NisbetChuck_20210726_Transcript.pdf

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Part of Chuck Nisbet Oral History Interview

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Chuck Nisbet
Interviewed by Eric Severn
The Evergreen State College oral history project
July 26, 2021
FINAL

Severn: This is Eric Severn, and I am talking with Chuck Nisbet. It is July 26, [2021]. Chuck, you are in
Chicago, correct?
Nisbet: I’m actually in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, today.
Severn: Okay, talking with Chuck from Twin Lakes, Wisconsin. I am in Seattle, Washington. Chuck, to
get us rolling, if you want to just give some basic where you are from, early Nisbet life stuff.
Nisbet: I think about somewhere between five and 10 years before Evergreen opened, I’d heard a
rumor that there was going to be a new college built in Washington. I believe the rumor came from
Mervin Cadwallader because he was teaching at San Jose State at this time, and I was teaching in San
Jose Community College. Years went by and one day and Mervin called to say there was going to be a
new college. That’s when I first became interested in finding out about Evergreen.
Severn: Let me backtrack just a little bit. You were at San Jose State teaching.
Nisbet: No, Mervin was at San Jose State. I was at San Jose Community College.
Severn: And you were teaching there?
Nisbet: Yes.
Severn: Just a little bit of academic background. Prior to that, you had finished your grad work where?
Nisbet: I graduated in ’58 from Kalamazoo College. There was a minor recession going on then, so I
decided to keep going and applied at Northwestern and at Indiana. Indiana offered me an assistantship
in the School of Business, so I went to Indiana.
After getting my MBA at Indiana, I went to California. I was looking for a job and just by chance,
I walked into the office of the President at the community college in San Jose. This was about a month
before school was going to start, and they just happened to have an opening that they hadn’t filled.
They practically horse-collared me into the office because it was good for them, and it was good for me.
I went to Berkeley right away and got a teaching credential so I could teach in a community
college. I taught there for two years, and after two months of teaching in the community college, I knew
I wanted to teach, but not in a community college for my lifetime.

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I had to get a PhD, so I applied at the University of Oregon. After receiving my PhD at the
University of Oregon, I went to the University of Wisconsin on a visiting professorship. In the meantime,
I’d accepted a position at UCLA. After the visiting semester at Wisconsin, I went off to UCLA and I taught
there for four years.
In my fourth year, that’s when Mervin called me and wanted to know if I was interested in
Evergreen. Eric Larson, who is also a faculty member at Evergreen, and his wife, Pat, and my wife,
Sandy, were both students of Mervin Cadwallader at San Jose State. I was often at Pat Larson’s father’s
house, which was sort of a meeting place of liberal, radical, Democratic professors from San Jose State,
and one of them was Mervin. That’s how I got to meet Mervin. Our wives already knew Mervin and the
husbands got to know Mervin by sitting around their house and holding these all-night meetings
planning Democratic strategy for elections in the state of California.
When Mervin called, we—meaning both Eric and I—would come for a faculty visit at Evergreen
at the same time to check out the place. On the way to campus that morning in a borrowed car with
bald tires, we had a flat tire just before arriving at Evergreen. [laughter] So, we were a little late for our
interview—not too late, a little late. We had a very productive and exciting interview and the result was
I told Mervin, “If you want to hire us both, we’ll both come. If you don’t, neither one of us will come.” It
was kind of a bluff.
Severn: But it worked.
Nisbet: But it worked.
Severn: I want to go back to these nights that you talk about at Larson’s house. But as an economist,
how did you come to wanting to be an economist? You have a particular interest in economy that,
within the context of Evergreen, you were kind of an outlier. How did that arise for you?
Nisbet: I’m trying to figure out what part of the multifaceted question . . .?
Severn: How did your interest in economy—
Nisbet: You want to know how I got interested in economics?
Severn: Yeah.
Nisbet: This is a true story. When I was at Kalamazoo, I was taking economics from Sherrill Cleland,
who was a young assistant professor from Princeton. He was looking for a babysitter. He kind of
announced it to our class, and I raised my hand—I applied. I went over to their house and his wife was a
nurse and they had two small children. I would babysit for them once a week.

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Over that period of time, I thought they were such a wonderful family, I decided, I’m going to
major in economics. Then I could have a life like this. That may sound corny, but that’s the truth about
why I decided at 19 to major in economics.
Severn: I don’t think that sounds corny at all. I think in a lot of ways, we come to our interests by
recognizing people that we want to be like and recognizing that their interests could possibly also be our
interests. I think that makes sense.
Nisbet: At the same time, I majored in economics and I minored in philosophy, about as far apart as you
could get. My minor was with a very elderly man, highly serious, highly professional, who was so
interesting. I majored in philosophy because the man was so distinguished and interesting, I thought I
couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spend time in seminars at his home.
Then I went to Indiana and obtained my MBA. I took a job after my MBA, and within three
months, hated it and decided this was not for me. I had no idea what I wanted to do.
I was married, and went to California where my wife was from. [On a lark I took a job making
pizzas to pay rent until I could find something better.]1 One day I walked into the administration
building at San Jose Community College and asked if they had any openings. [laughing] They said, “What
can you teach?” I said, “I have my MBA from Indiana University.” The president came out of his office
and hired me on the spot. I taught accounting and economics at the college level.
I’m not sure I answered everything you asked about, but that’s the trajectory.
Severn: That’s great.
Nisbet: When I decided that I really liked teaching, I’d found something—by the way, as a footnote to
that, I have always tried to support the idea with students of trial and error, and never keep doing
something they don’t like, because that’s how I found something I really loved doing by trial and error,
and not sticking it out - quitting and starting looking again.
When I decided I needed a PhD, I wanted to go back and get it in economics, so I applied to
Oregon. When I went to Oregon, the very first day—I went a summer earlier to make sure I knew where
the library was. I took graduate courses in the summer to get ready for fall quarter. The chairman of
the department called me in and told me if I shave my beard [laughing]—this is a true story, I thought
you might like this—he’d think seriously about offering me a teaching assistantship. [laughter] [This was
another older, serious academic who didn’t coddle hippie looking young people,] just a different time—
1960— so, I shaved the beard, of course, got the assistantship, and ultimately received my PhD.

