TaylorNancy_20170228_Transcript_pt4.pdf

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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 28, 2017
FINAL

Taylor: So I want to talk about this travel fund that I’ve set up. About five years ago, I was writing my
will, and I decided that I wanted to do something for Evergreen. And what I chose was to set up a travel
fund for students that would pay for any student travel that is credit-generating. So it could be from a
program, or it could be an individual contract; it could be to South America or China or Alabama. I
mean, it’s a support travel fund. And I have given $25,000, and the interest will fund probably a
thousand dollars a year, at the moment, to just support people to travel.
And the reason I did that was just my own life. Probably travel and exposure to other cultures
had the biggest impact of anything that I did. It changes your perspective, it changes your point of view.
And students that I have met who want to go to Japan, or want to go to study French, or want to do
something, and it’s an economic burden; they just can’t do it. I was talking to somebody maybe a year
ago that was working in the bookstore, and it’s what she wanted to do more than anything else, but she
says, “But I just don’t have the money.”
So it won’t make a huge difference, but it’s the plane fare to get there. So that’s what I’ve done.
And the reason that Amanda [Walker] and I were in conversation is, what could we do to enhance it?
And that’s the conversation I want to have with Amanda. She says she has some ideas; I have some
ideas. Just letting it be known that it exists, people might add to it.
And a farfetched fantasy, I thought one of the things that I could do was to, if I had contact with
students—my students, from years ago—I don’t know how many the college is still in touch with, but
they’re in touch with a bunch. And I’ve had in—what?—28 programs, just go 28 times 50 and you get
1,400 students or something, is that right? Something like that.
Schrager: Be in touch with them . . .
Taylor: …just say, “Join me in supporting travel.” You know, you get people to send in $30 or
something. Whatever. So I’m thinking that we could do something just by making it known to enhance
it, so that there’s more support. And the more I think about the college, and its difficulties in trying to
do what’s right and not get bogged down in other things, the one thing that is constant, in my mind, is
support for study abroad, in one form or another. And it started way back when I was at Stanford, and I
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did Stanford in Germany. And that made a huge difference. Spending time in Japan made a huge
difference—to me, personally. Just exposure to other cultures.
When I think of my own growing up, the one complaint I have of my parents is that when I was
about 14, they should have said, “Why don’t you go somewhere?” It could have been Italy, Russia,
China, Brazil. It wouldn’t matter. “Why don’t you go somewhere and learn another language?” And
that just wasn’t, in their eyes or in my eyes, coming from small town Kent—
Schrager: Did they travel out of the country themselves?
Taylor: No. I mean, my dad was a real adventurer, and he was in the war, so he had been in Italy, and
he’d traveled; he was in the Navy, he was in Singapore. And he had a vision of further away. My
mother, she was educated—she was a teacher—but she had no travel experience at all until she was an
adult. In fact, the first time she ever went to Europe was when I was in England and my dad was sick,
and they came to visit. I was already 35 or something by the time they traveled. Then they did travel
quite a bit. But small-town Kent didn’t have that as the—and the idea that you should learn a foreign
language, that just wasn’t there, and so I never did. And that’s a huge, huge regret.
So that’s sort of the basis towards the travel fund. And in my generation, I never earned all that
much money. Evergreen salaries have never been good. Fritz taught at the university at a time when
salaries weren’t very good. In fact, when he got promoted to full professor, he got promoted, but he
didn’t get any salary advance because it was a year when there were financial troubles. So he never was
paid anything like what he should have been. I mean, a historian that doesn’t bargain and try to see
where else they can get a job . . .
But, because of the stock market, and because of TIAA-CREF, we’re doing fine. And I look at
younger people and say, “Boy, did we live at the right time economically.” Because I think probably in
the ‘70s, buying power was the best it could be. It’s never been as high as in the ‘70s. And so we were
able to do more than—you’re just a little bit younger, so you maybe didn’t get the advantage that we
did.
But anyway, so there’s money. So, that’s what I did.
Schrager: It’s a great use of your money.
Taylor: I think it is.
Schrager: It’s a great way to donate to the college. And I’m impressed you came up with it.
Taylor: I think I came up with something that will be constant, will be there. For a while, I was giving
$1,000 a year, and then it turns out that if you give at least $25,000, it becomes an endowment, and

