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Part of Nancy Taylor Oral History Interview

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Nancy Taylor
Interviewed by Sam Schrager
The Evergreen State College oral history project
February 24, 2017
FINAL

Taylor: Did you ever teach with Charlie McCann? I only did it once, but it was quite an experience,
because he was not a very public person. What he wanted to do more than anything else was just read.
He didn’t want to process it; he just wanted to read. And his idea about seminar was, he said, “I don’t
know how to teach. I just read.” And he made all the students just read. And they worked harder than
any students. He got students to work amazingly hard. And when they’d come to the University of
Washington, Fritz—because people knew Fritz knew Evergreen—people in the English Department
would call up and say, “What do I do about this student?”
And Fritz said, “Who wrote the evaluation?” And if they said Charlie McCann, and it was good,
Fritz said, “Admit him right now.” Because he had such high standards.
Schrager: So what would happen in seminar if they just read? Would they just talk about it?
Taylor: I guess they just talked about it. But he didn’t lead. But somehow, he set an expectation and a
seriousness that you just came prepared.
Schrager: Why don’t you just tell me about the Milton, just so—
Taylor: Have you turned this on?
Schrager: I just did.
Taylor: Okay. So, yeah, this is a good story. This is in the program Great Books and Great Questions, or
Great Questions and Great Books. Anyway, with Charlie and Gil Salcedo and Gordon Beck, and it was
the Great Books program of the year. I ended up coordinating it, and not feeling at all like I knew what I
was doing, but because David Marr was supposed to do it, and he became dean.
We read a big chunk of the Bible. We read a lot of Greek stuff, and then we read a big chunk of
the Old Testament, and then we read the New Testament, and we read Dante. It was a standard Great
Books thing, except for a lot of the Bible.
And when we got to Milton, about April, Charlie McCann stood up and said to the students,
“You are better prepared to read Milton than any other student in the United States,” or something like
that. He said, “You are freshmen, and you have read absolutely everything that Milton’s going to refer

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to. You’re ready.” And it was true. It was the first time I’d ever read Milton. And the discussions were
good, and students were quite proud of themselves. It was probably the hardest book of the year.
Schrager: And it was built on the Bible?
Taylor: It was built on the Bible; it was built on Dante. It was a really good intellectual program. The
atmosphere, the faculty bonding wasn’t as good as some of the other programs. There was no social
element in this program, which I always insisted on—and that’s not the atmosphere that was created.
But the intellectual atmosphere was really good.
And David was my dean, and he came. I always used to write letters of self-evaluation. I always
used to write them as a letter, rather than a self-evaluation. I think Leo taught me to do that. And
sometimes I would write them to the team, and sometimes I’d write them to a dean, and sometimes I’d
write them to my sister. It didn’t matter. But it meant that I had an audience that I was writing to,
rather than just an abstract thing. And that year, I wrote to David, because, I said, “You’re responsible
for this.”
Schrager: Would you be interested in talking about the books, since we started there? We can come to
this at the end, or we can just start with it.
Taylor: Last night, I typed out all the programs that I had been in; and 28 teams over the time that I was
teaching, 28 different teams. And I taught group contracts maybe three or four times, and individual
contracts maybe twice. And I was in the Library one year for two quarters. But mostly, I taught
coordinated studies in teams, preferably at least three and four. I mean, that was my career. That’s
what I did. And so I wrote them all down last night, and counted up all the people, just to see; just
because I wanted to have a record of that.
And I was saying earlier that it seemed like every program—lots of books I would have known,
or gradually, they wouldn’t be the first time read, although there were always books that I had never
read. I used to say to people, when summer came, “Oh, such a relief.” I don’t have to read a book that
weekend. Because every weekend, I was reading a book. And lots of times, it was something that was
totally new.
But it seemed like every team, every year, a book stood out. And I just thought last night about
books that stand out. And I didn’t look back at any programs or anything. It’s just they still stand out.
And they’re a big array. It’s not what you’d normally think. Emily Dickinson, for some reason; we were
reading Emily Dickinson and for some reason, I did more than just read it; I decided that this was
important, and it’s “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” I mean, it’s still—I don’t know poetry, I don’t know
Emily Dickinson very well, but that year, I spent—
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And I connect all of this with the best side of faculty development. Because, how many people
are so lucky in their career to spend—what?—40 years learning. It’s better than going to graduate
school. And at Evergreen—well, for me—it was not like being a graduate school student and digging
deep into one thing. It was easy to call it dilettante-ism. It was breadth. But I got to read all these
different books in all these different fields, and get myself educated in a way that you don’t in graduate
school. I mean, you learned to become an anthropologist, but you don’t have the opportunity to read
the breadth of stuff that we did.
So I just wrote down some books. The first one was [Tzvetan] Todorov, because he just died.
You know who he is? I read that in a program when I was teaching with two community college
teachers at North Seattle Community College. It was called something about exploration, and it had a
lot to do with South America. It was stuff that I had no idea. And we didn’t have very good students,
and we didn’t have very many students, but we read Todorov. And it was tough, and it left an
impression. So when he died, I said, “Ah, I remember reading that.” And I never would have read that.
So that was one.
Tennyson, I said earlier, In Memoriam, which Susan Preciso wanted to read. And, again, you
know, Tennyson is something that you don’t think you’d read. But there it was.
And that same year, my favorite book of all time, Middlemarch—I’ve probably read that six
times, and it’s very fat. Maybe I’d read it before. But if you ask for my favorite book of all time, that’s it.
Schrager: And why?
Taylor: I got lost in her story, and . . . I don’t know. I haven’t read it for a while now, but I could go back
and read it. You get so irritated about her relationship with Casaubon and with what—have you read it?
Schrager: Yes, in college.
Taylor: And for students, it was a slog. It was hard. Some of them really took to it. But that program
that both Tennyson and Middlemarch come out of, when I think about that program now, I cannot
believe we did it, and I cannot believe a program doing it today. And it was the year that the Supreme
Court Justice Thomas was interviewed, because I remember students were just really upset about that.
Schrager: Anita Hill.
Taylor: Yeah, Anita Hill. And students were furious. But in that program—1994 or ‘95—we read about
10 Victorian novels. We read Bleak House, we read Middlemarch, we read a Wilkie [Collins],
Moonstone, we read Wuthering Heights, and then In Memoriam. And then we read Darwin, and we
read history—industrialization; stories about health. Janet Ott was in it, and so we did a lot of history of