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Bracketed sentences are those inserted by Chuck Nisbet after interview.

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At Oregon, I had a summer Ford Foundation scholarship at Stanford. [Then I was awarded a
Fulbright to do my dissertation in Chile.]
Severn: When were you in Chile?
Nisbet: Very interesting time. I was there when Salvador Allende was elected President. I was sent
back there by the government—this is disjointed maybe—in the spring quarter of 1973, I did a 10-week
worldwide lecture tour with the Agency for International Development on agricultural development.
After that was over, they sent me back to Chile, where I’d done my dissertation. What it really
amounted to was when I got back to Washington after the Fulbright time, I was asked a lot of questions
about Allende. I didn’t know there was a coup coming, but it was a month before the coup.
Severn: Wow.
Nisbet: Some of the Evergreen people thought that I was a CIA agent. I wasn’t. [laughing]
Severn: Did they really?
Nisbet: Yeah.
Severn: I love that.
Nisbet: The fact that I could leave campus for a quarter and be gone all that time raised suspicions
about me.
Severn: I’m sorry, Chuck. Bear with me. I want to get the timeline straight, just so we have some of
these plot points nailed down here. You meet Merv when you’re teaching at the community college in
San Jose.
Nisbet: Correct.
Severn: You have not yet gone to Oregon to get your PhD.
Nisbet: Correct.
Severn: But you decide that you want to teach, so you go to Oregon, you get your PhD. At this point,
you’re on communication with Merv. Is that right? You have somewhat of a relationship?
Nisbet: Wait. I don’t think there was any real communication with Merv because there was this time
before Oregon where there was a rumor of a college. I don’t remember the timeline in years exactly,
but I think I went all the way through Oregon without any contact with Mervin. I actually had my PhD by
the time I heard from Mervin.
I was at UCLA teaching when Mervin called and said, “I’m a dean at Evergreen State College.” I
think I discussed this in my writeup that there were three deans. Mervin Cadwallader for social sciences
was a smart man, an exploratory thinker and very organized. Don Humphrey was a low-key science
dean who put together a terrific science faculty. Charlie Teske, arts dean was an interesting, talkative
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character and talented musician. I think they did a remarkable job of hiring people the first and second
years.
It’s my impression, or my recollection, that when Charles McCann received the mandate to
build this new college, he didn’t have a model in his head, other than he didn’t want to replicate every
other college in Washington. He wanted to do something different. It’s my recollection—I could be
mistaken, but I think you can probably find this out with other people—it was Mervin who had the
rough outline. It was Mervin who was the thinker about the model of the college. Even in our first and
second year, Mervin was writing little essays—memos—and sending them out to all the faculty having
to do with “What do you think of this idea about Evergreen, doing this and doing that?” He was a real
ideas man.
Severn: Do you remember some of the more salient ideas that were being passed around? Is there
anything that really stood out for you coming to Evergreen that Mervin was passing around that you
were particularly interested in?
Nisbet: By the time I was hired, there had already been a year of planning faculty. The planning faculty
and the deans had ended up with the “Evergreen model” by the time I got there. What happened after I
was there was not formulating Evergreen, but there were ideas about, should we have multiple
colleges? Should we break up into like three different components, or should we stay as one? But by
the time we got there, it wasn’t like, well, what are we going to do?
Severn: They were already there and doing it.
Nisbet: They already had that figured out. I would assume any founding faculty members that you
could interview would verify that, that it was formulated with them and Charles McCann.
I feel like I’m digressing, but there were so many things unique about Evergreen in the early
years, and one was Charles McCann. He used to invite faculty—I was never really one of them, I think,
not much anyway—but he invited faculty to his office for open-ended discussions in the first couple
years. They just sat around and talked about the college.
Beryl Crowe was always one of those faculty members. David Marr, I think, was another. No
other President of Evergreen after that ever did that. And he was a listener. He was not a talker. In
fact, we wished he’d talk more, but he wanted to participate in all of this discussion and get feedback of
how things were going and recommendations for hiring new faculty and every possible issue.
There’s something like a disconnect after that. Presidents were administrators but they weren’t
connected to the heart and soul of what the pedagogy was at the college.

