TeskeCharlie_20170629Part8_Transcript.pdf

Media

Part of Charlie Teske Oral History Interview

extracted text

Charlie Teske
Interviewed by Susan Fiksdal
The Evergreen State College oral history project
June 29, 2017
FINAL

Fiksdal: Okay, Charlie. This is our last interview. We have a lot to say. [laughing]
Teske: Yeah. And whereas before, Susan, I tried hard to find transitions to try to make things as flowing
as possible, today, because there are a bunch of things that we may have touched upon before where I’d
like to see a bit more, and some things we neglected talking about. So, this is going to be somewhat
herky-jerky because we’ll simply say—you know, I’ll ask you, “Do you want to hear any more about this?”
And if you say, “No,” then we move to a new topic.
Okay, one of the things under the headings of already discussed, but either lost due to technical
problems, or things to underscore about the planning year, which was September 15, 1970 through to
June 30, 1971. We’re 18 of us—planning faculty members, three academic deans and the academic vice
president—we were the academic group working on the whole academic program.
Okay, one of the things that I think is very important, and one of the reasons why Evergreen
worked at all, is that we did things in the right order. There were a number of colleges—among them,
our dear friends at Hampshire College in Massachusetts—in Hampshire, not only did they have a long
planning time, and some strong educational theoreticians working—the Hampshire planners wrote a
book. Before they built the school and hired a faculty, they wrote a book about what their education
was going to be like.
And, of course, what happened is [when] they hired the faculty, and actually started working
with students, they found that their book did not fit what was actually going on. Okay. What we did the
very first thing, after our wilderness experience—which I describe in my—I’ll speak a little bit more about
this later.
Fiksdal: But you did talk about it in the tape.
Teske: Yeah, in the “Notes to a Future Historian.” After we got back from that, the first order of business
was to start planning the first coordinated studies programs. But, now, let me add—we talked a little bit
about this before—about the fact that Merv, Don and I—and it was mainly Merv’s doing—organized the
planning faculty into three groups, each led by a dean, that we called the various schools. There was the
Alfred North Whitehead School, the A. O. Lovejoy School, and I had the John Amos Comenius School.
2

And we started, because Mervin knew from experience that most faculty members themselves,
unless they’re fresh out of graduate school, had forgotten how to hold seminars, and how be behave in
seminars. [He is pounding his fist on the table throughout.] And so, we had to have book seminars,
sometimes one two-hour session a week, sometimes two two-hour sessions a week. And what we
worked on were, at first, the educational philosophy materials—Joseph Tussman’s experiment at
Berkeley; Alexander Meiklejohn’s Education Between Two Worlds; some of the John Dewey things on
education. And then, we branched out doing other sort of large-vision, philosophical works about
culture. But, of learning how to do seminars when you’re not—when, you know, you’ve been in faculty
department meetings, and you may lead student seminars, but you have not been doing it yourself.
So, but the other order of business was to be working up the programs for the first year. And
that was done, I think, pretty much around Thanksgiving-early December that we had those. And that
enabled me, as editor, to get together the academic section of the first catalog, so that we could be
publishing those.
All right. Only after we had the actual programs in mind that we would be running—we then, of
course, we now included the planning faculty—we knew what kinds of people to recruit. We looked at,
okay, if we’re going to do this program, we’re going to need a so-and-so. But now, that person should
also be adaptable enough that the person would be able to serve later on.
Okay. So then, we started having these heavy-duty discussions about educational policy. And, as
you might imagine, what group discussions we had, the work on the programs was mainly small, two
men—and they were men, all men—two men or one person asking others for advice. But that was a
very supportive time, trying to come up with ideas, blue-skying, you know, trying to get the [hire the
much? 00:05:06]. When you get into discussing educational policy—“Now, are we going to do it this way
or that way? And how are we going to organize ourselves? And what power will the coordinator have?”
And so forth—that’s ripe for argument.
And we would do that. And, although Provost [Dave] Barry came in a bit, Merv, Don and I were
there almost all the time, unless we were out trying to raise money; or, in certain cases, do the first
recruiting. We would go to LA, San Francisco—several times, I was in Chicago, Cleveland, D.C. and New
York City—and we would deliberately get hotel rooms or motel rooms near a transportation hub. And
so, the faculty—the would-be Evergreen faculty members—would pay their own way to come to hold
recruiting sessions with us.
And I remember [chuckles] the day in New York, when I first talked to Nancy Allen and to Betty
Estes, I had had an impacted wisdom tooth. But I had a terrible abscess, and I had taken a Polaris—I’d
2

