TeskeCharlie_20161115_Transcript_pt5.pdf

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Part of Charlie Teske Oral History Interview

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Charlie Teske
Interviewed by Susan Fiksdal
The Evergreen State College oral history project
Interview 5, November 15, 2016

Fiksdal: Okay, Charlie. You wanted to talk to us about the summer of 1970.
Teske: Yeah. And, again, as I mentioned, the order was Don Humphrey moved here first in April, and did
this single action crucial thing, (unifying the three academic divisional budgets), but with Merv
Cadwallader’s and my blessing, and the blessing of the Vice Presidents and President. McCann and the
rest did not want departments, but they were contemplating something like divisions. And so the
budget had been set up so that there would be a budget for each of the three Deans. They would have
their own budget, their own justification to make, and their own turf, and their own equipment funds
and so forth.
And Don, one of the first things he did when he got here, and was put in charge of the budget,
said, “Well, we’re not going to have departments, but we’re not really going to have functioning
divisions.”
And so setting up these individual territories and turfs would just be preparing the ground for
acrimony and wheeling and dealing and so forth. So he unified the budget, and that’s the way it’s been
ever since. And that—when I think of how crucial that was—there are things, Susan, where people have
assumed that we, the Deans and the Planning Faculty, didn’t really know what we were doing, and just
blundered into things. That’s partly true. But there are other things that somebody had —“Boy, that
was really smart.” Well, yeah, we did sort of blunder in. But still, as you look back, there was a kind of
line that we were following very gradually emerging, with these things.
Two of the things that happened after the three of us were finally here together. The one was—
and I don’t know if it was ever clearly written out on paper, but it’s the way things turned out—each of
the three Deans had really three large functions. One of them, even though we were not going to have
divisions, was to take responsibility for thinking about our strength and our offerings in particular areas,
so that I was thinking about humanities and arts; Don was thinking about natural sciences, and what we
would do about mathematics; Merv was thinking about social sciences. Now, he was also charged, when
the time would be right, to be thinking about doing something with public administration, developing
programs there.
So each of the three of us still felt obligations. As I mentioned earlier, we could trade, so that I
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would come with Ed Kormondy, who really belonged in natural sciences, and give him to Don; or
Mark Papworth, and give him to Merv. On the other hand, I would take Sid White in art, whom Don
recommended, and Peter Elbow and Richard Alexander in literature and so forth, whom Merv
recommended. So there was trading off, but we still felt that responsibility to quasi-divisional thinking.
That’s one responsibility.
With that came being the clients for the construction of the facilities to serve those three areas.
So Don became the client for the Lab complex; Merv became the client for the Seminar Building
complex; and I became the client for drama, music, art.
Now, what means “client”? It was really as if each of us was designing and building a house
under the supervision of Jerry Schillinger. “No, that’ll be too expensive. That won’t work,” and so forth.
But we would then meet with—I can talk more about my own area—the staff architect assigned
to me was Bill Phipps. The College had already hired Walker, McGough, Foltz and LyerleDon of Spokane
to be the architectural design firm. So I would explain to Bill Phipps the kind of thing that I wanted, and
even draw out some diagrams or something like that—not the way the shape of things should be, but
how a room should be located so that it could be adjacent to thus-and-such and so-and-so.
Fiksdal: Yeah, you’ve talked about this a little bit.
Teske: Yeah. Right, a functional diagram of that. Bill Phipps would take that and translate that into
architect’s language, and communicate that to the project architect over there in Spokane. He would do
the rough drawing for what he thought we wanted, and give it back to Bill; and then Bill would sit down
to me and explain to me what it was like. And I would say, “Like this”; “Like this”; “No. Here you
misunderstood,” and so forth. And Don was doing the same thing with the Lab Building, and Mev was
doing the same thing with the Seminar Building.
Now, as it turned out—and this may explain to people why things are visually and architecturally
the way they are—of the three of us, Don was the only one who got both phases of his building. There
were supposed to be two phases of Lab. Each of them would have faculty offices and so forth; each of
them would have certain basic spaces. The second, Lab 2, would be more sophisticated, made for more
specialized equipment that Don wanted. But still, they were akin to each other.