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Severn: The way you’re talking about these discussions, that is very much what I’m hearing, and that’s
very much in keeping with the ideal spirit of what Evergreen set out to do. This idea of part of what is
being cultivated in an academic program, in a seminar, is this sense of being able to listen to one
another, to talk with one another, and listen to ideas, and be receptive to a diverse array of opinions
and thoughts.
Nisbet: Yes. Maybe I should start talking about this first page I’ve got here because otherwise I’m going
to repeat myself.
The first section I have is called “traditional education vs The Evergreen State College.” I believe
that in those early years, almost all the hires had experienced teaching elsewhere before coming to
Evergreen, so they knew orthodox education. One of the reasons they came here is because they
wanted to do something different from that.
For example, because we came with teaching experience, we knew what being an assistant
professor was. We knew the class society of orthodox education. You’ve had assistant professors,
associate professors, full professors. Assistant professors keep their mouths shut. Assistant professors
listen to full professors who run the department, who grant tenure. They don’t talk, or they talk very
carefully. They bide their time. I, for one, didn’t like that at UCLA. I wanted to talk. I always wanted to
talk, but it was not the right thing to do.
There’s a department chairman and he’s your boss. At Evergreen, you don’t really have a boss.
Your department chairman dishes out penalties and favors, so you have to get along with your
department chairman. When I say chairman, in 1971, there were no women chairmen [and] not just in
my field, economics. In fact, there were no women—period—except token as adjunct professors. They
paid them pitifully little. They had no benefits. They had nothing except they could keep the costs
down in their department by having this one older woman teach regularly when I was there.
Orthodox education has academic deans who administer. Depending on how big the school is—
there could be an academic dean of sciences or social sciences, a different one in the arts faculty. There
could be multiple academic deans. Once you become an academic dean, you don’t teach anymore.
You’re a pure administrator.
The academic deans hold enormous power because they have the control over budgets of
various departments. They have the power over whether a department will get hires or won’t get hires.
For me, and I think for others, when we came to Evergreen, we didn’t want to have that kind of
structure where there was an academic dean who wasn’t a teacher and had that kind of power.

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Academic deans were so removed from teaching faculty and their departments, they could
make hard decisions. My classic example is Berkeley. They did away with the Geography Department.
They just eliminated it. I can’t tell you the year this was, but that’s a drastic action. You have professors
of geography who all of a sudden, after how many years of service, they do away with your department.
They could do away with that because they weren’t teaching buddies of the geographers. They weren’t
daily connected to them. There’s a reason why traditional education has that kind of separation. When
we come around to talk about Evergreen, we’ll see what happens over the years when it’s just the
reverse, and maybe results in unintended consequences.
Creators of the Evergreen model wanted to do away with the class structure in conventional
education. One way to do away with that is I was never called “Dr. Nisbet” or “Professor Nisbet,” nor
was anyone else. I was called Chuck. Eric Larson was called Eric. It would be unheard of at UCLA for
anyone to call me by my first name, or at Wisconsin. That generates the classness, the separation.
Professor—student. They’re not equal, they’re different levels.
At Evergreen, we wanted to have students challenge us, and the only way for them to feel
comfortable challenging us is for them not to feel so separate. Obviously, we were separate, but not to
have that hammered over their head that they’re just students and we’re the knowledge holders here.
It simply worked at Evergreen. You had to be on your toes more at Evergreen than I would have to be at
UCLA where students were reluctant to question their professors.
Severn: You had to be ready for pressing questions in the way that you wouldn’t have to be in a
conventional [structure].
Nisbet: Yes, because Evergreen, like anywhere else, had some really smart students. If you didn’t take
your job seriously, you’re going to get embarrassed. I was not about to get embarrassed. I like that I
couldn’t just blow something off. I had to be prepared. I think that new faculty/student relationship
was something that attracted many liberals to Evergreen.
My good friend and teaching colleague, Alan Nasser, a radical leftist, didn’t mind students asking
questions because he was so confident in his ideas and himself it’s like, go ahead, fire away. So, not just
liberals came, but some radical leftist also were interested. But conservatives didn’t come.
Conservatives—and this is just my opinion—in traditional academia, they like the classness. They like
the separation. They would object to be called by their first name. They wanted the prestige and
separation of Dr. or Professor. At least that was my point of view.
At Evergreen, the deans were drawn from the faculty. We all liked that. We were for that, I
should say. The idea of the administrator right above us was one of us, it seemed they would have a
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better understanding of what we’re doing at the teaching level. They came from us and they’re going
back to us after a few years of administration.
However, there was an unintended consequence of that, which was that the kinds of faculty
that came into the deanship were generally not type As, but type Bs.
Severn: How do you mean?
Nisbet: [Generally, the faculty picked “Type B’s” to serve as dean. That is, low key, soft spoken,
sensitive, good listeners, etc.] But one example was “Type A” Ron Woodbury became a dean and he
tried to fire Sandra Simon. We’ll talk about her later.
Severn: What year was this?
Nisbet: I can’t pinpoint exactly the years, but there’s a record of when Ron Woodbury was a dean.
Beryl Crowe, who was a very respected academician at the college, was a mentor of Sandra
Simon, and he and his friends pushed back on that process that was going after Sandra Simon, and Ron
Woodbury had to back down. It ushered in the notion that firing people at Evergreen was going to be a
problem. The problem was you were not going to put deans in there who were likely to take painful
action against one of their own.
Interestingly enough, Ron Woodbury left Evergreen shortly after that and he spent the rest of
his career on the East Coast as an administrator. I think he was made out to be an administrator in the
more conventional sense. Ron was a decent Type A guy type. [But he wanted all faculty to follow the
rules. If you didn’t there should be consequences.] There was nothing strange about him, but he did
not really fit well at Evergreen, as everyone else chosen as dean.
Severn: When you say fit, it seems like part of what you’re getting at here is just a sense that a kind of
hierarchy, where decisions are made from the top—decisions like firing and that sort of thing—where
there is a kind of distance from those decisions, like you’re talking about deans having distance from
departments in a conventional academic setting. You’re sort of talking about the general antihierarchical structure of Evergreen, in a way.
Nisbet: Yes.
Severn: And how that is baked into the institution itself.
Nisbet: We didn’t know that. When you think of any of the conventional schools, the academic deans
don’t party with the faculty. They party with other administrators. They party with their own. At
Evergreen, faculty in those early years, there were lots of parties. How do you have a party when you
have some faculty member walk in, who’s currently the dean, and he’s just fired someone, and here are
all the friends of the people that he’s going to the party with? Very uncomfortable.
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Severn: And this was unexpected for you. Coming to Evergreen, you didn’t have a clear sense that it
was going to be like that.
Nisbet: No, because it’s not possible to think through all the unintended consequences of a very
different academic model —even if you were able to think through some of these outcomes, it wouldn’t
be well received because it’s like you’re taking the energy away from something that hasn’t even been
tried yet. They’d argue, “Let’s try it, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll change it.” You’re caught in a kind of
catch-22 here, where you can’t go either way.
The enthusiasm was to try our innovative model. We’re going to take on administrative
responsibilities because we think we can do a better job of protecting teaching and not have it torn
apart by someone who doesn’t even teach anymore.
By the way, another little footnote here. Bridges is part of the faculty now. It’s a conventional
safety net. When you appoint someone President, the worst thing that could happen to him or her is
teach. Charles McCann went back and taught after he stepped down as President and I taught with him.
He was the same person. He was not a talker, and he was not charismatic, but he took the job of
teaching seriously and earned the respect of all his colleagues. [I taught with him several times in the
Management and Public Interest program.]
I think part of why he did such a good job is because he was the father of this new college. He
was part of the birthing process, so even after he wasn’t President anymore, it’s not like he could just
head for Florida. He had to finish off his commitment to the college as best he could as a teacher, and
he did just that.