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science. The students all did a major research project—a big one. And they were reading all these fat
novels. Vanity Fair. I mean, they were all like 600 pages. And they did it. And the group was strong.
I wish I could remember the name of those two students. One was named Rhonda, and the
other one might have been Christina. They were two very smart women. One was from Shelton, named
Rhonda, and she ended up working in the State Legislature. Pretty conservative; coming to Evergreen
because it was close, and she could live at home. A little bit older. But really willing to work. And then
this other person, who had blue hair; was a hippie; was very smart; was totally on the other side of the
political spectrum; from California. And she ended up going to St. John’s graduate school.
And they met, and I remember having a conversation with Rhonda. She says, “I just can’t
believe I can be friends with somebody with blue hair.” But they absolutely bonded, and loved it. In
fact, I saw Rhonda maybe five years later, and she still remembered. They didn’t stay friends after they
left. But it was about these big novels that they were reading.
That was a good program. And that was another program that I ended up coordinating, because
Jin Darney was supposed to be the coordinator, and she became dean. But she decided that even
though she was dean, she wanted to be in this program. She read all the books and came to every
faculty seminar. That was just what she wanted to do. So we didn’t lose her. And that’s why Susan
Preciso was hired, because Jin left.
So it was Susan and Jan Ott and me. And Jan Ott was way in over her head in the literature and
had to really struggle, because it was so much reading. But she did the history of science. And we did
statistics, because the idea was statistics was started in the nineteenth century, so we found a way to do
statistics. That was a strong program.
So, other books. Willa Cather, My Antonia. The problem with that book—I love it, and I was so
invested in it, and in loving it, and the students didn’t like it, and they just blew it off because it was too
slow and too unexciting. I taught that with Helena Knapp with a group of reentry women, the Ajax—
Schrager: You mentioned that.
Taylor: Yeah. And it just didn’t work, even though I wanted it to, desperately. And whenever I was in a
seminar where I really, really wanted—I liked something and really wanted to have a good conversation,
I would work too hard at it, and it wouldn’t work. Did you find that true, if you were too invested?
Schrager: I hadn’t thought about that.
Taylor: That was one case, but it’s still one of my favorite books. De Tocqueville. You just got so much
mileage out of de Tocqueville whenever we read de Tocqueville. It’s a memorable book and strong
book, but that wasn’t one of those ones that sort of came out of the blue, you know, because I would
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have pushed it. And same way with Machiavelli. When I taught with Merv, when we did Two Cities, we
read Machiavelli, and we read Castiglione. You know?
Schrager: Yeah.
Taylor: Do you know the word sprezzatura?
Schrager: Yeah, but I don’t remember what it means.
Taylor: It means that you can do something brilliantly but effortlessly. So, if you were a gentleman, you
could play music, or you could dance, or you could ride a horse, and it looked like you just were gifted
with this skill without doing anything. And, in fact, you would have spent hours and hours and hours
training. So it’s a very strong compliment. It looks effortless, but you know behind it, it has hours and
hours of work. That description, from Castiglione, has always stayed with me.
Schrager: What context was this book?
Taylor: That was Two Cities of Destiny, when we were reading about Florence. And we read
Machiavelli, we read [Giorgio] Vasari, we read some economic primary sources about the Medici, we
read about Michelangelo. We started with Dante, the book On Government. We didn’t read Divine
Comedy, we read On Government, which was a very good book to read because you could—it was a
political science book, basically, and you could work through what it was. I remember the seminars on
that were good.
Then here’s another book. Don Quixote, we read the whole thing. It was with Nancy Allen, and
it was a program called Great Books in Context, or Classics in Context. We started with Antigone, and
then we read the French Antigone and a Spanish Antigone, and the students wrote their own Antigone.
The theme was how a book would be seen in different contexts. And that was the one I chose, and then
Nancy chose Don Quixote. We read the whole thing. And this was a program for first year students.
Another thing I wrote down here was a bunch of students that I remember. Well, I’ll take a little
detour here. There was a student who was a basketball player from Long Beach. Can I give names, is
that all right?
Schrager: Sure.
Taylor: Well, his name was Tuggy. His name was Trelton, actually, but he went by Tuggy. And it was
the year—1997 or something—that Evergreen decided to have a league basketball team, and
deliberately went out and recruited. And we got five or six African-American men from Los Angeles who
came to Evergreen. And they were freshmen; they were all 18 or something.
They had no understanding of the college, or Olympia, or why to come here, but they were
recruited, and they were given money. None of them had money, so it wasn’t a basketball scholarship,
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it was just need-based money. And they arrived, and were put into programs without—in a way, I think
it’s one of the most—it was unethical what the college did.
So they started playing basketball, and we had—Nancy Allen and Argentina Daley and I had this
program called Classics in Context, and we got three of these students. Now, what in the world was
going on in any advisor’s mind or anything that would put these students in this program that was going
to read Antigone in 10 versions, Don Quixote; and then the third book of that quarter was Jack London,
because Argentina had chosen Jack London; so short stories and Martin Eden? And then I don’t know
what we did the next quarter.
But these students were not prepared, and it covered topics that were completely out of their
interest. So Tuggy was in my seminar. Nice kid, very good basketball player. And about the third week
of the program, the students—it was regular seminars, but they had to do historical background stuff for
what was going on, and they had to do reports. It was a planned-out program, like most, and they had
to do quite a bit of writing. And these three women teachers. And we got along pretty well, although
we hadn’t done much planning before this all started.
And I had conferences with everybody, which I always did after a couple weeks, and Tuggy came
in and he wasn’t doing anything. He wasn’t doing any research, he wasn’t reading the books; he didn’t
have a clue, and he wasn’t doing anything. And we had a very, rather frank conversation. And I said—I
can just remember the words—I said, “Tuggy, are you in college or aren’t you?” And he left, sort of
hanging his head, and he came back the next day and he said, “I’ve quit the basketball team. I’m in
college.”
And he started to work. And we worked really hard, because he didn’t have skills. I met with
him and we worked on writing, and we would figure out—I remember he did something on [Marcus]
Garvey. We figured out something so that he was able to do something that was more interesting. But
he did some research on Don Quixote, and he ended up getting full credit, and the students in the
program respected him, and he liked the seminar. The people, I mean, it was pretty welcoming. And in
January, he joined the basketball team again. So the whole winter and the whole fall, he was a student.
And he stayed in the program for the length of the program. The students went to the
basketball games. Nancy and I went to, I think, every basketball game. They were good. They won
some games. He ended up graduating in four years. He then went to Europe as a basketball player.
Didn’t like it. Came back. And I’m still in touch with him. He wrote to me about a year ago, or more
than that, and said, “Do you remember me? I want to go to graduate school. Will you write me a letter
of recommendation?”
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He had gone back to Long Beach, and then helped start an Upward Bound program at Long
Beach Community College, and had been working there for like 10 years. And he decided he needed to
go to graduate school in counseling, to do a better job in his job. So he was applying to Long Beach
State to get into—and now, that’s where he is. I heard from him not very long ago. And he’s one of
those huge success stories, and it was all because I said, “Are you in college or aren’t you?”
And he remembered. And when I wrote the letter of recommendation, I told this story; and I
guess it worked because he got in. But I said, “You remember that?” And he says, “Oh, yeah, I
remember. I remember.” Anyway, that’s all because—I remember the book, Don Quixote.
And then, here’s another book. When we were teaching Cultural Codes, and we read [Clifford]
Geertz’s story about the cock—what’s it called?
Schrager: “Notes on a Balinese Cockfight.”
Taylor: Yep. And I think we must have read some other stuff by Geertz.
Schrager: You read his essay “Thick Description.”
Taylor: That’s right, yeah.
Schrager: Those are his two most famous—
Taylor: And I’d never heard of him before, and then I read some more. And so when I wrote my book,
[Cousins in Love: The Letters of Lydia DuGard, 1665-1672] there’s this sentence, and it’s all because of
you and Clifford Geertz. Yep. Oh, from “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Because I say:

However, as Clifford Geertz has said, the self is constructed within a network of social values and relationships.
Reading Lydia’s story involves uncovering at least three codes in this network—the code of accepted women’s behavior, of
family and kin relationship, and of romantic love.

