time.
Tougas: Yeah.
Fiksdal: Later, it changed to Evening/Weekend Studies. But what interests me is that it took us a while—
I think a year or two after you got hired—for the faculty to agree to five permanent faculty members in
that position. There were lots of others that were contingent, like you, who were fabulous, so there
were plenty of people to teach with, but it was not like fulltime. It was a limited group. I was wondering
if you remember at all how you formed programs, and how you talked to people, how you chose your
teaching partners.
Tougas: For most of that time, up until I started teaching fulltime, I was constantly on the lookout for
opportunities to teach with anybody who would have me. Basically, teaching whatever I felt I could make
a strong case that my background was relevant. I remember having a conversation with Rita Pougiales
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and it was about money. It was about what the pay would be, so that brought in the question of
experience years.
Fiksdal: Yes, right.
Tougas: I was thinking, well, I did this teaching at Irvine, and I did this at Shelton and I did this at
Evergreen. That was what I had for experience years. Rita was, “No, no, no. We see here that you’re
teaching business, and I know you’ve had a business for 10 years.”
Fiksdal: And that was relevant.
Tougas: There were some other things. Working in classrooms, volunteering at Lincoln [Elementary
School], that kind of stuff. Rita went to work and said, “We can do a little here, six months here.”
That’s where I became clear that there was unpredictable curriculum needs and there were
people who were trying to fill those needs in a very creative way. That’s what made those activities
worthy of being experience years, and I got paid for it.
Fiksdal: Yeah. That was our practice I remember, but I think the business, we would only half of that in
not 10 years but five. I’m not sure why. Because it wasn’t teaching, but it was relevant. Who did you
teach with in Part-time Studies? Do you remember your teaching partners?
Tougas: The guy who taught Web design. Arlen?
Fiksdal: Oh, yes.
Tougas: Space, or something like that.
Fiksdal: [Transcriber found Arlen Speights.]
Tougas: That was an interesting program because it was community building through the Internet.
Arlen was a Web designer. My part of it was to have the students go out into the community and
identify non-profit organizations that were doing good work, but it was in Grays Harbor, and how are
they ever going to make use of the Internet when there’s nothing offered there that really fits their
needs, which is basically to build community around these different organizations.
The YWCA and the YMCA. What were some of the community . . . Oh, there were people who
were providing elder services in the community. There were people who were working in tribal
communities. All of those different people with their different need—they did have in common that
they wanted to be able to use the Internet to build awareness and to provide services.
My job was to get the students out into the community interviewing. A lot of them already
belonged to organizations in the community that they could immediately hook up with. Others, it took a
little work, but that was the point of it, to get people out there.
They were working in teams, so they were usually two or three together and learning how to
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divide up the work of that community building, and to support each other in learning to do Web pages. I
think it was a two-quarter program, and by the end of those two quarters, they had all created Web sites
with whatever capability they needed for their particular thing. It was a perfect blend of the hands-on,
technological, up-to-the-minute with this is what’s happening out there in the world.
Fiksdal: That was early on, too, so it was a real service to that community. Such an isolated place.
Tougas: Yeah.
Fiksdal: High unemployment. So, you did your service doubly continuing on at Grays Harbor.
Tougas: Yeah, so that was that. Dang, I wish I had . . .
Fiksdal: You can fill us in later if you think of other things. That’s a good memorable experience, though.
I’m glad you brought that up.
Another question I have is, over your years of teaching at Evergreen—which were quite long—
did you learn pedagogical approaches or strategies that you ended up using that you found useful that
other people had introduced you to.
Tougas: Yes. One part of that is the way of using writing as a pedagogical structure. There were a
couple of people that really influenced that. [chuckles] Now, I’ve got a dozen different programs
popping up and fitting together.
But the use of writing in connection with community dialog and community building, I think I got
ideas about that by looking over the shoulder of Sam Schrager and Matt Smith, in particular. And then
there is the work that I did with Nancy Koppelman—with Nancy, we taught together just the two of us.
But then, we taught, in addition to that, in three-person faculty teams.
What was going on there in terms of the pedagogical development was discovering ways to use
different content materials in the learning of the writing skills. The writing fulfilled a dual purpose. It
challenged students to develop just the craft of writing. Sometimes it was fiction. Sometimes it was
creative non-fiction. Those kinds of writing activities.
But they were always aimed at getting the students to think about the things in their daily lives
that they could articulate in these different kinds of writing assignments, usually developing over the
length of the quarter, and going through a series of stages of outlining, researching, drafting the
standard, the step-by-step structure for the writing process. And always making use of the content
expertise of whoever it was I was teaching with.
That was where teaching with Nancy was so rich because of her understanding of history, the
writing of history and the critique of history. That was very rich for the students. What really nurtured
the collaboration with my teaching partner was that we brought different skills and different teaching
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goals, and then we challenged ourselves to demonstrate to the students how that worked.
Don Finkel, of course, was another influence. The ideas from his work that I could apply to the
activities that happened in the classroom with the seminars and with the individual projects,
encouraging students to really identify topics that they were genuinely interested in.
I remember talking a lot with Nancy when we were developing a syllabus. We would start with a
stack of books. Then, as we were working through the thematic trajectory of the program, narrowing
down, focusing in, Nancy was always bringing in these wonderful short pieces of writing that we could
have the students really tear them apart . . .
Fiksdal: . . . and to do close reading.
Tougas: Yeah.
Fiksdal: How did summer institutes help? Did you go to those?
Tougas: Oh, yeah. Partly as a self-recruitment tool [chuckles] to get to know other faculty. Partly, I
remember some of the Summer Institutes were very contentious. I think that was partly because we
were trying so hard to nurture all the different teaching ambitions of our colleagues.
I remember one discussion about how we used writing, and this idea of Writing Across the
Curriculum. One of my teaching partners said, “We’re supposed to be doing Writing Across the
Curriculum but what we’re really doing is typing across the curriculum.” [laughter]
Fiksdal: That’s a very interesting statement.
Tougas: Yeah. One of the first full-time programs I taught in was a health and human development
program that I taught with Bret Weinstein. One of the things about Bret is he didn’t read books. He
didn’t like to plan. He was very attuned to his own idiosyncratic interests, which drove me crazy.
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