Another thing about why we were excited about coming to Evergreen. When you teach at any
university, they couldn’t care less what you wanted to teach. Their curriculum is practically set in
concrete. It’s all these different courses in any department whether history, economics or philosophy.
Only occasionally will a new course be proposed. Then it has to go through so many committees, from
inside the department to the department, to the academic dean, to the provost and or academic vice
president. It could take years to get that done. Years!
What I loved about Evergreen—and I’m sure many others did—you could create a new
academic program in the spring and then teach it in the coming fall. When Bill Clinton became
President, one of the first things on their agenda was to be healthcare for all Americans. Thus, in spring
quarter, I put together a fall quarter program on healthcare with one faculty, myself. Hillary Clinton
headed up the formulation of that original healthcare plan. So, fall quarter, we followed daily
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everything that was taking place in Washington D.C. on healthcare planning in real time. The students
loved it, I loved it. You could never do anything like that at traditional colleges.
Every faculty member at Evergreen could sit around and think about what they wanted to
teach? It was exciting to call up other faculty members and three of you sit down and brainstorm about
a program you could do maybe not in six months, but maybe in a year from now. [Something that
would excite the students and yourself.] You could do this year after year after year. That was a huge
attraction, to me and incoming students as Evergreen had a living in real time curriculum.
Severn: It’s interesting to hear you talk about it like this because, on the one hand, what you’re saying
obviously is about this tremendous freedom. But on the other hand, part of what you’re implying is also
a tremendous responsibility, because you’re offering freedom to really investigate and invest in a
student’s time, and what they want to learn about. But with that comes all these responsibilities and
obligations to build these learning communities as they come up, and to make them substantial. That’s
got to be difficult, too.
Nisbet: Well, yes, but one advantage of the team-teaching approach, in contrast with my one quarter
on healthcare, is you’re not alone. You can have a team of diverse disciplines, backgrounds and
personalities, and as a team, you can draw on different strengths and compensate for any weaknesses.
You may have three, four or five faculty members taking the responsibility to deliver what you’re talking
about. If you’re all on the same page, you can deliver a terrific program.
You must have heard of Jeanne Hahn.
Severn: Yeah.
Nisbet: Jeanne Hahn was probably the most dedicated, the hardest working, one of the best professors
ever at Evergreen. She gave her life to this place. [She wrote the best student evaluations. She attracted
the best students. She put in long hours. She was a terrific colleague.] I’m not suggesting that all
faculty should have been Jeanne Hahn. But she’s the perfect example of what made Evergreen a firstrate liberal arts college.
Severn: Sure, but she was good at [unintelligible 00:43:51].
Nisbet: She was a terrific hire and a faculty member at the college. I’m going to cover this later, but
there were so many bright, dedicated faculty. It was an inspiring place to be. It was a place that raised
you to a higher level, in my opinion.
Now, [keep in mind that Evergreen had a normal distribution of faculty and students just like
everyplace else]. Evergreen had some not so good students and not so good faculty But the good news

