2 40 57 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/4fb472ebbc91dd9e3041b4407f4ff0a5.JPG 37a66aed976cfd7969cd3fb04fab9305 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/7c4f650836d7ac3f3d9d60c19f2f8873.mp3 26b55e1756f941a108140908cba4a5ad https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/ae21e7973c8e78a39fb8d693a6e2387c.pdf 71ad5d68a9cf5a66c39392de19c6ce59 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/4d08cf8e1697b684701e518e2b17175d.pdf f28101cebe7447a8d833dbbd965115b1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Time Summary A summary of an interview given for different time stamps throughout the interview 1:02:36 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit December 13, 2018 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Eileen McAdam, Sound and Story Project of the Hudson Valley Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Susan J. Bender Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Location The location of the interview Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date Submitted Date of submission of the resource. Examples of resources to which a Date Submitted may be relevant are a thesis (submitted to a university department) or an article (submitted to a journal). August 24, 2015 Title A name given to the resource Interview with Susan J. Bender Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource May 13, 2015 Description An account of the resource Susan Bender, was a faculty member in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work from 1982-2010 and also served as Associate Dean of the Faculty from 1998-2002. In this interview she covers her academic background in archeology; being a mother and woman at Skidmore; the development of the Anthropology department and local archeological field program and lab; the establishment of the Liberal Studies curriculum; increase in academic rigor on campus; and the building of the Tang Teaching Museum. 4-1-4 Academic Calendar Academic Rigor Anthropology Department Archaeology Field Lab David Porter Feminism First Year Experience Interdisciplinary on "Mapping" J-Semester Liberal Studies Tang Museum Tenure Town-Gown Relations https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/fccf41f16a6befe79fcd3ab2b88bf483.JPG bbe01fec2a65a0593c50e05f5c99c2ae https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/304593b3ca7acb2efa2ee6bb4d356301.mp3 680bd135e20afd4c8fd4825e796f6eb0 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/cb031f4b1eaa23f5505826d7ae113e7b.pdf d91136d2e287e1e633a01d47fde8a20f https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/d9b38b6c1cce96743a22a75d982e0fb3.pdf 52ed266fe7a998934132feccfd39c849 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Eileen McAdam, Sound and Story Project of the Hudson Valley Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Tom Davis Location The location of the interview Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:57:24 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Tom Davis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource May 13, 2015 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource Tom Davis, was Sidmore’s Chaplain from 1966-1996. In this interview he discusses his role in responding to student needs created by broad sociopolitical changes in the U.S., including religion, abortion rights, and alcohol education. In addition, he reflects on the College’s move to the North Broadway campus and Issues created by its transition to a co-ed student body. Abortion Rights Campus Culture Campus Move coeducation David Porter Gay Rights Palamountain Student Activism Student Newspaper Town-Gown Relations Upward Bound https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/cb5f7ef49ee0f852b375af1df6ba158a.JPG a5379b34b9f8d7b2e81dbc6f67477bc6 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/fee930917bff555e7ca6745f6c9befc1.mp3 2ceb509aa169164404d1123f75f9d8d0 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/4bd23a25821f43f95855bc1e6d80af85.pdf 403273b926af440dc079c44b3fc6abb5 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/4b5bf42b44d47a48596c5a0142c7bc1f.pdf e13ff16f2dd4a9cdd15f6d1f45a8a50a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Eileen McAdam, Sound and Story Project of the Hudson Valley Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Lynne Gelber Location The location of the interview Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:00:59 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Lynne Gelber Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource May 13, 2015 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource Lynne Gelber, was at the college from 1966-2002 as a faculty and later chair of the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department (now World Languages and Literatures). In this interview she discusses establishing the first Skidmore-run study abroad programs in France and Barcelona (later Spain). She also reflects broadly on Skidmore’s move to the “new” campus on North Broadway and its transition from a women’s college to co-education. 4-1-4 Academic Calendar Anne Palamountain Campus Move coeducation David Porter Faculty Club Foreign Languages and Literature Palamountain Town-Gown Relations UWW https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/cee189904012d42e913f65260b369648.jpg 12c2ff1f54a09d28b3f5bebca2e6083c https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/adfda45e41a9a3c311b8a807e679b3b9.m4a c987731829282452fc46442e1ce99718 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/872359a985b9a0d63dc4cb09b7140db2.pdf ebc7a69f2a478f5fd4cd2f4cefca500f PDF Text Text Interview with Deb Fernandez by Lynne Gelber & Sue Bender (recording tech), Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, Saratoga Springs, NY, May 28, 2024. LYNNE GELBER: This is Lynne Gelber. It's the 28th of May, 2024, and I'm here with Sue Bender, and we're wanting to interview Debra Fernandez. Debra? DEB FERNANDEZ: Hi Lynne. LG: Welcome. DF: Thank you. LG: Why don't you tell us a little bit about where you grew up and what brought you to Skidmore? DF: Great. I grew up in Tampa, Florida, and this is an interesting, winding story to Skidmore. And I was thinking about this. Probably not something that would happen now, with the current more strictness in hiring, everything that you have to go through. So, I trained with my teacher in Tampa. In about 1980, I moved to New York City, and I got a call from her that said the Brianskys, Oleg and Mireille, who you probably remember, had a ballet summer camp, one of the first people who did that kind of thing, now they're everywhere, at Skidmore. Her name was Haydee Gutierrez, an incredible teacher, and she called and said they need a jazz teacher for their summer program. So, I came up here. I promptly fell in love with Saratoga Springs, which you guys remember in the '80s, what a place. A bunch of characters living here. And I worked for the Brianskys. It went really well, so I spent seven summers coming here to work with them. So, by this point, I got to know the Skidmore faculty. And, lo and behold, I was living in New York, I was a teaching adjunct but (had) a really fun teaching job at Marymount, and I got a call that said there is an opening. And here's the other strange part, I was both a ballet dancer and a jazz dancer, and in those days, that was not common. In those days, you were one or the other, you know? And the two didn't mix. So, I believe it was Elisabeth Carroll's husband, Felix, was leaving, and he was a jazz and a ballet dancer. So, again, back then, they sought to replace what he was doing. Now when we hire somebody new, we don't necessarily try to replace the previous tenured track person. So, I came up and interviewed, and I was driving back to Albany to stay with my friends in Albany, and I got the call as soon as I got back to Albany, offered the job. It was crazy. And I was like, "Oh my gosh." LG: Who interviewed you? DF: The dean was Dean Weller. LG: Oh, Eric. DF: Eric Weller. And here's the other... I hope I can say this on the oral history. Felix did not get tenure, and that's why they were hiring me. Who took me out to my interview dinner? Page 1 of 14 �Felix and Elisabeth. I'm like, "Okay." That's a typical dance department faux pas. But I must say, they were so incredibly gracious. They never mentioned anything. You know, they treated me so beautifully. We went, it was either Eartha's or Court Bistro, and it was the most wonderful meal. And I taught I think it was maybe three different classes. I met with the students, it was great. LG: Okay and what year again? DF: That was 19... I started in the fall of 1990. So, I probably came up that spring, I'm imagining. LG: Good. And you were brought onto teach what? DF: Ballet, jazz. I believe in my first year I taught a lot of different levels of ballet. I definitely taught jazz. That was very popular. My classes were packed that year. I taught jazz 6:30 to 8:30 at night. Now, I'm in bed by 8:00. And they were just packed with all levels. I didn't care who it was, you know, it was just so much fun. It was really great. LG: Now, the dance program was part ofDF: It was part of athletics at that time. So, we were athletics. Were they called exercise science? They've had so many different names. LG: Not yet, I don't think. DF: Not yet. But it was definitely dance and athletics. But I know whatever exercise science was, they were there, because Denise Smith came in the same year with me and we used to be at the meetings. That was a whole process of extricating ourselves and finally becoming a department, which I don't remember what year that was. LG: What was the process of extricating yourself? DF: First, we... Mary DiSanto knows this, or remembers this a lot better than I do. First we just went away from athletics, and it was exercise science and dance. And then we also split and finally became separate departments. But those meetings in the early days were pretty hilarious, you know? Tim Brown was chair of... But you know what's so interesting? It’s that we all went to Tim's Christmas party. All three departments, we were all friends. But at the meetings, we had absolutely nothing in common. So, we knew that we needed to pull away if we were really going to hone the department. LG: Who initiated that? DF: I think Mary and Bea. Isabel Brown. They started to really see, and probably bringing me in too and seeing that I wanted to do much more with performance. And I started choreography. I don't believe choreography was being... That there was a choreography program when I first got here. Most of the performances, as I recall, were parents' Page 2 of 14 �weekend, and they would be during the day. And I know that I was encouraging the department to up the performance to evenings and to do more performances than just parents' weekend. We started the fall, the winter concert, the spring concert. Little by little, I think we became a department very known for performance, but it took a while. LG: Did you work with other departments too? Like theater, for example? DF: I did, because I knew some of the directors. But in those days I remember dancers being pretty isolated to themselves. Not Mary, they did... And Bea, too. LG: Mary DiSanto-Rose? DF: Yeah. They both did, what was it called? What was the first... Where you worked with other departments? The freshman, now it's seniorLG: Oh, liberal studies? DF: Liberal studies. Both Mary and Bea were very active in that. I wasn't. Well, I did teach a Stravinsky Balanchine with Chuck Joseph's, and let me tell you, I was terrible. I had never taught an academic class, I was strictly an artist, but I knew a lot about Balanchine. But I did not know how to teach that kind of a class. Thank god for Chuck, because he was incredible. LG: So, you're starting to touch on work within the interdisciplinary programs. So, what other programs? DF: We really didn't start to work with too many other departments, I'd say, until later, with the exception of LS, because Mary always did that. And I believe I started in the '90s. I worked with Phil Soltanoff, with Carolyn Anderson, and I did a lot of works for the theater. LG: AnythingDF: But other than theater, I didn't work with any other department. LG: Anything that stands out? DF: Yeah, a lot of them. For Carolyn, I actuallyLG: Carolyn Anderson? DF: Carolyn Anderson, I actually wrote the music, the scoreLG: Did you? Page 3 of 14 �DF: ... for the Caucasian Chalk Circle, because I was also a composer, but of course I had to not focus on that, because you have to pick