put in a Polaris pad, which drains the gum, but then you get your cheek all swollen.
Fiksdal: Oh, no!
Teske: And that was hurting me enough that I had a bottle of sherry that I was continually drinking.
[laughter] So, I’m sitting in the Commodore Hotel, you know, and Hiro and Nancy, and later in the day
Betty, coming in. “God, is that some sort of growth?” You know? “Should I say anything?”
At any rate, other than trips like that, you know, we were working every day along with the
faculty. And Barry, the Provost, did not come to that many of the meetings, but McCann came quite
often to sit in. But that’s when we made these pretty much collective decisions about no tenure, no
ranks, etc. But it seems so easy to say that now, Susan, but there was a whole lot of serious discussion
going on.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Teske: And, of course, one of the ironies that I notice, there are some things that we did that the faculty
just—the later people, faculty and students, later faculty—assumed, well, it just sort of happened. No,
we’re the result of very careful thought. And there were other things that happened. Well, did we get
on tape the business about why there were no classes on Wednesdays?
Fiksdal: Yeah, we did talk about it.
Teske: Okay, then we now have that. It turned out, you know, here was this thought of great planning.
We’d allow a day in the middle of the week when we had enough space so the students could revise
papers, and maybe we could have two different short readings in the week rather than one big reading,
and so forth. And the answer, of course, was Merv Cadwallader wanted to be able to go skiing in the
middle of the week. [laughter] But at any rate, this was intense.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Teske: And, of course, one of the things that Charles McCann—Irish, bald, very, very fair skin—and he’d
be there. And as we’d be talking about contracts, and about—and he, of course, was the big one—“no
requirements”—he said, “You mean to tell me”—for some reason, it was ceramics. That was his
bugaboo. “Do you mean to tell me a student could go through here for four years and do only
ceramics?” [pounding on table] And Mervin and, I think, I chimed in and said, “Well, if that person
could find a program, and then could find sponsors who really thought that that would be what the
student ought to be doing.” You know?
I mean, think about what life would be like if Leo Daugherty had told Matt Groening, “No, you
don’t do any more cartooning. Uh-uh. No, we’re going to cut that out. No more credit for cartooning.”
As I say, the world would be quite a bit different.
2

All right. So, Charlie said, “You mean that—?” We said, “Charlie, yes, if that person can talk
faculty members into this is the right thing to do.” Charlie turned around and faced the wall, and we
were all quiet, and the red started at the base of the neck, and went up and all around the bald head.
And sometimes when he would be doing this, he had a cigar, and there would be puffs of smoke coming
out. It took about two minutes, Susan. And then finally, Charlie turned around and looked at us and
said, “All right.” So, that was what happened.
Fiksdal: So, that was—you could see his thinking process.
Teske: Yeah.
Fiksdal: Whereas the rest of you had been thinking about it and talking about it.
Teske: Yeah.
Fiksdal: Yeah, because he just popped in sometimes. I see.
Teske: Yeah. So, he would get results. Now, there was one time—it must have been about three or four
weeks after this contretemps about the ceramics—Charlie was away for about four days or something,
and we, the planning faculty, started cooking up this idea. Well, maybe—we kept thinking, at that time,
about four-year students, you know, freshmen through senior. We weren’t thinking about a large
number of transfers or anything like that. Well, maybe what we ought to do, if we really do believe that
individual contracts are good, and we believe the coordinated studies are good, maybe, as a
requirement, we should say that a student earn at least one-third of his or her Evergreen credit through
interdisciplinary, team-taught programs, and at least one-third through contracts.
And Charlie came back on a Friday, and we tried it on him. It lasted about 15 minutes. Charlie
looked at us and said, “You people talked me into no requirements, and no requirements means no
requirements.” Bam! End of that particular story. [laughter]
But now one, to keep going on with Charlie, he found out—after it would have been about the
first full year of school being open to students—he heard through the grapevine that when he would
appear before legislative hearings that the legislators would deliberately try to nettle him, because they
wanted to see his complexion turn red. Now, once he heard that, he started on a program of whenever
he was due on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday to testify before a House or Senate committee, he would
go out sailing over the weekend, and would get a windburn and sunburn, so they couldn’t make him
change colors. [laughter] You know?
And another thing, too, we started, I think, doing that even before we were open to students.
But when Charlie had to appear before, let’s say, the Senate Ways and Means, or Senate Higher
Education Committee—okay—we would meet. Let’s say he was due to testify on a Tuesday, he would
2