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then it’s dedicated—up until that time, it’s just money that’s sitting there—and then it can be disbursed.
But this is the first year that it will be disbursed, so Amanda and I need to talk about that.
So I’m proud of it, and it’s something that I think is good.
Schrager: So, Nancy, let’s talk about your research, and how it developed for you, and how it came to
the writing of this really cool book, Cousins in Love.
Taylor: It’s a good story, I think. I was hired at Evergreen without a Ph.D., and without a discipline,
really. I had a B.A. in history and I had an M.A. in the teaching of history, and that’s it. And I was hired—
well, we told that story—I was hired just fortuitously, but I was hired with the potential and optimism
that I could be a good teacher. I wasn’t hired to teach history. And at Evergreen, in those days, the
discipline wasn’t major. In fact, those wildcard positions that you were talking about, while they may
have been in an effort to get a more diverse faculty, they were also a throwback to hire teachers, not
disciplinary-based people; hire people that could teach in core programs, and could do a whole variety
of things, but didn’t necessarily have a disciplinary point of view, or a crusade to teach chemistry or
math or whatever. That’s the way I was hired.
But I always felt an insecurity. I always felt that when people say, “Well what do you know?” or,
“What do you teach?” I should have a better answer. And so 1977—so I’d been teaching six years—I
decided to go back to the University of Washington to get an M.A. in history. And I was admitted, and I
knew that I was interested in European history, so that’s what I declared. And that’s where I met Fritz. I
was a student. I was a different kind of student than other students, because I was a whole lot older,
and I had a job, I was going back to a job. So it was different in that sense. But Fritz taught Renaissance,
Reformation and English history. So that’s how I met him. But the interest in wanting to be able to say,
with some kind of belief, that I was a historian was sort of fundamental to making that decision.
But I never did get the M.A. I went to school for a year at the university. I moved to Seattle, and
did it full-time. It was successful intellectually, absolutely. It was successful personally, because Fritz
and I, during that time—well, we got married a year later, but I met him in probably September. I’d
been there in the summer, and I met him in September, and we got married a year and a half later, in
June. But that was also the year my father died, and so it was a horrendous year emotionally, in lots of
ways. So I never did finish the M.A. I did all the coursework.
But out of it came this interest in women’s history. And the year after University of Washington,
I taught Shakespeare in the Age of Elizabeth with Peter Elbow and Leo [Daugherty] and Richard Jones.
And we had good students, and it was a great program. And because I had just done a lot of English
history, I could participate; I could bring history to the program. And if you look at my self-evaluation for
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that year, I don’t credit myself with doing it very well, but if I hadn’t done it, it wouldn’t have been done
at all. There would be no history in that curriculum, because Richard Jones was a psychologist who
wanted to make up history, and the other two were literary people—Peter and Leo—who were
speculative, and were critics in philosophic ways, and so they just took the text. And the whole context
was in the program because of me, and I always felt that was good. But also, because that was the year
of Fritz and my romance, Fritz was totally integrated into the program. He came for faculty seminar, he
came a lot to participate, and he became very good friends with Peter and with Leo. I mean, he was
included.
And he gave lectures, and when we had a big Shakespeare feast—which was spectacular,
actually, one of the best all-program things I think I’ve ever done. It was a huge feast at a grange hall,
and we had people in roles, and Queen Elizabeth, and the whole thing. It was great. And Fritz was right
involved in that. So that sort of all rolled together.
And then, Fritz and I got married in June, and immediately had a year’s sabbatical in London.
And we had applied for the sabbaticals independently, of course, before we had even announced we
were getting married. You apply in November or something. And we both got sabbaticals. And my
research proposal—with Fritz’s help a bit in terms of formulating it—it was really experimental in ways
because he didn’t know what I’d find. But my research was to study 16th century English women’s
letters. And because of him, I met some interesting people, and one guy was a Tudor historian from
Stanford. And he wrote me a letter of recommendation, and in that letter he said something like, this
was an exciting project, and he had no idea how many letters were out there. And he gave an estimate.
Well, it’s turned out now—this is 30 years later—they found tens of thousands of letters. In the time I
was starting this, it was thought of in the hundreds. And how would we find them, and what was going
on?
So my research was pretty much on the edge. People hadn’t done it. So I had that sabbatical in
England, in London, and every day, I went to the British Museum—British Library, which was in the
British Museum—and went through manuscripts in the manuscript room, looking for women’s letters.
It was needle-in-the-haystack sort of stuff. Turns out that women in the 16th and 17th century were
taught Italic rather than what’s called secretary hand, which is what the men during Shakespeare’s time
would have been writing, the businessmen. Women were not taught that. They were taught this very
decorative, round, italic—which is what it is now—handwriting.
So when you look through family papers at that time, you just get a box, you get a manila box,
and it would have family papers in it. And it would be from mostly gentry—stately home kind of people.
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And Fritz laughed about it, because he’d be sitting on that side of the table and I’d be sitting on this side,
and he could tell across the table if I’d found a woman’s letter. Because you go through these things
and then you see this italic, and almost always, it’s a woman. And they’re not categorized. You just say
“Skipton family papers,” then you look. And one of the things about women’s writing is that they will
very often say “Thursday afternoon.” “Dear Beloved Husband.” “Your Obedient Wife Abigail.” So you
have to figure out who in the world these people are. You have to figure out the date, because
Thursday afternoon isn’t very useful. And I found lots of letters. And at home I have stacks of letters,
because, well, those days, you paid for photocopies, or you hand-wrote them. But they were easy to
read. In contrast to secretary hand, which is hard to read, these are easy to read. So I spent that year
looking at letters, and looking at letters, and copying and whatever, and collecting. And I still have all of
those at home.
Ever since then, every other summer, we went to England, and I continued on this project. In
maybe ’81 or ’82 or ’83, I don’t know, Fritz and I took spring quarter off without pay, and we went to the
Shakespeare Folger Library in Washington, D.C., which is a wonderful research place. It’s got lots and
lots of primary sources, and it’s in a beautiful setting. They provide housing. They provide tea every
afternoon. It’s a very collegial group. I gave papers at the seminars.
And there was a woman who taught—she was a reference librarian and research librarian who
knew the Folger Collection. And she put me on to this series of letters, these Lydia DuGard letters, and
said, “Nobody’s ever done anything with these.” And they were in a box, not cataloged. So I cataloged
them—or helped catalog them, this Leticia Skipton actually did the cataloging—and copied them. And
then that’s when the research for the book started.
And there are 29 or 30 letters, and there was a couple of unusual things about these letters.
One is: almost all the letters that we found when I started were aristocrats, gentry; nothing below
gentry. I think that they found more and more now. There’s a man named James Daybell that’s really
done what I should have done. He’s published several books on sort of the totality of the letters
available.
Lydia’s letters are—she’s the daughter of a schoolteacher, and one of the things that I found is
that the level of literacy among women goes down the social scale further than was originally thought.
Because, while women weren’t educated very well—except in dame schools till they’re nine, but beyond
that, it was all tutors—schoolmasters’ daughters, ministers’ daughters, were often taught by their
mothers. It was not a class based on money, but a class based on education. So ministers and
schoolteachers educated their children, whether they were boys or girls.
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And that was Lydia’s experience. So that’s why she’s interesting, because she’s a nobody. She’s
just an ordinary girl. But then, on the other hand, she’s not ordinary, because her parents die—her
mother dies when she’s 10 and her father when she’s 11, something like that—and so she moves in with
her uncle, and falls in love with her cousin, who goes off to Oxford, and then you know that story. They
eventually get married, and the husband writes a treatise on how it’s good for cousins-german to get
married. And the irony is, after she dies in childbirth three children later, and he marries a second
cousin, and then he writes a book on how good it is to have many children—and he has eight children.
Interesting guy.
But in doing Lydia’s letters, I gained the confidence and the belief that I could do history. And
that whole discipline of history, it’s manifest in there. And without publishing a book, and without
having that project—which took forever—I wouldn’t have sort of the identity to feel like I did history.
And I had a lot of help with people at the British Library, and friends—because we’d see them
every summer. I mean, this was a long-term project—I think probably 15 years from the first time I saw
those letters till the book was published—because I had to do not only the research to find out about
the letters, but then I had to do the research to find out about cousins-german, and I had to do a lot of
work about how you edit papers, and what you do. And the standards are incredible. And then, I got it
accepted by an English publisher, and they were going to print it, and then, I don’t know what
happened, but they sat on it for a couple years. And, at one point, I finally wrote and said, “I want it
back,” because they just sat on it. And just learning about how this all worked. But eventually, I got it
published—it was published by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, in conjunction
with the Renaissance English Text Society.
So that’s that story. And it wasn’t published until 2003, but I think I saw those letters first in
1983 or something like that.
Schrager: Can you talk a bit about how you developed your interpretation, the breadth of what you
came to understand about Lydia, her as a woman, and the large social historical perspective that you
had? Because when I read this, I was impressed by how rich your sense of her life—her inner life in
particular—was. And how did that grow for you as you worked?
Taylor: That was the fun part, because I spent so much time in her head. I don’t have all the letters to
show this, but she says that she writes once a week to her future husband, who is at Oxford. She says
she’s writing in code because she’s in love with her first cousin, and her uncle does not approve, and
she’s living in that household with the uncle. And the way the letters get written, and transformed and
sent, and it’s done by carrier, and it’s all public. And so her inner life is revealed in these letters, but it’s
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secret. So there’s this big sort of mystery going on. I don’t have his letters, which is too bad, but I have
hers. She starts when she’s 15, and she gets married when she’s 21 or something.
So you have five years of letters, and you see her grow; you see her handwriting change; and
you see her interests change; you see her sophistication about the world, because she moves around.
One of the things that’s interesting is at some point she says, “I didn’t have time to recopy this letter.
Save it for me.” So one of the things that she’s doing is there are two copies. Every letter she writes,
she writes a copy. And you find out about her friends; you find out about her relationship to the family;
you find out about travel; you find out about what a girl can do and can’t do.
And, on the other hand, she’s representative of just an ordinary life, which, to me, that was fun.
You weren’t finding out about somebody privileged. She was privileged in the sense that she was—I
don’t think they would have used the term middle class at that time, but she lived in a rectory, and she
could read and write, and she learned to play the viola, and she traveled.
Then, when they finally got married, in her last letter, she says she can sign it Your Loving Wife,
because it’s known. But up until she does that, it has to be secret, because Samuel would get fired,
because you can’t be a fellow at Oxford and be married. And as soon as they find out, he is fired as a
fellow of the college, and he comes home. And at that point, we know that the uncle, Samuel’s father,
has to have approved, because they move back into the house. And eventually, he gets a job as a pastor
of a church, minister of a church. And they have three children, and Lydia dies in childbirth. And one of
the things I found was the will of the child that survives, whose name is Lydia—Lydia, her mother, dies in
childbirth—that daughter, Lydia, I have her will, and she also dies in childbirth.
Well, it was just fun. It was fun to experience her life. Have you ever read an American book
called The Midwife’s Tale? by Laurel Ulrich, I think her name is. It’s a wonderful book that starts out
with a diary of a midwife. It’s a kind of historical research that parallels what I did. She has a text,
maybe it’s 30 pages long, and she writes a book that uses that text as its starting-off point, and goes in
every direction she can about what was happening, about point of view, about religion, about
everything, that’s based on that short diary. And I have these 29 letters, and within those letters, you
can create a world. So it’s bigger than the 29 letters.
Schrager: I was particularly impressed by your tracing of their emotions, both of them—especially hers
because you know much more about hers. But the ardency of her love for him, its character, and then
in comparison to his, which you describe as less idealistic.