something to put your energy into, but I loved doing it. And Carolyn let me do that, and it was wonderful. Machinal with Phil Soltanoff was terrific, In the Boom Boom Room. We did a lot of shows together. And that led to Phil inviting me to the Williamstown Theatre Festival to work with him, and that was a whole other piece that was really important for me. That was in my 40s, and that was in the '90s. LG: So, there was a building. Most of your performances were either in the danceDF: Either in the studios or in our little theater, which was a temporary facility originally for the theater department. We took it over and it remained, and it still is, our humble little theater. But it was really a very temporary type of building. But, you know what? We grew to love it and it still works. LG: What were the advantages or disadvantages of that building? DF: It's weirdly configured. There's a lot that's not ideal about it, as a theater, but what we did love about it is that it was ours. I liked to teach my classes in there. I did not like to teach choreography in the studio where there was a mirror. So, I liked to teach in the theater. And we could use it whenever we wanted. We started, as we upped our performance schedule, that would've been really complicated to share with another department. Which a lot of colleges have to do, dance and theater share. LG: Right. So, as buildings got built, how did that affect your program? DF: The one thing that I think about, and I wonder what it would be like now, had we made a different decision, when President Glotzbach had his eyes on the Arts Quad, you know the theater, the Zankel, they invited dance to be part of that, and I believe they were going to redo Filene. Well, after a lot of conversation, it would've been wonderful to be over there with everybody, but we were just a little bit afraid that whatever got built would also not be ideal, maybe in a different way, or that we'd have to share that. So, we just decided to stay put. And our concerts sell out, probably we could have a bigger house, but it's fine. It's a college dance program, and the students get to use the theater. I think we probably did the right thing. What we have been gunning for, for as long as I was chair, and I was chair for 11 years and, I believe, they're still gunning forLG: Do you remember what years those were, that you were chairing the department? DF: Well, let's see. I retired in '21, and I was chair for 11 years, so probably I took over around 2009 or '10? Something like that. And we really wanted to get that intermural gym, because it's the crossing point from the theater to the two studios. We've never been able to swing it, but I think if we could get that intermural gym and divide it up into more studios with offices, it would be much more cohesive. But at this point, what I've heard is that now that exercise science or health... Their new name, health and exercise science, I think? They're moving to the new science building. Page 4 of 14 �Finally, our dance faculty are going to go into the offices where Jeff and Denise Smith and Jeff Segrave, the main offices. So, we were always in these little closets. They're going to have windows, finally! After 40 years! LG: So, did the Tang have any influence on the programs that you did? DF: Huge, I would say, and the Tang was another interesting timing, because up till that point, I was not chair yet, and I still had a working relationship with Phil Soltanoff, and he had a company in New York. So, I would go to New York almost every weekend, so I still had a place there. So, I was always kind of back and forth. It wasn't that I wasn't giving my all to Skidmore, I was, but I was still very professionally motivated to be in New York. Then 9/11 happened, and I was living in a loft, I had a part-time share in a loft, downtown New York, and I thought, "This is it. It's time to go." And then the Tang opened. So, it was so perfectly aligned for me. And I met Ian, and we did the first opening with David Porter, the wonderful David Porter. Mary, it wasLG: Mary? DF: DiSanto-Rose. Yeah, it was Mary and I. She did a piece, Erik Satie, David played, of course, and then I did the John Cage piece. So, Ian and I hit it off right away, and the Tang just became a second home to me. So, that was very beautifully timed, because I had now this incredible new venue. Not only a venue, but the amazing artists that Ian linked me up with to collaborate. So, it was great. It was like, "Well, I can't go to New York anymore." But, in a lot of ways, New York is coming to me. LG: Came to you. DF: Yeah, or coming to the Tang. LG: What space did you use? SUE BENDER: Could you describe one of those collaborations? LG: Yes, that's what I was getting at. DF: Yes, absolutely. The Cage piece, I have such a funny story about the Cage piece. And for anybody that will listen to this that doesn't know who John Cage is, he was very much the creator of... I'm sure everybody does at Skidmore but, you know, the whole... The happenings, the spontaneity, the crazy throwing things together and seeing what happens. So, we did the Sonatas and Interludes, Margo Mensing was my visual collaborator, and she just did an incredible job. She made these nine, I believe it was nine-sided maps that people would open when they came to the performance, so they would know where they could go. So, in the map, we also copied things from John Cage's book, Silence. And there was this one sheet that said, you know I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like, "Three minutes, cough. 20 minutes, stomp on the floor." So, we're in the performance, and all of the sudden we hear all of this coughing, and then later we hear all this Page 5 of 14 �stomping, and Margo and I are looking at each other like, in a panic, and David's playing this very quiet music. LG: David Porter? DF: Porter. And we're like, "What is going on?" Suddenly we remember that that's part of the map. So, after the show, let me just say that President Porter was not happy. So, we had this big collaborative talk in the room, and I said, "You know, you guys, it strikes me that I can understand why David is upset, because he's in the middle of playing, but this is about as John Cage as you could get. This thing we never knew would happen that became actually kind of a riot." And I'll give it to David, he was like, "You know what? You're right. Let's stick with it." LG: Whose ideaDF: It was amazing. LG: So, who was directing that? DF: I would say that I was the director for the most part. Margo was too. Not of the people, we collaborated on the ideas. As far as the actors, because I brought in actors from New York too, and this very funny kid, Phil Restino, he's walking around, mopping. He's one of those people that, you don't know why, but when you look at him you start laughing. You know, that kind of thing? So, he's just in the background mopping, and people are laughing. It just was so free, and so delightfully fun. Ian's little girl, now she's a grown woman, I think she's a doctor, there was kind of a... And we had flower pots everywhere, and there was this kind of very quiet... I think she was three years old. And all of a sudden, Fiona walks out with a little watering can, and she waters the flower. And everyone in the audience just went, "Aww." So, there was all this... Margo had toasters everywhere and she'd put bread in. People started taking the toast out and trying to feed the dancers. It was wild, but also very beautiful. So, I fell in love with the freedom that came. And I will say one thing for Ian, not one thing, I could say many things about Ian, but he is an amazing producer. He gives the artist so much leeway. Everything is a yes until it can't be, but he doesn't start with a no. A yes, it was just a great amount of creative leeway. It was wonderful. LG: So, what space in the Tang were you using? DF: We used, for the Cage piece, we used almost everywhere. Downstairs, we used the vestibules, the glass... Those were beautiful. We used the upstairs. That's why we knew we needed that map, because otherwise people would just feel too lost. The map gave them a little bit of instruction, but they could unwind the map and that's where the chance came in. They didn't have to follow a strict... Margo was very brilliant too with that creation. Page 6 of 14 �Then, I ended up doing, I was counting, I think it was either six or seven full length works for the Tang from that time till when I retired. The last one being, I think, maybe 2014, which was called Doubling, and that was with David, the composer David Lang's show. And So Percussion came to play. I believe that was the last one. LG: Did you work with any other departments? DF: Let me think about that for a second. No, I don't think so. I think it was usually just the artists that I was assigned at the Tang. I worked with a painter, Paul Henry Ramirez. We did Balls, that was also another one. That was a lot of fun, and also kind of wild. Yeah, So Percussion was David Lang. Partying I did all on my own, although I did use a lot of actors in that piece. So, it wasn't a collaboration with the faculty, but with the kids. I used a lot of actors from theater. LG: And the actors that youLG: ... were able to call on? DF: From the theater department? Oh, what I liked to do when I did the shows at the Tang, I would do my top group of students, and then I would bring in professionals, like maybe two dancers and maybe a few actors. I always peppered it with people that I had been working with in New York. LG: Okay, that's what I was thinking. DF: Yeah, and it was great for the students, because they got a big boost from that. LG: So, what were your biggest challenges? DF: From the get go or just throughout the whole... I don't know how much time we have. LG: Just go for it. DF: Maybe I'm being rose-colored glasses looking at the past, but there were not a lot of challenges. What I also want to say, Bea was my chair for quite a while, and then it was Mary. Mary was the program director and then later chair for like 25 years. You know, she really did her service. What I loved about the department, and I'm sure a lot of other departments might have seen it as way too loosey-goosey, but I always felt that Mary and the entire department supported me in whatever changes I wanted to make in my approach or my career, or the things I was teaching. And it was really quite a freeing atmosphere, you know? Because I started out as more technique. And then as I grew older, and I grew more into my creative work, I was much more involved in the choreography process, in more experimental things. And I was just supported, 100%. I'm a huge Skidmore fan. My department supported me, the administration supported me. LG: Had you been doing choreography before you came to Skidmore? Page 7 of 14 �DF: Yes, yes. So, I'm sure there's some challenges in there, but to me, it was a very stable time. As I were telling you guys before the tape started rolling, we all got there in the '90s, and we all just retired. So, the original crew of Denise Limoli, Mary DiSanto-Rose, Isabel was the first one to retire, Mary Harney, Lori Dawson, our tech director, Carl Landa, our musician. We were there for so long that it provided such a stability for the students, that that's something that I don't think is probably happening right now. I think it will, but right now it's more in flux since all the, as I call it, the old ladies have exited the building. But it was a very family atmosphere, and that can be good and bad. And that's what I think the younger group, that has come in now, has cleaned that up a lot. So, again, there's always a good side to something, and there's always something that could be improved. But it was quite a family atmosphere. SB: Can you describe a little bit more what you mean by a family atmosphere? DF: Yes. And I'm sure this happened in the past, before things became so much stricter in many other departments, but we would hang out with the students. We were not only their teachers, we were their mentors, in some cases friends. I still have those friends. Some people have said to me, "Yes, I go to all my students' weddings." And I said, "Yeah, and I've also now gone through all my students' divorces." That's how long I've been friends with them. They write me and I find out they're turning 50 and I'm like, "Oh my god." We're still close. LG: Are any of them professional dancers? DF: Yes, and doing very well. They're professional choreographers. LG: Who? DF: Emily Pacilio, Emily Craver. These aren't names that everybody will know, but Caitlin Trainor's