Mervyn—and this was one of my trivia questions, How come we call it the Seminar Building
when there are only a few seminar rooms in it?—answer is Merv had his architect design a building that
would serve as a gateway, and faculty offices with a few seminar rooms, in the—well, we didn’t talk
about our first phase yet, but that would be a nice end enclosure to the college square of the plaza and
so forth—and then behind that, going down about three stories into the sloping meadow of daylight
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basement. It would be maybe three stories down. It would go down to the level of the parking lot
behind the Library. That would be the flat level down there. And then, there would be maybe three
more, at least three more, stories up above. And that would be where the seminars would be. And
there would be then, on each floor, there would be a center thing, like the lounges in the Library
Building, for whole-group meetings; so that you could, in effect, get a total of 500 or 600 persons in
coordinated studies programs stacked up in that building. And the entranceway that had the open arch,
that’s where the offices were for the faculty members who were going to teach in main the Seminar
Building.
I, over on the other side of the campus, was responsible for having a building that would have
the intramural stuff—the rehearsal rooms for the orchestra; the rehearsal rooms for smaller musical
groups; the practice rooms and so forth; the faculty office studios, for the music and drama and dance
teachers and so forth; the dance studio. And then, in that area—and my reasoning was that the
audience spaces in there should not be for the wider public. There should be audience spaces because
the students would need audiences in order to develop their craft in music and dance and theater.
Therefore, we would have a small recital hall, and we would have a small experimental theater, which
would also serve for dance, some dance would be done in the recital hall. And then, the whole thing
there would be made to fit onto a 2,000-seat auditorium.
And indeed, we were enough committed to the auditorium that, as I may have mentioned, one
of my trips away from Ohio for a weekend was not here; it was down to Santa Monica where the
acoustics expert, who was designing the auditorium acoustics, I met with him to tell him what I wanted.
And this, of course, Susan, was the big thing that a lot of people don’t think about, but if you don’t
understand it, you don’t understand why this school is the way it is—that we were supposed to go to at
least 12,000 by the early ‘80s. And, of course, then we would need a 2,000-seat auditorium.
There were also plans—Pete Steilberg had come on, and his assignment was to serve as client
for both the intramural Recreation Building that would have the swimming pool, the conditioning rooms,
the racquetball courts, the weight rooms, multipurpose rooms and so forth, where we used to meet, too,
when they would be for dance, exercises, and so forth. And then, that would also be directly connected
to a basketball arena.
Those were the big projects that confronted us in the summer, as we had to get busy right away.
One of the big decisions made that summer was to split all of these into two phases. Don Humphrey,
with the Science Labs, was the only person who got both phases. With Merv’s, the entryway and faculty
office building, with just a few seminar rooms, was what, for many years, was there as the Seminar
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Building. And I got the first phase, Drama, Music, Art 1.
Fiksdal: Yeah. I didn’t know both those buildings were supposed to have additions to them. I knew, of
course, about the College growing.
Teske: Right. Because—well, just as an example, Susan, why is Room 110 in the ComLab, why did that
used to have “Orchestra Rehearsal” in front of it? A lot of the things that I learned was allowed to have
three consultants from Oberlin in music, drama, and visual art to instruct me on this.
And I was sick and tired at Oberlin of observing people having to rehearse in different-sized
spaces from where the thing was going to be put on. I mean, it isn’t too difficult with the symphony.
There will be acoustic problems. But with a drama, if you block people in a space that’s much smaller
than your mainstage, they’re going to get out and wander around and waste a bunch of rehearsals on
that. Whereas there was another show that I was in at Oberlin where the place we rehearsed was
actually larger than the mainstage, and we kept bumping into each other in the final rehersals.
So I wanted a room built into the first phase that was going to serve as the exact duplication of
the mainstage and orchestra. Well, so there it stands.
Fiksdal: Yeah, that’s interesting.
Teske: Okay. And now, of course, because nobody bothered to look at the old drawings, or, since I was
teaching in Tacoma, even to talk to me, you now have this marvelous addition on the parking lot side of
the ComLab that is great: offices, beautiful hallways and so forth; but which, in effect, blocks any attempt
to put the auditorium there. Which we’ll never see anyhow because we’re not going to be that large.
Fiksdal: No, we’re not.
Teske: But, well . . .
Fiksdal: It would have been nice, though, to have bigger events.
Teske: Yeah. The whole story is, when I think of all the things that we did plan that were knocked into
oblivion with this, what I have written about as March Mayhem 1973, the restriction of the College to
2,500, and then maybe further up to 4,000-5,000.