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Taylor: Yes, he’s kind of a pedant. He’s loyal, he’s absolutely loyal to her, but he’s not a romantic, and
she is absolutely. “How could I love you any more?” It just goes on and on and on. It’s every letter. But
she’s also 16, 17, 18 years old, and is just head over heels. Yes, you see that. And, yeah, it was fun.
And the other thing that I said to you last week, I was writing this, or I was thinking about it,
when we did Love and Work together. And that’s when I read Clifford Geertz. And Clifford Geertz, in a
funny way, provides an anchor on how to see things. I don’t know. Have you read Hillbilly Elegy?
Schrager: Parts of it.
Taylor: Well, when I think about that book, if you think about it in Geertz’s terms—what is J. D. Vance
telling himself about himself?—you end up with more understanding. Because he even says, “Well, my
sister told me that what I’ve written is not true. But I left it in, because it makes sense to me. Even
though it wasn’t true, it makes sense because my memory includes that, and therefore, I think of other
things in that context.”
And that’s what I chose to do with Lydia; that her letters are really her telling herself a story
about herself. So that was really useful, to me.
Schrager: Yeah. And I think that’s at the heart of ethnographic interpretation.
Taylor: So maybe I made the letters an ethnographic study.
Schrager: Yes.
Taylor: I didn’t know I did that at the time, but that’s maybe what I did, rather than a historical study.
Schrager: Well, it is historical, though. It’s history of consciousness, really.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: It’s very personal. No, it’s great. To me, it’s wonderful that Geertz was helpful to you in that
way. Geertz’s work, that we’re interpreting their interpretations of their own experience. At the heart
of that is to understand, as best we can, their interpretations of their experience. That’s what places
him in the humanities.
Taylor: Sure.
Schrager: He’s drawing on humanities kind of understanding of how to approach the study of text.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: And that was the most important gift he made to anthropology, and ethnography more
broadly.
Taylor: Yeah. So anyway, so that works. So, see, here was a connection of you and of an Evergreen
program that got used, and made a difference in my work. So, that’s the give and take.

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So anyway, I was proud of that book, and I still have some connection with people doing work.
I’ve gone to any number of conferences about women, and doing work on women’s letters, in England.
And now, there’s a whole field—that didn’t exist in the ‘80s—about letter writing, men and women.
And there’s a new Web site now, which I’m contributing to, that is trying to catalog all the women’s
letters in the 16th and 17th century. And it’s huge. It’s called WEMLO, Women’s [Women’s Early Modern
Letters Online] . . . It’s run by this guy, James Daybell, out of Southampton University.
Schrager: To draw this work into your teaching, in terms of you being the historian, insofar as there is a
historian in many of the programs that you taught, did you find that your teaching of history at
Evergreen over the years changed, and how it fit into your work as a faculty, that dimension for a
program for students’ understanding?
Taylor: I always tried to do that, and I had a lot of resistance—both my own resistance, because if you
read my self-evaluations, there’s a lot of talk that I should have done more, I should have done more.
And I never have truly felt that I brought a historic consciousness to the programs. I mean, I would insist
on historical context and perspective. But, you know, my identity is, I’m a teacher. That’s my identity.
I’m not a historian. When Fritz is asked, “Who are you?” He’s a historian. He’s written historical
monographs. He is a professional historian. I’m not. I am more of a historian than I was, but I am not.
And so I’ve always felt a bit guilty. And Evergreen, as a college, is terribly negligent. I mean, we
have been willing to be a college with one or two historians across the world. And if someone just reads
a history book, that qualifies. I mean, in any other discipline, it would not be allowed. But we have
maybe three historians on the faculty, as we speak, who are trained in history. It’s criminal. It’s
absolutely unprofessional. And I was always counted as a historian, which I sort of deserved and sort of
didn’t. But it’s only by stretching like that, or including people that are—I think David Marr was always
included as a historian. He did American Studies, or Rudy [Martin] did American Studies. That was okay.
Now, they taught history. Jeannie Hahn taught history, and was in political science. But I think
the only historians, I mean, Michael Pfeifer, and he left. Stacey [Davis]. Tom Rainey. Rob Smurr, who
did—it’s just very, very few historians. And I think they’re now going to hire an American one, is that
right?
Schrager: They are.
[Dog barking]
Schrager: Well, that gets, to me, to the heart of the weaknesses of the college, in terms of the quality of
the education that we were able to provide. If we can’t face the importance of certain fields of study
that are not being represented at the college, then we are denying our students the opportunity to
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really learn those subjects. That’s in no way to suggest that you were not a great member of the faculty,
in terms of what you did bring as a teacher. It’s important to have faculty that have the breadth of
understanding that you brought to work. And it’s not defined by the fact that it is not history. History is
a part of it.
[Dog barking.]
Taylor: Yeah. No, I mean, it’s a tension that has been at the college since the beginning. And I
definitely was a beneficiary of the college caring about breadth in teaching. And I was also willing to not
have a narrow focus. I was willing to do a whole variety of things, and there were too many people that
aren’t willing to do that. So that’s one tension.
And the faculty that was hired at the beginning was hired not to get a range of subjects, but to
have a range of points of view, and dedication to teaching and to students. So in the first range of
people, we had five or six biologists, mostly environmental people. Nobody cared, because the college
was small; the whole point of the college was to do interdisciplinary work, it wasn’t to do coverage. And
thank heavens, because if you offer coverage, there’s no way you can do it, and you do it badly. You
can’t do everything. I mean, the University of Washington that’s called the flagship doesn’t do
everything.
So we were in a situation where you had to have a different philosophy about what you were
teaching. You weren’t going to offer that every language was going to be provided, or every discipline
was going to be provided. You had to offer what you could offer. And, because we did interdisciplinary
programs, and we were teaching writing, critical thinking, point of view, we were rich. We were getting
people educated. And from the very, very beginning that tension about how do you do advanced work,
was there. It was there in the articles that Byron Youtz and Fred Tabbutt wrote in 1972. Because how
are you going to prepare a chemist, how are you going to prepare a political scientist, or whatever—
advanced work in mathematics—unless you offer a series of courses that build? How are you going to
offer history if you don’t offer Latin? I mean, how are you going to do it? And we’ve never come to
terms with that problem, because if you say, “Okay, you’re going to have disciplinary possibilities,” then
the next thing is you’re going to have departments, and the next thing you have is Southwest
Washington State College. And that’s always been there. Are you going to stand for innovative, freer,
more responsive kind of education, or are you going to fall back on the 19th-century university?
Schrager: But you made a case here for the college needing, say, four or five historians. If the college
has four or five people in business, why wouldn’t it have four or five historians?

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Taylor: It depends on what you want. I think having four or five historians is much easier to argue,
actually, than four or five business. But that’s because my point of view about what a college is. For me,
it’s about education, it isn’t about vocation. And increasingly, higher education in the United States is
about job creation. And Evergreen was founded not as that, but as a college that would provide
education. I mean, we’ve always been in a liberal arts tradition, of not preparing for jobs, but preparing
for critical thinking, well-spoken, good-writing students. And that’s how an interdisciplinary Core
program can work.
Now, if you have a belief that you have to prepare people for a job in business, now, we’ve
always argued—and I think you could, but I don’t think the world accepts it completely—that a wellrounded person is going to be better at doing business. And we used to argue that really hard for
people, like teacher training. It would be much better to have a four-year degree in general education
of some sort, and then do teaching credential as a fifth year. And I think that’s where the college came
down on that one. Because that argument, about wanting to teach teachers, started minus day one.
And Charlie McCann was the strongest negative vote: We are not a teacher institution. I mean, he was
absolutely adamant. He didn’t want to have a master’s degree in teaching. He didn’t want to have
anything to do with being a teachers’ college.
Schrager: What was the reason for that?
Taylor: He came from Central, and it was kind of an elitist notion in his mind, I think. He wanted people
to learn something, not learn to teach. When we finally did set up an education program, it was based
on that you had to have a four-year degree before you could enter the program.
So I think history is different than business. And I’m not sure if I agree with this—it reflects on
the college now—but early on, Fritz, when he first got to know the college—and he was kind of a sorting
point of view for the University of Washington, because once he got to know me, then he had an inside
look at Evergreen, and people then would ask him, and he was a defender. And he used to argue. He
said, “There is no better education than to go two years to Evergreen, and then transfer for advanced
work.” And that was exactly what Byron [Youtz] came up against, that he didn’t want people—and the
irony is—
Schrager: He didn’t want people to transfer?
Taylor: He didn’t want people to transfer, so there’s that tension. But the irony is that increasingly—I
don’t know if it’s true today—but increasingly, we were not getting freshmen and sophomores, but we
were getting transfers to come to Evergreen—where, in the early days, I think it was really clear, but
that the undergraduate first two years were probably our strongest. Now, I’m not sure that’s true. It
11

