ChandlerJeannie_20190925_Transcript.pdf

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Part of Jeannie Chandler Oral History Interview

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Jeannie Chandler
Interviewed by Jin Darney
The Evergreen State College oral history project
September 25, 2019
FINAL
Darney: It is Wednesday, September 25, 2019 and I’m talking with Jeannie Chandler at her home.
Would you start by telling us a little bit about how you grew up and where you grew up?
Chandler: I was born in Corvallis, Oregon. My dad was head of the entomology department at Oregon
State University, and my mom was sort of a housekeeper. My dad died when I was really young, so my
sister, my mom and I moved to Puyallup, Washington. We eventually lived with my maternal
grandmother and her brother. It was kind of an unusual household.
We grew up with a real—on my mom’s part—intentional work ethic. My grandparents owned
several variety stores and all my cousins and my sister and I started working in the stores from third
grade on. We’d start stocking shelves, stuff like that.
Darney: You moved in with family, but then you had other family there, cousins and aunts and uncles?
Chandler: Yes. One of the other stores was in Enumclaw and I had five first cousins there, while my
sister and I worked in the Puyallup store. I liked it when I was old enough to do the cash register because
it would really surprise people to see this young kid—it was an electric, with a cord—doing this cash
register. I really liked kind of blowing people away. That was probably my favorite job at the time.
I went to Western Washington State University from ’68 to ’72, which was a really wild time for
our country. Martin Luther King had been killed, Bobby Kennedy had been killed, and then the war in
Vietnam— we really turned a corner, and all of a sudden—I remember having one sociology teacher
who was alone, every Friday standing in downtown Bellingham with a “Stop the War” sign. In time,
thousands of people ended up being there in the space of two years. It was a really exciting time and a
scary time.
I had some really good experiences there, had some really good teachers. I learned about
Evergreen my senior year, and it was too late to try and get in, plus I felt an obligation sort of to the
teachers and I had my student teaching all set up. It was a picture in the catalog of Byron Youtz—I’m
not even sure it was a catalog—in a seminar with students. That’s what I saw, and it was the picture
that got my attention, and then the fact that it was an “alternative” school. I had taken some fulltime
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similar programs, fulltime interdisciplinary team-taught programs at Western, and I really liked that, so I
was drawn to Evergreen for a whole bunch of reasons. That’s the significant stuff.
Darney: After you graduated?
Chandler: I was married, so when we both graduated, my husband had a job in Anacortes and we lived
there for a while, which was great. They closed the Employment Security office in Anacortes where he
worked and offered him a job in Olympia. My first thought was Evergreen. I’m sure there were
thousands of people with the same thought.
I got a job in an insurance adjustment firm. My husband worked with the husband of the
Director of Personnel at Evergreen, who said, “Just make an appointment with the director.” I was like,
shouldn’t I start somewhere else? And they were “No.”
I went in and made an appointment with Diane Youngquist and she hired me on the spot. She
said there were two jobs available, and she wasn’t sure which one I’d get. The uncertainty did not deter
me in the least. I just wanted to work at Evergreen. I think one of your questions will probably be
something about how it was when I first got there.
Darney: Yes.
Chandler: My first day was very confusing. I was in a trailer in a park that was off campus with all the
maintenance yards. My boss had quit that day, and his boss was laid off in a reorganization, so no one
was quite sure what I was supposed to do. No one knew who I would report to or anything else.
Darney: When was this?
Chandler: It was January of ’73, so it was the middle of the second academic year.
Darney: Is it your sense that that’s kind of how hiring was done—we like this person, so we’ll find
something for them to do?
Chandler: Yeah. I’m sure she was a charming person, but very by the book. She knew her stuff and had
worked at the UW for many years. I’m sure it was all legal, but whoever I was going to work with never
interviewed me. I think they had these openings, they needed someone quickly, so in those cases, I
think that they just hired someone and had faith that it would work out. [laughing]
Darney: Was it Facilities?
Chandler: Yes. For some reason, I was under the Controller of the college, Ken Winkley. I didn’t have
an organizational chart, but somehow I knew that name, and I knew that he or someone would come