So Merv was left with just the first phase of the Seminar Building. And, as you know, for many
long years, we had the swimming pool and the intramural parts of the Rec Building, but not the gym.
Now, part of the reason for this, Susan—and here, I think, we were—we, led by Jerry Schillinger, Facilities
Director—were actually pretty smart. We figured that the Legislature would understand the need for a
basketball floor. They might not for conditioning rooms, weight rooms, swimming pool. They would
understand the need for an auditorium by the time the school got to be 12,000. But rehearsal rooms
and so forth, they might not.
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Now, the worst thing that could happen—and Merv agreed with this, too, about his part of the
project—would be that you would get Phase 2 and wouldn’t get Phase 1. Suppose he would have gotten
his six-story-high Seminar Building, but without the faculty offices? Suppose I would have gotten the
auditorium, and no rehearsal rooms or dressing rooms, or costume shops or set shops? Suppose Pete
Steilberg would have gotten a basketball court, and no place to dress for the games? So that was what
happened. But that was a fairly big and serious move that took up quite a bit of thought during that
summer.
Fiksdal: I can imagine.
Teske: Assignment #1 of the three Deans were the quasi-divisional responsibilities.
Fiksdal: Hiring and that sort of thing.
Teske: Assignment #2 was the Facilities for these activities. Assignment #3 would be, you might call it,
educational modes. Merv’s baby was what came to be called, a few months later, Coordinated Studies
Programs. Mine, individual contracts, though we did not really—at first, we planned to have no
individual contracts in ’71-’72. Then, well, maybe we can devote one faculty member to individual
contracts. Well, there might be more pressure, so let’s hire another, so there would be two faculty
members. But the idea was to hold off, because the individual contracts were supposed to be for
advanced work.
So Merv, Coordinated Studies; I, contracts. Don—and just in listening again to the beginning of
that crucial planning meeting, Don, already there, is starting to talk about what he calls auto-tutorials;
later came to be called Self-Paced Learning. And Don’s dream was that if you could do it by a computer
and a computer program, don’t take up faculty time to do it.
Again, one of the things that we were all hoping for, but that was really Don’s initiative, was as
much as possible to use our strong audiovisual bent to record lectures, so that if I gave a lecture that I
was pretty pleased about, instead of my giving a lecture like that to a later Program, I could tell the
students on their own to go over to the library and watch, so we could start ahead, and we could
gradually build up. I must say, of the three—and Don certainly felt this—the Self-Paced Learning didn’t
work out as he had hoped. But that was his kind of assignment.
Fiksdal: I remember that. I knew about the SPLL [pronounced splew]—Self-Paced Learning Lab—and I
even created some materials for it. And I think a lot of people did. But reluctantly, because for me, it
harkened back to the way that Richard Alexander and Al Wiedemann were thinking about having
languages be all using some kind of machine, and you could just sit there with it individually, and learn
something; which I kept arguing was just impossible and not correct, because language is not about—
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language is for communication with other people. That’s the whole point of language. We wouldn’t
have language if we didn’t need to communicate orally, or with sign. So, yeah, I remember sitting and
typing these little cards that you could type on, and they would be placed in a machine, and pop up
when you turned it. And then I made recordings to go along with it. I would say the word, and then I
would say how it was used in a sentence, in French. Maybe it’s somewhere in the library in some box.
Teske: Yeah. But at any rate, that’s another big dream that we had, even in that 1970 planning meeting.
Fiksdal: Why do you think that didn’t get off the ground so much, while everything else did? Was there
resistance to it?
Teske: Probably the same reason that people didn’t, with some of my projects, go back and look at the
groundwork that had already been laid. We love to reinvent wheels.
Fiksdal: Yeah, we do.
Teske: But it isn’t just that, Susan. Remember, early on—I don’t know if it got on the recording or not—
but I mentioned that my friends, basically working in the sciences, would invite me into their programs
to give my lecture on romantic nature, and how that fitted in with the whole concept of life scientists.
And, as I told the guys, I said, “I don’t have a lecture. I lecture on that topic, but I’m a jazz
musician. And every lecture is going to be different, and it’s going to be fitted, as much as I can do it,
into your Program, and into your students’ context. So therefore, it’s all very well to talk about ‘Go listen
to Charlie’s lecture on thus-and-such,’ but that isn’t what I would say to your class, because every
context . . .”