doing beautifully as a choreographer in New York. Alana Jacobs is in New Orleans doing great stuff. Kaitlin Guerin lives in New Orleans, she's a dancer and has started her own... What is it when you make the desserts? Oh my god, senior moment. LG: Pastry chef? DF: Yes, she's a pastry chef, thank you. And she's in New Orleans, she's got her own business. And so she was later than Alana, so I got them together. They now work together. It's just great. And there was also a family feeling in the department, too, among the faculty. And again, that doesn't, as you know very well with families, that doesn't mean you're always getting along. There's problems with that too, but I do think that we felt that way. If that answers your question, Sue. LG: Yeah, what were some of the disputes, though? DF: The disputes? They weren't so much about policy or the program. I think it would mostly just be the petty, annoying, personal stuff. Page 8 of 14 �LG: Oh, okay. DF: Because really we didn't have that many disputes about the policy until our two new colleagues came in and said, "Hey, okay, you guys, we got to tighten this ship up a little bit." And they've been wonderful. That's Jason Ohlberg and Sarah DiPasquale. I hired them, I think it must've been four years before I retired, so I had some good time to mentor them and they're incredible, and they've taught me a lot, and they've been fabulous at redoing some of the work that we needed to do. SB: What hiring process did you use when you were hiring? DF: You mean in terms of how did we advertise it or how did weSB: Yeah. DF: We went through pretty much the normal channels, and then I think it was a pretty normal hiring process. Probably... I don't know if... Let me think. I'm thinking about Jason. Sarah was already on our faculty, and she was one of those people that was adjunct and I'm like, "This one is a winner. She's great, she's going definitely be in administration some day." I could see that in her. She's a physical therapist so, at that moment, dance science, it was called, which I kind of have a problem with that term, but what I saw was that in universities and in academia, they were really starting to bring in research, more anatomical, and we were not really like that. We were more about creativity and music and events. So, I said, "We really need to focus on Sarah and bringing that out of her." So, she applied. She was perfect for the job. But at the same time, Jason Ohlberg showed up, and I could see that he was incredible, and I did not want to lose him. And I'll give Beau Breslin credit for this. I begged Beau to let me hire both, and he could see that, eventually, the rest of the ladies were going to retire too. He said, "Let's get them both now." So, it worked so well because, sure enough, we all left within... I think Mary, maybe Denise was first, then Mary, then myself, then Mary Harney, and then this year Lori Dawson left. So, it was very good of Beau. LG: Do you want to talk about what you've been doing since you retired? DF: Yes, and it's really been amazing. Last August, I think, I started just working with tracing. Those pandemic years, where we just stayed home so much, and we were looking for stuff to do. It was post-pandemic but I still was staying at home. I'm like, "Okay, what's wrong with this picture?" But I started tracing just to give my... I missed choreography, in terms of just that wonderful play of moving people around, and spending a few hours just playing with form, and I didn't have that in my life anymore. I was still teaching online. I'm teaching a yoga class online, and I've done Motion is Lotion for the retirees, I think, three or four times, but I wasn't choreographing. So, I started doing... I'm not a visual artist, I started just tracing just to get my hands to draw shapes. LG: When you say tracing, explain that a little bit. Page 9 of 14 �DF: Tracing, I just had like tracing paper and a book of leaves, and I would just take a pencil and trace them. And then one day, I don't even know why, I just cut them out and started pasting them on paper, and this collage work started to blossom. And I actually brought some stuff to show you guys. And they were pretty bad at first, but they just kept pouring out. And everybody that's seen them, (I post them on Facebook, I haven't had an exhibition yet, but I'm going to work on that,) have said, especially my former students, "Deb, it's so funny how this looks so much like your dances." So, that was nice. I recognize that I was able to sort of substitute something that was filling that need for shapes, to move shapes around. And it's really fun, because I cut them out and I just lay them on the table. There's no prethought about what the image is going to be, which is what reminds me of the choreography. And so I just start taking them and moving the shapes around, just like I would make a dance. So, it's also a lot easier than working with dancers. That paper does not argue with you. LG: At the point where COVID came in, you then began to teach dance on Zoom. Talk about that a little bit. DF: Yes. LG: Very interesting problems that occur, and have youDF: I'm so glad you reminded me of that, because I was going to do phased retirement. And my last semester I was on sabbatical, spring of 2020, so my last semester, I didn't know it was my last, because I decided suddenly to retire, but fall of 2019... No, fall of '20, sorry. I was on sabbatical in '21. Fall of '20, when COVID was around, they're like, "You're teaching choreography and you're teaching it online." And I'm like, "What? How's that going to work?" I was so used to my methods that I used in the theater and working right there in the moment. It turned out to be such a learning experience for me. And I'm sure it's part of what has influenced this visual art, because I started to separate myself from that density of the bodies, in close proximity. We had a camera in each studio, because I didn't want too many people being around each other, so we had both studios, we had a camera. And it was like The Wizard of Oz, there I was, up on the big screen, in both studios, giving them instructions. And I would watch them work, so it really wasn't that different. And then what they did was they had to film, instead of doing dance in the theater, they did everything outside and they filmed it, and we ended up having a film on Zoom, our showing was on Zoom, they showed their films, their films were beautiful. We used the Tang, we used all sorts of site-specific locations which, by that point, having done so much site-specific work, thank goodness, I felt very comfortable with that, and I knew how to instruct them. And I would just do these very simple... I would start with these basic compositional kind of fundamentals, like make 10 shapes with your hands. Now, put that in your feet. It all had to be from the intellect but they would transfer it through their bodies. So, it was really fascinating for me. Page 10 of 14 �So, that was my last semester teaching. '21 came around, I was on sabbatical, and I thought, "You know what? I think I just did phased retirement." And I decided, there's no reason, I'm done. So, I let the department know, and then I left at the end of '21. But I'm so glad I got that opportunity to do the teaching during COVID. It was fascinating. SB: When you're teaching people that you don't see in adjoiningDF: Spaces? SB: ... spaces, what's that like? Is that different? DF: It was very different, and it was different... I'm sure it was more challenging for the students than it was for me, because I kind of, like I said, I was kind of the overseer, just watching everything. But it was hard for them to ask me a question. You know, there were those little technical glitches. But we would always, I said, you know, "Come on Zoom anytime and we'll talk one-on-one." It worked out. But it was very different. Again, I think it was good training for everyone, because there was much more of an independence that had to be owned, rather than me always in the theater right on top of them, and I could be very, shall we say bossy? So, I stepped away a little bit. SB: It may have, I'm just speaking from personal experience, made the person on the other side listening to you be more aware of the space between him or herself and the screen. DF: Yes. SB: And be more interactive, and moving forward and moving around. DF: Yes, absolutely. And also they couldn't be too close to each otherSB: Right. DF: ... because they were still masked. So, it was almost like, I don't know, one of these COVID sayings, "alone together", comes to mind. That's kind of how it was. They were in the room, but more alone, but they could look around and see the other people. It was challenging, there's a challenge. But we did it. And my biggest concern was that they... Or, not my concern, the biggest, most important thing for me is that they did good work. Not now in Skidmore necessarily, but I think there's much more of a hand-holding mentality. I grew up with teachers that it was all about doing good work, they didn't really care if you were nurtured. And that's kind of how it felt. LG: Do you want to talk a little bit about the changes that you saw in the college itself in the time that you were at Skidmore? DF: Mm-hmm. The great changes, as I mentioned earlier to you, Lynne, I think that the Tang Museum, and I don't know if all faculty members share my... I'm sure they don't. The Tang Museum and the Zankel, I think, just upped Skidmore's game tremendously. I Page 11 of 14 �always respected Skidmore. I thought it was a great school, every professor that I came in contact with I learned so much from, I thought they were wonderful. But I think the Tang and the Zankel really were just phenomenal additions. On a personal note, and I'm sure a lot of this is nostalgiaLG: Excuse me, butDF: Yeah? LG: ... did you use the Zankel at all? DF: I sure did. I was the inaugural performance in the Zankel through Marie Glotzbach. It was Arts Fest, and it was the collaboration I did with Richard Danielpour, “Swan Song”. And I'll never forget that; sitting in the Zankel, watching a music concert, the curtains were open so you could see outside, and it was one of those moments where it was the lightning bolt. I'm like, "That's the piece. It's going to be outside and inside." And it was just such a beautiful event. And then I repeated the “Sonatas and Interludes”, the Cage piece with David Porter and Margo, in the Zankel. A whole different thing. It was a stage piece, not a happening, but that was the last piece that I did there. The changes, Lynne, that... And my point about nostalgia, and I'm sure everybody feels this, because I remember Jeff Segrave used to talk about his friend, I can't remember his name, who left and how they used to always go out on Fridays. There was a very collegial feeling, which I'm sure you guys remember, you probably... I'm seeing you agree with me. I don't see... I went to every person who retired, I went to that at the Tang to hear them be toasted. I don't think that kind of... I'll just say it, I don't think the collegiality is necessarily the same anymore. It might be different, and I'm not part of it, so it might have taken on a different kind, but collegiality as I know it, you know? That kind of we all went to meetings in person, you know? So, I see that not as a great change. But again, I'm not there, I can't really say. It might be just fine for the people who are there now. It is what it is for them. LG: What about the composition of the undergraduate population? DF: That I don't know. I don't know. Can you tell me more about what you're getting at? LG: Well, it just seems a very diverse population now, in comparison to decades ago. DF: That is probably true. Although, it's very interesting, because I was looking back at some of my older pieces. I had a lot of students of color in my original jazz works. LG: Right. DF: A lot. And again, those are people that I'm still dear friends with to this day. So, for me, in the dance department, it didn't feel that different. LG: Okay, that's quite helpful. Page 12 of 14 �DF: The students thought it was, but I kept trying to tell them, "You don't know enough about the history of the department." We did get thrown under the bus. We had a pretty contentious, before I left, there was a pretty contentious period with the students. But, again, I said, "I don't think you guys did your homework." Because I went back and showed them the list of faculty of color that we hired for sabbatical, guest artists. We constantly had that going on. But there was a