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and talk to me the next day. They didn’t know what I should do, but I should make myself busy or try to
figure it out. It was very confusing.
My first day, what I didn’t know was that they closed the maintenance yard and locked
everything in it at 4:30 or 5:00. My husband couldn’t come and pick me up in the car until about 5:30,
so I was locked in. [laughter] I had worn a dress, not knowing, and nylons. Probably high heels. But I
did have a phonebook, and I recognized the name Ken Winkley. I didn’t know who he was in relation to
me or my job. Bless his heart, he was still there. He told me not to try and climb the fence [laughter]
and that there was a security department and they would come, and they did right away. That was my
introduction. No boss, no organization chart, sitting in a trailer alone locked in. [laughter] I don’t know
what it was like before that, but at that point, it was pretty chaotic.
Darney: What did it turn out that you did?
Chandler: It turned out I was on a computer, and I don’t think I’d ever been on a computer at Western
or anywhere. The maintenance people would come in or fill out forms on what they needed to
purchase, so I did all the purchasing for them, and then what were called campus stores, which later got
put in the bookstore. But it was if you were a program secretary, you could go to campus stores and
charge paper and pens and all that kind of stuff.
I was pretty isolated. The maintenance guys made me feel really welcome, so that was my first
sense of community at Evergreen.
Darney: How long was the operation in the trailer?
Chandler: I think that went on for probably a couple years.
Darney: Because that first year, there was still building going on.
Chandler: This was the middle of the second year, but there was still a lot of building going on, so I think
it was there for quite some time. I was only in that position maybe six months, and then got a job in
Admissions. I’m not sure what my title was, some kind of office person in Admissions. There was no
academic advising, so we had a waiting list of students, probably a couple hundred. Some of those
people moved here so that they could try to up their chances of getting in and made friends with people
in Admissions. They’d check in every week to see where their name was on the waiting list.
I guess I then became the office manager or something, so we had students we had to train to
do tours. We processed all the applications. In those days, we had an essay that people were required
to complete. It was a really exciting time, and we were doing really well on enrollment, so that wasn’t a
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concern, but just trying to get things organized. There had been a series of audits, and the front page of
the newspaper was critical of the Evergreen campus because of the dogs and stuff about purchasing or
something. We were trying to get things more organized and systemized.
Darney: Because you were the first person in that job, you had to invent everything.
Chandler: No, I wasn’t the first person. There was another woman who was the office manager. When
I went in for that interview as compared to my interview with the Director of Personnel, I think there
were 17 people in the room to interview me for an office position. The one I remember is Laura
Thomas, who became Registrar later on, and then Director of Financial Aid. There were people from all
the offices that I would be interacting with should I get the position, plus the director and the acting
director. There was a woman there, and I’m not sure at what point, but she left fairly soon and then I
moved into it.
Darney: Who was Director of Admissions then?
Chandler: There was no director at the time. There was an acting director. I was there maybe a few
months and they hired Ken Mayer, who was from California.
Darney: After Admissions?
Chandler: I was there maybe three years, and I left and had my first child. I’ll come back to that. I was
rehired by Laura Thomas in Financial Aid and was there maybe three years. Then they were hiring a new
Business Vice President and he hired me to be an administrative assistant.
Darney: To that office.
Chandler: Yeah. At that time Byron Youtz was Provost. His secretary was in the hospital and needed to
take an extended medical leave. As it turned out, I ended up kind of helping both vice presidents. It was
a privilege. They both were very understanding of what the other person expected and what my
workload was, so I didn’t ever feel at loose ends or anything.
I did that for a few years, and then they needed an adult figure one summer in Housing to be
the director because the two assistant directors both needed to be gone. So I went over there—I don’t
know what year that would have been—and then I just stayed. [laughter] I think probably the hiring
might have been a little bit controversial because there wasn’t a search process, and normally at a
director level—in most levels—there’s always a search. But Joe Olander was new. He had fired a
number of people. Gail Martin had just been appointed as the first Student Affairs Vice President, and I
had somewhat of a working relationship with Gail, so she had a little bit of a basis of knowing me.
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Darney: There wasn’t a Student Affairs Vice President before that?
Chandler: No, Gail was the first one.
Darney: Who did Student Affairs before that?
Chandler: We didn’t really meet as an area—like Student Affairs—which was problematic in that there
wasn’t necessarily a shared sense of mission or a Student Affairs community. I’m sure people would
argue with that, but that was my sense. If there was a figurehead, it would have been Larry Stenberg,
who was Dean of Students, but he didn’t have all of Student Affairs.
Darney: Like Advising, all the pieces of it.
Chandler: Yes. He was more Enrollment Services, so he had Financial Aid, Registration and Admissions,
and I think Career Development.
Darney: Olander systemized it a bit more by creating Student Affairs.
Chandler: Yes. That decision, I think, was based on a lot of people’s input to Joe about Student Affairs;
that if it were all together and if it were more integrated, there could be more cross-training, and there
could be more staff development in terms of student development, those kinds of things. I do think he
had input on that before he made that decision.
Darney: Who was President before Olander?
Chandler: There was Charles McCann, of course, and then Dan Evans.
Darney: And Olander was the next one?
Chandler: There was an acting, Dick Schwartz, who I had worked for when he was the Business Vice
President. He was the acting President, and I’m sure the search was at least a year, so Dick was
probably Acting President for a year and a half before Olander came. Then Olander let him go almost
immediately, did a big reorganization, and as part of that, named the first Student Affairs Vice President.
Darney: Olander was the first President who had been in administration at another institution?
Chandler: Charles McCann was Dean of Students at Central.
Darney: So, he understood.
Chandler: Some.
Darney: And maybe reacted against? I don’t know.
Chandler: Could be.

