FoxRuss_20190827_Transcript pt1.pdf

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Part of Russ Fox Oral History Interview

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Russ Fox
Interviewed by Eric Stein
The Evergreen State College oral history project
August 27, 2019
FINAL
Stein: I am here with Russ Fox at Russ’s house. It is August 27, 2019. Russ and I are continuing on with
an interview that we started in 2017. In that interview, we heard a lot about Russ’s early studies and life
and career leading up to teaching at Evergreen. We are going to continue on that interview and I’m
hoping that we’ll hear a little bit about some of teaching in the early years and what Evergreen was like
at that time, especially your role in community-based studies.
Fox: Okay.
Stein: I think at the last interview, we finished up with you just arriving at Evergreen. I’m curious to
know what it was like to start teaching at that time, and what were some of the first programs that you
taught at Evergreen.
Fox: I was in the Peace Corps from 1968 to the early part of mid-1970 and then I was a Peace Corps
trainer. Like a lot of Peace Corps volunteers, when you come back you try to figure out what to do with
your life.
I reconnected with Carolyn Dobbs, who had been a classmate of mine at the University of
Washington in the master’s urban planning from ’66 to ’68. She was just being hired in 1970 to start
teaching in 1971 at Evergreen. In 1970, she was teaching at the University of Washington in an
experimental program there. Because of that—or maybe because of other reasons, too—she was hired
to teach at Evergreen. She said, “Come on down to Olympia. There’s a new college here, there’s State
government, there’s jobs potentially for people with planning and land use background.” So, I did. I
came down to check out Olympia. Carolyn and I established our deeper relationship and I hung around.
During the first year of the college—1971-72—Carolyn was teaching in a program called
Environmental Design with Larry Eickstaedt, Chuck Nisbet and Phil Harding. One of their projects that
year was to have students learn about land use planning by attending public hearings and meetings as
the County was deciding what to do about planning and zoning in the county, particularly in the Cooper
Point area. Because the location of the college had stimulated a lot of speculative and real changes in
the land use area, there was no planning for the area, so the County Commissioners asked their Planning
Commission to come up with a plan for Cooper Point Peninsula, and they did. The students went to
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observe the public hearings and the meetings. They were taking great big video equipment and
videoing the hearings, both at the Planning Commission and the County Commissioners.
What the students were discovering was that lots and lots of people who were attending and
who were residents of the Cooper Point area were essentially saying, “This was done without our input.
We really don’t know if we like it or not.” In fact, it had been done primarily by the Planning
Commission as a blue-ribbon committee of citizens that were doing this because they were asked to, but
didn’t involve a lot of public input.
The students in the Environmental Design program and some of the residents that they were
meeting while going to these hearings decided to call a public meeting at the college up on the fourth
floor, which was the dining hall at that time. A couple hundred people came. It was obviously of real
interest. Out of that came, over a couple meetings and months, an organization called the Cooper Point
Association, as students were wanting to learn more with the residents about issues of housing, and
protecting critical habitat, and transportation, and commercial needs, if any, for a neighborhood outside
of the downtown area of Olympia.
That led to lots of meetings with residents and students. After a few months, the official
organization was incorporated and called the Cooper Point Association. It had both residents and
students on the board. They divided into different working study committees on housing, habitat
protection—the things I mentioned—but after a few months, they decided they really needed some
guidance in how to pull all this together into a process that might lead to some recommendations that
could go to the County Commission in response to what they had proposed.
I was looking for work. I interviewed for some State government jobs and was asked if I would
just help facilitate this process as a planner for the Association. I said I would, and it was month-tomonth based on how much money the Association could raise. I needed to get a little bit of income, so I
prepared something called a Plan for a Plan, which was how I would go about working with the
community and the students.
That led to the completion of a Plan for Cooper Point within about six months. By then, the
Association had 750 members, and it was quite an inclusive process. It was presented to the County
Commission as an alternative to what the Planning Commission had presented, and ultimately went
through a series of hearings and was adopted.
I realized this was kind of fun, working with the students in the community. In the spring and
summer of 1972, the college was expanding the faculty another 50 positions. I think there was an
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original planning faculty of 12, and then 50 the first year—1971—and Carolyn Dobbs was one of them.
There were going to be 50 more positions in ’72.
One of the positions was really broadly described as relating to the interface between the
natural and built environment. That, of course, attracted applicants from geography, architecture,
landscape planning, and city and urban planning. I said, “I could fit that,” so I applied. My
understanding is it was the last position hired to start in 1972, and I wasn’t hired until right about now—
the end of August—to start on a contract September 15, and to start teaching at the end of September.
The other two finalists were people I knew well, and I guess it took so long because it was an
interesting decision to have to figure out which of many, many applicants—and then down to the
three—that were representing different contributions to the potential growth of the college in
environmental and community studies.
Anyway, I was the one selected. One of the others, Rainier Hasenstab, had been offered a
position on the faculty in 1971. I knew Rainier from graduate school days at the University of
Washington. He was an architect. He was a student or a PhD student or maybe a TA. He had not
accepted the Evergreen position in ’71; instead took a position at the State University of New York, one
of their campuses; was not happy and applied again to come back in 1972. So, obviously well known,
having been offered a position once. The third finalist was a principal from a major nationally known
landscape architecture firm with an office in Portland, also known for regional projects. So, we had an
architect who the college was already interested in his contribution that he could make, a well-known
landscape architect (they didn’t have a landscape architect on the faculty) and another land use
planner—Carolyn was already on the faculty.
In those days when we were hired, we were interviewed by each of the three deans as well as
meeting the President and the hiring committee. I think somehow I must have had some kind of
potential interest to each of the three deans. Charlie Teske was active in the community and a resident
of Cooper Point. He was a member of the Cooper Point Association. He really, I think, appreciated that
working with students in the community had potential, as well as the fact that first year, the students
working with the community on the Cooper Point Association was seen as one of the most significant
student/community or college/community interactions during that first year, which had lots of other
more contentious or mysterious relationships among individual students or smaller groups of students
working in the community.