lot of anger in that. I guess it wasLG: Coming from the students? DF: Yeah. But, you know, it went through the whole campus. It was probably couple of years b efore I retired, so it probably started, I don't know, 2017 it seemed to start heating up? LG: Okay. DF: I could be wrong about that. LG: And the basic problem was? DF: They were complaining that there wasn't enough diversity, which I agree with, but we had had that, they just weren't aware of it. It was just kind of this weird lull. So, I think that's been addressed, thankfully. I also think, in general, the students were just angry and frustrated, and especially during COVID. There were a lot of emotions that probably got dispensed into areas... I don't know. I do know that it was a hard time for me because I was chair, and that was difficult. And that's part of why I think I was like, "I think it's time for the youngsters to take over. It's time for me to go." It's nice to know when to exit the party. I love it that Sarah DiPasquale, who's been an amazing chair, she took the job after me and she said, when I told her I was leaving, she thought about it for a few days, and she called back, she said, "Okay Deb, you're like Seinfeld. You're going out on top." So, now she calls me Jerry. LG: Is there anything else that we should cover that we haven't? DF: Let me think. Well, you know, I guess the one thing I want to say is that everything ebbs and flows and changes depending on who's in the department. It is a very different department now. Now, unfortunately, I'm now... Fortunately, I'm a snowbird; unfortunately, I can't get to all the concerts because I'm not here. But I'm still very close to Jason and Sarah, and I hear everything. And Erika Pujic, who's wonderful. It's just very different, and I have really let go. And I think that that was something that Jason said to me, he's like, "I've been very surprised, Deb, at how you've been able to just walk away." And I said, "Hey, it's your show now. You get to do what you believe in." LG: And when you say it's different, what do you mean? DF: I think it's less... I was always very performance-driven. And I think that the students learned a lot from me if they wanted to watch me do what I wanted to do. You know? Page 13 of 14 �They came along and they learned because I always felt we teach what we want to learn. Because if you're passionate about what you're learning, you're going to be passionate about teaching it. So, it was very performance-driven and very artistically... Now there's... And I knew we needed this, that's why I wanted Sarah, why we all wanted Sarah, not just me, the whole department, it's very research-driven. There's a lot of dance science going on, anatomy, Jason is amazing in the dance history classes. I would say it's more well-rounded, I think, but I don't think it has the same performance drive. Maybe they'll get there. LG: Good. DF: Yeah, but they're doing a great job, and like I said, I'm not going to have the ridiculous job of trying to compare it, because it can't. Department is who's in the room, who's in the building. And it has to be, we're human beings. So, I just wish them all the best, and I love the department, I still love Skidmore, and I hope it's still a good place. LG: I think it is. DF: Okay, good. LG: Thank you. DF: Thank you, guys. This was fun. Page 14 of 14 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Lynne Gelber Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Deborah Fernandez Location The location of the interview Saratoga Springs, NY Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio Recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 43:22 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Sue Bender Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Deborah Fernandez Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource May 28, 2024 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource Debra Fernandez began at Skidmore in 1990 after working in dance and theater in New York City and, for many years, at the Briansky summer dance program in Saratoga. She served as teacher, choreographer, performance director and Dance Department Chair. In this interview she discusses collegiality, diversity, dance science and development of the dance program into a department. Deb also explores her experience teaching dance during COVID, the influence of the Tang and Zankel on her work at Skidmore as well as some of the performances she directed. She retired in 2021. https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/4235aaa6db9d445aa61f30ab98654aae.jpg 6aedee1519c644decd22cf6882969dc0 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/0e4cdb576af01e0c0864ce1d13658e67.m4a 36d93e323ff993c82dfdbaf9c7f78869 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/cbdf694bc7f96557c50f9710be829855.pdf b691ac4f3468979f7e8c11e67a131496 PDF Text Text Interviewee: Tom Denny Years at Skidmore: 1982-2010 Interviewer: Lynne Gelber Location of Interview: Saratoga Springs, NY Date of Interview: May 4, 2023 00:00:00 Header 00:00:33 Grew up in Pittsburgh suburb, earned degree in philosophy from Haverford, taught English and history at The Harley School, then decided to return to college to study music. 00:01:10 Did undergraduate work in music education, earned PhD at Eastman School of Music. 00:01:30 Always had played piano and had interest in music, but Haverford didn’t have much music and it wasn’t focus at that point. “It took me a few years to find it … I’m happy that I did.” 00:02:20 Interviewed at several places, including Skidmore. Began at Skidmore fall 1982. 00:03:30 At that time, music department classes and concerts were in Filene Music Hall. 00:04:05 Taught medieval section of music history sequence; History of Jazz, where “I was one step ahead of the students;” some music theory; plus courses on various composers. 00:05:00 Zankel opened two semesters before Denny retired. Zankel had many superior facilities. “It was one of the great privileges of my life to be chair of the department for [the years] that led to the opening of the Zankel and then to shepherd our move through there.” 00:06:00 Original Zankel design was planned before Denny was chair, but construction delayed because of the dot-com crisis. “When we actually got the money to move forward, … I had a lot of responsibility for details that made things work.” 00:06:40 Denny advocated for details such as compartmentalized storage, a moving pit, etc. 00:07:40 Chaired music department for a total of 12 years at Skidmore. Music department is large (35-40 staff people with various statuses), which created some complexity/challenges. 00:08:40 Chair responsibilities ranged from hiring people to rearranging stage/pushing pianos. 00:09:40 In fall of senior year, music majors who wanted to graduate with honors proposed projects or auditioned for an opportunity for a final recital; faculty determined who was eligible. 00:10:38 Filene Scholars began September 1982, “just as I arrived … [I] probably perceived the whole trajectory of the department in terms of the Filene program and everything it led to.” 00:11:10 Huge impact, including being the first merit scholarships, “which the College has later on embraced in other areas… .” Filene program brought very talented performers to campus, which helped provide a critical mass for orchestra, chamber ensembles, etc. They also were bright students — a high percentage received Periclean award and/or were Phi Beta Kappa. 00:12:35 “It raised the expectations and the profile and the capacity of the department because [in addition to scholarships], also provided money to bring in professional artists to work with the students.” A contributing factor to the increase in numbers of faculty, students, and majors. 00:13:51 In 1970s Skidmore had 6-8 concerts per semester; “now they have 35 concerts, and it’s the same thing with programming all over campus, that everything is much more.” �00:14:29 The profile of the performers invited to campus was also elevated. 00:15:22 Some came for Filene Gala, others for Filene Residency. Residencies visited several times during academic year to work with students, plus did a final performance. 00:15:58 Funding for group performances: some from Filene, some from Jean Sterne, etc. 00:16:26 Performance groups included Robert Mann (of Juilliard) with his son, and Continuum, a Juilliard ensemble that performed interesting 20th century programs. 00:17:10 Also Young Concert Artists, a “talent agency, that had this incredible track record of identifying the rising stars.” 00:18:00 Fondest teaching memories: teaching new courses; also, some great research collaborations with students. 00:18:30 Opening night at Zankel. “That was just such a fulfillment of so many things.” 00:19:05 Carnegie Hall group performed at Zankel opening night; comes back every year. 00:20:23 When Zankel opened, Phil Glotzbach was Skidmore president. When the money came for Zankel, David Porter was Skidmore president. 00:20:50 “It was fun to have [David Porter] give lectures and perform in Filene or elsewhere.” 00:21:24 Greatest challenge at Skidmore “…was mostly when I was chair, … managing both personnel and managing …the limited facilities that we had in Filene.” Moving into Zankel was also a challenge, but “an exciting, totally great challenge.” 00:21:50 Served on a lot of committees: CEPP, FPPC, Curriculum Committee, some task forces. 00:22:35 Two governance roles with most impact: 1) chairing an ad hoc committee that worked with Curriculum Committee to consider the science requirement. 00:24:20 2) Being part of a task force to review faculty statuses; led to improved artist-inresidence situation. “And there was nobody else on that task force who had particular knowledge of what those people did and how under-compensated they were, so that was sort of my niche.” 00:27:15 Changes during time at Skidmore: expanded curriculum — more courses overall; more non-Western music, more jazz, more electronic music and music technology. 00:29:16 Comic example of Zankel’s importance: Filene not soundproofed, so before Zankel, “the College tried a variety of solutions to where the drum instruction should take place.” 00:30:17 Once drumming was in Palamountain, underneath Biology. “Bernie Possidente does research on the circadian rhythms of mice, and their sleep was being disrupted … so we were thrown out of there mid-semester.” Zankel has a soundproofed space. 00:31:27 Activities since retiring in December 2010 have included writing program notes for some Lincoln Center events and giving pre-concert talks for alumni in the summer. 00:32:03 Also headed up Sustainable Saratoga’s Urban Forestry and Treetoga programs for years, and is still involved. That led to getting appointed to the City’s Comprehensive Plan Update Committee, which in turn led to volunteering with the Open Space Advisory Committee. 00:33:12 Recently co-founded small non-profit to re-green a small property in Saratoga Springs. �00:34:14 Soon will give two community talks related to Opera Saratoga’s festival. “I’m excited about it. As satisfying as all the tree and other stuff … it’s really nice to be … digging into some music again.” 