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Darney: But then Olander brought it back into kind of a more typical higher ed administration.
Chandler: Yeah.
Darney: That’s interesting. By creating Student Services, he set it up so that Gail then needed
somebody in Housing. There were people there, though, who had left?
Chandler: Yes. The Auxiliary Services Director, who was Ken Jacob, started out as Director of Housing,
and then was given more and more responsibility for Food Services, eventually, Security, Bookstore—all
the auxiliaries. Instead of having a director, Ken had two assistant directors. During that Joe Olander
reorganization, which happened fairly quickly, Ken Jacob as Auxiliary Services Director, the position was
eliminated, so they needed somebody to take over Housing fairly quickly.
Darney: I don’t know the world of student housing. Is it unusual for Housing to be in Auxiliary Services
rather than Student Services?
Chandler: That’s a good question. No, all the housing that I’m aware of on public campuses is an
auxiliary, so they have to be self-supporting. They can’t use any State money. It’s a little bit different in
terms of not getting an allotment and having to really watch your budget carefully.
Darney: But it also says something about the importance of student life and student housing to the
academic purpose of the college. Does it seem to you that way?
Chandler: Yes, and before I came to Housing, there were several faculty members who kind of would
serve as an academic advisor in Housing. The first couple years, one of the faculty lived in housing,
which was great. When I got there, I just started a lecture series. I remember Byron Youtz coming over
with slides of the building of the campus, and hundreds of students who ended up showing up to hear
that.
Different faculty would come and talk about the research they were doing or programs they
wanted to teach the next year. That was really helpful. When I worked in Admissions the second-third
year of the college, there was not a brochure or catalog that talked about what the specific programs
would be the following year, there was a supplement that came out much later, so when we got to the
point where we needed to be recruiting students and didn’t have a waiting list, we needed to be able to
show them what they would take as a freshman, and what real programs would exist. That was another
huge shift from the Student Affairs point of view was to be able to have the faculty produce their
program descriptions way sooner than they were used to, and to find teaching partners and all the rest
of it.

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Darney: Just to plan further out than two months?
Chandler: Yes, than they were used to.
Darney: Was that a hard change to make?
Chandler: It was. It was more of a top-down decision. I remember when we would get the
supplements—we can come back to this part about relationships—in Admissions we’d get the catalog
supplement, we’d have to mail thousands, and we’d be there all weekend. Charles McCann would
always show up with a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread and some cheese. Ed Kormondy, who was the
Provost, would show up and we’d all sit there for eight hours stuffing the supplements. It was more a
top-down decision.
There were no faculty meetings per se. There was really no faculty governance per se. The
Agenda Committee didn’t exist, faculty meetings didn’t exist. Byron had brownbag lunches every Friday
in his office, so if you were a faculty member, or anybody for that matter, and you had an issue or a new
idea, you’d show up on Friday. Whoever showed up, everybody got a chance to speak about whatever
they were there for. But there weren’t regular faculty meetings. [laughing]
Darney: Because Kormondy was doing the work of putting together some teams, if teams didn’t form
themselves. Is that true?
Chandler: Yes.
Darney: Kind of matching people?
Chandler: Yes. Later on, Barbara Leigh Smith became a master of that. He was trying to put teams
together, and I think it was also a matter of scale that it was still maybe small enough that many faculty
still knew each other, and they certainly got to know each other a little bit at the retreat.
Darney: So, there was a retreat, but no faculty meetings.
Chandler: No.
Darney: That must have been conscious on somebody’s part not to have them.
Chandler: I don’t know that part. That would be fascinating to see.
Darney: Because it seemed like a lot of what structure there was, was a reaction to the structure at a
typical school?
Chandler: Yes.

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Darney: Just thinking about that, one of the things that faculty hate is faculty meetings, so let’s just not
have any.
Chandler: Right. That could be it. It could have been very conscious. I do know that when Byron
decided to start having some faculty meetings, it wasn’t one of the first ones, but the Agenda
Committee was formed, and Byron very reluctantly chaired the faculty meetings. Then he argued in
front of the faculty that it shouldn’t be his agenda, and they should have their own chair. Nobody
wanted to do it, so he ended up chairing it for several years before he finally put his foot down and said,
“No.” He thought it should be a blend. Of course, as Provost, he might have some things like “You’ve
got to get your program description in two years ahead of time.” [laughter] And the faculty did. I don’t
remember it being difficult, but I’m sure it was. I’m sure, in retrospect, that was a hard sell.
Darney: Was Byron the second Provost?
Chandler: There was Ed Kormondy and then Byron, yes.
Darney: They were there a long time, the combination.
Chandler: I’m trying to think. There might have been one before I came, because I came right in the
midst of this chaotic reorganization, where two of the four Vice Presidents were let go. My memory is
that Ed Kormondy stayed as one of the Vice Presidents Provost, and that Dean Clabaugh stayed as the
Business Vice President. Charlie Teske knew.
Darney: He will tell us. [laughter] You were in Housing for quite a while?
Chandler: I was Director in Housing for 14 years at least. Then I had a series of things that happened.
My mother had a major stroke. I was downtown, and Barbara Smith came up to me—she’d just been
appointed Provost—and she said, “I want somebody like you when you worked for Byron. If you know
of anybody, you have to advise me.” I must have taken a step back—somehow visually, I must have
reacted—and she said, “You wouldn’t be interested, would you?” I said, “Well, yeah.” She said, “Of
course, there will be an application process. I can’t guarantee you anything, but I would really love to
have you think about it.”
She ended up hiring me, and it was at a time when it was really exciting to be there. It felt like
spring instead of winter. Joe Olander had left under these terrible circumstances. People were
emotionally really down. There were acting Provosts and an acting President. I think there were a
dozen DTFs that never finished their work. Everything was in flux.