So the whole introduction is all based on your introducing me to Clifford Geertz. So that was
good.
Have you ever read Kokoro?
Schrager: With you.
Taylor: Yeah. Did we read that in . . .?
Schrager: It was with . . .
Taylor: . . . Cultural Codes maybe.
Schrager: It was either Cultural Codes or Love and Work.
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Taylor: It wasn’t Love and Work, because we didn’t do anything with Japanese, did we? Because
Setsuko was teaching in Cultural Codes, so I bet it was there. That’s such a great book. So that one.
Schrager: What is it about that book that it sticks with you? I loved that book myself.
Taylor: I loved that book, but it’s such a captivating story. Nothing happens, but you cannot stop
turning the pages, because you get into the mind of this man. And it is one of those stories where
there’s three points of view, and so you come to some conclusion, and then you read another point of
view and you have to come to the totally different conclusion, and then you read another and you have
to come to the totally different conclusion. So it’s one of those like The Bridge Over the River Kwai,
where you realize the point of view. We got a book group to read that, and everybody likes it. And it
tells you a lot about Japanese culture, and then about [Natsume] Soseki.
I don’t know if we want to do more books. They’re hugely different. Wallace Stegner, Crossing
to Safety Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. Moby Dick. I read Moby Dick with Hiro [Kawasaki] and David
Marr. That’s where my respect for Hiro just went through the roof. He had never read it before, and his
ability to cut through things in a different way was memorable.
Now, Wallace Stegner, I think we read in Love and Work. Crossing to Safety. Yeah. Erik Erikson,
I read in the very first program I was in, Human Development. I didn’t like it much, and I never bought
into it. But the thing about these programs, it forces you to become familiar with stuff that you would
normally not read. So it’s all part of getting educated. Invisible Man, did I read that with you?
Schrager: Likely. You were in Cultural Codes with me.
Taylor: Yeah. And David Marr. I think that might be his favorite book of all time.
Schrager: I thought of him more than once.
Taylor: Yeah. And then another thing that has to do with faculty development and Evergreen is: In
college, I never took a Shakespeare class. Ever. And yet, if someone asks me, “What do you know
about?” or “What did you teach?,” Shakespeare comes to my mind first. And I have taught Shakespeare
nine quarters—so three years—where I’ve done nothing but read Shakespeare. And I’ve read
everything Shakespeare wrote. And then, because of the connection with Fritz, I’ve spent so much time
at the Shakespeare meetings that are in Stratford, which happen every other year, and I’ve probably
gone to 10 meetings. So I know lots of Shakespeare scholars, and I’ve been to lots of meetings.
And so it’s through teaching, and through connections, that I have become a scholar of
Shakespeare, to the extent that I am of anything. I think that’s sort of odd and lucky, and a pretty good
thing. I first taught Shakespeare with Peter Elbow in 1975 or something. It was a program called
Shakespeare and Writing, and Peter, as a writing teacher, believed in lots of writing. He believed in, he
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used to call it “cooking,” I think. He wasn’t very interested in the editing part; he was most interested in
the getting it out part. And his belief was you’ve just got to write and write and write, and then you’ll
find something good in what you write. Whereas I also taught with Mark Levensky, or with Fritz, and
their style of writing is you do all your editing in your head, and when it gets down on the paper, those
precious 10 words are there, and they’re done. Once it’s on the paper, you don’t edit because you’ve
done all the processing. And Peter is the opposite.
So the program was called Shakespeare and Writing, and the belief was if you read good things,
it will have impact on your writing. So every student had to write 15 pages a week, and we read two
plays a week, and we talked about the plays and we talked about the writing. It kind of worked, but that
was my first—I had not read much Shakespeare before. I had done a few plays, done a few things, but
not much. Those early years, I was out on a limb most of the time. And I probably wrote the 15 pages a
week, knowing me—that’s what you did, you did everything—and it was memorable.
And I went back, and the next thing I did was teach Shakespeare in the Age of Elizabeth, with
Peter and Richard Jones and Leo Daugherty. It was a year-long program, and we read 30 plays, I think.
And we did a lot of history, we did a lot of religion.
Then I did Shakespeare another year, with Jin Darney and Don Finkel. And then I did another
quarter with Hilary Binda. Do you remember her? And then my last teaching at Evergreen, in 2008, was
called Playing Shakespeare, and Fritz and I did it for just one quarter. So it’s fun to think about how, just
through the luck of choosing, so that I am comfortable with Shakespeare, which, if you’d asked me that
in 1971, wouldn’t be possible.
Schrager: Shakespeare is how central to Fritz’s professional life?
Taylor: It’s not central, but in about 1980 or something, he was invited to the Conference at Stratford,
which is an invitation-only—about 200 people come—and it was during the fad of Shakespeare studies,
where historicism was coming in. And every scholar of Shakespeare would take some historical incident
for their first paragraph, and then they would go from there to the play.
And Fritz was sort of the “make history true.” He was the truth-tester. Because people were
doing stuff that historians looked askance at. They were using history for their own literary purpose. So
Fritz became the one that truthed people about history. So he had a role, and he was respected.
And then, once you get invited to that meeting, you get invited again. So we’ve gone, and I
could tail on. But I was the one teaching Shakespeare; he wasn’t. [laughing] So then I had connections
with all the people that were there. And we’re still friends with all those people. But it is not really
what he does. He’s read a lot, and when we taught together, he always came to it as a historian.
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Actually, there’s sort of an interesting story about that program, 2008—my last program—as a
post-retirement contract, and so we just sort of showed up, and we were given a seminar room, or an
office in the Seminar building, and didn’t have much to do with the college. It was a very different kind
of teaching. We had pretty good students, and we did two brilliant things that made it work. Because
Fritz was leery, because he didn’t feel like he was an expert enough. He was coming at this differently
than I. Always was.
I learned, from teaching with Hilary, about performance. And it wasn’t that we required
students to perform, as a full play, but once a week, we had this thing. It was called the “Hundred-line
exercise.” We gave groups of students—like four or five students—a hundred lines, and another group
of students that same hundred lines, so we had little teams. And they had to prepare those hundred
lines. They didn’t have to memorize them, but they had to prepare them. They had to block out the
scene; they had to understand what it was; and they had to then—one group would perform it, and
another group would perform it, and then the program would critique it.
And it meant that students figured out what was going on. I remember there was one about
Richard II or something, where they had to throw the gauntlet. And when they read it through, they had
no clue what was going on. And then they figured it out, and they got a glove, and they performed it.
And there were just like eyeballs. People got it. And it was just showing that through performance.
So we did that. It was the favorite part of the program, so we did that every week. And we
would choose the hundred lines, where there was something that they had to figure out. And usually, it
wasn’t a soliloquy, it was something where they had to act. That was one thing that we did that was
brilliant.
And the other thing, because nobody had seen Shakespeare performed—you don’t go to a play
in Olympia, and most students had never seen it performed—so we did a lot of film. And neither Fritz
nor I had a background in understanding film, but some of the students did. And so there were a couple
of students that became sort of the leaders—I learned a little of this from Caryn Cline, because I worked
with Caryn Cline once. It’s multitasking. Students were much better at being able to figure out what
was going on in the film in terms of the director and the camera and the music and the acting, and how
the text was changed because of the film. Maybe we saw five different versions of the opening of
Hamlet, all on film. And that was good. That was my last teaching, in 2008.
Schrager: And you were still improvising.
Taylor: Still improvising.