00:35:04 END � https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/d5b6f5853db3798249fac7e6608d3591.pdf 8549ee1ea2d007b071a85afb8f63ce3e PDF Text Text Interview with Tom Denny by Lynne Gelber, Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, Saratoga Springs, New York, May 4, 2023. LYNNE GELBER: This is Lynne Gelber. We’re in Saratoga Springs, and I’m with Sue Bender, who is helping with this interview, and Tom Denny, who gladly agreed to come and talk to us, for the Skidmore Retiree Oral History Project. Tom, why don’t we start by having you tell us a little bit about where you grew up and, um, what your preparation for your job here at Skidmore was. TOM DENNY: Okay. I grew up outside of Pittsburgh, had a Pittsburgh mailing address but was technically in the suburbs, and lived there my whole life until I went off to Haverford. And then I had a bit of a circuitous route to get to be a music professor because I did an undergraduate degree in philosophy, very little music study, and I went out and did a few things that people did in the early ’70s and ended up teaching for a couple of years at a private school — English and History — and then … LG: Which school was this? TD: This was at The Harley School in Rochester, New York. And then went, decided to leave hat and go back to school. And I had to do a couple of years of undergraduate music education before I could apply to grad schools. And did my graduate work at Eastman School of Music in Rochester, and, uh, Skidmore was the only real job I ever had. LG: So, what made you change your mind and go into music? TD: Well, I had always been, you know, played piano and been interested in music, but ended up at Haverford. It didn’t have too much of a music department and it wasn’t, um, … LG: No! We had a lot of people who would come over from Haverford to Bryn Mawr for music… TD: Uh huh. Anyway, I um, I just, it wasn’t where I was at that point in my life and it took me a few years to find it. So, I’m happy that I did. I thought for a while that I might be, you know, a pianist, but that was a delusion in that highly competitive, rarified world, and I found musicology was much more suited to my skill set and interests. LG: Um, so how did you get to Skidmore? TD: They hired me! I came out of the PhD at Eastman and interviewed, actually at a number of places, and Skidmore, which was probably the best of the places I interviewed, was also the only one that offered me a job [laughs]. So. LG: Who interviewed you? TD: Isabelle Williams, George Green, Ruth Lakeway, Ed Hausman. I’m not sure there was �anybody else because they hired three people the year I came. They hired Tony Holland and they hired Janet Sullivan, who was a choral director and did some classroom teaching, and so it was a small department of full-time people and they were having three hires, so I think it might have just been those four. LG: Yeah. TD: That was, um, 1982. LG: Okay. Um, do you know why there was this, uh, growth in the number of people that they were hiring? TD: It wasn’t really growth; they were all replacements, I believe. LG: Oh. TD: Yeah. Um, I really don’t remember, I mean I didn’t dig too deeply into why people had left, but I think it was a mixture of reasons, it wasn’t all either bad or good, but … LG: Where were most of your classes at the time? TD: They were all in Filene. Yeah. Filene Music Hall. LG: And that’s where all the concerts were, and …? TD: Yeah, it’s where everything was, a 240-seat lecture hall that they pretended was a concert hall. [laughs] It was great, my daughters still can conjure up the fragrance of Filene Recital Hall from their childhood years. LG: laughs]. Um, so, what courses were you teaching then? TD: I was teaching mostly just basic music history. Um, at that point we still had a four semester sequence that went from medieval through Renaissance through Baroque through Classical to Romantic and Twentieth Century, and I initially was teaching the medieval class. Isabelle Williams said, when I got there, “You’ll teach History of Jazz, won’t you?” And what’s an untenured person going to say, even though they don’t know anything about jazz, but “Of course, I’d love to.” So, I was one step ahead of the students. LG: Uh huh. TD: Um, at some points early on I taught a little bit of theory, but it was mostly — and I would teach, you know, lower-level courses that might be in what we had, The Great Composers rubric, where you could pick a composer or two and spend a semester with liberal arts students, looking at that. LG: So, I’m curious, in the course of your tenure, um, Zankel was opened, and what effect did �that have on the curriculum and the way you taught and things that you could do? TD: Well actually Zankel opened, um, only two semesters before I retired, so it had a huge effect, but not so much on my life, long term. You know, I didn’t teach that much in Zankel. It had, you know, far better, um, larger classrooms, more varied classrooms, more room for all of our studio teachers. Um, it had a spectacular concert hall and a large rehearsal hall. And, and, and, and! It just, it was spectacular and it was one of the great privileges of my life to be chair of the department for about the five or six or seven years that led to the opening of the Zankel and then to shepherd our move through there. LG: Did you have a role in making suggestions about that new building? TD: I didn’t have a role in the original design, so I didn’t have a role in the big design. That design was already in the books in the, maybe 1999, 2000. The dot-com crisis sort of derailed that for a while. And so that had been done when, I think Gordon Thompson was chair, might have been Dick Hihn, but in any case, I didn’t, I wasn’t on the committee that designed the main elements of the hall. But that said, when we actually got the money to move forward and started to work on it, I had a lot of responsibility for details that made things work. Things like, one of the huge problems in Filene was that back stage we just had one big room where the small … the jazz equipment was stored, the pianos were stored, the music stands were stored, the African drums were stored, you know, it was, and it was just a mess. The stuff would kind of wander off out of that. So, in Zankel I made sure that we had compartmentalized (space) and we carefully measured them and so that the storage thing was. So that sort of level of detail. Lobbying for, we lobbied at that point to have the pit that goes up and down, um, and so those kinds of details, I either advocated for or had some role in designing. But the big, the big building was already in the books before I became chair. LG: What kinds of challenges did you face? TD: With Zankel, or? LG: No, in general. TD: In general, um, I was chair for probably 12 of the, my 29 years, something like that. So, a lot of, three or four different intervals, starting with a one-year but then a couple of fiveyear stints. Um, it’s a big department, we had 35 or 40 staff people, when you counted every part-timer. There were various statuses, we had the tenure track people but we also had the Artists-in-Residence, who went through a lot of changes. And … so it was just sort of a lot of complexity there. And then, um, … we had our personalities that made life interesting, you know. [laughs] So. LG: Do you want to … do you want to talk about any of those interesting moments? TD: No, that’s okay, no that’s okay. Leave it to say, 35 musicians can, you know, cause their challenges. �LG: All playing in different tempos? [laughs] TD: Yeah. LG: So, the responsibilities would have been to help hire all these people? TD: Absolutely, yeah. And, um, I mean, [laughs], when I interviewed — to show you the sort of involvement we had — we didn’t have a concert manager, we didn’t have, um, a dedicated stage crew, we didn’t have any of that, so when I interviewed for the job, Isabelle Williams, one of the things I had to do for my interview was to push pianos around the stage to see how I did. Um, because that often fell to the chair [laughs]. You know, the chair might be the only faculty at a particular concert and there’d be a need to have a little rearrangement of the stage, the students hadn’t shown up and, uh, the chair was down there pushing pianos and moving music stands and things. It’s, it was astonishing how, how much of those kinds of things, uh, the chair had to either oversee or convince people to do, or … LG: [laughs]. Did the student majors, um, do a final concert, while you were there? TD: It depended what their emphasis was; it wasn’t a requirement. Um, if they wanted honors, they had to do either a recital, if they were a performer, or they had to do a thesis or they had to do a composition or some major project, but it was not a requirement that every student do a recital, no. LG: Mm hm, okay. And whose responsibility was that, for doing the recital? TD: Uh, the faculty had the auditions in the fall of their senior year to determine who was eligible for honors, and in the case of theses or whatever, we would look at proposals and discuss them and make a call as to which students, uh, seemed promising both in terms of what they, their level of achievement during their four years but also the … the quality of the preparation for the actual project or concept. LG: Now, there were Filene Scholars? TD: Right. LG: Do you know when that started? TD: I do. The first Filene Scholars arrived the same day I did, basically [laughs]. 1982. They had auditioned in, I guess the spring of 1982, and they arrived on campus September, just as I arrived and Tony Holland and Janet Sullivan, who didn’t stay there, but Tony and I, I think, really saw, or probably perceived the whole trajectory of the department in terms of the Filene program and everything that it led to. LG: What did it lead to? What effect did it have? �TD: Oh, it had… LG: On both the faculty, the curriculum and the students. TD: It had a huge, huge impact. Um, it’s, I mean from the College’s point of view it was kind of the first of merit scholarships, which the College has later on embraced in other areas — science, I know was the first, and, I don't know how that’s played out, but. Um, it just brought, we had basically four a year, so it brought 16 very talented performers to campus, and, they weren’t just performers, they were bright people. We, back when I was chair and we were trying to kind of do statistics on impact, um, we had the highest percentage of, I mean a very high percentage of people who had gotten the Periclean award, a very high percentage in Phi Beta Kappa, even. I mean there was, they were good students, so they brought a lot to the department. They gave a critical mass for some kinds of programs, or at least they provided a critical mass around which an even larger critical mass, for the orchestra or vocal chamber ensemble or string chamber music, some of those things. Um, and just the whole concept of the Filene program, I think, it raised the expectations and the profile and the capacity of the department because it wasn’t just, um, it wasn’t just scholarships, it also provided money to bring in professional artists to work with the students, and that led, those kinds of things, as I think Skidmore has realized, in a larger sense, when you start to get things that seem attractive and high profile, they attract other things that are high profile, or that people want to do more. So, I think it was clearly a turning point. It’s not the only factor, but … but since those days the faculty expanded, the student — I don’t know what the majors are currently in terms of numbers, but in the time I was there, we went from around a steady state of nine, ten, eleven to about nineteen or twenty. LG: Majors. TD: Majors. But that was just the tip of the iceberg because there was, um, all the people who were in the chorus, all the people who were in the jazz ensemble, and, um … you know a chunk of that was attributable to Filene. Not all of that, other things happen, but it did lead to us completely outgrowing Filene and having to move to Zankel [laughs]. LG: And the residencies of outside groups, professional groups, did that start at that time? TD: Well, in any high-profile way. I mean, I think if you go back, at one point, we assembled all of the programs that we could find for Filene, I don’t think we went back to the old campus, so that goes back to, like, ’67 or ’68, and in the … you know this from Skidmore as a whole, in the ‘70s we had about eight concerts a semester, maybe six concerts a semester, [laughs] you know, and now they have 35 concerts, and it’s the same thing with programming all over campus, that everything is much more. And, the profile of the people who came definitely jumped up. Initially in the Filene program they tried to bring in really high profile people, like, we had Marilyn Horne, we had, I think the first was Anna Moffo, we had Vladimir Ashkenazy, and … and then we decided it was, rather than spend, you know, X amount of dollars bringing those people in for a one-off, and they �didn’t really understand liberal arts students, we started dividing that up into maybe three pots and bringing in people who were more like extremely, um, high profile faculty at conservatories, who actually knew about teaching in a way that Vladimir Ashkenazy didn’t, and that kind of thing. So, we began to use the money differently, but even at that point, still, the people we’d bring in were much higher profile than they were in the ’70s. LG: They would come in for short residencies and interact with the students? TD: They typically came in, we had two things, we had … um, what was it called — the Filene Gala— was a concept that we eventually abandoned, but it was, that’s where we brought in Marilyn Horne and Vladimir Ashkenazy, and that was basically a concert, and an expensive concert. And then we had a Filene Residency that was funded. And that, those people had to come maybe two, three, four times over the course of one academic year and work with