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Barbara had been there for a long time. She was hired specifically as a dean. Even though she
had been away in the sense of being on campus but being affiliated with the Washington Center—which
was more externally-based—she knew the faculty, and she really liked the faculty. [laughing] And she
liked matchmaking, and she liked curriculum building and those kinds of things. It was kind of like, okay,
we’re back on track. At the time, Les [Purce] was acting President, and he really gave her free reign and
backed her up. It was very exciting when Jane Jervis came, and to have this strong team. It was a fun
time.
Darney: That was the period where there were a lot of women in administration.
Chandler: Correct. By that point, Gail had left when Joe Olander was President. Carolyn Dobbs was
there for maybe a year and a half, two years, and then Art Constantino came in. But women in the
deanship . . .
Darney: . . . and the Finance Vice President, right? Wasn’t that when that woman was there? Whose
name I can’t remember.
Chandler: Oh, yes, that’s right. Anne Daly. There were two women.
Darney: Right. The other one. [laughing]
Chandler: That’s right, Ruta Fanning.
Darney: Did you sense a change of atmosphere on campus? Is that what you’re saying that people felt
differently in that period?
Chandler: Yes, I think they did. One of the things that is kind of a body memory is the first faculty
meeting—it was more a faculty-only orientation—and it was in the Recital Hall. Barbara was going to
introduce her staff and her agenda, part of which was bringing all those DTFs back together and having
them finish their work and figuring out what resources they needed to do that.
We had a visiting fellow. I think most of the staff were still there from the previous Provost. So,
we walked out, and she introduced us. When she walked out and then we walked out, there was a
standing ovation, so there really was, I think, this sense of, wow! Let’s get to it. Let’s get back to work.
Darney: What did your role entail working with Barbara?
Chandler: I did quite a bit of writing, but what was important were my relationships with people, and
trying to listen to faculty. I do remember when Barbara hired a secretary, and she had us both in the
office with Karen Wyncoop, she just said, “When people walk into this office, I want them to feel that

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you’re all approachable; that it’s a safe place to be; that you will be at all times respectful and listen, and
make them feel that it was worthwhile to come here.”
That was always primary in my mind. Because of my role in Admissions, and not having
Academic Advising, I forced myself to get to know the faculty, and be able to advise students. I knew it
was bigger than just being a cultural anthropologist; that people were expected to teach all kinds of
things outside their field. I didn’t know any of that, so when I was at the Provost, particularly the faculty
that had been there longer, I knew pretty well. It was to help the DTFs, to help them do final reports, to
redo the faculty handbook.
Darney: Maybe faculty saw you as not a viaduct to Barbara, but if they couldn’t get to see Barbara, they
could talk to you about whatever the issue was. Is that true?
Chandler: Yeah, I think that’s true. I had some really interesting experiences where if somebody said to
me, “I want to share this, but you can’t share it with anybody,” I took that as fact. [laughing] I had
several people come to me later and say, “Why didn’t you tell Barbara that?” [laughter] I think there
were definitely people who wanted me to serve as a conduit and I just didn’t get it. There were a lot of
times when I could just save them a lot of steps.
One of the things that Gail Martin and Barbara Smith both did really well was they personally
took on people’s orientation to the college. Gail, for example, always made it a point to invite each and
every new faculty member to coffee, and she’d find something out about them that they would have to
converse about later. Barbara was very much the same way. She really wanted to get to know each and
every faculty member and spend time with them.
Early on, because of all the confusion, when I would ask a question, it was “Don’t call the
mailroom, call Eddie Batacan.” I learned really early on that you got stuff done if you knew the person
and had a relationship with that person. I saw that embodied in Gail and Barbara particularly that they
realized right away those things were so important.
Darney: By modeling it, they encouraged you to do that as well.
Chandler: Yes.
Darney: I know that Barbara said. “You have to get out of your office and go to faculty, go over there.”
Did you do that, too? You had a lot to do in your office, though.
Chandler: I didn’t have a lot of time to do that, but I did do that. There were some faculty that I, for
whatever reason, knew that they were having a difficult time, so I just would try and reach out a little
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bit. Or, if I knew they weren’t seeing students or teaching, I might get a coffee and just wander over
there. I think that people learned to trust me, then more and more people just came to my office.
I got to know the new people through the Agenda Committee. By the time I got to the Provost’s
office, the Agenda Committee was more new faculty getting oriented to the college.
Darney: You mean they were on the Agenda Committee?
Chandler: Yeah, more people would get nominated who were new. The people who had been at the
college longer had already done it a bunch of times, and they didn’t want to do it anymore, so instead of
just setting the agenda for faculty meetings, we were trying to orient new people because they didn’t
know about the administration. They’d never seen an organizational chart.
Darney: There wasn’t ever one, was there?
Chandler: Yeah, there finally was. [laughter] In fact, I worked on it! I just remember it was really
helpful to have one.
Darney: To know who to talk to. There were several other staff who worked with Barbara.
Chandler: Yes.
Darney: What was your relationship with those positions?
Chandler: We worked really closely together. We had a staff meeting once a week, which was John
McCann, who was Grants Manager; Walter Niemiec, who did all the budget and was the associate; Steve
Hunter—and then it became Laura Coghlan—Director of Institutional Research; and me. We had a
really nice team, and we had a good idea of what each other were working on. There were times that
Walter could pinch hit for me or I could for him because we had enough knowledge of each other.
Darney: Walter was budget. Did he have other people with him?
Chandler: Yes, he had Dee Van Brunt and later, Lorri Moore. There’s always an excellent student and
then another fulltime position. I don’t remember what that was called, but it was another accounting
position like Dee.
Darney: It sounds like a team that worked very well together with Barbara. You all were on the same
page.
Chandler: At some point, for quite a number of years, Karen Wyncoop had the program secretaries, and
then Walter took that on, too. When I started at Evergreen, the program secretaries had reported to
the Provost’s secretary. It was nice in that if people were not getting evaluations done, or on the