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Schrager: That’s great. Well, I’m thinking maybe a good next topic would be your work as dean of
hiring and faculty development. Those two went together for you. Right? That’s still what it is.
Taylor: Oh, yeah, that’s still what it is. Yeah.
Schrager: Faculty development of others seems interesting to me. We’ve talked quite a bit about your
own development.
Taylor: So, yeah, I was hired—in 1999, I think—to be dean of faculty hiring and faculty development. I
had applied to be dean once before, and at that time, I had applied to be Core dean, which made a lot of
sense. I was turned down. I was, I think, a little bitter about it, because there was politics involved in
the appointment. I’m pretty sure I could have done a better job.
But anyway, so then I applied, and the job was faculty hiring and faculty development. When I
got that job, and throughout the time, I realized that’s the best dean’s job. It’s absolutely the best
dean’s job. You’re not telling people “no” very much, and I made a point of being very involved with the
faculty, and that was part of it. It was not about money. So anyway, it was the best dean’s job.
And the deans’ team, at that time, I think, was unusually good. At least it was unusually
compatible. Jin Darney, John Cushing, Susan Fiksdal, Bill Bruner, and I started. And eventually, Susan
was replaced by Russ Fox, and Lee Lyttle was in the Library after Bill Bruner, I think. And Don Bantz
replaced John Cushing in the last year. And Barbara [Smith] was there as Provost for two years, and the
third year was Enrico—what was his last name? I don’t even remember. I think he’s gone in
everybody’s mind. However, I do have a story about him that was significant for me.
So anyway, Barbara was quite wonderful, in terms of dean direction and dean help. I met once
a week with her. And she was very supportive of me. She once told me that she was surprised, that I
took to being dean faster than anybody else that she’d been around, so it was natural what I did. And it
was natural because I was just doing it. I don’t know. I guess I was just prepared because I’d been there
long enough.
But the first year, I think we hired eight or nine people. And the second year, maybe 13. And
the third year, maybe 10. Something like that. So it was pretty heavy hiring. The first year, I think, the
number—one of the things you ask is about multicultural. The pressure was definitely on to hire faculty
of color. And I think, out of the first group, six of the seven or something were. And the next year, I
think 11 of the 13 were women. And how that happened was just organic. There was consciousness,
but there was no controversy particularly—well, maybe with a couple of exceptions.
And I guess, in some ways, the story doesn’t have a very happy ending, because lots of those
people are gone. They didn’t stay. Some very good ones did, but some left. And more people of color
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left than not, I think. In some cases, maybe they were—you take somebody like Babacar [M’Baye], who
did a good job. But he came not knowing what he was coming to; and in the end, I think, decided that
he didn’t want to be in a place that did education innovation. I think he’s at Bowling Green or
somewhere now, or Purdue or something.
He was so funny. I called to offer him the job, and he said, “Wonderful! I’ll take it.” I had had
enough of a relationship with him over the phone, because he asked a bunch of questions, like “What
should I wear?” Or, “What’s going to happen?” He just didn’t—this was new to him.
So I said on the phone, “It’s customary to wait a day or two. Go talk to your family, and go talk
to your advisor. Go think about this. The offer’s not going to disappear tomorrow. You don’t have to
say ‘yes’ right now.” And the next day, he called back and said, “Yes!” But I think just the idea that he
would be offered a job was just mindboggling. And he did a good job for a while, but then—and there
were some others that were similar to that.
So faculty hiring was like a machine. I mean, I had wonderful Deborah Blodgett, who was in the
dean’s area as my administrative assistant. We had a smooth operation, labor-intensive. I did discover
that if you want to have a successful hire in an area where the people—the faculty itself—are at odds,
you absolutely have to put all camps onto the committee. You can’t get a committee that’s going to hire
one that they’ll all agree with, but you can get support if everyone is involved. It was particularly true
with the Art History hire, because there were just camps. And I think that with Comparative Religion.
You’ve got to put the controversy upfront, where it has to get solved at that level, rather than
bring somebody in and then have people from the other camps complain. There were a number of
cases like that, where the job description was broad enough that it could bring controversy. It wasn’t
clear. But I was pretty successful at getting those groups to function. I was also totally aware that I
didn’t have much power at all. The committees did have quite a bit of power, and the faculty had quite
a bit of power. The dean had no special power in that, and I don’t think people realized that, but I had
no special power. I guess I could have eliminated somebody, but I couldn’t choose.
But then, we had to have two hiring committees. Two hiring DTFs were operating at the same
time. I got one of my very smart ideas, I thought. I just had to pick somebody to run the other
committee, because we had double, and I was running one. One year, I asked Carolyn Dobbs to do it,
and she was a natural. I mean, she’d done that sort of thing. The next year, I asked Clyde Barlow. And I
didn’t know Clyde very well, but he was perfect, and he did the job, and that was good.
So that was going on. And the faculty development part was not what I even knew about. I
came in as faculty Hiring Dean. That’s what I was thinking of. But for Barbara, the development part
12

was the most important. And Barbara really guided and helped. She had been doing so much with the
Washington Center, and I worked with the Washington Center. There was a woman named Janine. Do
you know who that was? She worked with Emily . . .
Schrager: Lardner.
Taylor: Yeah, who was Emily Decker at that time, and she had taken over for Barbara, and she worked
with Jean MacGregor. Janine wasn’t a particularly creative person, but she was a management person.
And at that time, summer institutes were free-for-alls. There was a little bit of money, and the faculty
were asked, “Propose a summer institute. We’ll support as many as we have money for. And let it go.”
So these institutes: go walking in Mount Rainier, go read five books, go paint. And some of
them were fantastic, and some of them were boondoggles, I think, fair to say. But there was really no
logic. It was just faculty support, with a little bit of money. You got $100 a day to go hiking at Mount
Rainier and meet your colleagues, or whatever. Some people thought that was the best one that ever
happened. So, you know, there was all over the place.
So I then inherited the idea of summer institutes, and any other kind of faculty development.
And I did two or three things of significance, I think. I felt a big obligation to new faculty, so the faculty
that I had hired that year—I organized the first new faculty retreat, which went Port Ludlow. It was the
first year of Les Purce’s presidency. So, as a new person, he came; and then, he came to every one after
that. He loved it. It was three or four days. Matt Smith had designed something for new faculty before,
which was on campus; and we did the Matt Smith plan, which was really a self-introduction kind of
orientation. We did that on campus, and then we left, and we went to Port Ludlow. And Barbara paid
for it, and Barbara came, and all the deans came. And it was hugely successful.
And we did a version of the design-your-own-program thing that the Washington Center had
done, where people were in groups and they had to design a program, and we did a lot of selfintroduction. I remember Nancy Murray talking about it, because she went through it the next year.
And when she became dean, she said, “I’m going to do that again.” But she was leery about it at first,
that it was going to be too touchy-feelly kind of thing. But it was, I thought, really successful. And we
did that then for all three years, and I think Rita Pougiales continued it.
Unfortunately, in my mind—but this, I can see how it would change—by the time Rita was doing
it, staff people felt left out, because it was just faculty. And it changed from a retreat of orientation to
the faculty culture to an orientation. So the Admissions person would come, financial aid would come.
And it was, you know, one hour of this and one hour of that; and get to know the librarians, and get to
know all the people. And it was changed from we did it at Port Ludlow one year, and the next two years,
13

we did it at Lake Quinault—which was significant because it was far away. Then it was done at
Alderwood, and it was an hour away, so people came for an hour and left. And the whole thing
changed. Not bad; different purpose. And what I had designed, which I thought had a different purpose
and was really useful, died.
But that was one thing I did, and Barbara absolutely supported, and there was money to do it.
And the new faculty, they were not just new faculty, but were teamed up. So there was as many old
faculty as new faculty. Everybody had a buddy. And I remember George Freeman and Betsy Diffendal,
they were the social chairmen, and it was so funny. It was just wonderful, the sort of the group spirit,
especially the two at Lake Quinault, when George and Betsy took on the challenge of making the group
cohere.
So that was one thing of faculty development that I did. Then the new faculty I met with at least
once a month all through the year, so that they became a coherent group. It was especially effective the
second year, with people like Nancy Murray and Martha Rosemeyer. And there were lots of women in
that group. And the new one-year hires were included, which I thought was important. So it wasn’t
just—it was all teachers, everybody that was new.
And then, a sidelight to that—and I credit Greg Mullins, but it was sort of Greg and Lance [Laird].
And it was because they were living in Seattle, I think, and they started a group called the “New and
Nearly New.” Do you remember that? It was about faculty development. It was, how do you be a
faculty member at Evergreen when you don’t know what’s going on? And so it was “New and Nearly
New,” and it met pretty regularly, both social and specific tasks. I know we met about writing
evaluations. I think Greg’s motive was, how do you figure out who to teach with if you don’t know
anybody? So it was about teams; it was about, how do you form teams? So it was putting people
together so they’d have a chance to find out what common interests they had. So that happened all
through the time, but it started my first year as dean, and then it went on. And I supported those.
And then, the summer institutes. I convinced Barbara. We did this deal. [laughing] I convinced
Barbara that the most effective faculty development would be program planning, and that we ought to
pay people to do program planning. And she thought that was something that the faculty should do on
their own. So we made a deal that people could have a week’s worth of program planning time, but
they all had to show up for the first hour and do something collaboratively, like it was about writing or it
was about conflict resolution, or it was about something. So there was an hour, and then, you could go
home. But you had to come for the first hour, and then you could go and do planning together. And
you couldn’t just be a team that went to the beach together. You had to come, and then you had to
14