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is they didn’t have that much of either. They had some, but that was unavoidable. [With our “free
market” curriculum the good students and good faculty selected each other and visa versa.]
I think I sent you something today—oh, I have a people at Evergreen list that I sent you, a
spreadsheet, that I’m going to talk about. At the end of the people list, I have tried to write down the
hires in the sciences, because one of my mantras is that the strongest part of the college from day one
was science, even though I’m totally a non-science person and I’m looking at this from the outside. You
look at the hires made in science for ’70, ’71 and ’72. Incredible, in my opinion. There was not a single
one in the sciences that was problematic or weak.
Severn: You’re talking about the people. These are incredible hires. But do you think that the structure
of Evergreen in some particular way facilitated something about the sciences that leads to a kind of
excellence?
Nisbet: That’s a good question. I don’t think so. I think that they made it. [chuckles] I never thought
about the question you’re asking, but I don’t think their facilities were unique or special.
Severn: Chuck, the reason I ask is because it seems like you hear discussions about the sciences a lot at
Evergreen and how Evergreen, as an institution, does have a kind of anti-hierarchy, just like you’re
talking about. That is part of Evergreen. But built into the sciences is a kind of hierarchy. There is builtin scaffolding to the sciences. I do wonder if there’s something in that relationship between an
institution that allows for freedom, and how even within that freedom, the constraints of the sciences
can somehow operate in a more creative way because of that context, but at the same time, the
scaffolding keeps something coherent and together about it.
Nisbet: I don’t know. For example, Evergreen, while I was there, had only two graduate programs.
One, the environmental science. Two, public administration. The main reason for the Master’s of
Public Administration was we were in the State capitol. Public employee of the state, if they came to
Evergreen at night and got their master’s in public administration could qualify for pay raises.
It was very obvious there was a market there; that if we offered this program, we were going to
get students. Not like Grays Harbor. The college opened a campus in Grays Harbor, they didn’t attract
sufficient students. You might guess why that was going to be the case.

Let me get back to what I was talking about. Because faculty could generate new programs at
Evergreen, it didn’t have what you saw in traditional education—the students sitting in class, and there’s
the professor up at the podium, and his notes are yellow and worn. There may be some shes, too, but
in the 50’s and 60’s is was primarily hes, teaching the same thing for so many years that he just kind of
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laboriously goes through these notes. You didn’t see that at Evergreen because we were constantly
teaching new programs. Every time you taught in a team program, your read new material, and you had
to create new lectures.
Severn: And you seminar that material with your colleagues, too.
Nisbet: Yes. That’s another reason why this college appealed to some people.
Severn: When you came to Evergreen, did you have sense of what that aspect of teaching would be
like? Did you come knowing that you, as someone who was going to be team teaching, would actually
be seminaring materials with your colleagues? Or is that something that when you got there, you
realized?
Nisbet: I think we had some kind of idea, but not as much as ultimately came forth. We all knew that
first year—I knew I wasn’t coming to teach introductory economics. We knew we were going to teach
with a team, and the team would be made up of—like in my case—Larry Eichstaedt was the coordinator,
and he was a marine biologist. Phil Harding was an architect. Caroline Dobbs was an urban planner.
There was an excitement in the air that you were actually going to be working with a group of
people that had a totally different expertise and that you could learn something besides what you
already knew. But how you were going to do that, you may not have known as much. It wasn’t that you
knew you could create programs every year, but you knew that there were going to be different
programs every year. You didn’t know how much you could be a part of this, but it was going to
happen. For me, teaching Principles of Economics, or any economics course year after year, was chilling.
It was just dreadful.
What kind of people came the first year? I think very confident. Primarily, very confident
people. Why? Because they were leaving the comfort of certainty and entering into an arena of
uncertainty.
Severn: They had to have a degree of confidence to do it.
Nisbet: Had to have a degree of confidence. If you’re going to walk in a room and be subjected to
questions by students, and even your colleagues, you’d better have some confidence.
Severn: Also, I would imagine—correct me if I’m wrong—something of a clear sense of mission, too, a
kind of orientation toward the school and teaching that has its own sense of why it matters. If you don’t
have the scaffolding of convention is what I’m saying.
Nisbet: Yes, I would agree with that. There were all kinds of different approaches by different faculty.
For example, one of my favorite stories—Steve Herman, science faculty. Students loved this man. They
respected him. He had an 8:00 program that he taught by himself.
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Severn: At Evergreen? That’s unheard of. Eight in the morning?
Nisbet: It turned out he was an early morning person. [laughing] You know what? Steve Herman was a
type A guy. He wanted to teach at 8:00. If you wanted to learn anything from him, you could damn well
show up at 8:00. You know what he did at 8:00? He locked the door.
Severn: Oh, wow. Also, not quite in keeping with Evergreen.
Nisbet: No, so I’m saying, there were all kinds of different approaches here. He locked the door. I
actually saw a student banging on the door one morning. He never let the student in. Guess what
happened?
Severn: The student wasn’t late again.
Nisbet: They all showed up on time. And they loved and respected Steve Herman. Sometimes a bit of
type A authoritarian stuff gets you in trouble, but somehow his delivery of it, how he went about it,
students accepted.
I’ll tell you another Steve Herman story. In the fall of every year, there were leaves all over the
campus, Red Square, and the Maintenance Department, when you walked on campus at 7:30 in the
morning—I’m an early morning person, too—there they were with their gas-powered leaf blowers
blowing these leaves into big piles and all that. Steve Herman was offended—absolutely offended, so
we went out and bought a dozen rakes. Not the morning that he had his class [but] he had his students
raked Red Square. They kept doing that for I don’t know how long, I don’t exactly remember, but he
made his point that it was noisy, there was no reason for them to use mechanical equipment. He was
very unorthodox, which was true about many of us.
Third story about Steve Herman. Fieldwork was a huge part of his work in the sciences. In the
early years—which I’ll cover later—budgets were huge. Unbelievable, in retrospect, the budgets we had
in the first five or six years. Later, we had little to no money.
When Steve first started taking field trips, there were motor pool cars and vans he could take
and charge it to the program budget. When the big program budgets days where a thing of the past,
what did Steve do? He bought an old, yellow school bus. When I came on campus in the morning, there
was that yellow school bus, the students all lined up with their notebooks, backpacks and whatever, and
[they] piled onto that school bus. Steve drove them around to complete their field studies. However, it
was not that long—maybe a year, I’m not sure—and then ultimately, they closed him down because of
liability concerns. The college wouldn’t allow him to use a private vehicle to do that.
I think this paints a picture of a unique faculty member. Steve was also a falconer. He had a
falcon cage in his backyard for his pet falcon. He was diversified and a hard worker, but he wouldn’t
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comply with certain responsibilities that everyone else did. The college had to bend and accept because
he was so good at what he did. [Here is where a Type B dean came in handy.]
At Evergreen, there was no tenure, just revolving contracts. But in practice, there was a kind of
tenure. After a few years, there came into existence what they called a probationary contract that
didn’t exist initially. A so-called three-year period of your first contract, you’re put on probation. I don’t
know if there was a single person ever terminated after the first three years. There may have been,
especially maybe in the last 29 years, I don’t know, but not in the 30 I was there. [When faculty
unionized in 2006 (?), I doubt firing was made any easier.]
After your first contract, there was a series of revolving contracts. I think there were three- to
five-year contracts. All they did is they just revolved, essentially. The irony was supposedly, this was
going to be a no-tenure place, which all of us thought was a great idea—the faculty, some faculty
anyway, for me and Jeanne Hahn and others. Why? [People would have to stay involved, stay sharp.]
We wouldn’t have old deadwood, these old faculty members who are burned out, they’re tired, they
have no more energy. We liked the idea of no tenure, but it never worked out that way because of
these revolving contracts, problematic faculty evaluations and Type “B” deans.
There would be no letter grades, just pass and fail. The narrative evaluation, which I think we all
liked because if all you can give a student is a A,B, C or F what does that really mean? When I taught at
UCLA, there was a knock at my door, the only time a student ever came to my residence in the four
years I was there. When I opened the door, I didn’t know who it was. He said, “Professor Nisbet, I’m Soand-So and I’m in your Latin American Economics class.” I said, “Oh.” He said, “I need a
recommendation for graduate school. Could you please write me a letter of recommendation?” What
could I write? I went to my gradebook. All I could look up was letter grades from the work he turned in.
I knew nothing about this young man.
Narrative evaluations, we thought, were terrific. The thing we underestimated is the time it was
going to take to complete them for 18 to 20 students each quarter. Very early on, the faculty separated,
where people like Jeanne Hahn and Nancy Taylor—a whole laundry list of others—spent hours and
hours, me included, and wrote a full page narrative evaluation of a student. Not just saying, oh, they
were a good student or that’s a great paper but providing details of what kind of paper they wrote, or
what kind of contributions they made in seminar. When somebody would look at that letter, you knew
something about the student, not just they were a quote great student. How were they great? What
did they do that was great? [What areas of improvement were needed?]