students, and then give a, some kind of a final performance. LG: Were they individuals or were they groups? TD: Typically, they were individuals. I’m trying to think if we had any groups. Uh, we certainly had been bringing in groups, and they must, some of them must have been funded by Filene. We then had Sterne money, which was, Jean Sterne was a wonderful alum that I went down and visited in Philadelphia, and gave money, and um, she … she wanted kind of a chamber music and particular instruments that she favored. And then we got other money, so it’s … LG: So, did you bring in chamber music groups? TD: Absolutely, yeah. LG: And do you want to, do you remember which ones? TD: Um, well we had Robert Mann of the Juilliard, and he didn’t want to bring the Juilliard, he wanted to bring his son and they did a duo concert. Um, who were some of the earliest? We had Continuum, which is something that came out of Juilliard, which was kind of a Twentieth Century … it wasn’t your typical, like, string quartet chamber group, it was an ad hoc ensemble that Joel Sachs, down at Juilliard, would pull together for very interesting programmatic concerts. Um, I know way back in the ’80s we did have string quartets, but I’m drawing a blank on which they were. We also had Young Concert Artists, which was an amazing …ah, what do you call it, agency, talent agency, that had this incredible track record of identifying the rising stars. And, I mean they really, whoever was doing the auditioning was very perceptive. But we could never sell our audience — like we had Dawn Upshaw, who went on to be a superstar, and 23 people came to our concert in Filene because nobody, um, you know, we didn’t quite market this as “you’re hearing the next great thing.” That was, you know, an early transitional thing. LG: Um, okay, let’s see. Um, so what would you say your fondest memories are? �TD: [laughs] Um…fondest teaching memories usually centered around teaching a new course, and that, I always found that particularly exciting and … the first time I ever taught Duke Ellington or the first time I ever taught Wagner, I can remember those students really strongly. Um, I had a couple of really great collaborative research students. I think if there was one night or one moment that I remember that really captured the excitement of all it was opening night at Zankel. I mean, that was just such a fulfillment of so many things, and, um, were you there? LG: Mm hmm. TD: Ok there was, you know, everybody was there an hour early! I mean it was chaotic, we had no way to manage the crowds, we had no concert manager, it was just kind of us improvising, and … you wanted it full, you didn’t want any melt, and we had people sitting listening to the pre-concert talk in a different room, and … but it was just jam packed and then it was the people from Carnegie Hall, the young people from the Carnegie Hall who gave the concert, and they were just blown away by the hall. LG: And they came back every year… TD: Yeah, and they still do, they still do. They keep changing their name but they keep coming back. And, um, yeah that, I mean that was just a magical night after all the years we’d been in Filene and all the promise that that hall showed, and just the whole thing. So, from that point of view, that was a high point. Um …so. LG: Did you have advocates in the administration who were particularly helpful? TD: Oh, you mean like Chuck Joseph was the Dean of the Faculty? [laughs] LG: Well… TD: No, that, I mean to some extent that was a coincidence that he was Dean of the Faculty when Arthur Zankel died. Um, you know that’s, that was not planned and I think that was going to happen, that money was going to be used for that hall regardless of how much people advocated. Um, I enjoyed working with a lot of people in the administration. I wouldn’t say that any of them were, you know, sort of, under the radar particularly strong advocates, you know. LG: Who was the president when Zankel opened? TD: David Porter. No, no, no, Phil Glotzbach when it opened. Um, David Porter when the money came, I think. I think David ended in about ’05; the money came in ’04. LG: And David was a music major at Swarthmore, as an undergraduate. TD: Yeah. And he was, he was always very interested in music. But I wouldn’t say that he gave �us any favoritism, that I was ever aware of. But, uh, it was fun to have him give lectures and perform in Filene, or elsewhere. LG: Robert J. Lurtsema. Do you remember that name? TD: Sure, from Boston radio. LG: Well, he was, um, also a Swarthmore student, and I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the music classes that the two of them took together. TD: Yeah, [laughs], hmm. LG: Okay, um, so your greatest challenge, you think? TD: Um, I would say it was mostly when I was chair, you know managing both personnel and managing the … the limited facilities that we had in Filene. I mean it was a challenge to move into Zankel but, um, it was an exciting, totally great challenge. LG: Now, um, you were also a large part of the faculty governance system. TD: Mm hmm. LG: What committees did you sit on, and …? TD: I served on a lot. I never served on CAPT. I served on CEPP, I served on FPPC, I served on Curriculum Committee, I served on some task forces, um, and I would say the two things that stand out, I don’t think we ever did anything terribly dramatic when I was on CEPP; being chair of FPPC was, you know, a lot of Karl Broekhuizen and dealing with budgets and all of that, and I wouldn’t say that was the most fascinating. The two most fascinating things that I think I did, or that maybe had the most impact, one involved Sue … SUE BENDER: [laughs] TD: It was when I was on the Curriculum Committee and they had been trying to get an expansion of which departments, or courses, qualified for the lab science requirement, for ten years, or something. LG: Oh! TD: And the faculty finally had voted pretty definitively that they wanted it expanded, but they didn’t really give a road map and so it was handed over to the Curriculum Committee to figure this out. And Janet Sorensen and I were on the Curriculum Committee and we decided that she would become chair of the Curriculum Committee in exchange for me chairing this little ad hoc committee that was going to consider the science requirement [laughs]. And it was, this was to get Exercise Science, it was to get some of the Anthropology or Archeology, as lab courses. Um, was there anybody else who was really �trying the …? You know at that point it was Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Math, and whatever else — the standards. And so [laughs], we sat in a room, the bullets were flying over our heads, … LG: … Computer Science? TD: I don’t think Computer Science ended up being a science. LG: Okay. TD: I’m not sure. But, we had sort of been given a mandate but the science departments weren’t that happy about it, and, you know bullets were flying over our heads, but we kept ducking and we came out of the, we came out of that committee with everybody on board and it passed and the rest is history! Now they’re all in the Center for Integrated Science, you know? LG: Yes. [laughs]. TD: But that was … the other one that I was really happy to be a part of was there was a task force on faculty status that Mehmet Odekon chaired, and it was to review a lot of these people who were, you know in unusual statuses, it wasn’t about tenure track people, by and large. LG: You had quite a number of them. TD: We did, and we had a large number of just adjunct part-time instructors, but the one that was of greatest interest was the artists-in-residence, and they had been created when Ed Hausman and Ruth Lakeway retired in the late ’80s. I think Chuck Joseph was chair. And they were tenure track, full tenure track professors, they were full professors, both of them. And we had need for, you know, not just a piano and voice, we had need for string, we had need for flute, guitar, whatever else, and, um, Chuck worked it out that we would give up two tenure track positions in exchange for four artists-in-residence. And then, a few years later it got expanded to six artists-in-residence. And initially they were oneyear contracts and extremely lowly paid, low paid, and no faculty development access, you know. And so, the artist-in-residence was, sounded like high status, but it wasn’t. So, one of the things that we did on that was to get it so that they, in this task force on faculty status, to get it so that they moved to three year contracts, they became eligible for sabbaticals, I think. I’m not sure what else happened, but I do know that it made a huge difference in, not just the lives of the music department, but Alma Becker came up to me once and said, “I hear you had something to do with getting me into this status. Thank you for that.” And that took a lot of pushing. LG: Alma Becker was in the theater department? TD: She was in theater. And, um, … I mean part of me thinks that we should recoup, regain �some of our artist faculty in tenure track positions. It apparently is not likely to happen at this juncture, but in any case, that was a solution that I thought was really important. And there was nobody else on that task force who had particular knowledge of what those people did and how under-compensated they were, so that was sort of my niche. I’m sure we dealt with, you know, some other important faculty status situations but I’m a little fuzzy on those, but that was rewarding. LG: Good! That’s helpful. Are there other things that you want to tell us about? TD: Um, I mean I know you had asked about how things had changed since, in the time that I was there. And the Filene thing, as I said, did a lot. It mostly did it, but not a hundred percent, for classical, Western classical music, because that’s what the audition requirements were. Although a number of Filene scholars have come in who were multitalented in music and had other interests besides purely classical. But the curriculum not only expanded in terms of the number of students that we served and the number of faculty but it broadened, you know, into having West African drumming, and … you know Gordon Thompson, and now others. LG: [inaudible] TD: Yeah, or, um, you know world, various non-Western music. And jazz grew incredibly in the time that I was there. And even electronic music and music technology, which has an amazing studio in Zankel. All of these things that were, if they had any place in the department in 1982 when I got there, it was tiny and understaffed, and/or under resourced. And so, over time, all of those things grew. LG: But the offerings were focused mostly on Western? TD: When I got there, there were, there were a couple of things, there was one History of Jazz course in the catalog. I think there was an American Music course in the catalog. And pretty much everything else was straight, you know, Western music sort of stuff. So. LG: But it didn’t include Indian or Asian, or TD: No, not when I was first there. Probably not technically until Gordon arrived, which must have been the very late ’80s. So, if you want a comic example of why the Zankel became important, it would focus on drum instruction. LG: Right, yes. TD: So, Filene was in no way sound-proofed that you could have drums being played in the building at all. You would have heard them every … every area. So, the College tried a variety of solutions to where the drum instruction should take place. And sometimes it was also a sort of …mixed in with band rehearsal space, but we tried to resist that because that led to different management problems. But for a while they were in a trailer kind of just outside of Filene. They were in um … I guess there was kind of a part of �North Hall that was … I think in the end they put air conditioning, HVAC coolers in, a big industrial thing into this space. The funniest thing on campus was they got put over, do you know where purchasing is right now? At that point it was kind of underneath Biology, over in Gannett, not Gannett, Palamountain. And, I guess it was, was it Bernie? Bernie Possidente does research on the circadian rhythms of mice, and their sleep was being disrupted by [laughs], so we were thrown out of there mid-semester. And that, once they had that sort of data to show what the drumming was doing to his mice, we were … and then we rented a house kind of kitty corner from Allerdice, down on Division Street, for probably close to a decade. A guy by the name of Freddie Blood taught drums there. And, anyway, in Zankel they have a bunker [laughs] where they are able to do all of this without