come back at the end of the day, and do something. That was Barbara’s requirement, making it a little
more official. I think that part of it died, but when I was there, that happened every year. And it was
very popular.
Schrager: I remember it happening, and being really grateful to you that you pushed it, and got that to
happen. Because it made a big difference.
Taylor: It made a big difference for teams. And my team, we always did it. Because you’re going to do
it anyway, and to have it be a little orchestrated, and force your team to be together and do it, it meant
for better programs.
Schrager: Well, I think, to be remunerated for it is symbolically really significant.
Taylor: Yeah. And it was only, I think, it was first $100 a day, and then it was $125 a day. So we did
that, and that started out the first summer of when I was dean. And I don’t know if it still goes on. I
don’t think it does, because I don’t think, after Barbara left, I don’t think the Provost had faculty
development in mind, to this day. I don’t know how much faculty development is going on.
But I didn’t know very much about faculty development—I still don’t—but I read quite a bit, and
then I went to a number of conferences. Jin and I went to conferences, and Barbara, at that time, was
president of AAU, American Association of Universities or something. And there was a big meeting in
New Orleans. And she was president, so she insisted that Jin and I and, I think, all the deans went, to
support her, but also just we went.
And then she says, “Well, you know, when you go to these conferences, you learn a lot of things.
But we’re in New Orleans!” [laughing] And so she would insist that we went to music, we went out to
fancy places to eat. We just, this is what you do. So, as Jin said, she taught us how to go to
conferences.” [laughter] And Barbara loved retreats. She had a good sense of humor. She loved
retreats—and I think those are gone, too—and so she was always pushing faculty retreats.
But also, faculty development, as dean, there were two major initiatives that I did. One was the
September Symposium, which happened on 9/11. It happened in 2001. It was scheduled for 9/12-1314, and it was in Tacoma. Did you go to that? And after 9/11, there was some thought that it should be
canceled. We decided the opposite; it’s the last thing that should happen. It shouldn’t be canceled. We
should be together.
And it was in Tacoma, which was my idea, and was really smart, because it was a good venue,
and it was Tacoma’s new building. They got to show off. It was a real conference. We had art, we had
plenary speakers and we had other speakers. That was 2001. So I think maybe that was Enrique’s
[Riveros-Schäfer] first year. Yeah, because he was supposed to give a talk. And at lunchtime, there was
15

opportunity—we made it so that—I remember Terese [Saliba] did something. There was political stuff
that happened because of 9/11, and a fear of what was going on. But also, the number of people
involved, it was huge. And everybody got paid, because it was before the 15 th of September. And I
remember even retired people came, and people got to share their work. And it was good, I thought. It
was very professional, and people liked it, and people attended. And then, because it was on 9/11, that
put a different twist to it.
The year before, the thing that I had done was in honor of Don Finkel. I did a huge Finkel
workshop. And Peter Elbow came from Massachusetts, and, I think, about a hundred faculty
participated. It was huge. It was in the Longhouse, and everybody designed a Finkel workshop, and
tried it out on other people. And everybody was given Don’s book, I think. Barbara paid for that, and
everybody got paid. And lots of people attended that. Did you do that one? It was good. And there
was a student that worked in the hiring office whose name was Jessie Fries-Kraemer, and I was in
England during the whole summer, and so I came back and she had planned it. I mean, she had done all
the legwork for it.
And it was in the Longhouse, and it was for a week. And people came and they worked. I
remember the one I did, I did with Peter Elbow, and with Thad Curtz maybe, and it was on Montaigne’s
essay on friendship. So that was another thing. I don’t know if anybody does anymore Don Finkel
workshops. But that was useful.
So, that was faculty dean and faculty development.
Schrager: So with the dean role—the hiring part of it—I have this idea in my mind, from my experiences
with faculty hiring, that there were some committees that I would call politicized, and others that were
not. And I felt I had a lucky track record of being on committees that were not politicized. And when I
was on a committee that was politicized, I was keenly aware and disturbed by it. And I was asked, on
two occasions, to be an observer who, as an interested faculty member, go to the talks, and read the
files. Because colleagues of mine said, “This is a politicized committee, and I would appreciate it if you
would”—
Taylor: There were some. Art history was. And so the subcommittee, I think there were seven people
on the committee, because the only way you could keep it from being—it was politicized, but at least
you had all parties on the committee. And that one was pretty ugly. And I don’t—I heard later about
comparative religion, because we didn’t—we had Lance [Laird]—Lance had already been hired, so I was
okay on that one.

16

Well, I do remember another one. And I don’t know if people, in the end, would have said it
was politicized or not. The person that was hired was not who I would have hired. But they came to an
agreement, the committee did. That person’s still at the college.
Schrager: So does that distinction work for you? Do you think, as Hiring Dean, would you be aware,
when the process was going on, of how the committee was functioning?
Taylor: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I had to intervene. I don’t know what stories you’re thinking
of, but I don’t think they were during my tenure. Maybe they were. The art history one was the only
one I remember. And then there were other ones where it felt like people were being forced onto—
forced hires. And there were a couple that fortunately they left, because they were really bad hires.
Really bad hires.
Schrager: Forced hires in what sense?
Taylor: Well, in one case, there was pressure to hire because of wanting a minority candidate, who was
an applicant. Shouldn’t have been hired. He’s gone. He lasted one year. If he hadn’t lasted, I would
have taken him to court. I mean, he was violent and scary, and shouldn’t have been on campus. And
we got rid of him. But he was hired because he was the right demographic. He shouldn’t have been
hired. I don’t know any other case that that happened.
Schrager: Well, the one committee that I think of, from our conversations, the African-American studies
hire, which I was not a member of the committee but—
Taylor: When Babacar [M’Baye] got hired?
Schrager: Yeah. And a friend on the committee asked me to—
Taylor: In favor of Babacar or against Babacar?
Schrager: For Babacar. I mean, I didn’t go into the committee work with a commitment to any of the
candidates, but I attended all the presentations because . . .
Taylor: . . . because there was fear that it wouldn’t go that way.
Schrager: Right, that it was going to be preconceptions and entrenched positions, and so I—and I had
an interest in the hire, because whoever got the hire I hoped to teach with.
Taylor: Yeah, I don’t actually remember.
Schrager: Well, it played out, in the end.
Taylor: It played out. Yeah, I don’t remember it being controversial in the end at all. But the ones that
were, and will continue to be, more controversial than anything, I mean, when you got hired, that was
super-controversial. And hiring of the part-time people when they become permanent, that’s always