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We were excited about narrative evaluations. Not all faculty took those evaluations that
seriously. Macro evaluations started to appear over time, where you filled in blanks.
Severn: You mean like a form evaluation kind of?
Nisbet: Yeah, kind of. It was okay, but I just think that some faculty couldn’t compete with the likes of
Jeanne Hahn in devotion and energy. She was a single woman. If you’re a faculty with three children,
you didn’t have the same kind of hours to put in that she did, so you didn’t try to match her. But you
could still do a good job. If you had 20 students eventually, how many hours can you spend on each
student at the end of the quarter?
I was going to talk about when the college opened. I spent the entire era of the Vietnam War on
university campuses—University of Oregon, University of Wisconsin, and UCLA. By the time Evergreen
opened in the fall of ’71, the public was tired of the war and tired of campus protests.
While it is true that campus protests were instrumental in helping to bring about an end to the
war, it came at a cost to higher education in the years ahead that I never anticipated while I was a
participating anti-war protestor. The taxpaying public watched years of campus demonstrations,
damage to property, and even campus deaths. There was a bombing in Science Building at the
University of Wisconsin. It killed one student, one of my fellow students at Kalamazoo College years
earlier. You had Kent State shootings.
In the years ahead, after Vietnam, the public asserted its unhappiness with higher education by
lessening its financial support. It took decades for the public to come back together with academia
because the public, in many ways—or some segment of the public—resented the fact that we college
professors and college students were spending our time not in the classroom, but we were out raising
hell. So, when the college opened in ’71, we opened in Thurston County with a skepticism and a
concern from the public who saw faculty looking like hippies and students looking like hippies—
Severn: Can I ask you something about that? You had mentioned that there was this speculation that
you were a CIA agent. You had just done this work in Chile. I’m just curious if you could fit that in—your
experience with that, why that came up within this cultural context you’re talking about, but also
specifically Evergreen? What was that about?
Nisbet: The very first year of Evergreen, everybody taught in a team-teaching program and two faculty
members took individual contracts. I cannot remember one of the faculty member’s names, who didn’t
stay there very long, if I remember correctly, but the second one, Robinson. I’m forgetting his first
name. Peter Robinson! That’s it. Peter was here and then he was gone. He was here and then he’d