didn’t mean that you couldn’t do things junior and senior year, but it wasn’t as focused. The energy and
sort of the belief system supported the first two years better than the second two.
Although clearly, the advanced coordinated studies were some of the best that ever have been
at the college, and that was because you had students that were more prepared, and so you could do
these interdisciplinary programs that were rich and difficult and far-reaching. I remember one when
Rudy [Martin]—and maybe it was David [Marr], I don’t know—they did a program about war. And it
was upper division, and they had really good students. They had students that were strong, and so they
could do more in that program with juniors and seniors than they could have done with freshmen, just
because they had strong students.
But it has always been difficult to get big programs. And if you’re going to do a coordinated
studies that really is interdisciplinary, and wide-ranging, and has points of view, as Richard Jones used to
say, “You need to have four.” You need to have four faculty if you really are going to do that dream
program, where different perspectives are brought out.
Schrager: My gut feeling about that is three.
Taylor: You could argue about that, too. But there are very, very few four—
Schrager: That’s because of the dilution that happens if four people are having to share the pie. It’s just
harder to get depth.
Taylor: But it’s also harder to get the students. You know, I said earlier, I was in 28 teams, and I had
one team that was nonfunctional. One out of 28. But it is hard work. I read in one of my selfevaluations that was probably the year when I came back from my first sabbatical when Fritz and I were
married. And I write in my self-evaluation that I come late to this, but I am no longer willing to make the
college my life. Because for 10 years, the college was like my life, I mean, 24 hours a day. And I
expected that of every team member. And if they weren’t doing that, I was critical. And I recognized
that people had families and I didn’t, but faculty seminar was number one, and being there for students
was number one, and that was just what I did. And I did it with my heart and soul, until I got married.
And then, I was going to Seattle. I never moved to Seattle because I never thought I could do the job if I
weren’t here. But I got some insight [laughs] at that point that maybe there’s another thing, another
life.
But when the college opened, nobody believed there was another life. I mean, there were
probably more divorces right at the beginning. I mean, the college was demanding, in a way, not
because you had to, but because it was in the air, those first few years. Everything was the college. And
it couldn’t sustain that. And it took me a while to recognize it. And the way I taught in programs, and
12

the way programs grew after, say, 1976 or ’77 or ‘78—certainly when I came back from that sabbatical—
it was different, because you just couldn’t sustain it. It’s like the books you read about elementary
school teachers that go to a difficult area to teach, and give everything, and the burnout is two, three
years. Well, I think that’s what happened.
Schrager: So what you are describing is a shift institutionally, not just you? Do you think that by the
‘80s, faculty were slowing down—
Taylor: I think there was some slowing down, but there was also a degree of not the same kind of
commitment to team teaching, and to collaboration, sort of for health and surviving’s sake. I mean, if I
just look at what I did in programs—I don’t think you do a worse job, but you come more focused on
doing what the job is, rather than making the job be everything. Like those journals that I wrote the first
few years, I didn’t write those afterwards. I still wrote evaluations with all my heart, and I read papers,
and I read books every single weekend, and I was in teams, and I have students that are memorable.
But I wasn’t unreasonably putting my whole time and effort into the college. And I think that probably
was common.
I don’t think that’s the big story about the college, though. Well, I don’t know what’s happened
now, but I know that when I was dean, and I felt a huge obligation to new faculty, the biggest difficulty—
and actually, we talked about this at the beginning, when the college was going to grow too fast—the
biggest difficulty was to hire people, and then orient them, and help them, and teach them to be
believers in how to make it work. Because very few people out of graduate school were trained to teach
in this kind of a place. And even though, philosophically, they said, “Oh, this is just what I want,” when
they get here, their commitment to doing their research, and doing what they’ve been rewarded for in
graduate school for the last seven years, or whatever it takes, and then all of a sudden, you’re saying,
“Do something different.” And the whole faculty development business. I mean, I think that it’s hard.
And we went from 1,000 the first year to 2,000 the second year, and doing that. And then,
moving towards having, for economic and maybe just historic reasons, moving to part-time and evening,
and more fragmented opportunity. That happens.
So I think it’s, in some ways, just amazing that we’ve kept as honest to the original goals, if not
way of doing things, that we still have the same values as we started with. Which, I think, probably we
still do. But I hear, just by reading stuff now, that the tensions that have been there all along are sort of
boiling. And who knows where it will head?

13

Schrager: Can you say what those tensions are that you feel have been there all along that we haven’t
been able to resolve, and that now are maybe a higher temperature? Recognizing that you, like me, are
distant from the place now.
Taylor: I’m pretty distant. Yeah, I’m pretty distant. One of the things that has happened over time, and
I don’t know the answer to. The original idea of the college depended on the notion that we would get
full-time students, who lived on campus, or weren’t working very much—they were working like 15
hours a week. They were standard college students. We did not design something for a 1980s
population, or ‘70s population. So that’s the expectation. And the students that we had that were that
way, it was wonderful for them. The expectation, I think, was that these interdisciplinary programs
were appropriate to all students. I think, starting maybe two years in, there was a question about
whether that was true.
Now, it wasn’t a matter of whether it was the diversity of students. I mean, Rudy had a program
for Contemporary American Minorities the first year. And there was recognition about women, early.
So it wasn’t that, except for the answer was, “Yes, what we’re doing is appropriate,” rather than
listening to the notions that it might not be. So I think that’s been a push all along. And then, when the
college had a crisis about enrollment, and the answer was we need to be more responsible to local, we
need to be part-time, we need to have evening, we need to have courses, and we did it—a hundred
percent we did it—in order to get students, because we didn’t have enough students.
And it was a compromise, in terms of values. And that seems to be going on now, because the
real problem right now is we don’t have enough students. So is the answer to sort of dig deeper, and go
back to original values, and say, “Yes, if we told the story better, we’d get them”? Which, people have
doubts about. Or, if you change, are you going to throw out the baby with the bath? That’s the
problem, it looks like. And I guess the worry is that the traditional curriculum, in Evergreen terms, isn’t
responsible to a diverse student body—that’s one possibility—or isn’t responsible to a vocationdemanding, job-wanting student body. I don’t know which it is, but both of those, you hear about. I
don’t know.
But I think the tension of are you going to be on the leading edge of doing things flexibly, and
change—the very first catalog was about change. From the very beginning, there was this push about,
should we be a Southwest Washington state college? Should we have departments? Should we have
majors? Should we have grades? That was always there. So you always have to fight. And I don’t think
there’s push for that, but there certainly is push for disciplinary coverage. There’s push for courses.