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I think I was probably of some interest to Don Humphrey, who was the dean for more of the
sciences, because I had a math background, and I could potentially contribute to quantitative work and
work with scientists with that background.
Merv Cadwallader, the third dean, I think he was particularly interested in my work in South
America and my having been influenced by Paulo Freire and participatory research, and some of the
more theoretical and academic aspects of the kind of work I had done both in my graduate work and in
the Peace Corps.
For whatever reason, I was hired. I was asked to teach an advanced urban planning program to
pick up students who had finished Environmental Design and wanted to do more advanced work. I was
to teach by myself in a full year-long program. It was not the ideal way to start at Evergreen by teaching
by yourself. I had no teaching experience. The closest I had was being a trainer for the Peace Corps
program for volunteers going to South America. I worked in the Peace Corps training center at the
Catholic University in Ponce, Puerto Rico. That was as close as I could claim to any teaching experience.
Anyway, I used a strategy that I then subsequently used in other programs, particularly when I
was teaching by myself or with just one other colleague. That was to essentially spend the first two
weeks of the quarter creating the syllabus with the students, because I didn’t have a lot of history,
although I knew some of the students from working with them in the community. I knew some about
their academic background that they had had from that first year, but there were other students
applying and coming into the program. They just had to be juniors and seniors. There was no other
prerequisite.
We spent the first two weeks creating a syllabus, and I laid out the kind of things that I thought
would be important to learn and the kind of experiences I wanted students to be able to have as upperdivision students, primarily experiences in the community. At the end of two weeks, with all the
students having their input into what their backgrounds were, what their interests were, what they felt
their skills were, if they had particular books to suggest. Everybody was doing some research on
readings and potential speakers and workshops. We made this big list of all these things that could be
put into a syllabus for the year, and then we did it.
We spent the first quarter—the fall quarter—was mostly my presenting, bringing in guests and
using my own background, some of the principles and history and skills of community planning, and land
use planning. At the same time, starting to get the students to think about the kind of ways, or the
program to think about ways that we could try to do something with this background.
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The winter term was more of a mix of starting to have some smaller groups researching
potential community projects, creating proposals for what those projects might entail in terms of more
in-depth work, and what kind of additional workshops and readings and skills they would need in order
to do those projects. We continued to build that pool of background that we could then rely upon, both
academic and skill-based, readings and theory, practice and skills.
Spring was to be pretty much full engagement in the community projects with reflection and
journals and coming back together to write about and talk about how their experiences were reflecting
the academic background, both from their previous studies (because some had come in with some
stronger background in political theory and economic background than I had) and our fall and winter
classwork.
Out of that came two major projects and a couple more. The biggest one, which became the
most famous—within the college and to some degree within Washington State—was working with the
town of North Bonneville, which was being faced with being told by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—
essentially, the U.S. government—that they were going to build a second powerhouse next to the
Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, and that the best site for that second powerhouse—which
entailed a new channel in the river—was the Washington side of the Bonneville Dam, which is where the
town of North Bonneville existed.
In the late fall of 1972, when we were starting to research potential projects, I was informed by
some colleagues in the Washington State Department of Planning and Community Affairs that this town
needed some assistance to figure out what it meant to become relocated or dispersed because of the
major federal construction project.
About 15 of us went down and attended a city council meeting. This would have been in early
December of 1972. The mayor had just been elected in that fall’s elections to be county commissioner,
so he could not also be mayor. The main agenda that evening was for the other five city
councilmembers to decide who was going to be the mayor to replace the mayor that was elected to
become county commissioner.
We sat and observed for about an hour and a half as they avoided making that decision because
nobody wanted to do it. They were all retired—as most of the people in North Bonneville were—
workers who had worked on building the original dam in the ‘30s and were now in their retirement age
and had settled in the area, or there were people who had worked in the logging industry or a couple
local businesspeople, but nobody who was obvious to any of them—we had no idea who these folks
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were—to have the obvious nest step of leadership, especially with this huge uncertainty about the
relocation coming up, and what that might mean. Finally, a man who had been a painter on the original
crew that helped construct the Bonneville Dam in the ‘30s named Ernie Skala agreed that he would
accept the mayor position.
Then they could move on to find out who we were who were sitting watching this meeting. We
introduced ourselves, the students and I, and said that we were looking for the students to have an
opportunity to apply what they were learning about land use planning and city planning, and we were
looking for projects that would engage the community, participate with the community, and we were
exploring whether this might be something the community was interested in and that we could
facilitate, and that we could logistically make work because North Bonneville is about 140 or 150 miles
from the Evergreen campus.
We stayed overnight, we stayed another day, we had more meetings. The framework for a
working relationship was established. We came back to Olympia and the students, during the early part
of winter quarter, started formulating a more detailed plan for how we would work with the
community. That ended up being a really significant project. At least 15 other students came in and out
of the project. We worked pretty much fulltime from mid-winter quarter on through the end of the year
helping the community come up with a major document—it was in a three-ring binder—that organized
all of the research and background information that the students, working with residents who were
interested, came up with about their situation—what it meant, what the laws were, what the current
legal and economic and social, who the community really was, what was important to them, and what
the options were for what was going to have to be either dispersing broadly through the region, or
trying to stay together as a community having to be relocated. That included having to build some
political strategies for working with the State of Washington and the federal government.
I could go on and on with many, many stories about that. It was a fascinating project. It became
a four-year relationship between Evergreen and the town of North Bonneville. My significant role was
just in this first year, although I stayed on in an additional capacity just working with the faculty from
other programs or the contract sponsors who worked with students as they carried on over the next few
years.
Stein: Did other full-time academic programs take on this work as the core project of the curriculum?
Fox: Not as the core project of the curriculum but as a sub-piece, a smaller sub-piece. Phil Harding
worked with the students in whatever the next program he was teaching in. He had known some of the
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students from having been in the first program with Carolyn in ’71, and being an architect as this project
moved into more of the working with the architectural firm that was being hired to help plan for the
new community. I think most of Phil’s work was through individual contract sponsorship, but they may
have been embedded within a program. I’m just not sure.
I think Hap Freund, who was an attorney on the faculty, was working with some of the students
and got involved in the college working with the community. Those were the main two. I stayed
involved to some degree, mostly through individual contract. What I preferred to do was a cluster of
two or three contracts working together as a group rather than just individually. That’s a good jog of my
memory.
The second most interesting and significant project coming out of that 1972-73 year was doing a
plan for Burfoot Park, which is a park out on the way to Johnson Point, on the way to Boston Harbor.
The county had purchased, I think, 20 acres and had wanted to have the students create a document
that would help them with some alternatives of how to either develop that park or let it stay natural.
That included some natural history inventory and some preliminary set of alternatives about recreation
versus non-recreation, passive versus active, beach access, as it’s on the waterfront.
That became a useful document to the Thurston County Parks Department who didn’t have the
capacity or the funding to do a park plan themselves. That’s become a very pleasant park that’s used as
an access to the waterfront as well as some trails.
Stein: It’s one of our favorite parks.
Fox: Good. That was an Evergreen project that helped lay the groundwork for that, also one that
probably a few students picked up and worked on the next year. I didn’t follow that one as much.
That was my first year, teaching by myself. I only taught by myself maybe one or two more
times in my whole history. I almost always taught in four-person programs in the early years. I liked
being a free agent, available for fitting into teams that needed someone with a community perspective,
or an applied in the community interest. I wasn’t usually the initiator of program themes. I just liked
being able to come in and enrich a program that other people had coalesced an idea around.
That led to some fascinating team-teaching offers. I only taught in year-long programs, which
probably no one else is going to be able to say that’s their Evergreen history of teaching. I can’t say I
only taught in team programs, but the vast majority. I think I taught in fulltime programs with 51 or 52
different faculty over the years, which was an incredible experience. I felt like I was still in grad school
because each one involved lots of other faculty’s interesting material and reading books from other
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disciplines, and finding creative ways that I could offer, whether it was information about communities
or how communities change, theories of community, theories of planning, techniques, workshops, skill
work on how to work in community, connections to community organizations. It was a lot of fun
because I could be a bridge between community organizations and academic programs.
Carolyn and I were both really active in the community. We weren’t the only ones, but we
tended to be on lots of non-profit boards. In fact, as we started raising our family and having a farm, we
had to discipline ourselves to only be on a maximum of three boards, and we couldn’t have more than
two nights a week of meetings. It couldn’t be the same nights, and it was all logistics about how we
could make this work in our lives of having a family, doing our community work, and doing our teaching,
and somehow raising our own food.
We grew up in big cities and Olympia is not a big city. We decided we didn’t really want to live
in a suburban development, so what about living on a small farm? That meant that if we were going to
live on a small farm, if we’re going to eat meat, we’re going to raise our own meat so we know where it
comes from, and we’re going to try to be back-to-the-land hippie young people and just start gardens
and raise pigs and chickens. We did all of the above.
But being involved with community organizations led to us being a good source of being able to
bring community folks active in different issues onto the campus as guest speakers or as potential
workshop instructors.
The earliest of some of the programs I taught was one called Encountering America. Another
one is called Ways of Knowing. That one was one that Charlie Teske had initiated. He and I had talked
about wanting to have a program that could be a good experience for one of our faculty who was not
having good experiences in her early couple years of teaching. We didn’t want her to either just leave or
find herself teaching by herself or with just one other person that she could get along with or already
felt comfortable with. We took that on as almost like a faculty development opportunity for someone
that we both agreed was somebody we wanted to help. That helped define the program because that
person’s offering and specialty needed to become a central part of the program also. But a program like
Ways of Knowing can include everybody or anybody. Any four faculty could probably teach a program
like that and make it really interesting.
That gave us the opportunity also to teach with two faculty of color, so it was a very enriching
program with arts, humanities, social science, and a little bit of quantitative work that I was able to
offer, being the only person closest to being connected to the natural sciences and the physical sciences,
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which was mostly my math and my interest in learning more about geology. But it was primarily arts
and humanities and social sciences.
There was an interesting structure for that program. As I remember, the first quarter we were
all together teaching our foundation work that we wanted the students to examine. The second two
quarters, we divided each quarter into five-week components. Each five weeks, two of us would team
teach two different offerings. The next quarter we scrambled and we made two different five-week
offerings with two other combinations of the four of us, so the students had opportunities to get a little
bit narrower, working with two faculty, and then the next level of in-depth versus the total breadth with
the four of us teaching in the fall did. That was a nice strategy. It gave each of us a chance to work with
each other over a five-week component.
Stein: What would the two faculty do who weren’t the main program faculty?
Fox: We had two different offerings each five weeks.
Stein: How would the students choose which offering they were going to take?
Fox: They were able to have a first and second choice because we had to have it to be fairly balanced.
Students that didn’t get their first choice in the first round, if there was a need to sort people in the
second round, would be given priority for the second time.
Stein: Would students stay through the whole year?
Fox: We did pretty well. Not everybody stays. Those of us really dedicated to teaching year-long
programs gave a lot of care and attention to how we structured the program so that at least winter
quarter, it was open and available and feasible for students to come in even if they hadn’t had the fall
quarter background. It was harder adding new students in the spring unless a few times we had
umbrella homes for people that otherwise would be on individual contracts and gave them a base to
work from. If we had a group of students who were going to work with some of our program students
on a project, they could come in and contribute in some way to that project. That was harder.
Some of those strategies were things that other faculty still do, I’m sure—offering some pre-first
week readings to do to catch up on. We would say, “The two most important seminar books from fall
quarter, we would like you to catch up by reading these over the winter break. Be prepared to have
these as part of our work the rest of the year—even though you’re not going to be involved with an indepth seminar as part of the background.” During the first week of winter we would have both social
and content overlap between where we had been and where we were going to be in the winter quarter;