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flipside, if some students were doing a show and it was particularly good, the program secretaries would
know to call the Provost’s office so that the Provost could get out and go see.
Darney: Was Joanne Jirovec Barbara’s secretary, or was that when she was a dean?
Chandler: No, it was when she was a dean.
Darney: And then you retired from Barbara.
Chandler: Yeah! [laughter]
Darney: I think the stories that you have are from your whole career there, but I think there were lots
from the period when you were working with Barbara? What strikes me—because we went through
some of them last night—was the sense of play and of joy being together that came out those
experiences. Is that true?
Chandler: Yes, I think that was at the very beginning of the college. When I thought about this
interview, that was something I wanted to be sure and mention. I think when I got there the second
year, there was very much a sense of shared mission. Even though we had a waiting list, what we were
doing was really important, and it was serious. Not so much that it was an experiment, it was more, do
these things really bear fruit, these principles and things that we think are important? Because the
college was closed down for two days during this reorganization thing, everything stopped, so
everybody—the custodial staff, the grounds staff, all of facilities, all of Student Affairs, all the staff and
faculty—were at these meetings, so there very much a shared sense of purpose that what we were
doing was really important.
So, there’s this serious aspect. But from the beginning, there was this playful, joyful, whimsical,
people acting really stupid and silly onstage, and singing even though they didn’t have a good singing
voice. A lot of that was Malcolm Stilson, who was in the Library, who wrote these wonderful plays. The
leadership would be the silliest characters in the play, so you had the academic deans and the Vice
Presidents dancing and singing onstage in front of the campus.
There were a number of parties. I remember working on one when Dan Evans was President
and we had this big party called “Dreamers and Schemers.” Somebody got an award for being the
biggest dreamer on campus, and somebody else was the biggest schemer on campus. Judy McNickle ,
who became Director of College Relations, won the award for biggest schemer. She had to go up
onstage and get this award from Dan Evans, and she kissed him, and then she went over to the

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microphone and said, “He’s the first Republican I’ve ever kissed.” [laughter] Nancy Evans, Dan’s wife,
stood up in the audience and put her hands on her hips and said, “It wasn’t so bad, was it?” [laughter]
There was just something very fun and equalizing about seeing the President of the college
dancing, doing the jitterbug dance with his wife, and all the academic deans. It reinforced the sense that
we’re all in this together, and that people could let their hair down and have fun.
Darney: And it would be all right.
Chandler: Yeah, be silly.
Darney: What other kinds of fun planning or whatever you want to call it do you think about?
Chandler: Just a couple highlights to give you a taste, and I know you know these stories, so I hope I’m
not being repetitive about other people. One of the things when I first came to Evergreen that I realized
was that there was a really strong—not structured—group of women, and the women really helped
each other. Eventually—I think because of Barbara, and Sue Washburn—they had more organized
activities. It was usually in the spring. It was open to all women, faculty and staff. There was one where
we went to Harrison Hot Springs. There were three vans full of women. We went up there and we
would make up things, like people would say, “What are all these women doing together?” We would
make up like we were a mortician society, or all gynecologists. [laughter] It was very playful.
Everybody, I think, had a very good time.
On the way back on Sunday, here are these three vans. We’re at the Canadian border trying to
get back into the United States, and there’s a telegram from the former Governor of the State of
Washington—now the President of The Evergreen State College—that we can’t be allowed to come back
in. It was written in a limerick. The Canadian guards were very serious, so, for several seconds, we were
all completely taken aback and speechless. [laughter] Then the American guards come over and they’re
laughing and we get a hint at what’s going on.
Ellie Dornan, who was one of the women on the bus, insisted that she go to a telegraph office.
The end of the limerick was “Your pink slips will arrive the next day.” She said, “Just wanted you to
know, my pink slip size is 38.” [laughter] It was really fun to see the Presidents, the Vice Presidents,
everybody being silly sometimes.
Darney: Was that after the “Sewing and Terrorist Society” incident?
Chandler: No.
Darney: It was before that?
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Chandler: Yeah, that was before that.
Darney: Talk about that.
Chandler: There was this other group of women, who Jin Darney was part of. We would get together
sometimes for an Evergreen-tradition potluck. It wasn’t structured, it wasn’t like once a month or
anything like that. It was just when somebody could host it. It was my turn to host it, and I was late
getting invitations out to all the women who usually came. I mailed them via campus mail, and that’s
using the resources of the State for personal use, so I wasn’t supposed to do that, but I didn’t realize it.
I had the dinner. It was really fun. I came back and my boss at the time, Dick Schwartz, said,
“Dan Evans wants to see us in the President’s office,” so we went down there. The Chief of Police and
the head of the mailroom and Dan were in this room, and Dan asked me what the women’s “Sewing
Circle and Terrorist Society” was about. It was a joke. That’s what we had named ourselves. I realized
that the Chief of Police and the person who was over the mailroom were serious, and they were like
“Jeannie, how could you do this? You, of all people?”
Dan was getting kind of red in the face [laughing] and my boss was looking at me like, “Is this
true?” I explained that it was just a joke, and that I would never, ever use campus mail for personal
reasons, and I was very sorry that I had misunderstood. But I think it tickled Dan.
Darney: He suspected from the beginning that it wasn’t a real thing.
Chandler: Yeah, and it also says a lot about him that he had the people in the room who saw my
reaction, too; that he respected them and treated them respectfully. Those are some good stories. I
was trying to think of some others. They are so plentiful.
Darney: We talked a little bit about the memorial for Sandra Simon.
Chandler: Yes. I always felt that parties were really important, and that these things had meant a lot to
me. I was part of a singing group and would play the piano, and sometimes when people retired, we’d—
as you know, having been part of that—that we’d do these things. I liked doing that, but somehow—I
don’t know if this was before my tenure, I’m sure it was—I started having to produce the memorials we
had for faculty and staff we lost. I remember running around with Karen Wynkoop and trying to get
potted plants in the Library and running them up to Library 4300 so there would be some greenery. As a
community, that’s something you do, and it’s a really important thing to do. I just don’t know how I
ended up with it, but I did.