14

Schrager: You were talking about the challenge for faculty development with new faculty being to help
get them to believe—and you used the word “believe”—in the potential of what they could do at
Evergreen.
Taylor: Yeah. The easiest story is—I don’t know if it still exists, but in the hiring DTF—you know this as
well as I—that when any potential faculty is interviewed, they always had to come up with a four-person
team and their dream program. And I’d say 90 percent of faculty hires think this is the most wonderful
thing in the world. I mean, everybody is excited about that question. And everybody is prepared. They
might not understand, but they are prepared, and they have fantasized about this. And they tell that
story. And the degree to which they can do that affect an awful lot of hires. That was an important
thing. If you didn’t have a twinkle in your eye in telling that story, you lost in the faculty hiring.
So then they get here, and for a while we worked pretty hard at the second year they were here,
they would teach their dream program. We worked pretty hard at getting people, to find others of the
faculty so that they could teach that. But one of the things that new faculty encountered from the
current faculty was “Oh, you can’t do that.” Or, “That’s not what we do anymore.” So there were mixed
messages right away. “Just don’t pay any attention to that. You don’t have to do faculty seminar. Just
come, and you can do whatever it is you want to do. And it might be a discipline, or it might be you can
just do your own thing. Just teach what you want to teach. There’s no--”
And my job as dean working with new faculty, was to counter that. It often happened because
their first assignment put them in that situation, so my job was to counter that; and then to work really
hard to get them to meet people that they would step out and do their dream program, or something
like that. But in some areas of the college, that’s just not there. We all know that.
And sometimes, the person, the new faculty, is strong enough, or stubborn enough, or lucky
enough that they’ll come out of it. Sometimes it takes a while. Do you know, maybe you know him . . .
Morisato is his name.
Schrager: Yes. Donald.
Taylor: Donald
Schrager: That’s what I thought you were going to talk about.
Taylor: See, Donald, when he was first hired, he was so excited about teaching English literature. He
was a research biologist—flies—and he came and he got really stuck in teaching biology. And I think he
was of two minds. He wanted to be stuck there, but he also wanted to do this other thing, and he didn’t

15

know how. And it took him—and some help, and some crisis—maybe three or four years before he
taught with Bob Haft, I think. Did he teach with you?
Schrager: No.
Taylor: But he taught with Bob Haft. He finally threw down the gauntlet—or somebody did, I don’t
know the story—and he stopped feeling like he absolutely had to teach Molecule to Organism every
single year, and do the coverage. And he started doing birds or art or something. And I have not ever
talked to him, so I don’t know what the real story is. But he finally did get out of that.
But I think that’s a problem. And when we hire people with a real clear disciplinary priority,
because that’s what the faculty wants, then you have two problems. Do they teach that in a very
narrow way, [laughing] or do they not teach it and go off completely? Which also happens. There’s still
that problem.
Schrager: I’m going to turn this off, okay? Take a break.
Taylor: Yeah.
End of Part 1

16

Taylor: So I was talking about a student named Max. My memory isn’t good enough to know even what
program it was in. But it was in a Core program, and we were reading classical Greek literature. So we
were reading something like the Bacchae or the Oresteia or Sophocles, or something. And I was on the
Board of Trustees as the faculty representative, or I was reporting a hiring, either of a provost, or maybe
I was working on Jane Jervis.
Anyway, I was giving a report to the Trustees, and I said, “Before I do anything, I just want to
read something to you. Just as a faculty member, I want to tell you what kind of college you’re in,” or
something. I said this to the Trustees. And then, I pulled out Max’s paper. And Max was a good
student. He was 18. I don’t know that he knew where he was going, but he was a good reader, and he
was working hard, and he was totally involved in the program.
And the week that we were reading some play, his aunt had died, and he wrote this journal
response about the relationship between his aunt and this Greek tragedy. And it should have been
published. It was a piece of writing that was so heartfelt, and so good—and I read it, and the Trustees
were dumbfounded. I mean, we all were, because it was just something special.
But what it showed—and I think all these students that I have—every example that makes me
remember them, it’s because something that they were learning had such an impact on their life. It’s
almost always that case, where I can tie a reading, or I can tie something that happened in a seminar, to
a student’s awakening of something—not just of a skill. And those are the memorable times about
students.
And there are students that are way back. I mean, I remember Maggie Welsh, who was in
Democracy and Tyranny, and she wrote—instead of Prometheus Unbound, she wrote Prometheus
Bound, and we ended up performing it. I can still remember it, and that’s 1973.
I remember Lynda Barry. Everybody knows who Lynda Barry is, and she was in Two Cities of
Destiny. And I remember, we were reading, her question was “I’m getting so tired of not knowing
what’s going on. Who came first? Christ or Charlemagne?” [laughing] And, I mean, she just wanted to
know what was going on. And it’s times like that that you just know what an impact you’re having, or
the college is having, on students.

17

That later group, Stephen [Engel] and Carolyn [Commer ] and Avery [Wiscomb] and Brook
[McLane], Monearr [Fatami]—there were five in that last seminar—I’ve kept track of them in the last 10
years, and they’ve all just done something fantastic that Evergreen started.
Schrager: And this was their first year?
Taylor: This is their first year, first seminar, and they were together. And I think Andrew will still talk
about those five, and Nancy Koppelman. It was just phenomenal. And it’s partly luck about a seminar,
but it’s also about a spirit, and a program that pulls them together. They’ll get up in seminar, and go out
and call somebody and say, “How come you’re not here?”
There was a program I can remember. This is Democracy and Tyranny, 1973 or ’74, and I can
still remember the students. Angie was from Yelm, Sheila was from St. Louis, Linda was from Los
Angeles, Maggie was from New York, and I think there was another local. And they became best friends.
And their eyes were just opened. That was a diversity of location, of how all these students that had
come together. And that summer, they all went to visit each other, across the country. And I’m sure
they’re still friends. And it was that kind of bonding, community, working together, where your best
friends at college are the ones that you’re spending time learning together, rather than your roommate
or something. It’s your academic work that’s tying you to friendship. And that happens a lot.
I could go on and on. I went through the programs, just the list of the 28 programs, and I can
remember students from all of them. But the programs that stand out, of course, are the ones where
the community really built. And that’s why the full-time, three-quarter programs—when they really pay
off is in June.
A program called Making American Selves; this was with Brian Price and Don Bantz and Sherry
Walton. That was sometime in the ‘80s, I guess. And we went to some local camp for the final retreat,
for three or four days. That was a thing that I often did at the end of those big programs. We would
spend the last week at someplace, and the students would do all the cooking, and we would have
seminars. And we’d read a book, and then the faculty would do evaluation conferences during that final
week. So you were writing and conferencing, and the students were seminaring and cooking. And I
remember having a big circle at the end. And there were four faculty, so there were 80 students. And
that program held together.

18

And we went around, and everybody spoke, including two Japanese students that had been in
that program for the year, Anna and Naomi, I think. Anyway, even the two Japanese students spoke, as
we went around the whole circle, of what had happened during that year. And you just wanted to cry,
because it was almost universal that this had been a significant educational growing-up. I just can name
those students, I could tell more and more about students, but I think probably not—I told you about
Tuggy last time, I think.
Schrager: Yeah.
Taylor: Well, and then there were students like the ones in the re-entry, the AJAX Compact.
Schrager: We did talk about that.
Taylor: We did talk about those, the women coming back to school. Then I remember Greg
Williamson—that was in Form and Content—and we read Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. And I
don’t know if you ever should teach that book, because it’s so powerful for young boys, young men. You
know what happens? He commits suicide over love. Greg came, and he was just devastated, because
he internalized the book so much to his life. So you have to pick up the pieces many times [laughing]
when you do—but it also shows the power.
So, you wanted me to talk about staff. Since I started the college as staff—well, I was extremely
lucky, because I was in on the big picture, and the staff and the faculty were so together on what we
were doing, there was no separation. Because my first job was to recruit the students, I took a member
of the faculty—of the 17 planning faculty—every day out. So the faculty all respected me. I was
included in all the parties, I was involved in all the meetings. My office was in the trailer.
So the early, early times, I think the separation between faculty and staff was really tight. I think
it grew apart, and I don’t know why. Maybe it was just institutional change. Early on, the faculty were
expected to do staff work, with the staff. There weren’t enough staff to do counseling, to do
admissions, so the faculty was involved in everything, and maybe that was it.
But gradually, then, we hired an academic advising office. There was probably a split that
happened. But one of the ways that staff was absolutely included: there was controversy about the
librarians—this was early, and I don’t know when. You could find the date. But there was a vote, or an
agreement, that the librarians would have faculty status. That wasn’t day one. But that happened.