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activities that made sure that new students were interacting in collaborative ways with some short joint
projects with the ongoing students so it wasn’t a cliquish kind of separation or isolation.
Stein: Was there community-based aspect of that program as well?
Fox: There was, but they were small, more like little research projects that got the students in the
community rather than participatory building something. It was a little more challenging to do the fiveweek components than the quarter and a half or full quarter. I don’t remember any particular ones, but
they were some way that the students—and usually we were requiring them to be in small groups of
two or three or four—learning about something. Going to city council meetings, learning about some
issue, and in addition following up by talking to some of the people or some of the organizations that
were testifying to get a broader, in-depth perspective of what the issue was—follow up interviews of
the city staff—and come back and try to reflect on that in ways that came back to this exploration of
different ways of knowing, and how those get projected in input into community decision making, for
example. People who were coming from different not only lifestyles but ways of thinking and ways of
being in our community, and how those get presented, and how they present different opinions or
alternatives on different community issues.
Stein: It sounds like a great program, one that could be just as valuable today.
Fox: Yeah, it’s needed. [chuckles] I could try to reflect on some of the others, but in general, my
contributions were—lecturing was not my strength. I did my share of lecturing when needed.
Fortunately, when teaching with Charlie Teske, Charlie says, “Don’t worry. I have more lectures than we
could ever use in a year-long program.” [laughing] I learned more from him than he learned from me,
but of course, I say that for a lot of faculty colleagues. I’m just thinking particularly of Charlie because I
just went to his memorial three days ago. Wonderful colleague and one of the really intellectual and
pedagogical foundations of the college curriculum.
Stein: Let me just take a pause here.
End Part 1 of 4 of Russ Fox on 8-27-19
Begin Part 2 of 4 of Russ Fox on 8-27-19
Stein: One of the things that I was interested in was hearing more about how your participation in
different community organizations—serving on the board of different organizations—how that helped
strengthen the community’s relationship with the college, and what some of the benefits were. You