invite the deans and directors over to his house on Monday night. And he would take the various items
that were in our budget, or whatever it was we were asking for—a building or something like that—and
he would press us individually to the wall to make us defend what it was we were asking for in that
budget, until he got—he forced us to give him the ammunition so that he could do a good job.
And there would be a certain moment, and after a while—it wasn’t Charlie who said it, it would
be one of us—where we sort of figured, all right, he’s briefed. And instead of waiting for him to ask us a
question—[deep voice]—“President McCann, how can you justify thus and such and so and so?” And
Charlie would automatically say, “Well, Senator, thus and thus.” And so, it came from him pushing us to
the wall that we would then push him to the wall . . .
Fiksdal: Nice, yeah.
Teske: . . . to make sure that he knew.
Fiksdal: Because then, you could verify. Yeah.
Teske: Yeah. And, as I say in my piece about—was it “Little Drops of Credit, Little Drops of Cash”?—that
once you briefed Charlie, he was tremendously retentive. He might bring you along, in case he needed
information. But there was only one time I would go. Dan Evans changed all of that. When Charlie was
there, I don’t think Merv ever went to the Hill, but Don Humphrey, when he was in the dean’s office, and
I, and, I think, Byron, when he was in the—we would go along for the hearings. Just moral support, you
know, friendly face, but if—the only time that I spoke out, it was in the Evans’s legislative hearing, where
Evans was trying to press us to the wall, because he was then going to turn around and try to sell it to
the Legislature. Okay.
And one of his staff members started talking about “Well, these courses, this course does thus
and such, and this course does so and so.” And I thought to myself, oh my god, he isn’t thinking. We’ve
sent him the stuff. He thinks we have a multi-four-or-five-course-at-the-same-time school. And I finally
put up my hand.
And McCann said, “Well, Dean Teske has something to say. What is it?” And I looked at the staff
member and I said, “Excuse me. You’re talking as if we’re talking about individual courses. We are not.
Remember that a program like this will be a student’s full-time activity, the equivalent of four or five
courses elsewhere.” “Oh.” Okay. So, that’s the only time that I spoke up in all that time.
But at any rate, Charlie was very adept at that kind of thing. Now, he could drive people nuts out
here by not being willing to come down and say, “Yes, yes, no,” or something like that. If he knew what
he wanted, or what he didn’t want, then you had it right away. But if he needed to make up his mind, he
would let you go ahead.
2

Indeed, when he was retiring from the presidency and was off to Yale for two years in the School
of Management, we had a roast for him. And Dick Nichols, the PR man, said, “Isn’t it interesting that the
School of Management that President McCann, after he’s resigning, is going to learn what he should
have known when he took the job.”
And what I did—this was close enough to Watergate that people still thought about tape systems
in offices, and I said, “Well, unbeknownst to Charles McCann, there was a tape system working in his
office. And I now bring to you a heated exchange and a telephone call between Charlie and Mark
Levinsky.” And I turned it on, and, of course, it was a blank cartridge. And after about 45 seconds
[laughing] people got the . . .
And I even wrote a parody meeting Larry Stenberg, and how he’s all trembling and everything.
He’s coming out of McCann’s office. Let’s see . . .
In all the groves of academe
No tougher task you’ll find.
No more exacting enterprise
Than changing Charlie’s mind.
And I saw Larry Stenberg staggering out. His eyes were red, he was trembling. I said, “Larry, what’s
wrong?” And this was what he said. “I’ve been in there a half an hour of changing Charlie’s mind.”
[NOTE: Transcriber could not determine whether this last was part of the rhyme that came before.]
At any rate, that was sort of the dynamics, you know, that were going on then.
Fiksdal: Laughing.
Teske: Okay. So, the point is, we devised the programs first, and then we devised the policies to fit the
programs. And then, we went from there to trying to get the, oh, the whole business of living
conditions, social contract and so forth that would foster this. But the point is, we started with the
concrete educational program planning first, and then went to the larger questions of policy and polity
and so forth. Okay.
Fiksdal: So, just one more point about that. So, was that because some of you knew about the former
failed colleges, and you decided to do it differently?
Teske: Yes, yes. Very good point, Susan. Remember—I don’t know if I said this before—but the
planning faculty, and in their own way, the deans, came out of different backgrounds. Merv represented
people who had been out trying to innovate and bore scars because of it. He was able to be successful
at San Jose. That led him to be an administrator at Old Westbury. And Old Westbury collapsed, and out
of that, we got Byron Youtz and Larry Eickstaedt and Bob [Solis? 00:19:57], who had been with Merv
2