19

And then, there was an agreement that staff should be entitled to write contracts for academic
credit. And that was important, I think, to recognize that there were people on the staff that were
perfectly capable, and enthusiastic, and wanting to do that work. They never got paid, but I think they
probably got release time from their work, maybe. So that was good. But I’m sure there’s still tension
between faculty and staff.
On the other hand, I remember secretaries from the first programs. The secretaries had an
enormous amount to do, because they had to type all evaluations, because we didn’t have computers,
and they were assigned to, like, three programs. But they were included with the students a lot more. I
remember Pam, my first secretary, she went on student retreats. She went with us when we went off to
Camp Wooten.
Schrager: Pam?
Taylor: It wasn’t Pam [Udovich], it was an earlier Pam. It would have been in 1971. I just remember her
name. But secretaries went with programs. Secretaries were included in programs. Secretaries often
were getting credit in programs. They did reading. And other staff, when I worked in Admissions, Sally
Hunter and Maureen [Karris]—Maureen was, I think, working for Larry Stenberg, but Sally was working
in Admissions. Sally had a memory that just didn’t quit. She had Social Security numbers of students in
her head. I mean, some student would arrive, just to check out the college, and she’d seen the
application, and she would remember. She was phenomenal. And she was included in everything, and
so was Maureen. That staff, the early staff, they were part of the project. And that probably didn’t last
forever.
The other staff, the college would fall apart if—it might still be the case, but when I was dean,
the dean’s staff, they were administrative assistants or, I don’t know. Betty [McGovern] and Debbie
[Waldorf] and Amy [Betz] and Debra Blodgett, those people that were in the dean’s area, who were
there even though deans were rotating, so they were constant, the curriculum wouldn’t have run
without Debbie [Waldorf]. And Debra Blodgett, who was doing hiring. I mean, they were just
indispensable. Or, if you talk to—somebody should do Rita Sevcik.
Schrager: John Carmichael wants to. Rita said no. He wanted to continue to encourage her.
Taylor: Well, Rita, she’s indispensable. I can understand why she doesn’t want to, because one of Rita’s
incredible traits is her absolute loyalty, and ability to recognize what was public and what was not; what
20

was private information. She was a fantastic supporter of whoever was President. I mean, she just
never, ever let anything slip.
But she was there from day one. I mean, she was Charlie McCann’s, and until she retired—
through part of Les Purce’s . . .
Larry Stenberg, who was the first maybe Dean of Students, but I don’t think we’ve had that title.
But, spectacular. And I don’t know ever why he left.
Schrager: When you say “spectacular,” why so?
Taylor: In terms of Larry Stenberg, he was a real charismatic person. But what he contributed, I
remember, he was very outspoken about women on campus, about service for women. He started the
daycare center. He just had a mind towards what students needed, and what he needed to push for.
And he was respected by people. He was young; he was probably my age when he was Dean of
Students.
Another person that was memorable was the Registrar, whose name was Perrin [Smith]. I can’t
remember Perrin’s last name, but he was a strong advocate for students.
Another one was the Chief of Police, the Campus Police, whose name was Mac [Smith?] . . .
don’t remember his last name.
Here’s a story. Now, I don’t know if this is a good story to tell, because it would get us in jail
today. There was a student, who came from Vietnam—I mean, served in the Vietnam War. Very smart.
Very unstable. What’s the stress . . .?
Schrager: Post-traumatic stress?
Taylor: Yeah. So he was in Shakespeare in the Age of Elizabeth when Richard Jones and Peter [Elbow]
and Leo [Daugherty] and I were teaching, so that’s 1979—’78. And the guy was smart, but he was so
skitzy. One time in seminar, he picked a fight with somebody who screamed about something having to
do with Vietnam, and he leaped across four rows of seats, and attacked this guy in the Lecture Hall.
And Richard Jones got a hold of him and said—and I think the police, this guy Mac, was called—
and Richard told Mac, “Go buy a bottle of Scotch, and meet me in my office in a half an hour.” Now, this
guy that was Vietnam veteran was probably 25 years old, and Mac and Richard and the student sat in
21

Richard’s office with a bottle of Scotch, and worked out the problem. And this guy, Richard counseled,
and helped for the rest of the year. And he graduated, and he went to the University of Washington and
got some advanced degree in English. And that decision of what to do was pretty unorthodox, but it
worked.
One of the things Richard Jones did early on was to teach the faculty how to be professional
counselors, what to do, because that was his vocation, that was his job. He knew how to do that. But
he ran seminars or workshops on how to be professional counselors to your students, and what to do.
And so I think he probably met with that guy—I remember his name, but I won’t tell it. And the police
were involved in that. And that guy Mac was good. He was very good with students.
That’s enough about the staff, I suppose.
Schrager: I do wonder about the police-student relations. That’s been an issue off and on.
Taylor: That’s been an issue.
Schrager: Was that an issue early as well?
Taylor: Well, it certainly was an issue—see, now, I think when Mac was there, there were no guns on
campus. And the issue about guns happened when Jane Jervis was President. And I can remember that
struggle. Do you remember that?
Schrager: Yeah.
Taylor: Because what I remember—and Jane supported guns, and her argument was she would rather
have Campus Police having guns than be in a situation where, when we had a college problem, we had
to rely on Thurston County. She would rather have authority over Campus Police than to rely on
Thurston County. And that was the winning argument. Nobody wanted to have the guns, but
apparently, there was no option. There had to be access to police with guns. And did you want to have
the person who’s hiring you had control over, or did you want to have Thurston County? Is that the way
you remember it?
Schrager: I don’t remember much about it. You remember it much more clearly than I do.
Taylor: But it happened during Jane Jervis’s time. And nobody wanted guns, but apparently, I don’t
know what the argument was, but that we had to have them. And so it was a matter of, did you want
22

Thurston County Police parading around, or did you want to have your own? I don’t know the
consequences of that. You know the case when the stalker came, and the girl was killed?
Schrager: Can you tell that story?
Taylor: Well, I don’t remember it well enough. I remember the name is Tissot, and she was being
stalked. And there was a law passed by the Legislature after she was killed, because one of the
problems was the stalker hadn’t done anything, so it was a catch-22. They couldn’t stop him until he’d
done something, and he killed her. And he killed her in the cafeteria at the college. And as a result the
law was passed—it’s called the Tissot Law—that allows a campus to forbid a student from coming on
campus if there’s a restraining order, if there’s a stalking order. It prevents a stalker from coming onto
campus. And I don’t remember. That was probably 20 years ago. That’s documentable. It’s just an
impression I have.
Schrager: Jane Jervis had to face the Mumia [Abu-Jamal], didn’t she?
Taylor: Yeah. Do you remember that?
Schrager: Well, I do. I was wondering what your recollection was.
Taylor: I was proud of her. The students have always, I think, from the very early days, chosen the
speaker, the graduation speaker, by vote. And they voted to have Mumia be the speaker. There was
probably some controversy, but it was a vote. And he, of course, couldn’t come; it was a recording. And
the policeman that he is accused of killing, his family came, and demanded that we not allow him to
speak.
And Jane said, “This is a free speech issue.” And the organization—the police and the students,
who were in favor of not having Mumia—managed a protest. They all turned around at some point
when the speaker was going on. But the speaker went forward. There was no incident. It was right.
And Jane explained it, and stood her ground, and I think it was the right decision. Do you remember
that?
Schrager: Mm-hm.
Taylor: Is that the way you remember it?