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mentioned that sometimes you would bring in speakers from different organizations they were part of.
What are some of the ways that you saw that really facilitating the work of the college?
Fox: Good question. I could go on for a while on this. First of all, I benefited from the fact that
Evergreen at that point—and I still think this is true—did not have professional publications as a criteria
for reappointment or a continuing contract. For me, my scholarship and my developing and deepening
my work was able to be manifest through engaging in the community.
My community service—which to me was not just a service of the college to the community—
was my ability to learn and deepen my scholarship and my practice and my teaching by engaging with
organizations in the community, and that was recognized at evaluation time when I was evaluated by
the deans as an equivalent for my professional development to doing other kinds of research which may
have been more scholarly in some different ways. The fact that that was acknowledged and supported
in terms of it being a part of fulfilling my contract made it even easier and more natural for me to
engage. It’s my natural inclination anyway, I was just able to do more.
One really wonderful example of this was the program Encountering America. It was one where
the faculty team changed dramatically just before the start of the program. It was a program initially
conceived by Llyn De Danaan—then Lynn Patterson—and Oscar Soule—I think that’s correct. One was
appointed dean and the other—or maybe they were both appointed dean. Anyway, we had to change
faculty midstream from our planning, so it was a more difficult program and it had more bumps in the
road as we made it through the first quarter. I’m sorry, I’m going to correct myself. This program was
called “A Matter of Survival.”
It was a difficult one to coalesce a new faculty team at the last minute. Students were, I think,
perceiving some of that not being run really smoothly because we hadn’t built that team over the
months that it usually takes. Some of the students may even have had a nickname of the program of
Barely Surviving instead of A Matter of Survival.
The interesting part about that program, from the perspective of the question you asked, was
that I had been asked by a dear, wonderful community member, one of the original founders of the
Evergreen Community College Organization—ECCO it was called—which were community members
who really wanted to support Evergreen by creating an organization and engaging with the college.
Many, many really wonderful community people joined this organization and were a great support to
the college. Some of them came through also meeting me through the Cooper Point Association
process.
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One of them was a man named Jess Spielholz. He had already retired from a long career. He
was a public health physician. He had been in his own practice, and then has been appointed to head
the State Department of Health. He had asked me if I would join the board of the senior center. I was
still in my early thirties, but I had a lot of respect for Jess. I had an interest in learning more about senior
issues and facilities and functions in our community to balance some of the other parts of the
community that I already knew more about or was also learning about.
I joined the board of the senior center, and Jess’s strategy for me was to chair a committee to
help do a plan for a new senior center. The old senior center was in a very small space catty-corner
from where the Olympia Community Center is now. It was a building that needed to be and eventually
was torn down and replaced by a more modern facility. He asked me to chair a committee, so my
strategy for doing that was to have a few members of the board, some other members or seniors who
came and hung out at the senior center, and other community people who I felt needed to have a voice
on a planning committee for a new senior center, such as someone who was very active in the faith
community—there was an interfaith council at that time—just trying to get a broader collection of
people.
There’s two ways that this story is going. One is that I ended up chairing committees that met
over two and a half to three years that ended up with our new Olympia Community Center in downtown
Olympia, which includes the senior center as well as a gym for the youth as well as many meeting rooms
and the cafeteria, a facility to be able to do food processing. It was a wonderful process that started
with a philosophy and ended with a building. The philosophy or ways of thinking about it included being
intergenerational versus just a community center as its own building, and being in the downtown versus
out in other parts of the community. So, we worked all the way through. That enabled me to make
many more connections among other people in the community as well as with the senior community,
which later I could use as an inroad, an opening, to have students be able to be engaging with seniors
and learning from their lives.
That started with the spring quarter of this Matter of Survival program. The program broke
apart at the end of winter. We stayed together as a program title, but it was more the individual faculty
doing group contracts. We lost one faculty, and I was able to hire Jess Spielholz as a visiting faculty to
teach with me in a piece of the spring program called Wisdom of the Elderly. We had some fascinating
readings. Jess had a wealth of people he could bring in as guest speakers, and he himself was just this

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fascinating teacher and motivator of energy about caring about and caring for people in later stages of
their lives.
One of the projects was that all the students were to spend, I think it was eight, maybe 10 hours
a week over 10 weeks getting to know an elderly person, a grandparent-age person in the community
and to learn something from them. They were to find those on their own by going to the community
center or the centers around the community—assisted living facilities, senior housing complexes,
nursing homes, church groups if there was a senior reading group or consulting group or interest group.
That led to some really—and I still know of a few—longterm friendships.
That’s an example where I was able to draw upon community resources to enrich the program
in ways that students—we’ve had other programs and it’s not uncommon to have students go into the
community and work with, learn from, a different segment of the community, whether it be different
ethnic groups or age groups or religious groups. But this one was one that was particularly successful.
In part I think it set up a model for how other faculty could potentially do these kinds of projects.
Stein: Did the students have something that they then would also contribute back to the community or
to the individual as part of this work?
Fox: Yeah, in a couple ways. One is that as many as who wanted to or could of their new friends or
partners were invited to come to some of the classes, particularly at the end where we had a big
celebration. Among the different products at the end was something to give back to their person that
represented what they had learned and how much they appreciated that; giving back an
acknowledgment that what they had learned was valuable. A couple of those were done by creative
ways of poetry or video, but it was to be something that they would physically give back to the other
person. That seemed to be very well appreciated that it wasn’t just “Where did it go?” Help me follow
up with the question.
Stein: I’m curious about another program. I think it was called Health, Individual and Community
program that you taught a few times. You mentioned that, and maybe it had different names over the
years. I’m curious about that program and what you covered and what kind of community-based
engagement you had through that program.
Fox: That was a program I taught, I think, four times. It’s a freshman program. The basic question of
the program is, what is a healthy state of being? Each time we taught it, three of us were the same
faculty and those were Linda Kahan, a human physiologist representing, what is a healthy body and
bodily systems and health from a physiological perspective? Oscar Soule, who was an urban ecology
13

faculty, and it was, what is a healthy ecosystem? Each time we had a psychology faculty. This was the
one that was different each time, interestingly, for different reasons. The question there is, what is
healthy human development, the stages of development, personality development? I represented,
what is a healthy community, or what are healthy communities and how do they manifest themselves?
So, a fascinating group of interdisciplinary material we could bring together, and lots of fun
projects about students doing different kinds of assessment and self-monitoring of their bodies, their
thoughts, their experiences in the community, their experiences in nature. Lots of interesting reflective
journal writing that came out of that along the way.
We also wanted to increasingly over the year have students go from the broader fall quarter all
together, lots of baseline common foundation work toward a smaller, intermediate level, going a little
more into depth into a subset of that into some either more advanced research, which didn’t need to be
community based but it was an option.
One of the community ones that was very useful and kind of fun was—because Oscar Soule’s
wife, Barbara, was the epidemiologist at St. Peter Hospital, and Oscar is also very active in the
community in some different ways than I and Carolyn were, but another subset of the community that
was brought—including the medical community—through Barbara’s work. The hospital was really
interested in a study of how hazardous waste medical material was being handled and treated.
Interestingly it was at a time when that was not really well known yet and it needed to be—disposal of
needles, all kinds of things.
The students were able to provide the work source for a study that was able to be in large part
directed by the hospital, but also influenced by the students in a sense as to what they were able to do
in terms of their background and legal access to certain materials that they were trying to monitor. It
was an interesting epidemiological process of looking at how the hospital was treating its waste.
Another one that Oscar was also really interested in was doing a noise study for a neighborhood
along Interstate 5 that was wanting to see if they could convince the State Highway Department to
buffer their neighborhood a little more. That was not too long after I-5 had been widened and
expanded, more and more traffic. It was learning how to use noise-monitoring equipment and to go out
and monitor and to write up a report. It was working particularly with one neighborhood that had a
reason to have this knowledge that they could then use to argue their case. The students didn’t get
involved with the political aspect of that but more of trying to put together a credible, scientific-based