before, and came to the planning faculty.
So, there, if we were trying to recruit them, we would say, “Look, it can still work. Don’t give up,
it can still work.” But that was money in the bank. Will Humphreys, later Charlie Lyons and so forth, we
had a bunch of people who had been at New College at the original Old Westbury at the [unintelligible
00:20:22]. Jack Webb had been at Prescott. Prescott failed. And so these were people who had to be
talked into “It can still work. Don’t lose faith.”
Fiksdal: I see, yeah.
Teske: Then, there would be other people, like me, who had had a relatively good time at liberal arts
colleges or something like that. And we would say, “Oh, boy, just let us try this. This’ll be grand.”
And the other recruiting strategy was “Wait a minute. It’s not going to be as easy as you think.
You’re going to have this problem, you’re going to have that problem.”
And again, you see, Merv and Don both had state school backgrounds. I was all private school
background. So, at any rate, we did have this balance, and you could go around the faculty and what
they would be bringing. In the one case, too much hope. [chuckles] On the other case, despair, but
we’re willing to give it another chance.
Okay. One of the things that I don’t think should get lost. Mervin was generally known as the
intellectual leader, the one who had actually run successfully the team-taught, full-time, interdisciplinary
programs, and so Don and I very definitely deferred to him. Sometimes we deferred to him and we
shouldn’t have. One issue was Merv did not want women on the planning faculty. He thought that the
presence of one or two women on that planning faculty would cause all sorts of morale problems, and
he did not want it. I don’t know what he expected; that it would be a king-of-the-hill, me-Tarzan-youJane kind of environment. So, at any rate, we shouldn’t have done that. We should not have followed
that. That was not my, you know, background, certainly not at Oberlin College as a coed school.
Okay. Another place where perhaps—well, not perhaps—we should not have listened was this.
We did not, in that planning year, figure out a way to tell somebody to go down the road. And one of the
reasons we didn’t, for Merv it was a non-problem, because he had run his successful programs as small,
ancillary programs, right next to a big, conventional apparatus. And if you, Susan, came over from the
French Department or the Linguistics Department to teach in our wing—you know, the lunatic fringe or
something like that—you’d come over to teach, and you wouldn’t make it there. You had your
department to go back to, and they’d probably “Welcome home, Susan. You’ve finally come to your
senses.” You know? Whereas here, this was it. You didn’t have any place to go to.
Fiksdal: It was the loss of a job, yeah.
2

