TaylorNancy_20170105_Transcript_pt2.pdf

Media

Part of Nancy Taylor Oral History Interview

extracted text

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

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

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

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

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

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

See? Here we are.

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5

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

6

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

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

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

7

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

8

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

9

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

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

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

12

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

13

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

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

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

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

17

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

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

19

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

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

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

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

21

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

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

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

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

23

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

24

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

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

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

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

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

29

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

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

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

32

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

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

34