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When we were planning Sandra Simon’s memorial—she was a faculty member who was
cherished and a very good writing teacher, and she had this menagerie of animals at her home—right
before she died, she had this rooster who was overweight and couldn’t stand up anymore and died, so
when she died, I think Jeanne Hahn and Steve Hunter and I went out there, so I knew that we would, of
course, want to do a memorial.
I was talking to one of the faculty members, David Marr, about the rooster, and we were kind of
reminiscing all these sweet, wonderful stories about Sandra, and we decided that we should have a pet
parade at the memorial, and that people could bring their pets. I think that Sandra had stuffed the
rooster that died, so David Marr came up with the idea that he could put it in a little, red wagon and it
could go to the memorial, too. [laughter] We did those kinds of things only if the deceased would have
approved of it, and Sandra would have loved it.
Darney: It was a pet parade? People brought pets?
Chandler: It was a pet parade. I can’t remember all the other stuff we did, but people brought actual
pets, and people brought stuffed animals, and David brought the dead rooster. [laughter] It was very
unusual and very fun.
There are so many, but one that stands out was when another cherished faculty member, Beryl
Crowe, died. He was a notorious smoker and drinker at some point in his life, and also just very genteel,
extremely well mannered, and gracious and generous. For his memorial, we decided that halfway
through, there should be a whiskey and smoking break, so we had a table lined up with all these
different kinds of whiskey. People who didn’t even smoke brought packs of cigarettes. [laughter] Of
course, we went outside. I just felt like Beryl was there with us. We had his blessing to do that.
I think the other thing that goes with that sense of play, it wasn’t so much that faculty and staff
were equal—we had really different everythings—but it was just that if you imagined something, or you
wanted to do something, everybody was treated respectfully. When I was pregnant and leaving, the
Vice President for Business—who also had his own way of orienting himself to the faculty—said
something like, “Well, you can’t leave. You have to go write a maternity policy so that you can come
back.” He was serious.
I didn’t understand why Evergreen didn’t have international students when I was working in
Admissions, and I had grown up where we had international students in our home. I always knew that
that was such a lifechanging experience for people, so why weren’t we having students come here and
our students go there? Again, Dean Clabaugh just said, “Well, you need to do that. You need to talk to
15

people and then write a policy,” and I actually did start one. But it was this sense that anybody can do
anything if they are willing to do it.
Darney: That there’s such a shared sense of the mission, and everybody is part of that mission. It
doesn’t belong to one group or another.
Chandler: Right. One of the really important features of community is that people have what’s called a
“sense of reciprocity,” so that I’m listening to you, but you’re listening to me, too. I may be an office
assistant in Admissions, but when I give you feedback about how terrible the academic fair was this year
and what I think should be changed, people are listening and taking notes, and next year it changes. It’s
really important to have that to cement . . .
Darney: Do you think that’s something that some faculty had to learn?
Chandler: Yes! [laughter]
Darney: I’m just thinking about the time I saw Dee Van Brunt dress down a faculty for being rude to a
staff member. How do you handle that with faculty, besides telling them off? [laughter]
Chandler: I know, with me, when I was in Housing, staff had this thing where they would come in and
go “I have a concern,” and that meant you’d better pay attention. One of the issues was I sugarcoated
things so much that it was hard for them to decipher what I was being critical about [laughing] so I’m
probably the wrong person to ask that. I had to say a lot of really hard things to a lot of faculty, and I
just don’t know. I think I always admired people like Dee—and you—who could just cut to the chase.
Darney: And Barbara.
Chandler: And Barbara, who would just say, “You don’t seem to like teaching. Maybe you should think
about doing something else.” [laughter]
Byron Youtz was that way, too. I remember there was a huge flap in the Library, and he told me
to just go down—the Dean of the Library wasn’t there that day—and to find a specific person and shut
the Library down, get all the students out, and have them set up chairs. We did that, and I think I ended
up staying to take notes or something. He dealt with the problem and he put it out in front of all 25
people who were working in the Library, they reached consensus, and that was that.
I just think that some people are naturally community-builders. Some people love all the
research on community and that kind of thing. I think particularly Student Affairs staff are drawn into
this concept of community, student community.