Teske: And Merv’s feeling was, well—and, of course, at that time, at the very beginning, Susan, it was a
seller’s market still for faculty.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Teske: We were still enough into the Baby Boom that there were lots of jobs. But still, we got this huge
number of applications, even though these were not people saying, “A job, a job, any job.” You know?
Okay. So Merv just felt, well, if a person weren’t cutting it, he or she simply wouldn’t want to stay.
Fiksdal: Oh, right.
Teske: So, it was a non-problem. So, when we ran into our first couple situations, where we thought
that the person had to go down the road but the person didn’t think so, we did not have an apparatus
set up to handle that. Okay, so there were mistakes there.
But Don, of course, the first big thing that he did was to unify the budget.
Fiksdal: Yeah, you’ve talked about that, too.
Teske: Yeah. And then later on—now, this is, in a way, not exactly painful, but a bit embarrassing for me
to talk about—as Dean of Humanities and Arts, I was responsible for developing—even though we did
not formally organize with budgets and territory—formally organized divisions—I still was responsible for
fostering work in the humanities and arts. Now, my background is all performing arts—acting, playing,
singing. Okay?
Don had a sideline—I don’t know how much work he himself did—in visual arts. He was very,
very strongly interested. And he was the one who got Sid White [unintelligible 00:25:03] Sid White and
so forth. And so, as we were starting to work, we ran into this problem. And I’ll say something again
about both problems that I’ve had.
Okay, first of all, as Dean of Humanities, I was responsible for fostering work in foreign
languages. And most foreign language departments around the country are subsidized by requirements.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Teske: That’s why they have their faculty members and so forth. We weren’t going to have
requirements. We did not know what languages we were going to need for our various programs, and
we didn’t have any idea at first of whom to hire, and how many, and what would be the demand for
languages in the absence of distribution requirements?
And so, the three—I proposed my initiative, but the others agreed with me, that we would put
off hiring more than a skeleton crew of foreign language people until we found out if there was a
demand, and then what the demand was for.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
2

Teske: All right. That’s why you were pressed into such important service when I got Andrew Hanfman
as coordinator, to be a tutor. Okay? And, of course, what happened, Susan, is—and I’ve written about
this in my piece called “March Mayhem”—that we, the deans—well, I initiated with the agreement of
the other people—we thought, look, the way we’re going to grow to be 12,000 people in the early
1980s, we’re going to grow by 35—we’ll have 35 or 100 new—yeah, 35 or 50 new faculty members at
least every year. So, we can wait until we find out what we need in foreign languages, and then hire a
whole bunch of people. Okay?
With the arts, it was quite different. You bring on visual artists, they need studio space. They
need furnaces for their ceramics; if they’re metal shop artists. You need printmaking facilities. You bring
in performers and you need practice rooms; you need choral rehearsal spaces and so forth. We didn’t
have those. And so, again, bring on a skeleton crew, just enough to get us started. Try to get the art
spaces. Then, when we get the spaces, we will have 35 to 50 new faculty members every year, so we can
hire a whole lot.
When the “March Mayhem” occurs in 1973, and a lid is put on our enrollment—you’ve got to
stay the way you are—there I was, and I thought it was completely rational, the decisions, these
decisions, but there we were with just so few language teachers, and so few people in the arts. Okay.
And then, the building that had first been—I was supposed to be working for two buildings at
the time when people thought there would be departments. One was a performing arts building, the
other was a visual arts building. The visual arts building, you lived with part of this architect’s dream.
That nice, curved dormitory at Western?
Fiksdal: Mm-hm.
Teske: The architect of that was the one who did the preliminary design for a fine arts building that was
supposed to be right across from where the Communications Lab is now.
Fiksdal: Oh, wow.
Teske: The building was not well thought out. Politically, we saw no possibility of getting it. I still don’t
understand. The man did a good job with the Western dormitory, but he had his painting studios on the
first floor, and his welding and ceramic and sculpture stuff on the third floor. No! [laughing]
Fiksdal: All that heavy equipment!
Teske: Exactly! [laughter] All right. So, one of the things that—well, Sid White and I and a couple
others on the planning faculty took the initiative. We scuttled that visual arts building. Instead, I put in
that large room on the third floor of the Comm Lab that has sloping, vinyl floors with drains. It has space
for big artistic portfolios. And, if you recall, has three faculty offices on each side, which can be opened
2