14

report using the data. We were able to both purchase and borrow some noise-monitoring equipment
that the students could use. That ended up in a report that the neighborhood organization could use.
That program also generated some more scientific biological research in working with Linda
Kahan. It was more individualized student research with her and maybe in her labs. I don’t remember
all the details of that part. But by spring, the students had an opportunity—and these were freshman
students—to do work that otherwise, in most other universities, they wouldn’t get to do until they were
at least juniors if not seniors.
Stein: It’s impressive that freshmen would go out with noise-monitoring equipment and complete a
study that would be useful for a community.
Fox: Yeah. Except for the first one I talked about—the Advanced Urban Planning and working in North
Bonneville—all these other programs that I’ve been talking about—in fact, my almost first decade of
teaching—was what we then called core programs. What do we call them now? First-year programs?
Stein: We have the First Year Experience, which is beginning just this upcoming fall.
Fox: It used to be called core programs. They were almost always four-person teams, year-long,
interdisciplinary studies for first-year students. That was really where I really, in my early years, just
loved teaching the first-year programs. It gave me the opportunity to teach broadly, and it gave me
more confidence and an opportunity for me to build my scholarship to a point where I felt more
comfortable and knowledgeable in expanding what I could with more advanced students. Because I
didn’t come in with a PhD, I didn’t come in with a lot of already well-deepened scholarship in my field. I
came with lots and lots of experience and lots of academic background, but not the same skills that
other people were coming in with, with their graduate and doctoral work. So, I needed to build both
confidence and a broader, deeper package to work my way into more—although I had a great
experience the program my first year. It was one that was directly using my academic expertise and
experience, but I didn’t want to limit myself to only doing that, working with advanced students.
Stein: Do you think the somewhat unplanned nature of Thurston County at the time in the 1970s—it
sounds like there was a lot of new development—that that provided opportunities for students to really
engage in the community in ways that they might not be able to right now?
Fox: It might have. Other than the Cooper Point Association, I don’t know of another one that was even
half that significant in terms of the land use and the planning. There were some sub-pieces of that.
That was also the era of a lot of new environmental laws like the Shoreline Management Act, so a lot of
things were new and there were opportunities for either internships or other small-group research in
15

that case. Carolyn was on the County Shoreline Advisory Board, so she was able to help some of the
marine science faculty that wanted to either learn themselves who was working on things in the
community and would get their students involved. She could be that conduit. Some students did work
on that.
I don’t know that it should be a lot more difficult now. Planning issues and land use issues are
still active, and the Growth Management Act brought a whole new era of planning that needs to be
reexamined every 10 years. Interesting question.
Stein: I was just thinking about it. I’m teaching a program with Julia Zay, who is a visual artist, in about
three years. It’s called Ruins. It’s a program we taught before, but one of the things that I’m hoping to
do is some community-based work with some urban planning components from an anthropological
ethnographic perspective. I’m really curious about land use, especially around the Tumwater Brewery,
which has had a fascinating and unfortunate history that I think reveals a lot about property ownership
and when the city does or does not get involved. I think it’s going to have an ongoing saga that students
might take part in in some way.
Fox: Yeah, I could immediately be interested if I were still teaching .
Stein: Okay.
Fox: I think you’re right. That is going to be an ongoing process that I think over, even if we said a
couple of years from now, that you’ll be able to plug into and maybe even start by making some initial
contacts such as who at the Tumwater City Hall is engaged in that? What are some of the other
environmental groups that are watching that? The Audubon Society is one. They have a couple of
active committees that work on monitoring local land use impacts on the natural environment because
one of their missions is to protect habitat for birds. It doesn’t take having to be on the board to join the
Audubon Society, go to their annual meetings, and just start to find out who’s on their habitat
committee that’s watching the political processes of planning. They’re a good source. They don’t have
staff, there are just volunteers who are active. I think that’s going to be an interesting one, and certainly
it’s one that fits in with your Ruin theme.
Some of the other historical sites in the community that haven’t yet been acknowledged but
maybe they should. The Parks Department tries to engage or revitalize or at least make more publicly
known some of the historical sites that maybe are not ruins but in some cases they are. They are
buildings that were homesteaded. I’m thinking of the ones down on the habitat . . . what is the name of
it? . . . it’s down near Little Rock, along I-5. I’ll get back to you on that. It was homesteaded and then
16

the building burned and they’re deciding what to do about it, whether to leave it as a monument that
there was a homestead there or . . . you know. It’s one of the natural reserves.
I think there’s always going to be a change going on in the community, and ones that have a
historic preservation potential, I think, are always going to be interesting projects. There’s always the
opportunity also to get students engaged with the community input into how decisions are made rather
than only just their own input by doing research. Finding out who else is interested in the issue,
whether it’s geographic or community wide.
Stein: I know you played a role in the formation of the CCBLA. You mentioned that that had several
different iterations, so I’m really curious to hear about the CCBLA [Center for Community-Based
Learning and Action]. Would you like to take a break before we talk about that?
Fox: Yeah.
End Part 2 of 4 of Russ Fox on 8-27-19
Begin Part 3 of 4 of Russ Fox on 8-27-19
Stein: We were just about to talk CCBLA and your role in the formation of the CCBLA and its various
iterations.
Fox: The hardest thing about creating the Center for Community-Based Learning and Action was getting
people to agree on the name of it. CCBLA does live on as a name but it’s an awkward one. But it does,
when you think about it, reflect the values that went into the intent and hopefully the functioning.
Over the years, both Carolyn and I would be asked by a faculty to help make a connection in the
community because the faculty wanted to do a project, and we—or at least I mostly—realized it would
be nice if this were institutionalized a little more, rather than just if somebody thinks about it or wants
to ask, or maybe find a connection on their own but really not know really how to do community-based
work even if they knew the right people to approach. So, it seemed to make sense to try to have a
location on campus where faculty or even students could come—and say, “I’m doing this community
project,” or, “I’m interested in doing a community project,” or, “I’m interested in finding out who’s in
the community that might be interested in what I’m interested in doing”—and somehow make that a
little more formalized than just random or somewhat haphazard, a place where faculty and students
from the on-campus perspective and community people from their perspective could find each other
and explore what might be ways to learn with and from each other.

17

There were, I think, three different attempts in different ways. One was a National Community
Service grant that lasted, I think, three years. I’m not remembering all the details of that one. I think it
included ways that faculty were given some release time to go out into the community and . . . I’m sorry,
I’m a little fuzzy. Anyway, we had a grant-based one that at the end of three years the grant was up and
there was nothing to carry it forward. We had another one or maybe two through another national
organization. There were a few attempts.
Stein: It sounds like it was a lot of work keeping this going, establishing grants, making connections.
Fox: Right, and it was slow trying to build a political foundation within the faculty and the college to say,
“This is important enough to have it be on ongoing small role.”
The Internship Office in the different ways that it was organized over the years, either
independently or through the Student Affairs and Academic Advising—it’s changed, I don’t know what it
now, it’s over the years—that’s one vehicle. Internships have always been a really important and
valuable piece of community-based learning opportunities.
I was also trying to find ways that we could go beyond internships and have group projects, or
even if there were internships, more ongoing ability to follow through and work with an organization
over time versus one quarter at a time or one student at a time.
At some point in the mid-’90s, there was a student of mine and a student of other faculty who
was an incredibly wonderful, engaging, motivating, stimulating person named Jacinta McCoy. Jacinta
was a student of mine at one point and I just loved her and wanted to follow her around and she wanted
to follow me around as we did our community work. She then became a staff person in the
Communications Building, so she stayed on at Evergreen. She always had a vision in her own words like
I did in mine about having more celebration of community and an opportunity for students and
community people to celebrate together, as well as have academic learning experiences together on
campus and in the community.
Jacinta, as a staff person, motivated me and others like Lin Nelson, other students, other faculty,
to see if we could create a committee—we used to call them Disappearing Task Forces, I don’t know if
there are still DTFs—to look into how this might be able to become a part of Evergreen in a more
structured way. We spent a couple years and engaged a lot of faculty into thinking about how they
could—we did surveys about the number of faculty already are engaged in some kind of community
activity, just to acknowledge the breadth that we have. A lot of it we don’t often think about, or even
faculty don’t think about it as being engaged in community service, such as being involved in their
18