So that, I would say, is the biggest.
Fiksdal: And everybody felt that way. That’s a good point.
Teske: Yeah. At any rate—well, Don got so much else accomplished, and later on, I want to devote some
time to what he did in the visual arts.
Fiksdal: Yeah. And I think getting the two phases, and talking about the amount of time it took, that was
probably another reason that he didn’t have time to devote to SPLL.
Teske: Yeah. And he just a marvelous job on those two lab buildings.
Fiksdal: Yeah, they’re incredible buildings.
Teske: But at any rate, we spent quite a bit of time on that. And then, we spent—the three of us, we,
the Deans—spent quite a bit of time thinking about what we knew so far of the personalities of the men
—and they were men—hired for the Planning Faculty.
And then, of course, this big decision that just seemed so obvious, and that is, Merv—again, Don
and I deferred to Mervin on almost—not almost all, but let’s say seven out of 10 points, he would be
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right. And the other, he wasn’t really thinking about putting his thing as the main academic thrust of a
whole institution. But he certainly was right to use Willi Unsoeld to organize a retreat.
One of the things that Merv knew is that we would be working in very close quarters. Now,
when you think of it, Susan—think of it—every single member of that Planning Faculty was no shrinking
violet. [laughter] We wouldn’t have been there if we were. And we were used to—most of us, the
places we came from, we had been trying to push the envelope on our own. We had had to try to be
personal forces for change.
I did it by being the sponsor of the Jazz Club. I did it with early assumptions about the
importance of oral performance, as opposed just to documents. I did it as fostering—it took three years,
but we changed the name from Audiovisual Aids Committee to Audiovisuals, with their own status, not
just to be used—well, as I said a couple times, a lot of English Department people think it’s okay for
students to go to Shakespeare plays, because then they could write better papers about the text. No!
No! You’re putting the priorities in the wrong order! The text is there so you can work toward
understanding the play, as performed. Etcetera. So it was no longer Audiovisual Aids, it was
Audiovisuals.
I also was working with the cooperative houses, which bucked the dining hall-dormitory system,
and was where the radical students and the artists tended to be. Of course, I had no assumption I would
ever get tenure. I doubt, if I’d had any political savvy, I would have—
But at any rate, so that would be all of us, wherever we were, had been doing things like that.
And then you put us all together. You get a bunch of individual people, and then you get them to say,
“Now, cooperate.”
So Merv knew that this, from his experience at San Jose, even with just five Faculty Members, he
knew that this was going to—and we wouldn’t have any students to vent to. We wouldn’t have
audiences.
Fiksdal: That’s right. You’re just all together.
Teske: We were all together, and we were going to be discussing—as you just said—haggling out every
single detail, looking at a whole bunch of alternatives, before finally settling. “No, we’re going this way.
Now, if we’re going this way, then we need to go do this. Then we need to do that.”
So it would be very intense, and therefore, Willi Unsoeld was going to get us all bound together
by taking us out, for several days, into the wilderness, and putting us through exercises together.
Fiksdal: In the wilderness? You went into the wilderness, Charlie? [laughing]
Teske: It’s part of my Notes to the Future Historian of Evergreen . . .
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Fiksdal: Great.
Teske: . . . of how the Evergreen Planning Faculty got onto NBC Television. And so, it’s there. I
encourage people to look at it. [laughter]
But can you imagine? Here I am—to me, back in Pennsylvania, our Scout camp was up against
the beautiful Delaware Water Gap. The ridges are 1,400 feet high. And I thought that walking up nice,
wide trails to the top of a 1,400 ridge was sort of mountain climbing. The Poconos, which I thought of as
mountains, Mount Pocono, the highest point, isn’t as high as Capitol Peak. That’s what I thought—
I love what Mark Papworth said when I recruited him. He just wanted to get out here, and I said,
“Are you a mountain climber, Mark?”
He said, “No, I’m a mountain walker. If I have to climb it, I’m not going. If I can walk it, I will.”
At any rate, I was just sort of a beginning mountain walker. And then my mother, in February, is
sitting back in eastern Pennsylvania, watching this NBC show [laughing] that I warned them about, with
Hugh Downs as narrator. And it showed me, on a couple things. And the NBC cameraman had actually
put the cameras a little bit tilted, so it made what we were doing look even . . .
Fiksdal: . . . even harder.