23

Schrager: Yeah. I remember walking in, as the faculty did, and being jeered by people who came to
oppose the speech—not students—
Taylor: No, no. The policeman’s wife that was killed.
Schrager: Supporters of the policeman.
Taylor: Supporters, yeah. They came, and they were allowed. And there was a protest allowed, but it
was silent. And the speech went on. And it was explained.
Schrager: Gary Locke withdrew from speaking. He was also on the program to speak.
Taylor: Oh, I don’t remember that part. I just remember Jane’s really principled stand. And that
seemed right.
Okay. Life after Evergreen? Shall we do that?
Schrager: Let’s talk about that.
Taylor: As much as Evergreen was my life—for what?—1970 to 2008, 38 years, it was really easy to
retire, and I’m surprised at that. Partly, it was we moved to Bainbridge, and so I was removed from
here. I’d always had this little house here. So then, after 2008, I rented the house, and I had no
presence in Olympia. Somehow, I kept my friends, and I kept my loyalty, but I didn’t miss reading a book
every week, and writing comments on 20 papers a week. I didn’t miss that.
And Fritz and I, for the first time in our married life, had a common house, and we had all our
stuff. And we had new friends, and I got involved in Bainbridge life, which has been a really good move.
So it was surprising. I regret that two hours means I’m not in touch with people. And I go onto the
campus now, and I don’t know many people. But even in post-retirement teaching, I didn’t feel a part of
the college. It’s a memory, and it’s a love, but life goes on.
Gail Martin and I once had a conversation about what do you do when you retire. And she said,
“Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to decide. It’ll happen.” And I haven’t looked back. I never
regretted it. So that’s good.
Schrager: What kind of activities on Bainbridge?