church or being active in Kiwanis or different civic organizations. And just to acknowledge that being of
service in some ways in the community is something we all really do have a little piece of in our lives,
and if we start to think about it, how are there some creative ways that could become part of our work
life and our students’ enrichment life as well as our own work, and to get a sense of the community’s
interest in having students involved in their work.
Some surveys, some conversations, looking at other models led to a proposal to actually create
a center that would be an ongoing financial commitment on behalf of the college rather than grant
based so that we could build some sense of continuity, and that the community would have a sense of
continuity rather than uncertainty whether it’s one quarter or one year or three years.
We were able to integrate that into the building of Seminar II and have it become one of our
centers. We had other centers at that time. I think some of them still exist. We had an opportunity to
have a place that over time had increasing linkages with housing, and with Student Affairs, the Advising
Office. We were slowly able to build the political support from the faculty to have this be not just a few
people who thought it was a good idea, but the faculty realizing they could all benefit from this, or many
more of them could benefit from this if we had a center. It’s grown, I think, quite well.
Stein: It’s still going strong. I wanted to ask you about your work in reservation-based programs.
Fox: I taught also the on-campus Native American Studies program. I taught in that in maybe the late
‘70s, early ‘80s. That was fascinating. Because I kept myself open as a potential add-on to other
people’s program ideas, I was asked by Mary Ellen Hillaire—who wasn’t on the original founding nor was
she in the first year, I think she started the second year when I did—who was one of the first Native
American faculty we have. She was an elder, a member of the Lummi Nation up in the northwest north
of Seattle.
Mary Ellen wanted to work with Native Americans in their own communities and Maxine
Mimms wanted to work with adults in her community in Tacoma and they created the model to
facilitate that by having an on-campus Native American Studies program that was open and would have
anyone be invited to participate in that program. They used it as a home base for their working with
their off-campus programs, but to have an on-campus, legitimate base of operations, but in the
meantime open it to others.
The year I was invited to join the program, there ended up being, I think, either five or six of us.
It was Mary Ellen Hillaire, who was mostly working with the Native American communities in Northwest
Washington; Maxine Simms meeting with students in Tacoma in the Women’s Club and her own
19

community centers that she was creating in churches before we had a Tacoma facility; David Whitener
of the Squaxin community, a Squaxin elder and leader; Lovern King, who was from a Midwest Native
community; Betsy Diffendal, who lived in Tacoma and worked a lot with Maxine; and myself, but there
might have been one more. It was at least five faculty and we had over 100 students.
Other than many contentious issues around that particular pedagogy structure—which
essentially was we would meet once a week for all day or most of the day, Mary Ellen Hillaire would
present some philosophy and musing and history about Native American thinking, others of us would
then add and explore that theme. It might be a whole day just talking about the concept of time, or
hospitality. It was trying to say, “Here’s another way of thinking about, or at least here’s the way
indigenous people”—mostly thinking about the Northwest—“think about our life on this Earth, and the
way that we then organize our lives and communities and do our work.”
Everybody was invited to participate in that and was expected to, but not everybody did.
Everybody was also expected to have what otherwise would have been an individual internship. But it
did give an umbrella of some opportunity to be with a community to explore some Native American
thinking other than just being totally on your own with your internship possibility. It was up to the
students then to think about and reflect on what they were learning about when they came to these
gatherings, how it connected to whatever they were doing, whether it was some kind of research in the
sciences, or many of them were in the arts.
It was pretty loose in terms of structure. That was a concern by a lot of us on the faculty about,
is this rigorous? Do we know what the students are doing? It didn’t necessarily have to have the kind of
structure that an individual internship had. Some did and some didn’t, but others were less certain.
Legitimately, there was some angst or at least a feeling that we ought to know more collectively about
this pedagogical model. The deans asked that there be a DTF to critically examine the on-campus Native
American Studies model just to find out, what are students doing? Are they building the kind of
pathway towards a degree, or are they just always taking the same thing and always just taking this
program? Legitimate concerns, so somehow I ended up being one of the co-chairs of that committee,
with Lloyd Colfax, a Native American faculty.
We spent two years really in-depth, looking at the transcripts, the evaluations of students that
had been in the program, getting the students who had been in the program to look back and reflect on
how that year or years or one quarter or whatever it was—because it was open—fit into what else they
were doing, and try to just see in a more systematic way how it was being used by students, as well as to
20

then have a little bit more organized way that we could present to the faculty the syllabi and the actual
faculty work in those programs as well as the student work.
We did a lot of wonderful work, and along the way, we were able to build the data to alleviate a
lot of the expectations that students were just using this as a place to flake off and not do serious work,
or that students were just doing one thing for the whole three years. In actuality, most of the students
were using it quite wisely as a break from being a year and a half, perhaps, in something really intense
and just wanting to have somebody let them just digest and maybe add a little more of individual. And
none of the faculty that they already knew or knew them were available to take them on an individual
contract.
It really was for many students used as an outlet to what otherwise would have been an
individual contract at a time when faculty were not compensated additionally for taking on contracts.
Our programs tended to be many times quite full and there just needed to be more breathing room for
students to breathe in and out of some intense work that they were doing. A lot of students did use it
that way. They would come into the program for one quarter, two quarters, and then go back into
realizing they needed more structured upper-division work and they’d get into another program.
Then there were those for whom it looked kind of fuzzy and not very structured, but when you
started looking at the kinds of self-evaluations that they were writing, they were solid. They were
maybe unique and different—not that everybody was taking best advantage of the opportunity, but
enough were, and enough data was being able to be organized that our recommendations that
eventually came to the faculty meeting—it took two years—were largely accepted, so the program did
have legitimacy. It had some tightening up that we were recommending and that did happen in terms
of documentation and making sure as much as we could—and this happened the second time I taught
it—that students would be grouped into some subgroups. In addition to the one day a week major
grouping, there would be subgroups that got together to have a second level of connection.
For example, anybody who was doing individual work relating to housing—which I had several—
or community development kinds of things would also have an additional once a week seminar, half a
day workshop, something that they could all benefit from, and then keep going, to kind of have a little
more—which doesn’t happen in individual contracts.
Stein: It sounds like the SOS [Student-Originated Studies] model to a certain extent.
Fox: Yeah, it became more and more like what more and more of us started doing in SOS. But the other
piece that came out of this was a recommendation that we work with the Native American students and
21