16

Darney: Do you think you had that when you first came to Evergreen, or is it something that developed
as you worked with the community?
Chandler: As a graduate student and as an undergraduate student, too, I had studied sociology, and I
was really interested in community, so I naturally looked at things more like a sociologist. I was more
interested in the patterns than the mega stuff, and I was always interested in how people achieve that.
From anecdotal information, a lot of Student Affairs staff seemed to be that way, too, and a lot of
faculty. But some faculty didn’t get it, how to take their turn in a faculty meeting, or how to not talk so
much on the Agenda Committee.
Darney: You also worked with Barbara with the deans, in those meetings, but I’m assuming in other
ways, too—supporting the deans or [laughter] telling them what to do.
Chandler: I did quite a bit of policy writing with the deans because we had revised the whole handbook.
Those DTFs that were all abandoned came back, so there were a lot of new policies about RIFF, about
reappointment, lots of different things. Those usually got finetuned with deans. I would meet with you
and a lot of the deans every week, and separately, too. I think it was just real open. It was like what
kind of help I needed, what kind of help you folks needed. I knew who to go to for what.
Darney: In ways that the deans don’t when they start.
Chandler: That’s true, too.
Darney: Because they don’t know the administrative side.
Chandler: Yeah, so that can be really helpful. One of the things that Barbara did—which was crucial,
which we used to do in the old days in terms of community building and shared mission—was we each,
in the Provost’s office and deans and faculty would try to adopt a new staff member and make sure that
they got in a classroom sometimes, because we lose sense of what the mission is. If you’re working in
Financial Aid and you have to turn down 10 students for an emergency loan, it’s really nice to go into a
classroom and remember why you’re there, and what fabulous teachers there were. This person might
have yelled at you in the hallway, but in a different environment, they were different people.
Darney: Were you staff support to DTFs?
Chandler: Sometimes. It depended on the DTF. A lot of times I would just come in at the end and try to
finetune it, and reach consensus, or tell them what was problematic.
Darney: In their recommendations or their ideas?

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Chandler: Yeah. Sometimes, before there was a faculty union, if one of the faculty were in trouble with
another area of the college, Barbara would ask me to be there with the faculty member as an advocate,
so I did that quite often.
Sometimes if the deans had a complaint from a student, or a student complaint about a faculty
member or a teaching team, and the student wasn’t happy with the outcome and was really upset, they
would send it to me. I did that in a whole number of cases. It wasn’t that I was over the deans, it was
that it was just the third final person.
Darney: Because you were representing the Provost doing it.
Chandler: Yeah. I did a lot of conflict resolution.
Darney: Had you had training in mediation and conflict resolution?
Chandler: Yes, and because new deans coming in didn’t have formal training and they were just
expected to know how to do it, I did arrange for the Dispute Resolution Center to come in. But I had
done that a lot, and I’m so glad I had that training, because that was a lot of what happened in
Housing—roommate complaints and mediations with roommates.
Darney: I want to go back to the policies that you were writing, because some of them have to go in the
Washington Administrative Code the WAC. How do you know how to do that to make it fit those
structures that are there?
Chandler: You just make it up. [laughter] There was actually directions for doing that. What should be
included in the Administrative Code, and what shouldn’t be? Generally, it was if it’s stuff that affects
people outside the college community, then it should probably be WACed. Or, if it involves money, it
should be WACed.
Darney: Then you know what doesn’t have to go in and what does.
Chandler: Yeah.
Darney: How do you help an institution have memory? I’m sure it’s true everywhere, but there’s a lot
of reinventing the wheel, or there’s a lot of somebody saying, “We tried that and it won’t work.” How
do you help create that memory for an institution?
Chandler: I think it’s really critical, because I think when you’re running on fumes instead of gas, it’s
those myths or stories that get you through the rough times. I can turn around and say, “Three weeks in
a row, the President and the Provost were down here stuffing catalogs.” That kind of stuff goes a long
way.
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I certainly think there’s a lot to be said for oral history, and for people to take orientation of
faculty, staff and students really seriously, and to make sure they’ve got an organizational chart, a buddy
they can go to if all else fails. I think it’s on the staff and faculty to tell the stories. I just think we were
so blessed that the planning faculty that first year, a lot of that is recorded. I think people like Malcolm
Stilson, Randy Stilson . . . I wish somehow—maybe it’s on those days that people come back to
Evergreen—with new people that somehow there’s a structure that exposes them to that.
I’m not nostalgic. I don’t want to go back to the good old days. They were precious, but it was
chaotic. I don’t have a desire to do that, but I just think the stories are really important. The Geoduck
Fight Song—we talked about this last night—that says a lot. The narratives that people get, particularly
when they’re new.
That was another thing. I think that you and Barbara and Rita Pougiales and many of the Hiring
Deans really beefed up the faculty development we were doing, and it became much more meaningful,
it became structured. There was really concrete help about how to write good student evaluations, or
meaningful student evaluations. A lot of how to do it, but a lot of philosophical stuff—John Dewey and
Alexander Meiklejohn. I think we really got our act together and really ran a tight ship. [laughing]
But I’m not sure how you do that, how you do the oral history or the written history that would
be interesting to people.
Darney: You could have a booth at “Return to Evergreen” and say, “Come in this booth and tell one
story.”
Chandler: That’s a great idea. We’ve certainly had so many people visit over the years, scholars and
stuff, so this project hopefully will really help those people.
Darney: Yeah. I interrupted you. I think you wanted to talk about something else.
Chandler: We were talking just a little bit last night about faculty-staff interactions. When I was
working in Housing and the Provost’s office, I felt like we were very careful whenever we could be about
the composition of the DTFs, because that was the one place that we could have meaningful stafffaculty interaction.
There were a number of grants written to the Pew Institute, where we had a number of facultystaff Summer Institutes where we studied student development. They were produced by faculty and
staff together, and I got to be on a team, for example, with Thad Curtz and Rob Knapp. The gist of these
grants that went over four or six years was re-putting together a successful academic program, and then