both ways and can be turned into ancillary paintings studios.
Fiksdal: Oh, nice.
Teske: And I fought Jerry Schillinger tooth and nail to get skylights.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Teske: Jerry was not—the facilities planner—he was having such problems with the huge library roof
leaking that when I came around and, as client, said I wanted skylights, he [makes a grumbling noise]. I
finally talked to him into it. Guess which roof did not leak?
Fiksdal: That one.
Teske: My building, yeah. But, at any rate. So, see, what I was hoping—and originally that building was
called Drama, Music, Art Phase 1—and I was hoping we did have one program that you could have your
drama and music and painting and some sculpture going on all in the building. Well, but that was not
going to be enough, and the students wanted more work. We even—I don’t know if I mentioned this
before—we had the expedient of renting a second floor big, open space in a building downtown . . .
Fiksdal: Oh.
Teske: . . . and turning that into our art studio. But then, we had to arrange transportation for the
students. And, because a lot of them wanted to use it at nights, we had to get escort services. It did not
work. So we said, “Wait a minute. We’re not going to hire any more artists until we get the building.”
All right.
So then, I got—finally, pushing and shoving—got my building in ’74. But the price—inflation had
worked—the total building—construction maximum and allowable construction costs and equipment—
was supposed to be $6.5 million. We were assuming that we’d get the building for $5.5 million, and we’d
have a million dollars left for equipment. As it turned out, we had about $400,000 left for equipment.
Fiksdal: Oh, dear.
Teske: And we needed desperately a lot of equipment. Don, by that time, had already gotten his Lab
Phase 1, and Lab Phase 2 was approved. Don did two big things. With the Lab buildings, he put
printmaking studios; I don’t know about welding, but ceramic studios to begin with. Then, some of the
rooms, especially ground-floor rooms in Lab 1, were so made that they could be painting studios, with
sinks and so forth.
Fiksdal: Oh, wow.
Teske: And there were painting classes. And then, he turned around—now, he was out of the dean’s
office, but wisely, since he had been the client for the Lab buildings, he still was put in charge of making
decisions about the money for the science labs. He, in effect, gave me—the sciences gave the arts—
2

$500,000 for equipment. Now, where do you find that; that an administrator in one division . . .
Fiksdal: Yeah, that’s pretty amazing.
Teske: . . . gives the equipment? He then went ahead and found the money, and got the design going,
for the lab and the arts annex in the Lab building with the heavy-duty [unintelligible 00:33:14]. That was
all Don’s initiative. So, he bailed me out when it came to the spaces for the visual and plastic arts.
Now, where did that money come from? I did not know this untl the late, great Fred Tabbutt,
when we were doing the Evergreen visual history archival stuff in the first decade of the 2000s. Fred and
I were both working on that, and I talked to him about this, this marvelous thing that Don had done for
the arts. And Fred said, “You know where that money came from?” I said, “I have no idea. I’ve always,
you know, wondered. Did Don rob banks? How come we have a standing electron microscope [that’s
worth? 00:33:57]?” He said, “Now, here was the deal. Don’s designs for the science buildings were the
first designs for science facilities that the capital wing of the program planning group had gotten. The
last one that they had gotten before Don’s requests was for the lab for the UW Medical School that had,
as you might imagine . . .
Fiksdal: . . . everything under the sun.
Teske: . . . tremendous budget. And so the capital planners downtown at Program Planning and Fiscal
Management, they had on their minds the kind of money that they had given for Seattle, and that’s the
kind of money they gave us, and Don took that and just ran with it, including running in our direction in
the arts with a whole bunch of money. So I just thought—
Fiksdal: Yeah, the first and last time that ever happened.
Teske: Yeah. And it’s just, you know—well, Merv on campus and I off campus maybe made bigger
splashes, but Don was in there thinking all the time. And, as I read from our first meeting that was in
here, I don’t know exactly what—I speak a lot about my motivation in getting behind Merv’s idea of it
being a team-taught, interdisciplinary, full-time programs. I don’t know what it was in Don’s background,
but he joined in that effort.
Now, I know one of your questions down here: Why was it that the deans were able to work
together when the vice presidents couldn’t? Well, I think one of the reasons, Susan—it seems very
ironic—but one of the reasons why we could work together is when we observed the Executive Vice
President and the Academic Vice President not talking to each other, being scared to talk to each other,
and even, in some cases, feuding, we determined that we were not going to do that. And therefore, we
really, I think, suppressed some of our differences in the interests of good order.
And another thing, you know—and, Mother, pin a rose on us—another thing that I think was
2