the Tacoma students who were participating in this program differently, and that those students be less
hidden and isolated from the rest of the campus.
That led to our creating a proposal for an in-community Native American program that would be
entitled Community-Based . . . I’m losing the full title here . . . Community-Based Liberal Arts . . . anyway,
an academic program in the communities in our region, and that we would hire a faculty specifically to
work with those communities. That turned out to be Carol Minugh. Carol had been an Evergreen
graduate in the early version of the Native American Studies program. She went on and got her PhD at
the University of Pennsylvania and came back and established the program. I became the first other
person to team-teach with her.
When I taught with her we had—I think this was ’92-93—we had four different Native American
communities where we met in the community two nights a week. It was the Makah, the Quinault, the
Port Gamble S’Klallam and the Skokomish. The communities created a theme or a topic that they felt
would be beneficial for them to learn more about. One of the years I taught in the program was
leadership. Another one was community.
We tried as much as we could to use Native scholarship and sources. We used the tribal staff
and expertise in bringing in as co-teachers. It was a program that I just really loved teaching in,
particularly because my role could be support. I’m not an expert in anything about Native American
issues and studies, but I was able to work with students on research skills, communication skills—which
were a big part of the program—and each year, whether or not the theme was community or even
when it was leadership, how to find and help create the curriculum by having examples coming from
non-Native world as well as Native world of leadership and community. Each year the students in the
program would create a project to give back to their communities.
The program is still going, I think. It was a spinoff of a different way to work with the Native
American communities than the on-campus program. I taught in that program twice. One year we had
a site over in Montana with the Salish Kootenai, so I was over there a couple times. Increasingly it
evolved to having more and more leadership of the program coming from the communities themselves,
instead of having just faculty from Evergreen going out and doing the circuit to have each of the
communities have a halftime faculty member from the community as well as an Evergreen-based faculty
member. I think over the years some of the coming on campus changed a little bit as more and more
online learning became easier and more accessible.
Stein: Let’s take a break.
22

End Part 3 of 4 of Russ Fox on 8-27-19
Begin Part 4 of 4 of Russ Fox on 8-27-19
Stein: We’re going again. I want to hear the story about the Cooper Point Journal blowing up, is what I
have in my notes. [laughter]
Fox: I’ll try to do it fairly quickly. The second time I taught alone was quite a few years after that first
year. Again, I was available for whatever came up as an opportunity, and there were a group of
students that went to the deans and said, “We have 25 students. We have a syllabus. We just need a
faculty.” These were advanced students who had been in a variety of other programs and they wanted
to spend the year learning about the history and practice of anarchism.
I said, “I’d be interested in talking to these students.” So, I did. I met with them and I said, “I’m
interested in this, but as a program that is student-run—and it really is the practice of some of what
you’re trying to learn about—here’s my conditions. One is that we spend, as I did before, the first two
weeks creating the syllabus together so that it includes other people who are going to sign up for this
without already being in your group that’s already organized something, and that I have a chance then
to become a part of the mix of creating a syllabus, and that we run the program on consensus, and that
the students are responsible for the ongoing energy of the program, which includes that fact that
everybody has to write a self-evaluation.” Because I knew with anarchists, there were going to be some
that didn’t want to write a self-evaluation.
This program started off with the two weeks of going off-campus to a Girl Scout camp
intensively for a week, creating this model that essentially ran by itself. Intense meetings, continual
meetings. Many, many meetings. Some really deep intellectual scholarship work that the students
wanted to engage in. A great combination of what I liked to do and had learned how to do of some
common work we all do together, but chances to spin off into sub-interests and go deeper into things,
still staying in groups, and slowly then moving towards some opportunities for individual. It was a
program that was continually looking for applied work to go along, but not abandoning the seminars and
the writing and the on-campus work.
In looking for projects—this was halfway through the year—the Cooper Point Journal collapsed.
Whoever had been the people running the different segments of the Journal—the managing editor and
all the different components—all threw up their hands and quit. The Student Affairs said, “Are we just
going to let the Cooper Point Journal die for the rest of this year and start it up again next year?” The
group of these students in this program said, “No. We’re going to put in a proposal that we run this
23

Cooper Point Journal for the rest of this year as a collective. We will rotate the responsibilities so that
there’s no hierarchy. We will get the paper out every week.” There was a lot of skepticism, a lot of “No,
you won’t. It can’t be done that way.”
But the administration or at least Student Affairs didn’t have much other option other than just
let it go, so the students took it on. There were probably six or seven of them that had it as their major
work for the rest of the quarter—doing the research, writing the articles, figuring out how to do layout,
how to distribute, how to do all the pieces of putting out a weekly school newspaper, where the
responsibilities rotated and they all got a chance to do the different tasks.
So, the Cooper Point Journal came out every week and they got terrific experience. Some of
those went on into journalism. They just picked it up and made it continue in a way that reflected their
learning about the practice of a participatory, egalitarian kind of structure of getting something that
usually is done in a much more hierarchical separate specialty kind of way.
Stein: That’s a great story. Thanks for sharing that.
Fox: They did it. It was part of that Decentralization Program. Of all the programs I’ve taught, that’s the
one that I’m still in touch with the most students, they’re still in touch with each other. There have been
reunions.
Two of the best students who deserved to get their 48 credits but did not write self-evaluations
at the end of the year did not get their credit. They were testing me, and there was this little window of
if faculty didn’t submit an evaluation, it just stayed in limbo. Predictably, 10 or 15 years later, these two
students came back and said, “We really would like those credits now.” [laughing] In both cases, I’m
not going to name names, one is really well known in this community and is doing work we’re all proud
of and the other is a professional capacity in another county and they have worked their way into those
professional capacities without having finished their degree.
So, they wrote their self-evaluations. I had saved all the notes. I knew what I could write. They
did get their credit. I ended up hearing about it because it goes to the deans saying, “What are you
doing? You’re filing evaluations for somebody 10 years later? We don’t do this.” I said, “They earned
their credit. One of the conditions of getting their credit was that they write a self-evaluation. They did,
and I’m willing to give them their credit now.”
Stein: I’ve heard about this story, by the way. This is semi-famous at the college.

24

Fox: Anyway, that came out of that program that was called Decentralization. I said, “We’re not going
to be able to call it Anarchism, so how about Decentralization?”
Stein: Is that one that you’ve taught one time?
Fox: That was just a one time. That was the most extreme of all the times when I turned the program
really over to the students.
Stein: Sounds like it worked out pretty well.
Fox: It did.
Stein: Would you tell us a little bit about your work as a Dean and the Evening and Weekend Studies
position? That was what you did toward the end of your time at Evergreen.
Fox: All along, I’d been interested in taking my turn to offer to be a dean, and whether it worked out or
not, at least I felt I could do it and it was something I believed in, having rotating deans. I’d been
nominated twice.
One is a funny one. I was nominated to be one of the Curriculum Deans and there were two
positions available. You may have heard this from others, too. There were two openings and there
were only three applicants, or three people willing to stand. I was one of them. One of the others was
Carolyn. The third was Matt Smith. We kind of knew that there was no way they were going to appoint
two deans from the same family. [laughing] But I thought it was important to have an open
opportunity, so that was the year that Carolyn Dobbs and Matt Smith became deans.
A few years later, I was nominated—and I said, “I’ll stand”—to be the Hiring and Professional
Development Dean. I was really interested in that because of the professional development part. I had
an interest in hiring, mainly that it stay as broad as possible and not get too narrowly defined, but
mostly in terms of working with faculty to find individual ways that they could continue to grow and
enhance their scholarship or teaching or different components of what our expectations are.
On that one, I was on sabbatical all year. Carolyn and I saved up and we both had our sabbatical
at the same time so we could go off, and it was after the kids were out of the house. We were in
Ecuador for five or six months, so I ended up being interviewed for a dean on the phone from Ecuador,
where I had been immersed in speaking Spanish and all of a sudden I had to speak English.
That was fun to apply for that. I didn’t get that one. That was the year Nancy Taylor got the
position, and that was perfect. She certainly deserved that. I think there were one or two other
applicants. I did my duty, I applied. Then they came around at the end of Susan Fiksdal’s term for
25