19

tying in things with student development, things that were going on in the student’s life that the faculty
didn’t know about, and then how to finetune the program. I just wanted to say that there were
structures in place to help with that.
I think having many Student Affairs staff come to the faculty retreats was also really, really
helpful. Then later, having core connectors in the programs for freshmen, where student development
specialists actually went to the program and in theory, went to the faculty planning meetings, where
people look at each other more like colleagues, and bringing in different expertise to figure out what the
questions were going to be.
Darney: Because there’s learning on both sides of that collaboration.
Chandler: Yes.
Darney: Do you have anything else on your list?
Chandler: It gets back to relationships. I think this is an anecdote that Charlie Teske wouldn’t know.
When Dean Clabaugh died and I was going to come in from Financial Aid and start working for the new
Business Vice President, I was asked to clean out his desk. I remember being in his office and the top of
the desk was always pristine. When I went to clean out the desk, I could not open the drawers, I
couldn’t open anything because it was so packed. [laughter]
Again, I mentioned that he was the Business Vice President, but he was on a mission to meet
every single faculty member, every single staff member. He just wanted to know. And he watched
people. He’d go to the Student Affairs conferences and the faculty things, and just go wherever he
wanted. He had a Rolodex, which was the size of my dining room table. [laughing] And for each
person, he had spouse or partner name, children’s names and ages, he had their birthdays. In the case
of many women, he had their favorite flower. I just was flabbergasted. It was all handwritten. He had
this huge thing and would keep track of people. It was very endearing, just as an example of how much
he wanted to remember about specific people.
Darney: And how important it was to know about people. Do you have any thoughts about the future
of the college?
Chandler: I’m very concerned because of my experience of how important team-taught programs are,
and coordinated studies being two or three quarters long, and having known a lot of faculty, and having
sat in a lot of faculty planning, I know it’s really, really difficult to team teach. It’s difficult to meet new

20

people and dream up new programs and keep your energy level up. But I really hate to lose that, and as
I understand it, those programs are fewer and fewer.
I think the perfect institution is where you have the institutional memory in your faculty and
staff, and that you have some old-timers and long-termers, and that you have a constant flow of new
people coming in who have new ideas and new approaches and new research, and to somehow make
sure that those two groups of people are mixing. I don’t want to dampen anybody’s ideas about what
should be done, but I think there’s probably a 50-50 chance that the college will go forward. The flipside
of that is that some other public institution of higher ed will take over.
Darney: It’s the only experimental college that is from that period in the ‘60s and the early ‘70s that’s
still going, which is amazing. Anything else?
Chandler: [She looks through her notes].
Darney: What do you think about policy, certainly practice, both in the Library and in Advising, of
faculty rotating into those positions, and in the case of the Library, librarians rotating into programs?
Chandler: My experience is that’s just great. It’s kind of like having newer faculty on the Agenda
Committee. It’s just a great way to orient both. The ones that I can remember were very successful. It’s
so great for the people in Academic Advising, because they really hopefully get to know the faculty
member and what their research is, which might be totally different from what they’re teaching, so they
can advise students appropriately. I think it’s great.
Darney: The Library, when it’s an exchange, is done at no cost, but Admissions isn’t. The people who
started thought it was important to do.
Chandler: I think another myth was that we’re all equal. I think for students and staff and faculty—I
used to call it the “big D”—when they realized we weren’t all equal, there was this big disillusionment
about “But this is the ideal campus, the ideal place to be.” I think there’s some disillusionment with
that, and I just think that we all have different stuff to do [laughing] and different parts of the mission,
and it’s important to see the whole picture if you can, if you have the luxury of doing that.
Darney: Nobody can do it alone. You have to depend on all these other people.
Chandler: Yeah, and it’s intentional. The orientation of people in an effective way was very intentional.
People were watching, keeping track of what other people were teaching, how they were doing, and if
they got sponsored research or not.
I know I’ve covered everything I had, so I think we’re good.
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Darney: You were just such a core part of the college, a really important key person, so I’m glad you did
this.
Chandler: Aw, thank you. We talked about this last night, too. I always felt like the college gave me so
much opportunity in Dean Clabaugh saying, “Why don’t you go write a maternity policy before you
leave?” Or, building new housing. I had no experience floating bonds, and we built 400 beds. Gail was
standing out on the soccer field with me when we broke ground in our hardhats and she said, “Do you
know what we’re doing? We both don’t have a clue [laughter] but we’ll do a good job. Don’t worry.”
I feel like if you really wanted to do something, you could figure out a way to do it, because
people were open to that.
Darney: Which is the mission of academics, also, for students, so it should be the whole college that
says, “You can do this.”
Chandler: And I can think of more good stories, but I can’t at the moment.
Darney: You can write me good stories. Thank you very much, Jeannie.
Chandler: Thank you for doing this.

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