15

disappear. I’m telling you, people thought he worked for the CIA because everyone else was here all the
time in those early years.
People didn’t live in Seattle or Tacoma much in those early years. Everyone was in Olympia and
on campus three or four days a week. They were there for faculty meetings, they were there at parties.
It was a real community. Peter was invisible, and nobody could find out what he did, what his
background [was]. He was a mystery man. The minute he became this mystery man, then [came] these
rumors starting about, oh, maybe he works for the CIA, or maybe he’s a secret agent. [laughing]
Severn: Were you a mystery man, too, or was there something else?
Nisbet: I don’t know about that. I think that . . . well, one of the things that was also a puzzle for me at
Evergreen is that there was a bit of a conservative image of me, but I think it had more to do with my
being type A—where that came from. Mainly because when I came, I came as an economist, and
economists [laughing]—all my years at Evergreen when we had parties and there were community
people there, people would want to know “What do you do?”
When I would tell people I was an economist, I got two responses. One was, “Do you know
where the bathroom is?” [laughter] Second response was, “I think I need to refill my glass. I’m going
back to the bar.” People don’t want to talk to you when you tell them you’re an economist. Even
businesspeople, who you’d think—they don’t want to talk to you. They don’t want to ask you anything.
At one point in my life, I tried telling people I was a sex therapist, and that worked about as well
as an economist. I couldn’t pull it off somehow.
The fact that the government was paying me to go for an entire quarter around the world
lecturing, and that was in ’73 or ’74, I’ve forgotten, that stood out. Nobody else was—how come the
government is paying Nisbet to go off all around the world? So, I think that’s where some of that—I’m
not saying it was pervasive, but it came up.
Severn: Sure. It’s hard not to [unintelligible 01:12:07].
Nisbet: I wasn’t hippie-looking, but I didn’t have a crewcut either. I didn’t wear sportscoats. Nobody
ever wore a sportscoat at Evergreen.
Another funny story. I loved fall quarter. I loved it. What I loved about fall quarter is going the
first day to class. All these new faces, and then looking at these faces and conjuring up in my head who
these people all were. One day I walked on campus in the fall quarter and there was this young man
with a white Oxford shirt with a button-down collar. I said to myself, when does that shirt get thrown in
the “free-box?” Sure enough, in about three weeks, I saw him again and he was entirely different.
That’s all I can offer you up about the rumor about the CIA. I don’t know.
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Severn: You had also mentioned in our initial talks about just some of the papers that David Marr and
Rudy would write and send around, and you all would talk about that during those first couple years.
What was that like, the sense of discussing and debating these ideas about the college?
Nisbet: It was invigorating. They called them manifestos. The M&M Manifesto 1 and M&M Manifesto
2. I never really got to know David Marr very well. He was very reserved, or I saw him as reserved. He
had a very nice wife. Just a decent man. Pensive person, I always thought. I knew Rudy a long time and
got to know him.
No one in traditional education asks you what you think about what they’re doing. [laughing]
Here, they’re asking. “What do you think about this idea?” I should say that not all faculty participated
in this, but a large number.
Severn: Yeah, and it was available. It was something that you could do.
Nisbet: That’s right, so you didn’t have to come, you chose to come. You elected to come, and most
people elected to come. It was invigorating. It was a way to get to know how someone thinks. It was a
way to have a stake in the place. In other words, when David and Rudy put themselves out there, they
were not just responding, they were putting themselves out there. Somebody would say, “That’s a
terrible idea.” They were willing to do that.
I hope this isn’t going to throw us off base here. Look what happened in 2016-2017. If there
was ever an opposite to that, when you have an equity plan that you can’t even comment on. When we
were talking about my experience and then this happens to my college, it’s like, what in the hell? What
a difference between then and now.
Severn: I do want for there to be room to talk about the now, but it seems that part of what you’re
getting at about the then, though—when you showed up—is there was all this room to take what were
preconceived ideas and to question them. There was a lot of room for debate, there was a lot of room
for different ideas to circulate. That was foundational for those early years.
Nisbet: Yes, it certainly was. After a certain period of time, it was over. There were no more position
papers.
Severn: What do you think happened? What do you think caused that shift?
Nisbet: Because these were papers on the big picture, and after a certain period of time, the big picture
was there. Then you dealt with micro issues, small pieces of the picture but not the big picture.
Severn: Yeah. I don’t want to get you too far off track here, but it sounds like you’re saying that there
was a question about what Evergreen is in those early years.
Nisbet: Yes.
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Severn: That question was ultimately answered.
Nisbet: Yes.
Severn: Fairly early on.
Nisbet: Yes.
Severn: Then after that question was answered, the discussion shifted to stuff within the smaller
question within that question.
Nisbet: Yes, or even actions. For example, there was a faculty member—one of the unintended
consequences of faculty evaluations was—and is, and there’s been no rectifying this in the big picture—
that faculty evaluations assume everyone will be honest and direct; that everyone is comfortable being
honest and direct with their colleagues. What was overlooked is human nature. That was too much to
expect. Jeanne Hahn could do it; I could do it, and a lot of other people could do it, but there was a
significant number of people who couldn’t bring themselves to do it.
Severn: What do you mean by human nature?
Nisbet: I mean confrontation. Here you are at the end of the quarter, and you’ve written your selfevaluation and your evaluation of your fellow faculty members, and you’re sitting together at a table. If
one of your colleagues didn’t read the books, didn’t show up on time, didn’t do a good job writing
student evaluations or holding student conferences and you cite this in an evaluation, this is going to be
very uncomfortable.
Severn: Right.
Nisbet: It’s bad enough that you actually write it down, but you have to look at the person when the
person reads it. Human nature, not everyone is comfortable doing that and being there, and you cannot
force them to do it because they can’t do it.
My best friend couldn’t do it. I didn’t know until it actually happened at Evergreen. He couldn’t
do it. The only thing he could do is search for some positive things to say. When you talked about the
good parts and you just left off all the problems, and that went to the dean, you couldn’t fire anybody
and maybe more important you couldn’t lay out details for self-improvement. It was a real dilemma.
Severn: Yeah, I see what you’re saying.
Nisbet: It was hard enough to do with students. You had the same situation. You should see a
student’s face when they read some of this stuff. It’s not that they don’t know it’s true. They just didn’t
think you were going to write it. [laughter] Or they were hoping when they walked in, oh, maybe he’ll
just go easy on me. In most cases, the students didn’t like it, but they knew it was true, so they couldn’t