Evening and Weekend Studies Dean. There weren’t being any applicants coming forward, so I started
getting lobbied to apply. I said, “I’d like there to be other applicants, too, but I’m willing to do it.” I
think we did get another applicant or two.
I did get selected for that deanship and I was Dean of Evening and Weekend Studies from 2001
to 2007, so I did my six-year term. I loved it. I think I did a pretty good job. It’s such a wonderful
position because it’s like you’re Dean for your own little sub-piece of the whole. You’ve got your own
little curriculum. I think now—and it needed to be then, but it was more difficult then to be as
integrated to the fulltime curriculum as it is, I think, now.
I got to hire adjunct faculty based on two things. One was what the fulltime curriculum was
saying they needed in supplemental courses, but also to make sure that we had a breadth of offerings
for people that could only come halftime or less than fulltime. I got to interview and hire or oversee 100
different faculty, including a cohort of continuing faculty on halftime contracts. They were my “planning
unit.”
I didn’t have to do any kinds of things that deans at other schools have to do, like fundraising. I
got to help faculty learn how to teach better. It was fun because the people coming from the
community, some didn’t have much teaching experience or not a lot, but they certainly had lots to offer
and a lot of enthusiasm. I got to go to observe classes, observe teaching and then meet and talk about
what went well and what didn’t, and “Here’s some ideas.” Or they would come and say, “What do you
think about this syllabus?” Just help new people with less teaching experience but lots of enthusiasm
learn how to teach a four-credit course at Evergreen.
Stein: Then you were dean of the summer curriculum also?
Fox: That evolved during my tenure. I wasn’t at the beginning. I guess all the way through I was also
the Dean of International Studies. That took a lot of time also, and a lot of controversy around some of
our international programs, and angst around a couple of them. No, the Summer—maybe it was even
when . . . who was next after me? . . . Allen Olson . . .
I thought it was really fun. I thought I did a pretty good job, even after I retired, when I started
getting asked, “Would you come back and teach, fill in for somebody for a quarter?” Because deans
always have needs of filling in for emergencies. I’d been out for a while, taking care of Carolyn. I
probably would have been willing to step in in an emergency way administratively, but I didn’t want to
have to get back into the scholarship of my field, which was getting old. The end of my teaching was
really at a good point to have it be a highlight. [chuckles]
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Stein: That makes sense.
Fox: After I finished my deanship and before I retired, I taught Student-Originated Studies.
Stein: Was it around the Center for Community-Based Learning and Action?
Fox: I wasn’t the official person now that worked with them. No, it was just my own SOS programs. I
wanted to build a couple versions of that so that other faculty could see different ways, and there are
different ways that you can structure those SOS programs.
Stein: If we had another two hours to talk, what are some of the things that you might want to go back
to or revisit to talk about in more detail?
Fox: I don’t know. It’s been fun doing this. [laughing]
Stein: It’s really fascinating for me, especially to hear about some of the early programs.
Fox: I felt it’s been a little more scattered this time and it won’t be as coherent. I was going to mention
that one part of the strategy that Carolyn and I had about helping faculty see the possibilities of working
in the community is getting to know people in the community that they might already not know based
on their own individual networks, and that was to try to have a lot of social events here at our house.
There were some early ones where we invited all the faculty and staff to come.
I don’t know if anybody else has talked about the goat roasts. We were raising goats and Beryl
Crowe, who was one of the early founding faculty, said, “Let’s have a goat roast. I want to butcher the
goat and prepare the goat. Let’s just invite everybody.” I said, “Okay.” We did this for about four or
five years. I’d take a goat that was a year old. I would have it slaughtered and he would then take it and
do his marinades and whatever he was doing. We would invite the faculty and staff. It would be a big
potluck. This is not an example of a community one, it’s more the Evergreen one, although I did invite
community people in.
Beryl would come over. I had a barbecue set up where we’d put the goat on a spit. He would
come over in the morning and bring two gallon-jugs with him. One was his marinade sauce to keep
working with the goat, and the other was his red wine to drink while he was enjoying the time with the
goat. By the middle or late afternoon, people would show up with all kinds of food that was spread out
all over the place, and everybody would have a great potluck.
But usually we would try to find ways to have Evergreen faculty and staff meet, not strategically
but just invite a lot of other people, too. People would see opportunities to get to know more folks, plus
just that we needed to do it as Evergreen faculty.
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Stein: Would you ever have students in a program over to your house to have class?
Fox: We did it, not as much maybe as some used to do in the early years. Once we started having our
own family dynamics with the kids, it was not quite as easy. There are a lot of students that remember
coming over here.
Stein: One of the things that I wanted to mention is that I accepted a position as the Learning and
Teaching Commons Fellow. As part of that work, I’m going to be exploring historical teaching practices
at Evergreen. I had talked with them about possibly putting together a podcast series, and it’s also
something that I think the oral history project in the college might be interested in. I’ve talked with Sam
Schrager about it. I’m curious if that’s something that you would be interested in having some of this
interview be turned into a podcast that might be available.
Fox: Sure, I don’t have any concern about that.
Stein: That’s great, thank you. If I do that, I would share it with you before we post it on whatever Web
site.
Fox: Okay. Great. Is Evergreen sponsoring this?
Stein: It would be through Evergreen, either through the Learning and Teaching Commons or through
the oral history project, or possibly both. It’s something that I like to do and I do it with students. I do a
lot of oral history work with students. They conduct in-depth interviews and what they do at the end is
create short podcasts, sometimes five to 10 minutes long, and we all listen to them and comment on
them.
I think it would be great to get faculty now and students to be able to hear some of the
historical teaching at the college. That’s still really important and vibrant. Some of these stories are
great.
Fox: I can’t remember everything that was going on at that time, but that was one cohort. Even
students who maybe their major project was something else, if the Cooper Point group needed some
extra emergency help, they had a few more people to draw upon. Like “We need a few more articles
about this.”
Stein: Thank you very much for your time. If you feel like you would like more time, let me know. I’m
happy to come back.
Fox: I think it’s been pretty [thorough].
Stein: It may be that you’ll remember a couple of things. Let me know. I’m happy to come back.
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Fox: No, I think we’ve covered a lot.
Stein: Okay, great.
End Part 4 of 4 of Russ Fox on 8-27-19

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