Teske: Yeah. And my mother is sitting back there saying, “He can’t do that! He can’t do that!” [laughter]
And then, for circumstances I mentioned, we’d forgotten about it. And there’s a whole harum-scarum
tale about why we now have that in the Archives.
Fiksdal: I’m glad we do.
Teske: We were in there for only about three or four minutes, but the first national mention of The
Evergreen State College came on that. And we got viewers, who were sharp enough—and this is before
videotape or VHS cartridges or anything like that—that they were watching, and we got some mail about
why did we see no women?
Fiksdal: Well . . . [chuckles]
Teske: In that first couple years, if you wanted to get in here, you had to write an essay, which included
how you first found about the school. And we got a bunch of people from around the country whose
first acquaintance with Evergreen was to see us as part of the Hugh Downs wilderness special.
Fiksdal: Students saw that and wanted to come. Well, for heaven’s sakes.
Teske: Yeah. Unfortunately, Susan, that cannot be—part of the deal with the NBC Archives is it can’t be
shown ever, for profit, and it can’t be really be shown to a full audience. So as long as we—but you can,
you know, if you ask Randy, you could see that. It’s sort of fun to see us back there.
Fiksdal: Yeah, it’d be fun to see it.
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Teske: So we did that, and it turned out to be really crucial.
Fiksdal: Were you on Mount Rainier? Where were you?
Teske: No. We asked Willi to find—no, Willi—okay, we’re getting into third week of September. The
contracts started September 15. And so it was a little bit touchy about how early rains might start, so
Willi started asking around about a rain shadow. So we went up on the east side of the Cascades, right
below Mount Stuart. And it involved going on I-90, over Snoqualmie Pass to Cle Elum; and then turning
left, and going up as if we were going to Blewit Pass. And then, after about 12, 14 miles, you turn left
and go back into the Cascades. And there’s a marvelous campground where we camped.
And, of course, [laughing] as I tell in the story, Willi put us through some exercises in the
afternoon, while the people he had recruited to cook were making our stew and so forth. So it got dark
fairly early in September, and we were having our supper, and we were standing around with our cups of
coffee and smoking. And all of a sudden, here along the gravel road, came these headlights. And our
parking area was, oh, about from here over to the house of the daughter and stepdaughter and son-inlaw back there.
And we were here, and the car was pulled in there. And this voice: “Is Willi Unsoeld there?”
[deep voice]
And Willi said, “Will they never leave me alone?”
At any rate, this was a team. Earth Day had been in the spring of ’70, and it was starting to heat
up with things about the environment. And the team had been out, and they had all these shots of
beautiful mountains and tall trees and waterfalls and so forth. And they needed some people.
Fiksdal: I see.
Teske: And the producer wanted to—the director wanted to set it up so that there could be some sort of
conflict between people representing mining industry, tourist industry and so forth, who would want to
exploit the wilderness. And he needed somebody who was going to be a spokesperson for the
wilderness, and somebody said, “The person you want is Willi Unsoeld.”
Fiksdal: So they tracked him down, huh? [laughing]
Teske: Yeah. “Where is he?” “Ask at Oregon State. They would know.”
So I don’t know if they drove from California into Corvallis. At any rate, they asked Oregon State,
and Oregon State said, “No, no, no. He’s moved. He’s now at a brand-new college in Washington State.”
So they came up I-5 in the mid-afternoon. They turned in. They finally found Evergreen, which
was not the easiest thing in the world. [laughing] They finally found our prefab buildings. [Sigh] “Is
Willi Unsoeld here?”
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“No.”
“Oh, geez.”
“Oh, no, no. He’s out with our Planning Faculty on a wilderness exercise in the Cascades.”
Free actors. So you can imagine what the director thought when he was told, “No, he’s not
here.” [laughing]
“Yeah. He’s out with a bunch of”—Perfect. And that’s why these guys—
So the way Willi did it, he was down there talking to these people for about a half-hour. And we
were out there: “What is he doing?”
And Willi came back sort of [low sigh]. “Guys, when you get up out of the tents in the morning,
it’d be a good idea to have some trousers on, because an NBC camera crew is going to be here.”
“What?”
At any rate, so that was really a memorable experience. And in case people doubt that, we do
have the tape of that.
Fiksdal: So did the retreat work? I mean, did that help you come together?