really great is the three of us—you know, Merv, of course, was leaning more and more toward
the humanities in his own academic interests, but he was trained as a social scientist, and he knew the
woods. He had done the exploration about what went on in the social sciences. Don knew very much
what went on in the natural sciences, and I knew about the humanities and arts. So, in effect, Susan, we
were an interdisciplinary team in the dean’s office.
Fiksdal: Yeah, you needed each other, actually.
Teske: Right. We needed each other. And then, as we retired, we were able, for the first go-rounds, to
keep that interdisciplinary fit. But then, it collapsed, and I think one of the reasons why the specialty
planning areas were so badly needed, Don and Merv and I, the three of us, we got hold of faculty
applications for people. One of the three of us would be able to figure out what that meant. See? The
person is saying this; this is what she means. You know? And so we did not have to call. “Hey, this
person says he’s a thus and such.”
There was this marvelous moment there when Merv beat me to it. People were trying to sell us
stuff. “New college? Oh, they’ve got a new budget started. Okay, let’s . . .”
The University of Washington had extra gamelan, and they were trying to sell us the gamelan,
and they had written Barry, the Academic Vic President. At one of our meetings, Dave said, “All right.
UW is trying to sell us a gamelan. What’s a gamelan?” And, before I could speak, Merv said, “It’s an
instrument made to be played by a Javanese village.” [laughter]
Fiksdal: Pretty darn good!
Teske: Yeah, it was pretty accurate. But the very fact that that was Merv and not me. And, I must say,
Susan, that continued when we then had Rudy [Martin], and Byron Youtz as dean, as scientist, and LLyn
De Danaan as social scientist. Great moment in there, maybe one of these only-at-Evergreen moments,
when a group was talking about—what was it?—science and philosophy and architectures, something
like that. And I think it was Rudy who said, “Well, what kind of thing would they be studying?” And I
piped up and I said, “Well, I hope they’d be studying the Golden Section and the Phi.” And Rudy said,
“What’s that?” And Byron said, “Well, it’s like pi, except that with Phi, it’s an irrational number like pi,
but it’s a relationship.” And he started talking about the Fibonacci Series of numbers, and I started
talking about how that ratio was used in the arts.
And, of course, it isn’t really true, but the assumption was that it’s the length of the Parthenon
by the width of the Parthenon, and so forth. It very definitely is true, Susan, if you find curled conch
shell or something like that, the way that that is laid down will be laid down according to these things.
And Byron went to the board and started writing equations, and drawing how these proportionate
2

would work. We had about a 40-minute faculty seminar on this important interdisciplinary concept as
part of a dean’s office business meeting.
Fiksdal: Yeah, wonderful.
Teske: Okay, again, only at Evergreen.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Teske: Okay. Now, I don’t want to say too much about this, but Mervin never was all that happy—he
kept it suppressed, but he wasn’t happy about the idea that the rest of us had taken his dream about the
faculty team, interdisciplinary, full-time program. That had been devised by [Alexander] Meiklejohn and
run by [Joseph] Tussman at Berkeley and by Merv at San Jose, to work on a particular kind of subject
matter. And, as I say in what I’ve given you today, we never had an Evergreen program that worked on
that subject matter.
Now, Merv and Nancy Taylor, when Merv left the dean’s office, did something like that for a year.
What we did was to take the pedagogical methods’ delivery system rather than the content, and we
developed completely different kind of content.
Well, Merv didn’t like that, and he never liked the idea—his dream did not include hands-on
work in the sciences or the arts. He didn’t see how his vision could—whereas Don put and I put in quite
a bit of time fostering program development that would do just that. Forms A and B. [Mendicon?
00:41:59], biology and Peggy Dickinson, ceramicist arts, where 20 artists and 20 biologists met. Let’s
see. Another one, Harmony of the Universe—Jake Romero, physicist, and Bob Gottlieb, music. Twenty
physicists, 20 music students, getting together and doing a whale of a program.
Fiksdal: So, he hadn’t been in a program like that, that was different from his vision.
Teske: Merv had never been in a program like that.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Teske: And, of course, Susan—I hadn’t thought about it until this moment, but obviously, the programs
that I, as dean, got in my dean group were the ones that included work in the arts.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Teske: So Merv, even as dean, did not experience here all that much. Well, it came to a head in the fall
of 1975, when Merv was no longer in the dean’s office, floated this idea of dividing Evergreen into two
colleges, one of which would have departments and conventional classes, and the other, which would
have Merv’s now-pure version of coordinated studies.

2