18

wait to get it over and get out of your office. That was an unintended consequence, and a serious
problem, but no one ever found a way to change it, improve it, get around it.
Because of that, one quarter there was a faculty member—Paul Marsh—that the college
wanted to get rid of, and they never had enough solid evidence to get rid of him. What did they do?
They put him in Political Economy with Tom Rainey and Chuck Nisbet, knowing that we would write
honest and direct evaluations containing enough deficiencies to fire him. That’s exactly what happened.
Severn: Wow.
Nisbet: That’s not a good outcome. That’s not a good way to rectify the system, and I don’t know of
any other case like that because I think that if you suspected that faculty were being set up to fire
someone, they would not be happy about that.
[Here is another change that took place over time. In the late 80’s if you had written a poor evaluation
of a female student, you left the door open while the student was in your office for the end of the
quarter conference and in some cases you also had a program secretary sit outside your office to listen
in so there couldn’t be a he-said, she-said compliant filed by the student because you had a witness.]
Severn: A lot of what you’re saying seems to be pointing toward how both these great ideals about
Evergreen have led to some really wonderful stuff, but built in, too, are some difficult conflicts that can
arise under the same ideals.
Nisbet: Yes, we’ve identified two of them right away so far. One is that the deans coming from the
faculty [and returning to the faculty will find it difficult to make hard decisions on their fellow
colleagues]. [The same outcome comes through on faculty evaluations. Some faculty won’t give the
deans honest information about the fellow colleague that could lead to his or her termination.]
Should I talk about the very beginning, Pack Forest?
Severn: Yeah, let’s do that, and we’ve been recording for about an hour and a half, almost two hours.
Why don’t you give me a little bit more and then we can wrap up the first session and we’ll just jump
right back in where you leave off?
Nisbet: Okay. I don’t know whose idea it was, but there was going to be like 60 of us, the planning
faculty and the first-year hires. They took us to Mount Rainier National Forest for a retreat.
The idea was team building and trusting, I suppose, getting to know each other, because it was
kind of awkward for all these people to all of a sudden be plopped down in the middle of the forest. We
didn’t know anybody. But my friend, Eric Larson, was there, so I had one person I knew.

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One of the first things that happened that never happened ever again at Evergreen, we
academics played touch football in the afternoon..
Severn: That’s hilarious.
Nisbet: You know what? It was a hugely successful thing. Dick Nichols was the communications
director. I’ll give you his full title, I don’t know what it was. He was a local sports announcer, and
everybody in the community knew Dick Nichols, so he was a good guy for the college, a good buffer. I
think it was Dick Nichols who said we ought to do this.
There was a large amount of the males that wanted to do this. Of course, the first year, there
were mostly males by a big margin. I threw two touchdown passes to Fred Tabbutt, and we probably
had limited contact for 30 years after that. But we all remembered that day, Fred and I, and we would
make reference to it now and again. What a distinguished person and faculty member was Fred
Tabbutt.
The second thing that happened at Pack Forest that was good was directed by Willi Unsoeld. I
don’t even remember how this happened, but we had a lot of free time at meals where people sat
together and introduced themselves. Little groups of people met each other, and probably made
friends there for a day. You know who Willi Unsoeld is, right?
Severn: Yeah.
Nisbet: All of a sudden, he’s marching us all off into the woods. We stop in this one spot, and he hauls
out this long rope, and he says, “Okay, we’re going to rappel over the edge.” I knew nothing about any
of this. I think we were all kind of standing around looking. I think Pete Sinclair, probably, who is a
climber, and a couple people must have volunteered. They could see them rappelling off the edge. I
don’t think it was terribly long. Willi held the rope while you were—and there was no safety [belt?
01:28:55]. It was just one big rope.
The funniest thing about that whole thing was Charlie Teske. Willi didn’t say, “Get dressed for
outdoors,” and Charlie Teske had some nice pants and Oxford shoes. [laughter] Here’s Charlie Teske,
who was not particularly athletic, had his shoes on the edge. It just was a total non-picture of what
someone should be looking like rappelling. It was just crazy. I’m sure there were some people who
didn’t do it, for good reason. But Willi had a lot of command, and if he said we were going to do this, I
said to myself, I’m going to do this. I think it was a good thing because again it was a trusting Willi and
team building.
Pack Forest was a wonderful first beginning, as opposed to just showing up on campus to your
team and start teaching.
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Severn: Also, kind of emblematic, too, just this notion all these different faculty and deans and
everybody going off the edge.
Nisbet: Yeah. We never did that again. We never rappelled and we didn’t play touch football. Never
again.
Severn: Let’s end this one right here and then we can pick up where we left off.
Nisbet: Okay, sure.

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