17

nasty, because it’s insider-outsider thing. Those were much more difficult than hiring people of color, or
hiring women.
Schrager: Well, for my hire, I was a full-time visitor, so I was an inside candidate, and I would not have
been considered, I think, if I hadn’t been.
Taylor: Well, sometimes it worked that way, and sometimes it didn’t. But those are traditionally really
hard. And I don’t have bad feelings in my mind, so I don’t think any horrible thing happened when I was
dean. But I know there were bad stories. [chuckles] But I don’t think in my tenure. I don’t know.
Schrager: How long were you dean?
Taylor: I was only dean three years. And I think I hired maybe 25 people.
Schrager: Had you had enough?
Taylor: You know, I think back on it, and I don’t know really why I retired, except Jin was retiring, and Jin
and I had been great partners, and it was hard to imagine being in the dean’s area without Jin. And I
guess, I think, I’d just had enough. And the next year, when I taught—well, I didn’t know that I was
going to teach that, but the next program I taught was wonderful. So I . . .
Well, and the other thing, Barbara was gone, and Enrique was not . . . doing a good job. He left,
I think, the next year. So the college was feeling iffy. And I think I just sort of bowed out.
Schrager: Did he stay one year or two?
Taylor: Two. I think he only stayed two.
Schrager: You said you had a story about him.
Taylor: Well, I had one really good experience because of him, indirectly. He was hired, and I actually
had been on the hiring committee, and I had not supported him. He was a real compromise candidate.
And I was on the hiring committee, and I was suspect of his resume all along. But that committee was
political and really split. Other people gave As and Fs to people, and then he was the C for everybody.
So he got hired. And it was a mistake. And people came to know that, and he came to know that. He
wasn’t a bad person, he just didn’t have any ideas. And his strategy was just to close his office door and
be uninvolved, basically. And whatever he chose to do backfired.
So one of the things he chose to do was to get involved with China. And he didn’t have any
faculty support for this, but he had a connection with China. And he and I got along fine during that last
year—we had regular meetings and whatever—and then I went off to sabbatical; went to Cambridge.
And he developed this relationship with this university in Wuhan, China. And he needed to have some
faculty go. And it was September, and they needed to go in October. It finally had come through. And
so LLyn De Danaan was retired, and I was on sabbatical, and Fritz was an outsider. Fritz was declared
18

and Evergreener, and LLyn and Fritz and I went. And we got our visas in two weeks. Enrique wanted
this to happen. And he had met this woman who was paying for it, who was Chinese; who ran some
private schools in China; who wanted a connection to get Chinese students to come to Evergreen. And
she was going to pay for them. And there was this negotiation, and it was very complicated.
And Evergreen finally said, “We will do something with your Chinese students, but we need to
have some support for those students. So you need to pay for an international advisor in the advising
office.” And that international advisor was going to be for all kinds of international students, but was
going to take care of these Chinese ones, and the Chinese were going to pay for it a hundred percent.
And they signed a contract to do that.
So then, we were sent to this university in Wuhan, Wuhan University of Commerce or
something like that. It was a great experience for me. It was totally out of the blue. One day I didn’t
know I was going to China, and two weeks later I was there. And we were teaching, LLyn and Fritz and I,
and we had 125 students or something like that between the three of us. The students were in a special
program that the college had set up, and that they were paying extra tuition for, that was to expose
them to American professors, and that was going to guarantee that they would be able to come to
Evergreen for a year.
Now, Evergreen hadn’t accepted any of this. Or, what we were told, is that the Chinese signed
something, and then they would begin the conversation. They don’t have the conversation and then
sign something. So they had told the students that this was all going to happen. The students’ parents
had paid this money. And the students were all serious students. They were all from one-child families,
so the parents were, you know. Half of the students were computer science students, and half were
business students. And we had them for one month. That’s how long we were there. We were actually
there six weeks, but we had the students for one month.
And the students were released from every other class. They just had us. We met from 7:30 in
the morning till 2:00 every day. And the students were wonderful. I mean, they were much better than
the Japanese students I had taught. They were much more gutsy, much more willing to try. Their
English somehow was better—not good, but better than the Japanese students. And where they had
learned it, I don’t know.
And we did this program called American Values, I think. It was about the development of the
West. The American Values and the West. We read the Turner Thesis as a start. And then, we did
trains and cars and computers. We did development of technology. We did a lot of things in a month,
and this group of students loved it. As I said, they bonded as a group. And our task was to teach them
19

Evergreen style. So we were to make it be a coordinated studies, where they met each other, and they
worked together in groups, and they had teams.
We had them do an action research project, where they had to go in teams, and tally
information about transportation in the city of Wuhan. So they tallied at five minutes to 5:00 and at 10
minutes after 3:00 or whatever. They had to go and stand at these overpasses and count the number of
three-wheeled vehicles and bicycles and trucks and buses. And then, in the end, these teams had to
present their recommendation to the transportation committee of the city council, and that was us.
And the students had computers, and they knew spreadsheets. Their English wasn’t so good,
but they took all this data, and they came back and recommended that the city do public transportation,
and get rid of three-wheel vehicles that were spewing pollutants into the air. Because the town where
we were, the kids knew, from their growing up, that pollution was so heavy in that town that they
couldn’t see the hills anymore that used to be right there. So it was all about environmental—
But anyway, we had fun, and we did a good job. And at the end, this wonderful Chinese guy
wanted to give Fritz silk pajamas. And we told him, “Don’t spend any money on us. Start a scholarship
fund.” And so they did, and we presented them a big check. And they wanted to take us out to dinner
and we said no, we wanted to have a party. And so the dean paid for drinks and apples and chips and
stuff, and we had a big party for all these kids. It was great.
And I’m in touch with two of those students. Fritz is in touch with one, a guy who went to the
University of Stockholm from China. None of them came to Evergreen. The program died because it
was never financially viable. The poor Chinese dean was left hanging. His group didn’t support him. I
actually met his boss in London. Anyway, the whole thing that Enrique had designed was a total
disaster. Total disaster. There was no chance that this was going to happen. But the idea was that they
were going to send 20 students a year, and they were going to get an Evergreen degree. But that was
never in the cards.
But I had a great time. And I went because Enrique needed to have somebody go. But the other
thing we should talk about is Japan.
Schrager: We should, but maybe we should take a little break, because we’ve been talking for an hour
and 20 minutes.
Taylor: Ooh, okay. So I’ve done the September Symposium, and I’ve done Don Finkel. The faculty
retreats.

Break
20

Part 2
Taylor: So I just want to add this to the conversation about faculty hiring, and being dean of faculty
hiring, and what are the things that I instituted. One was to get students involved in hiring. And I’m
pretty sure that I was the first one that got a student member on the Hiring DTF. And I also got a
student member on every hiring subcommittee, and they were full members, with voting rights. And
the student on the subcommittee was given a tiny bit of money. It was enough for everybody to go out
and have pizza, basically, or they could go to Dairy Queen or something. But they invited two or three of
their friends, and they took the person out to dinner.
And it kind of depended on the student how successful it was, but it was more often successful
than not. And the candidates loved it. It was always the candidates’ favorite thing, because they were
talking to students. And the students that I remember—I remember when Stephen Engel did it—they
took it very seriously, and were influential in who got hired. I mean, they spoke up.
So I thought that was a good thing. I don’t know if it always worked, but it worked more often
than not.
Schrager: I remember candidates saying to me how much they enjoyed going out the students.
Taylor: Yeah. It made it feel real. And I remember, with the Shakespeare hire, for sure—when
Elizabeth was hired—there was a woman that was really very good—I mean, she would have been fine
here, too—but the students just didn’t spark. And she got hired by Bowdoin or something. She got a
very good job, but the students just didn’t warm to her. It was pretty funny. But anyway, that was
another thing with faculty hiring that I did.
Schrager: So, Nancy, let’s talk about Japan. Tell me about Kobe.
Taylor: When we first started talking, I hadn’t really made the connection. But in my early years—I
mean, when I was a child—we had Japanese people living with us, because they were protected because
my dad was a doctor and had these Japanese nurses, and they were going to be sent away to the
internment camps. So they lived with us, and I can remember that. And then, my dad got them train
tickets, and they got out and went to Detroit. And we kept in touch with those people.
So my connection with Japan wasn’t brand-new. There was something in there. And, in fact,
when I was at Stanford, I did a special research paper on the treatment of the Japanese in the
Northwest. Because my father was a doctor, who went to the Japanese camps down in Puyallup when
they were taken, to take care of them. And my grandpa was a farmer, who always competed with the
Japanese. So there was this family thing about one side of the family was supportive and one side of the