Teske: I am sure it did. I am sure it did, because there were things later—okay, one of the things that
Willi had us do was rappel. That was the only time in my life I’ve ever done it. And this is a little bit
scary, if you’ve never done it.
Fiksdal: Yeah, I can imagine.
Teske: Going over something. I almost got the feeling going down—whee!—and went down too far.
And we weren’t hitting solid ground at the bottom. We would hit a ledge. And I was almost running out
of rope and didn’t know it. But at any rate, I think there was one member of the Planning Faculty that
didn’t do it. My attitude, Susan, was that if I’m going to be a Dean, you know, I’ve got to do it.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Teske: I don’t care whether I want it or not. It didn’t help at all, though, that Willi would be up there on
top, as I wrote, singing the equivalent of “15 Men on a Dead Man’s Chest.” Except that it’s about
breaking bones, and bodies hurtling through space. [laughter] You talk about the Galgenhumor, the
gallows humor. At any rate, so that’s how we started our Planning Faculty.
Fiksdal: Nice.
Teske: But I’m sure when things got really tough later on . . .
Fiksdal: That’s very significant.
Teske: . . . it was hanging around. Because just think of these personalities, all banging against each
other. And, of course, it meant so much. All of us, one way or another, had cut ties with other—we were
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going into the unknown together. And so it—yeah, I think that was really important.
Now, another big issue, main issue, or answer to the question, “Why are we still here?” I think
one of the reasons is that we, the Deans, with the approval of Dave Barry—on things like this, he pretty
much gave us our head. He did not micromanage. He delegated, and that was it. And McCann was also
an excellent delegator. “I want to have these results. Tell me how it’s going, but otherwise, you do it.”
And, of course, with the building, as I said in writing about it—it’s, again, in the Notes for the
Future Historian, and also on a podcast that I made about the building—it wasn’t that the other Deans
and Vice Presidents didn’t care about my building. They didn’t have any time. So, there I was with my
architect, with Schillinger riding the top gun.
“How’s it going?”
“Yeah, it’s going.”
“Okay, fine. Let me know how it’s going.”
That’d be pretty much it. So we did have a lot of say on why things would be as they turned out
to be.
Okay. Very important point here, I think. Some of the new alternative institutions, which were
founded in the 1960s, were founded by academic thinkers who had written out too much, and arrived
too much at more than a framework, but a blueprint, before they actually started working on the school.
And one of the hallmarks here is that it wasn’t just aims, goals, some exclusions, the way McCann put it,
but it was a full-fledged academic policy plan for the school. And only after that did people start thinking
about what would actually be taught and learned day by day.
We did it the other way around. The very first thing that the Planning Faculty did, we first—
Mervin, Don and I sort of defined our vision of the kinds of things that the theme teams could be/should
be doing. And then, after a couple weeks of just housekeeping, getting things together, the faculty
members set out on their main duty of reading, talking to each other, and coming up with plans for
eight, nine, ten Programs.
Now, during that time, we still kept having meetings, part of which was to bring people up to
speed with the thinking that had gone in so far to the planning of the school. But then, it was something
else; and I believe this is the kind of memory—because I don’t think it’s on paper anywhere—that is
otherwise likely to be forgotten. Merv felt that it was going to be difficult for faculty members, who
were used to lecture discussion, where the teacher stands up and gets individual questions from the
students, which often began with, “Sir do you think . . .?” “Well, yeah. Maybe, maybe not. You know?”
And I was so happy back at Oberlin when, in just a few times, instead of all the questions being
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directed at me, the students started arguing with each other. And I thought that was just great.
But that wasn’t what the lecture discussion thing was based on.
So, how do you learn to do the kind of seminar Merv had in mind? You hold seminars. How do
you do that? Merv divided us into three schools. Merv assigned the names of three great seminal
thinkers.
Don was the head of the Alfred North Whitehead School. The great mathematician, philosopher
of science, who is the founder of what’s called process philosophy, which is used now very much for
ecology and things like that. But at any rate, I recall reading his Adventures of Ideas, as sort of more
general reading that a bright undergraduate, or ambitious undergraduate, might read.
Merv’s school was the Arthur O. Lovejoy School. Lovejoy’s big work is his magisterial, historical
treatment of The Great Chain of Being. And he really founded, in the U.S., the discipline called the
history of ideas. And he founded the Journal of the History of Ideas, where you take a discrete idea,
which is still loaded with all sorts of significance, such as romanticism, or free will versus determinism,
and so forth. And you then press, press, press on that.