being chased around campus. LG: Tom, the last thing I wanted to ask you was about the activities you’ve been engaged in since you retired? TD: Uh huh. LG: When did you retire? TD: 2010. December 31st, 2010. There was that, there was an offer made, and you had to retire that fiscal year, or that tax year, or whatever. Same year as Terry Diggory. And Chuck Joseph. Yeah. So anyway, um. Yeah musically, for a while I was writing program notes for some things at Lincoln Center and giving pre-concert talks for the alumni in the summer. And I got started with Sustainable Saratoga very shortly after my retirement. And ended up heading up their Urban Forestry project and Treetoga for about ten years, which I’m thrilled to say, I handed off the administration of that enterprise to somebody else now who’s doing a great job. So, I’m still involved but I don’t have to call the meetings. That … that led to me getting appointed to the Comprehensive Plan Update committee back around 2014, which was a very tempestuous experience in terms of city … inner workings of City Hall, and … LG: Nothing’s changed. TD: Yeah. And then that led me to sort of volunteer to be on the Open Space Advisory Committee, which I’ve chaired for the last few years. We just brought a new Open Space plan to City Council about two weeks ago, and it’ll be open to the public for another six weeks or so and then will get voted on by City Council, um, probably in early to midJune. And so that’s been exciting. And most recently I’ve founded a little non-profit with some people that talked an oil company that owns the little triangle of land at the corner of South Broadway and Ballston Avenue, right next to Dunkin’ Donuts and across from Stewarts and across from Limoncello Bank property. Um, they gave us that property and we’re in the process of re-greening it. We’re going to get a water connection on the 12th of May with the help of DPW, and we’re going to plant some trees and then we’re working on a full pollinator … LG: So, it’ll be a little mini park? �TD: It’ll be a pollinator friendly planted mini greenspace. We hesitate to use the term “park” because apparently that opens up, you know, some legal requirements. [laughs] LG: Oh! TD: There are different standards for a park than there are for a greenspace, apparently. Right now, we are just landscaping this parcel we happen to own. So anyway, that’s, um, … but I am, this June, finally doing again something musical. With the new administration of Opera Saratoga I offered to give two talks at the library in preparation for their festival. So, I’m going to be talking about Italian opera buffa, and specifically Don Pasquale, which is what they’re doing. So, two things that are open to the public and maybe will drive a few people there. I’m excited about it. As satisfying as all the tree and other stuff has, it’s really nice to be digging my, you know digging into some music again. LG: Okay. Anything else we should add? TD: I don’t think so LG: We covered all of the bases, Sue? Thank you very much. This has been a delight. TD: Thank you for having me. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Lynne Gelber Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Tom Denny Location The location of the interview Saratoga Springs, NY Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 35:04 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit November 9, 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Tom Denny Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource May 4, 2023 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Description An account of the resource Tom Denny grew up in Pittsburgh and received his graduate degree at the Eastman School of Music. He arrived at Skidmore in 1982 and spent his entire career in the Music Department, serving as department chair for a number of years. He experienced the transition from Filene to the Zankel Music Center, the growth of music department faculty, and the start of artist-in-residence and visiting artist programs. He also worked to expand the scope of music courses taught beyond classical Western music. During his tenure he facilitated the growth of concerts on campus by students and visiting musicians. Since retirement, Tom has been active in Open Space and green projects in Saratoga. Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Artists in Residence Carnegie Hall Musicians Curriculum David Porter Drumming Filene Musician Residencies Filene to Zankel Hall (Transition) Gordon Thompson Jazz Lab Science Requirement Music Technology Non-Western Requirement Sterne Chamber Residency Task Force on Faculty Status Visiting Artists Concerts Young Concert Artists https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/81af98f20c832a196ad8912471d813d5.jpg 0c82e7583bc83e757ae046c32bfaf460 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/d7911dc1b87852bd1d14a918cff18bfa.m4a 3db0fb9fa5047bb77a295135ab3d203b https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/79156beb34bfb43c0cdf60a959d8f593.pdf 435696b74fefc6ad9747711cfda9caf4 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/54621cb0975f28658933b876e9354a38.pdf f5401926e90aac700c4d4a8b8557e5ff Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Liv Fidler '19 Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Susan Kress Location The location of the interview Scribner Library, Skidmore College Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:52:24 Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit November 5, 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Susan Kress Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource May 6, 2016 Language A language of the resource English (en) Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource Susan Kress joined Skidmore’s English faculty in 1975 and retired in 2013.  During her years at Skidmore she served as chair of the English Department, chair of 3 major college committees, Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Acting President during the sabbatical of President Phil Glotzbach.  She saw the institution of endowed chairs and was herself awarded the Class of 1948 Chair for Excellence in Teaching. In this interview she discusses important curricular changes instituted to increase understanding of diversity and attract more males to the student body. She also reflects on the balance between work and family life and her retirement poetry-writing initiative.  Academic Affairs College Governance Endowed Chairs Literature Women's Movement https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/2fc65db6f09995b7e401962caf455231.jpg 942f2249f1ac32a67ccc48ed5a4b47e6 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/c6d8db16dc111fefa7a74af6a57edcda.mp3 91505c425b7d86a6be44e135b5c7c42c https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/dc4db9c6cc4891c471750e87eb93b49a.pdf bed38bf251b7bbac51de2a7611fbf101 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/883ad33313493dbf665ea5a125091e32.pdf a47de97bc4d88f257fcab875ce68f660 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Andrea Wise Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Robert (Bob) Mahoney Location The location of the interview East Dennis, MA Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio Recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:08:46 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit August 17, 2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Robert (Bob) Mahoney Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource May 6, 2019 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Description An account of the resource Robert P. Mahoney was a professor of biology at Skidmore from 1964 to 1994, with interests centering on microbiology, electron microscopy, and bioethics. He also was instrumental starting Skidmore’s tradition of support for the Red Cross, launching the campus blood donation drives in 1968. In this interview, he talks about how he helped Skidmore secure its first electron microscope and how the Biology Department grew over the years, responding to curricular changes and student interests. The department named its microscopy lab in his honor when he retired, and in 2019 he was recognized as a Red Cross Blood Hero of the Cape, Islands, and Southeast Massachusetts for personally donating 264 pints of blood thus far. Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Bioethics Campus Move Curriculum Faculty Gender Equity J-Semester Josephine Case Liberal Studies Palamountain Student Research https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/8a0d4fb74796be3d1a5ea74de2c1911a.jpg 66f37b83fd4137ff2fcfc2b09aa552b6 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/9b6f641ea4e49dcd21acdc6c651a8d0a.m4a f1aa2901820feba0538ddc9652251f20 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/71f07a70e3377300dcd3bff53350302d.pdf c415db1fcc3f33bc3ed0f9e2fcdf0081 PDF Text Text Interview with Philip A. Glotzbach by Lynne Gelber, Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, Saratoga Springs, NY, November 10, 2023. LYNNE GELBER: This is Lynne Gelber interviewing Phil Glotzbach for the Skidmore Retiree Oral History Project. It is November 10th, 2023, and we are in Saratoga Springs. Phil, welcome! It’s nice to see you here. PHIL GLOTZBACH: Thank you. LG: Tell us a little bit about where you were born and a little bit about growing up … um, a little bit about your childhood, to start with. PG: Well, I was born in the Mid — I’m a Midwesterner … I grew up pretty much in the Midwest. I was born in Kansas City, Kansas. We lived there for eight years, in a little town just outside of Kansas City, on the Kansas side, called Prairie Village. Which interestingly is the place where Reg Lilly, in Philosophy, also grew up! [chuckles] Although we didn’t know each other. At age eight my family moved to Chicago for a few years. We lived there for three years. And then we moved to Dayton, Ohio, south of Dayton — Kettering, suburb of Dayton, and that’s where I really grew up and spent my youth. Went to Notre Dame, also in the Midwest, as we know, and then to Yale for graduate school — so that was really the first time I’d lived any place other than in the Midwest. LG: That must have been interesting to move to the East coast to live for the first time. PG: It was wonderful. I’ve [laughs] I still think that graduate school was sort of the pinnacle of my life and it’s been downhill ever since. LG: [laughs} PG: Although, … and so many people look back on their graduate school days with horror and say “Oh it was awful!” I just loved every minute of it. But … LG: What was so special about it? PG: Well, I got to do what I wanted to do, which was read Philosophy and study Philosophy and do it all day at Yale University, with, you know, the library and with the people and the professors and fellow graduate students who were very smart, and it was just … it was heaven, absolutely heaven. And I got to teach. My first … LG: As a TA? PG: As a TA, and then my final year there I had my own class, a two-semester Intro to Philosophy class, that I just loved. So it was, I had won something called a Prize Teaching Fellowship, which came from having some success as a TA in classes, and the reward was that I got an office [laughs], which I’d had before, but this was a nice office. 