21

family was threatened. So the whole thing—the Japanese connection—was pretty natural when I ended
up going to Japan.
The first time I went to Japan was for a Shakespeare meeting in 1991. Fritz was invited to give a
paper. And we flew to Tokyo, and there was an Evergreen student whose sister lived in Tokyo, and that
student was from Olympia, and she was a student that we knew; both Fritz and I knew her, actually.
And so her sister was visiting the family, so they just turned over their house in Japan to us, which was
pretty unbelievable. So we stayed in this house in a ritzy part of Tokyo, which had a tatami room and
the whole business. And the husband of this student’s sister had equipped the house with all the food.
I mean, it was quite a lucky thing. He was head of the Baring Brothers, before they collapsed, for Asia.
Anyway, so that was my first introduction to Japan. We stayed there, and we went to these
Shakespeare meetings. And then, we went on—we went to Kyoto, and we went to the pottery towns,
because we were interested in pottery even at that point. And we were in Japan for three weeks.
And we came home and said, “This is wonderful. We need to go back to Japan.” And so I
applied to go on the Kobe Exchange. And fortunately, I was turned down. And I don’t remember who
got it. Oh, I remember, it was Gonzalo [Munevar]. But it would have been too fast. So I applied the
next year and was accepted. So there was a delay of a year, which enabled me to learn some Japanese.
So I went to school in the summer, every day, for two months or something, down at the
Language School. Learned some Japanese—not much, but enough, a little bit. And then went to Kobe
in, I think, the spring of 1994. I don’t know why my situation was the way it was—the program was
called American Culture or something like that, and I had a huge class, like a hundred students. I don’t
know how many you had, but other people had like 20 or something, but I had like over a hundred. And
they were all first-year students, and it was an elective.
And I lived in the Jutaku, and upstairs lived Toshi and Hiroko Umeno, and they had just gotten
married. And they introduced themselves, and then the two of them came to class every day, to my
class, and helped. They were lifesavers. And Toshi taught me how to do the Xerox machine, and all this
stuff.
I don’t know what kind of teaching you did, but the teaching that I did basically was English. But
I had this range of students, some that knew no English, and some that were pretty good; some that
could read a page, and some that could read nothing, and some that could read five pages or something.
So I told the students that they would get credit if they came. Then I had to figure out, how do I know if
they’re there? So every day, I would figure out some ingenious way of collecting something from them,

22

so that I could take attendance without calling for attendance. And they didn’t catch on that I was doing
that for quite a long time, so it was fine.
But I would ask them things like “Write a Japanese proverb,” or I would do something, and I
would collect it. And they also had to do journals, and they had to write in English. And I had them do a
fair number of team—two people. And Toshi helped. And it was like you did, you’d teach only two days
a week for an hour and a half or something. And I would come home, and I’d say to Fritz, “That didn’t
work.” And then we would dream up something for the next time.
And I was prepared to do some things. Like I brought Jacob Lawrence slides, and we did this
whole thing about African Americans and slavery, and we did it for several days. And that was pretty
good. And then I showed the film about the Civil War. Anyway, I did some pretty good things.
And I had one experience that you probably had, too. I had a couple of seniors, and it turned
out they were off interviewing for jobs, and so they didn’t show up, and they didn’t come to tell me.
And so they weren’t going to get credit because they hadn’t been to class. But they were caught. They
were off interviewing for jobs. And so we had some runarounds with that.
But basically, I had a good time teaching. And then I had a great time with—did you know
Takako [Tanaka] and Yoko. You probably knew Yoko Matsuda?
Schrager: Mm-hm.
Taylor: And I had all the women faculty came to tea at the Jutaku. We just had a good time. And
because one of the very first things we did when we got to Japan, we went down to Kyushu and did a
trip before school started in the first of April or something. And both Fritz and I went over to the
president to be welcomed. And we were waiting for him to come in, and we were sitting in the office.
And when he came back in, Fritz and I were talking, and we said, “Oh, you have a Tamba pot.”
Well, the president was very impressed that we knew what that was, because we had just been
to these potteries. So at that point, we were pretty good, and we got even better, at recognizing the
pottery from the Six Ancient Kilns. So when I left the college, in July, I had a special present from the
president that was a piece of pottery from a local potter, which we still have. I didn’t see him. I saw him
the first day, and I saw him the last day, so that was fun.
Schrager: And you got to know the Umenos.
Taylor: And then Umenos came the next year. And so one of the things the Kobe Exchange did—I
mean, to me, it was pretty life changing, culturally, and friends—but I think Evergreen people that went
to Japan, and then returned, knew that we had an obligation to the visitors, and took that pretty
seriously---nearly everybody that was in the Exchange when the new ones came.
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So we took maybe five or six couples to Lopez. We always did things with them. But with Toshi
and Hiroko, we had bonded, and it was like they were like our children. And so we spent a lot of time.
And when they were here was when the Kobe earthquake happened. And they almost went home, but
decided not to. And one of the reasons they decided not to was that Hiroko’s mother and father moved
into the Jutaku, to their apartment, because their house in the city of Kobe was destroyed and they had
no place to live. And the wonderful president of Kobe Shodai recognized that this was the time to not
follow rules, and he let students put tents up in the yard, and he let these parents live in the Jutaku. I
mean, he was good. He was helpful.
And so Toshi and Hiroko were told, “Don’t come home. There’s no place for you.” So they
didn’t, so they stayed. Toshi and Hiroko had a really good year at Evergreen, and when they went back,
they had their child, the first girl.
And that’s when they wrote and said, “Would you be good parents to our daughter?”
And we wrote and said, “We think you mean godparents, and, of course.”
And they wrote back and said, “But what does that mean?”
And we said, “Well, it means that we’ll give your daughter an American name. She’s welcome to
come visit us anytime she wants, and we will remember her birthday and Christmas.” [laughing]
So they said, “That’s fine.” So we did, and we have.
And then the second one comes along, two years later, and they said, “Well, will you be her
godmother, too?”
“Of course.”
So the first one was named Anna, and the second one was named Rebecca, and they’re Yuri and
Rie. And we were back in Japan before Rie was born, so when Yuri was about two. And then they were
in England when Yuri was about five Rie was two, so we saw them again. And then they came to our
house for Thanksgiving one year, out of the blue, when the kids were pretty small. And then we didn’t
see them for a little while, until Yuri got cancer. You know that story?
We got this very sad letter from Toshi saying, “We have family troubles.” Yuri was nine, and she
had bone cancer in her leg. And she was admitted to the hospital, and she stayed in the hospital for a
year. Toshi took care of the younger sister, and Hiroko moved into the hospital. And she almost died.
She had major surgery, she had chemotherapy, and she has an artificial knee and an artificial bone down
her leg. She’s now 21 and she’s fine.