The way that I think really that Mortimer Adler has the companion volume for the Chicago Great
Books set up, it’s all by big themes like that—freedom of thought and so forth. Where did this idea come
from? Where did this idea come from? Where did this idea come from? Deism—God is divine
watchmaker. God is a physicist. Where did these come from? That was Lovejoy.
And mine was the John Amos Comenius School. Jan Amos Komensky. I knew only a little bit
about him then. But, as Lilo and I have done much more study of the Moravians and their background,
I’ve come to realize the tremendous importance of Comenius. He’s even been called the “father of
modern education.” He was born 1592. Lived into a large part of the 17th century. He set up
educational programs in this time of Enlightenment. He was brought to Sweden, brought to Poland, to
set up an educational system. He was brought to England, but some of that got involved in political stuff.
He never came to the colonies, but he was actually considered for appointment as President of Harvard
College.
Of course, he did all his writing in learned Latin, learned ,Late Latin and so forth. But—
tremendously important—first person to believe in the idea of using the printing press for woodcut
illustrations, so that books dealing with a subject would have illustrations to teach children about that.
Fiksdal: Illustrations? Imagine that.
Teske: So at any rate, we had these three schools. I doubt if Richard Alexander and Richard Brian will
remember even the names of the schools, but that’s the way Merv, Don and I—I think we eventually
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called them Alpha, Beta, Gamma. It got easier for the teachers.
Now, what did we do? We read major texts. As I recall, we took about two weeks on each.
Joseph Tussman’s Experiment at Berkley. Alexander Meiklejohn’s Education Between Two Worlds. [John]
Dewey . . . it’s Education and Democracy or something. At any rate, it has “democracy” in the title.
[Transcriber found Democracy and Education.] Richard Alexander—Stephen Pepper’s World Hypotheses.
Oh, I really dug on that.
So there would be six faculty members and a Planning Dean. And we would get together usually
for two, two-hour sessions a week to haggle about these major books.
Fiksdal: So you would seminar?
Teske: We would seminar. So we got used to the idea of instead of saying, “I’m an English teacher. Do
not bother me with anything that is not English literature or language,” that here we were, as human
beings, bringing our specialties, but holding large discussions. Some heat. No ill will at all. But at any
rate, we were getting ready to do the job.
And then it was, of course, during this time—no, we didn’t invite the focus groups in until after
the programs. I think that would have been in November, maybe even early Dec-, no I guess it was midNovember before Thanksgiving break. We had this great day when the Planning Faculty members
showed up with their program designs. And since there were 18—I don’t know if Fred Tabbutt was with
us the whole time. I don’t think so.
Fiksdal: He was half-time in that year.
Teske: Yeah.
Fiksdal: He must have still held his position at Reed.
Teske: At Reed, yeah. We had 19 positions, and Fred was sort of half-time in there, and six faculty
members and a Dean in each of these groups. So Jack Webb was the one who was going to be in
contracts, so he was working with me in planning what the parameters would be for doing contracts.
And again, we had really no guidance. Now, Oberlin had had a program called Senior Scholar,
and Yale had had a program, College Scholar. At Harvard, it was Scholar of the House. But, first of all,
Susan, you had to demonstrate that you were excellent in all of the regular things before they let you do
it. That’s point one. Point two, you had to go through so much paperwork to justify, as a junior, asking
for this status. You almost had to have your project done in order to be allowed to do it. And nobody
asks, “Will there be students for whom it will be better to be doing individual work?” And certainly, as
full-time, for a whole lot of people to be doing. Wow.
So Jack Webb and I were sort of on our own. We ended up talking to each other about planning
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for that. But otherwise, you see, there were enough faculty members to go around that each of the firstyear programs had two Planning Faculty members who had worked out, between themselves, what was
going to be offered. And I still recall, Susan—you would have loved this—Sid White and Byron Youtz had
gotten together on what turned out to be this great program, “Space, Time and Form” that would
combine math and scientific principles and art principles.
So the way they did it, when they made their presentation, we had—oh, yeah. The two planners
would come in and, at length, try to describe and sell their Program to the rest of us, so that we would all
know what was going on. They came in with the stereotype. Sid came in carrying a slide rule, and Byron
came in with a beret and a fake mustache and an artist’s smock. That was the sort of spirit.

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