24

Taylor: I do a certain amount of service. I’m on the public library board, and now we’re doing a big
remodel project. In fact, tomorrow, I’m selling surplus furniture from the library. So I’m very involved in
the library. I work at the Food Bank once a week, and that’s put me sort of in touch with a kind of
community.
For a while, I tutored math in the junior high school, middle school, just for fun. That was good.
I haven’t done that for a while, but it just put me in a school setting. And it’s that feedback. I don’t
know if we talked about it the first time, of my always wanting to be a math teacher, and Stanford not
letting me take math. So I did a bit of that, so it was still there.
And Fritz and I have traveled a lot. We always used to go to England every other summer, and
then we had three sabbaticals in England, maybe four, so I know England well. But we started, even
years ago, we’d spend the summer in England in London doing research, and then we’d take two weeks,
and fly to Venice, or fly to Vienna, or fly to Florence. And rent an apartment, that’s our standard way.
And, now we’ve done it, instead of every other year, we’ve gone somewhere every year. And we just
made reservations last week to spend a month in Paris, and a month in London, and some time in the
Yorkshire Dales. We leave on the fifth of May, come back in July. And as long as we’re healthy, that’s
fun to do. Our pattern has gotten smarter—well, it’s actually what we’ve always done—to have a place
to live, so that you’re not a tourist, and you can get up in the morning and decide if you want to do
something or not.
But this will be the first time that we’re going to spend time in London, and not go to the British
Library. Because neither one of us have projects that take us to the library. I still have my library cared,
and we’ll go just because we’ve got a lot of friends there, and so there will be some reason to go look
something up. But that’s not our reason for going.
Bainbridge is a place with a lot of interesting people. The demographic is too old, but when you
dig deep on what people have done, it’s phenomenal what the life experience—you meet somebody,
and you find out, well, they worked in the State Department, or they taught something somewhere.
Lots of lawyers, lots of academics that are retired on Bainbridge. So it’s a rich place. Like any small
community, if you haven’t lived there for 30, 40 years, you’re not a part of it.
You’ve been to our house. It’s not the house that you would have expected us to buy, and we
didn’t expect to buy it either. The realtor said, “This isn’t what you described you wanted.” But it had
good spaces, and we’ve been real pleased. And the neighborhood has been wonderful. And you
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wouldn’t expect it, because it’s in a kind of development on the golf course, with three garages—
because it’s expected to have a golf cart, and we don’t play golf.
And we laugh that we downsized into a bigger house. Because the house in Seattle was old—it
was built in 1905. And we had that house, and then I had my little house in Olympia, and two offices.
So we moved into a house that would hold all the books. We took the golf cart garage and made it into
stacks for books. So we made a separate room. We just made the place suit us. So that’s good.
So I’m glad to be living there. The reason, actually, we moved to Bainbridge, in part, was we
wanted to be under one roof. But my mother was still alive, and living on Marrowstone Island, and we
used to drive through Bainbridge all the time to get there. And she died in 2011, but we moved in 2005,
so there were six years where I could get to Marrowstone in an hour. And that made a difference to be
able to do that.
Schrager: How about Lopez and its place in your life?
Taylor: Oh, Lopez is just a wonderful retreat. It’s an escape. This was Fritz’s dream. He bought the
land, I think, in about 1965, and put up the shell of the house himself, with some guy that helped with
heavy machinery. And then he wired it and plumbed it. And then I met him, and then we put in the
hardwood floors, and we’ve put, I think, four different roofs on the place. It’s never been finished. He
keeps thinking I’m changing it from a cabin into a house, and he wants it to be a cabin.
But now, it’s got a washer and a dryer, it’s got new stairs, it’s got a porch. It’s different than
when you were there. But we were there last week for five days. And we did, maybe 15 years ago, buy
a propane stove, so it no longer has the big fireplace that salt rotted out. So we don’t smoke it up with
building a fire. You just flick a switch and it gets warm, so you can go in the winter. We usually go
Thanksgiving, Washington’s Birthday, 4th of July.
And we really do want to share it. I think I’ve taken every single Japanese couple that’s ever
been to Evergreen up there, just for fun. Toshi and Hiroko went. The Kusanagis went. [Takashi] Tohi,
that family went up there. It’s just a retreat. [Dog barking.] It’s not fundamental to my life, but it’s fun
to have just a little retreat. And anytime, if you want to go, you should just let me know.
But when I say it was easy to retire, and to put it all behind me. . . .Just having this opportunity
to have all these conversations. Evergreen really is a huge part of who I am. And I look back on it, and
just think how lucky I was. And it was timing, it was luck, it was hard work. But I look back on what I did,
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and what I accomplished, and it all feels good. So for me, I just am hugely grateful that I had that life.
And I’m 75, but I’m not feeling 75. I don’t know what 75 means. I haven’t quit.
I can’t remember books I read nearly as well. I’m listening, right now, to the book Astoria.
Have you?
Schrager: I know of it.
Taylor: It’s good. But I read it last summer, and then a book group that I’m in chose it, so we’re going to
talk about it next week. And I have a recording of it, and I listened to it coming down here, and I’ll
listen—it’s 10 hours of recording—and I just read it last summer, and it’s like a new book I’m reading
now. [chuckles] So I look at people—I look at like the Supreme Court Justices—and wonder, they’re 80
years old. How are they doing that work? Because I don’t remember. And the thought of reading
student papers, and being up on it now, I can’t imagine doing it.
The thought of doing the work I did as dean, showing up and being responsible, I only knew a
hundred percent. I don’t know how to do anything halfway. And when people used to say, “Well, if
people got better salaries, or if they got some more incentives, they would work harder,” I only know on
or off, and it wouldn’t make any difference. And I worked as hard as I could, whenever I was working.
And I can’t imagine doing that now. Just cannot imagine it. But I guess that’s fortunate, because I’m not
doing it. [laughter]
Schrager: Any thoughts about the changing relationship of women to the college over time? We talked
in the first interview—
Taylor: Yeah, I don’t have any great insight. I personally think one of the strongest times of the college
was when Jane Jervis was President, Barbara [Smith] was Provost, Ruta Fanning was Vice President for
Business, and there were three or four women deans. I mean, the college was run by women, and I
think it was probably one of its healthiest times. [chuckles] So I think there’s a loss when there aren’t
women in leadership positions. I think women are stronger, sort of emotional caregivers of an
institution. And that certainly was true then. And, particularly, Barbara was the big thinker, and was
pushing hard. And I think we lost that when she left.
Other than that, I don’t know. I hear that there are more women faculty than men, but I don’t
know. In the early years, there were eight women in the first class of faculty, out of 50, I think. No,
there weren’t 50 faculty, were there? Maybe. So it’s changed.
I think women have been well regarded, and it hasn’t been a fight for women. But I might be
wrong. I don’t know how all the women feel. There was a strange time—this was maybe just my
impression, maybe not—but that gay women were welcome, and gay men were not. It was sort of the
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notion, well, we can deal with one, but we can’t deal with the other. [laughing] And I don’t know if
that’s true, but I think gay women were hired, and welcomed, and given big responsibilities, without
concern, from early time. And I don’t know about gay men. Do you?
Schrager: Not as prominent in the college, when I first came.
Taylor: Yeah. Now, it’s definite. And the turning point came when the gay student organization was
given space, right across from the President’s office, or across from the Board of Trustees office. That
was the student hangout. And I don’t know if it was done deliberately, but there were comments about
it, and it was fine. The idea was that it was not going to be hidden. And that was probably more than 10
years ago.
Schrager: That is a turning point for gay men, or was it . . .
Taylor: Turning point for gay students. Yeah. And now, it’s—I mean, I don’t know how much of an
issue it is, but it’s certainly public, certainly a conversation that’s going on, to the point that people are—
there’s a controversy about it being overly done. That’s just what I hear.
Schrager: Well, I think there’s a generational awakening . . .
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: . . . for the Millennials, that that’s a level of acceptance . . .
Taylor: Thank heavens. Because, I mean, that did come—well, it came amazingly fast, actually. But
there was tension; there was certainly tension about gay marriage on campus before it became
accepted. Because there’s lots of examples.
The diversity issue that has surprised—not surprised me, but it’s just an observation—is the lack
of outreach to Hispanic students. That just has never seemed to strike people as something to be
assertive about. We’ve had Hispanic faculty—some. But there has been outreach to Native Americans,
there’s been outreach to African Americans, but not Hispanics. And I don’t if that’s just what I see, from
afar, or whether that’s really true. Do you see that?
Schrager: I think you’re right. And I don’t know why.
Taylor: I don’t know why. Well, I mean, we set up the Native American tribal program, with an
outreach. We set up an outreach program, campus, in Tacoma. But it never would have occurred to us
to do something, say, in Yakima.
We’ve hired, not by design but just by happenstance, some Hispanic faculty. I mean, [Cruz
Esquivel], Medardo Delgado], Gil Salcedo were there from early on, and there were other ones that
were. But we’ve hired Native Americans to service Native American students, and we’ve hired African
Americans to serve Tacoma, but we haven’t done that for Hispanics.
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Schrager: There was a Latino/Latina position being hired right now.
Taylor: Oh, okay. That would be the first. I mean, not that that would be the first Latina, but the first
specific . . .
Schrager: . . . designated . . .
Taylor: Yeah. We’ve never done that before. We’ve even, you know, we’ve hired dedicated Japanese.
Schrager: Right. Well, talking about women as administrators, there’s also the program level, and the
way that women faculty are in programs, and where the male faculty are in programs. Of course, you
can’t stereotype this.
Taylor: You mean what programs they teach?
Schrager: No, in terms of the roles that they play. I mean, the way that programs are held together.
When you described the early programs that you were in, it sounded to me, in the early ‘70s, that you
were more attuned to social dynamics, and able to work with students, in some ways. Partly, you were
younger than the male faculty, but also maybe because you were more tuned into students.
Taylor: Yeah, I think that’s true, but it might just have been me. Because I remember when Jin Darney
was teaching something with Bill Bruner, [chuckles] and Bill was designated the “Program Mother”—not
Jin, but Bill—and he told the first-year students—it was a Core program—he says, “Okay, it’s time to
change your sheets.” [laughter] That was Bill. That’s a sort of a stereotypic notion, but the role of the
social cohesion has got to be played by somebody. And I suppose more often it’s played by the woman,
but there was a case where it wasn’t.
For a while, it seemed like I was the one woman and there were three men, or one woman and
two men. And then, at some point, I taught with only women. And I must admit, it was a huge relief. It
was much easier. You know, these stereotypes. . . .but you just could expect a kind of collaboration that
was different when three women were teaching together. It was just easier. And I don’t know why that
is, but it was for me.
And then, I was thinking about the teams. I taught with, well, a huge variety of people—huge
variety—so I didn’t settle on one. I taught with Hiro [Kawasaki] at least three times. I taught with Leo
[Daugherty] probably three or four times. Gordon Beck, I taught with three of four times. Taught with
you twice, didn’t I?
Schrager: Mm-hm.
Taylor: Taught with Setsuko [Tsutsumi] at least twice. I taught with Nancy Allen the first year, and then
I taught with her like 25 years later. And that was important, because when Nancy and I first taught, we
were so green, and we were so insecure, and we were so unhelpful to each other. And when we taught
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the second time, it was like just a totally different experience. And at that point, we were friends. At
the first point, we were isolated.
Schrager: How did you see yourself as a seminar leader, in terms of your style?
Taylor: Well, actually, I read some self-evaluations about that. I think I grew to figuring out a role. It
was never automatic, and never easy. But I went through the stage of being really insecure, being really
directive, to learning how to have some inherent authority that I could display, just by being there, that
encouraged seriousness. But I learned that. I learned to signal to students that it was just unthinkable
not to be prepared, it was just unthinkable not to participate. And I always was the person totally
prepared, and sitting on the edge of the chair, waiting for a serious, exciting conversation to happen.
That was always what I signaled, I think, from the beginning. But I learned how to make that happen. I
don’t know, to this day, what makes that happen, but I got better at triggering it. Does that make
sense?
Schrager: Perfectly.
Taylor: Seminar was always my favorite part. And when Fritz and I taught together, he always laughed,
because I was never as secure as Fritz is about lecturing, or about command of information. I mean,
he’s a master at it, and he could do that. But he isn’t a good seminar leader, because he takes over.
He’s too concerned about making sure the students get it right, and get it all. And you can’t do that. I
mean, if you want them to participate, you just can’t do that.
And so seminar, for me, was the form that I liked. And I learned how to be a better participant
in seminar myself—both with student and faculty seminar. First faculty seminar, I don’t think I said a
word all year, in Human Development. And I think I went through that stage, too, where I then went
through the stage of faculty seminar, where I was demanding about —I would have questions . . . And
it’s sort of the same way I went through the stage about learning about lecturing, where, when I’d
lecture, I’d write it all out, because I was insecure. And then, I’d learn, eventually, to read, and then
trust what I knew, and be able to do it. And the same way with seminar, not to have to be so directive.
So what’s your take on seminar?
Schrager: It’s somewhat similar to yours. It’s a standard that I set, an expectation that I had. And a kind
of natural authority that, I think, developed, for me. Natural in the sense that it became more natural
and less something that I needed to externalize, something more internal.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: And I think our styles are somewhat similar.
Taylor: Are probably pretty similar?
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Schrager: Yeah.
Taylor: When I first taught with Richard Jones, he had this whole thing about natural authority. And I
understood it, but it was hard to do. My first experience teaching was in high school, and the first year
of teaching, the students ran all over me. I was 22, they were 18, and class was American Government
The second year, I had a different look in my eye. And it’s hard to describe that, and when you’re
working with student teachers, which I did for a couple years, you can describe it, and you can try to
help students get it, but it happens through experience, and it happens through confidence. And you
can read all these books about discipline in school, and they don’t help very much. But you get the right
look in your eye . . . And, in some places, it doesn’t matter where you’re teaching, but it doesn’t work.
In seminar, it’s the same thing. It’s just that triggering of seriousness, and of commitment. And,
I think, probably in your case, too, I mean, students recognized that I was interested in them, and cared
about what they were saying.
Schrager: Yeah, being responsible to each student, and having some sense of them, and having a way
for them, an expectation of them, to be involved in some way in seminar. So that became for me, over
the years, finding ways to be sure that each student said something.
Taylor: Yeah.
Schrager: Not only in seminar, but—
Taylor: No, I was good at that. And I can’t imagine being a stand-up lecture-class teacher at a university
that doesn’t know her students. I mean, every program I was ever in, within the first 10 days, I had
conferences with students. And I was pretty well known for knowing the names of every student in the
program within the first month. I mean, you’ll see that in my self-evaluations, or evaluations from other
faculty. They always say, “You’re the one that knows everybody.”
And I do. I’d just go around the room, and I always knew everybody.
End of Part 2

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