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But it was very scary. And in Japan, it seems that that kind of family catastrophe is not talked
about. So they had nobody to talk to, so they talked to us. So we had regular correspondence. A lot.
Every week. And we sent presents, and we sent support. It was very, very scary.
And when Yuri got out of the hospital in July—she’d been there for a year—the first thing they
did was all four of them came to visit, to Bainbridge. And it was a big family deal. And Yuri was very
much overweight, because she’d been in the hospital all this time. She’d gone to school. But she was in
remission, I mean, she was okay. Then, from that year on—she was 10—they’ve come every year. But
after the first year, the parents didn’t come, so just the girls came. And the last two years, only Rie has
come, because Yuri is now in university.
But we’ve been in touch all the time. We’ve been back to Japan three times, four times since, I
guess. I think we’ve been in Japan seven times in all. And we always stay there, and they’re like our
children. I think Toshi must be 50-something.
So that connection with the family is what’s made Japan special to us. And then I did another
year of teaching. I don’t know if you knew about that. Two years later, we went to Nagoya. When we
were in Kobe, Fritz was sort of the trailing spouse. He didn’t have any responsibility. But the college
was very confused and concerned, because here they had this professor from the University of
Washington, and they had to recognize him. And then they took a vote to decide whether Fritz would
be invited to the welcome dinner. Did this happen for you and Laura? We had a welcome dinner up at
Seishin-chuo at the restaurant, and the faculty had to pay for this dinner, so were they going to pay for
Fritz as well? And they had a vote and said, “Yes.” So Fritz was included in all sorts of things. And he
was invited to give a lecture or two. And Fritz did things for himself. He gave lectures at Osaka and at
Kyoto and stuff.
But when we went to Nagoya—one of the people from Kobe Shodai had moved to Nagoya City
University, and she invited Fritz to come. She invited us both to come, but she could only get Fritz a
major job, where he had a seminar or two, and I taught a couple of classes in English. So that was two
years later. So that was a different teaching experience, not as good as Kobe Shodai.
But, I don’t know, we felt very welcomed, and we soaked it all up, and learned. I mean, if you
want to have a faculty development experience that sort of opens your eyes to multiculturalism, that
did it. Didn’t it for you?
Schrager: Very much.
Taylor: Yeah . . . and I tried hard to learn Japanese. I had tutors at every place, and I tried hard, but I’m
not—but I did understand how the language is put together. I did that much. And we found we could
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get around everywhere. And I have kind of a love-hate relationship with Japan. There are some things
that—I hate the food, which is too bad. I like tempura, but I don’t like sushi, and I don’t like kombu,
which is in everything, and bonito flakes.
Hiroko laughs and she says, “I’m making yakisoba, but I won’t put bonito flakes on it. No bonito
flakes, no bonito flakes.”
And the way they treat women. And we had a lot of conversations about that, because there
were women on the faculty. Takako had left by the time you got there. You probably didn’t know her.
Schrager: I didn’t.
Taylor: She’s wonderful. We’re still in touch with her. Now, she’s just retired, She is a Faulkner expert.
Serious. She’s written on Faulkner. And she looks like a China doll. I mean, she’s just this very pristine,
gorgeous, frail—looks frail, but not. But she’s very smart, and very dedicated and conscientious. Never
had any children, because that wasn’t the life of a professor. It wasn’t possible. And she is in an
arranged marriage, but the marriage is great.
Schrager: Where did she go when left?
Taylor: She went to Nagoya City University, because her husband had a major professorship at the
University of Nagoya, and so she wanted to live with him. We’ve been to visit them three or four times.
So there was something else I wanted to tell you about Japan.
Schrager: There were your pottery travels. And was Kyoto an important spot for you?
Taylor: Oh, yeah. Kyoto was—well, we traveled a lot in Japan, and we went to Kyoto. In fact, we’ve
been back and rented a . . . I never knew how to pronounce it . . . michiaya? A Japanese house? We
found a place where you—a woman that rented us a remodeled, little tiny house in the middle of Kyoto,
so we stayed there for a couple of weeks. That was two years ago we went back and just lived there for
a couple weeks.
We’ve had Japan rail passes and traveled all over. Everywhere. I say, I think seven different
trips we’ve made. When we were in Kobe, Fritz used to go to Kyoto for the day, because it was close.
And to Osaka. I didn’t go as much. Then we’ve been to Tokyo several times. And then we went to
Kyushu a couple of times. We haven’t been to Hokkaido, but we’ve been to Tohoku. That’s the
northern part of Honshu.
And we have friends that, again, she taught at Kobe Shodai, Akiko Ochiai. Did you know her?
She taught African American studies, and she has a Ph.D. from University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She
moved to the University of Sendai, and she was there during the earthquake and tsunami, and stayed
because she wouldn’t abandon them. She was in a high-rise apartment that was safe, but she had no
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power, and sort of ate things out of a can without cooking them; and went to the university every day to
take care of students; and finally got out about three weeks after the tsunami. Now, she’s finally left
Sendai, and she’s got a job at Doshisha in Kyoto. So we’re in touch with her.
She’s married to an American religious Buddhist scholar, who is the only American to get a
tenured position at the University of Kyoto since—what was the guy’s name? Hearn? Who’s the
famous American folklore . . . Lafcadio Hearn. He’s the first one since him that has had a position at
Kyoto. That guy, Carl [Becker], is amazing. And they live in Kyoto, so we’ve been to see them.
So the connection with Japan is rich, to me. And then, because we had such a good time when
we were there, when I came back, I got to know Hiro [Kawasaki] more, and Setsuko [Tsutsumi] more.
And then, I agreed to teach Japanese studies. How I had the gall to do that, I just don’t know. Because
I—well, I guess, my whole teaching career, I was willing to put myself out on the limb, and the students
seemed to not—it seemed okay. I was one with them.
So I taught Cultural Transformation in Japan, and it was a year-long program. We had 60
students, and Hiro, Setsuko, and Takashi Tohi and me. Takashi and I were one person. So we had three
seminar groups, and Takashi and I were in one together. And I did all the reading in English, and I did
the seminars, and Takashi did all the Japanese teaching. And it worked fine. I mean, Takashi was a
natural teacher. I mean, he’s a sports guy, and so he just would do it. It was great. But he couldn’t keep
up with reading Tale of Genji, and all the literature and all the art we did. He tried, but he couldn’t do
that.
Schrager: But you were teaching with Setsuko and Hiro. You were well covered.
Taylor: I was well covered, yeah. And it was a good program. The students weren’t as good as they
should have been. Some of them were motivated by wanting to do manga or something. But some of
them ended up going to Kobe and Miyazaki.
Schrager: For someone who did faculty development as a dean, and experienced this yourself. The
importance of this exchange for the Evergreen faculty, and, I like to think, for the Kobe faculty, too. It
was very significant.
Taylor: Oh, yeah. I think it’s hugely significant, when you think about the best faculty development
experience I had, it was, with no question about it. And the Japanese program, I mean, I guess it’s sort
of on last legs right now, but it was at least 30 years, and that meant 30 people came here, and 30
people went there. That’s huge impact.
And when people went, a lot of times, people didn’t know what they were getting into, and they
were almost always converted to really taking it seriously, with a couple of exceptions. And the ones
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that came here it was the same. They didn’t know what they were getting into. And oftentimes, the
people who were sent here were young. I mean, I can think of three couples that came here sort of as
their honeymoon. Kusinagi? Did you know him?
Schrager: Of course. I know him pretty well.
Taylor: I think they got married, and came. I think it was like their first week of marriage.
Schrager: I think they were married—they came here after we went there. They came the next year.
Taylor: Oh.
Schrager: They were married.
Taylor: They were married, but not for long. And Toshi and Hiroko were married only a year. They
were like 30 years old. And I think, basically, we treated them pretty well, because they treated us so
well when we got there that you just learned that, oh, okay, this is part of their culture. You’d better
reciprocate.
When I first went to Kobe, the first thing we did was a faculty retreat. And we went out to
someplace, I have no idea where it was. Fortunately, the teacher that taught Spanish, and Takako and
Yoko sort of took me under their wing. I’d been there a week, and they helped me, because it was all
going on in Japanese, of course. But I remember, when the teachers introduced themselves—this is one
of my first cultural lessons—they introduced themselves, and they would write their name on the board,
and they would tell us how it’s pronounced, because you can’t tell a Japanese name just by reading it;
you have to know how you read that kanji. I had no idea.
And then, already, it was quite clear that men and women are treated differently. Because the
men—there were only like four women at this place, and there were like maybe 30 or 40 men faculty—
they had all these gatherings afterwards, and the women were definitely set aside. So one of the things
I did was I invited all the women to come over. And nobody had ever done that before. The women had
never, never gotten together, never done anything. It was just pretty odd. There was one Chinese
woman with two young children, and I think all the other ones were married, but no children.
So what other things do we need to talk about?
Schrager: I think we need to stop, because it’s now after 4:00.
Taylor: Okay, I should go.
Schrager: We have another time on Tuesday.

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