1 �It was in Sterling-Strathcona-Sheffield, Strathcona-Sheffield Hall, and it was on the 12th floor and I got to look out over the entire campus, so that was part of it, it was just wonderful. But the award gave me, extended my fellowship and it gave me this class to teach for my final year, so that was wonderful. LG: And, were the philosophy, um, philosophers that you were teaching mostly Aristotle, Plato, that group, or…? PG: Well, this was an Intro class that, again, it was two semesters so we started with Aristotle, with Plato … Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, but then we went up through, I think we taught John … I haven’t looked at this syllabus for a few years — this was 50 years ago! [laughs] But we taught John Stuart Mill and then, you know, a bunch of other things. I mean it was great, I loved it. It was sort of, it was through the history of Philosophy. But… LG: So, it was the teaching and the atmosphere that led you into Philosophy? PG: Well … I got into Philosophy as an undergraduate, and, … um, I’m never sure if I should tell this story, but at the end of my freshman year I had no clue about what I wanted to do, and I’d thought about English or Sociology, I just didn’t know, and I’d never had a Philosophy class — we’d read some Philosophy in a Political Science class, in a Humanities seminar, and so on, so I’d had some introduction. And so I went into the office of Freshman Studies or the Dean of the Freshman Year or whatever it was called back then, and they had an aptitude and interests test, which they would administer if you wanted them to. And this was like 500 questions, you know … “Would you rather be in the forest or driving a truck,” you know, these kinds of questions. And so I just did it, I mean just for the heck of it. And at the end of it, so they computed this thing and went through it all and they said, “Well, you score highest in interest in Philosophy and Religion.” And I looked at that and thought, “Well, yeah, that seems right! Ok!” [laughs] LG: Did anybody ever say “what are you going to do with that?” PG: No. Well, my parents, but… LG: [laughs] That’s who I had in mind. PG: But…and it wasn’t that I got interested in it because of the test, it was the test triggered something in me that said, “Yeah, I really am interested in this stuff.” And so I, … I mean, we don’t have to go through the curriculum. So that was the first thing, so I started taking more Philosophy classes and decided I was going to be a Philosophy major and all that. And every Philosophy class I took confirmed it. And then in the spring of my sophomore year I had another epiphany, and I still remember this to the … you know, vividly. Vividly. This was 1970, so again it was quite a while ago. I was in the library, on the second floor of the library at Notre Dame, and I ran into a section that had all these things called journals, which I’d never seen before, professional journals. I saw all these Philosophy journals, and I just started randomly pulling some off the shelf just looking to 2 �see what the heck these things were. And, you know, I opened one up and it was a Philosophy essay, and I thought, “My God, people write essays and publish them in these journals and people read them,” and I thought “This is fantastic! I want to do that!” And that’s when I decided, “Ok, I really want to … I want to be a Philosophy major, I knew that, but I want to become a professional Philosopher, I want to go get a PhD.” By that time I knew what a PhD was. I wanted to go to graduate school, and that just confirmed it. So I just fell head over heels in love with the discipline, and that led to graduate school. And at the end of my senior year, when I had applied to grad schools and had been accepted at a couple, including Yale, and I was very happy to go there, I got a letter from the American Philosophical Association — the professional association, right? And the thrust of this letter was basically, and I believe it was like, it was a one-page letter, and it said, “So, you’re going to Philosophy graduate school and you probably think you’re going to go to get a PhD and get a job teaching Philosophy at a college or university. Well forget it…” [laughs] “…because there are no jobs out there, and so you might as well …” you know. And I’m not sure what the purpose of that letter was, sort of to … to say “Well maybe I shouldn’t go to Philosophy graduate school after all.” But I thought, “Well, sure, there are no jobs out there, but I’ll get one.” [laughs] So I just threw it in the wastebasket and went on. And as it turned out, I was lucky to be one of the few who actually did get a job, at Denison. Denison University. It was my first … LG: And what year was that? PG: That was 1977. I graduated from undergraduate school in ’72 and, you know, spent 5 years in graduate school and still hadn’t finished my dissertation, so I was ABD. And they hired me anyway. And I, when I spoke over the years to new faculty members at Skidmore, I always told this story. I said, “Well I was hired …” and especially to the ones who were on temporary contracts or, you know, whatever it would be, um, short-term contracts, non-tenure track contracts, and I said, “So when I was hired in this job my contract said, ‘Tenure possible.’ ” And I would say, “I don’t even think they knew what that meant.” But to me it meant, “Ok, it was possible, so I’ll just go and do a good job and I’ll get tenure.” You know, silly me. But, um … and that was the first time I had really had experience with a liberal arts college. You know, I was at Notre Dame, which is a university, and Yale, which is a university, and larger, and I had a great undergraduate experience at Notre Dame. The Philosophy Department there was first rate and they really cared about their undergraduates. And they cared about their graduates too. And it was a community, and there was a philosophy colloquium every Friday, and everybody went to it. And I went to it and got to hear people, you know, argue about philosophical stuff. I mean again, it was just great. Um, but I’d never been to a liberal arts college, and at Denison I started learning what a liberal arts college was, and what it meant to teach at one. And I thought I was a pretty good teacher already, coming out of graduate school, but I wasn’t. And, you know, I had a lot to learn, and I think you could spend your whole life teaching — you guys know this — you can keep learning forever. But I really did learn how to teach there. 3 �LG: Isn’t that why they say we all became faculty members? PG: Right. To keep learning. LG: Yes! PG: Because it’s fun. It’s the best job you can have. And, and so this is kind of a long-winded way to say, and I spent 15 years at Denison in the Philosophy Department teaching, and loved it, and did some other things there, and … LG: So how did you get into administration? PG: Well, a couple of things happened. Over my time at Denison I became the Department Chair, and I enjoyed doing that. Most people look at that as a prison sentence and I liked it, I thought it was great. You know, you got to help the department. I mean it was really a series of experiences that expanded the scope of what I was thinking about. So, you know, when you are a teacher, you are thinking about your classes and this and that, and as a department chair you have to think about the whole department, like that, so I enjoyed that. And I got involved with some governance committees, connected with curriculum, primarily, and we did a curriculum revision and put in a new first-year curriculum. And I was elected chair of the Faculty Senate and we got that curriculum through, and then the last thing we did, at the end of the year, was to vote ourselves out of existence. Because, you know, I thought, and others thought, it’s silly at a small school to have a Faculty Senate. I mean, you know, have a faculty meeting and be done with it. And I enjoyed all of that, I found it interesting to think, now, then, not just about the department but about the whole college. What’s going on and how can we make things better? And my second … and so I had a series of experiences like that, where I kind of enjoyed it and thought it was good. And all that time I was very much enjoying teaching and doing research and all that other stuff. But I also started a couple of programs there. One was called the Denison Greek Studies Program, that I started with another faculty member, in English, and some other people in Philosophy, a bunch of us, and we would take students to Greece for a six-week seminar in the summer and study ancient philosophy and science and art and history. I mean it was great, it was an interdisciplinary seminar, so I loved that. And the second thing … and that doesn’t exist any more, it persisted a few years after I left and then I think it went away. But the second thing that I started was a PPE program, Philosophy, Politics and Economics, structure… patterned after the one at Oxford. And I’d heard about that program, I thought, “Gee that looks really interesting,” and it was an interdisciplinary program, and I thought that would be something that students at Denison would really take to. And so I worked with it, and I was chair of the Philosophy Department and I got support of our department and I worked with the Government Department and the Economics Department and it took a little while but we put this thing together and got it approved. And that program still exists today. So, I’m actually kind of proud of that. But 4 �anyway, I found those experiences to be interesting and enjoyable and satisfying and all that. And then I spent a period of time in 1987 as a member of the Presidential Search Committee, we were hiring a new president. And we had had a president before then who was there for four years and was not successful. And it was somebody who, someone with a very strong faculty background who came in and I was totally convinced that this person would be a great president, and it turned out he wasn’t. And, you know, I thought, “Well that was kind of interesting, to find that out.” So I found myself on this Presidential Search Committee, and I’d never worked with trustees before, barely sort of knew what they were all about, and there were alumni on this committee, and some other faculty members and staff and so on, and there was about 14,15 people on this committee. And I found that the experience of, first of all, I really enjoyed getting to know the trustees and to see how they related to the college and what they were all about and their commitment to the place, and they were very interesting people on their own, and same for the alumni who were on there. But the whole process of trying to figure out whom we should bring to Denison as a president, the next president, just turned out to be fascinating to me. I was interested in the questions we were asking and the whole process, and seeing … and we had 150 applicants, you know. There was no shortage of people who were applying. And I looked back over the list, once upon a time, and gee, some of those people went on and did other things and I’ve sort of gotten to know them in other contexts, I mean it was pretty interesting. But, so I found the process itself to be fascinating, and I thought, “These are questions I’m interested in,” — that we were asking the candidates. And I also thought, “And you know, they’re not THAT great.” I mean, it’s not like they came from another planet. LG: [laughs] You can do that too! PG: I mean, so I thought, “Yeah, maybe I could do this.” So, that led me to think that, “Yeah, I think I would like to be a president.” Because, again, it’s an expansion of scope. What would it be like to have responsibilities for thinking about an entire institution, and so on. And the pathway to becoming a college president, from where I sat, was to become an academic administrator, a dean. And I, there was no pathway for that at Denison because they had some very good people in administration and they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and, given the ages of our children and all that, it just seemed that, if I was going to do this, we would need to go somewhere else and start. So, that’s kind of a long winded, … I don’t know that anybody’s really going to be interested in this. LG: Well yeah, actually! So how did you find your way to Skidmore? PG: Well, I went, first of all, to the University of Redlands in Southern California, and … LG: As a…? PG: As,… I was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. LG: And that was … 5 �PG: That was in two,… in 1992. 1992. So I’d been at Denison for 15 years, and … I was Dean for, oh, I don’t know, six years or something, and I kind of moved into being what they called the … the Chief Academic Officer, something, then I became officially the Vice President for Academic Affairs. And when I came, there were two divisions, the College of Arts and Sciences and an adult learning program. By the time I left there were three divisions, a School of Business, School of Education and College of Arts and Sciences. And as Chief Academic Officer and Vice President for Academic Affairs I was in charge of all three of those, and so that was interesting. But I always had in the back of my mind that I wanted to be a president. And it was no secret to anybody, and the president there was very generous and … um, worked with me, mentored me, and you know, we thought about being, you know, what does it mean to be a president, and I paid attention to what he was doing. So I really felt like I learned a lot about administration in that job, and I was there for eleven years. And then in 2003 I had applied for some other presidencies and we, Marie and I, had gone on some campus visits and I’d had a number of interviews and nothing had quite clicked, and in the … in the spring of 2003 there were … there were three really interesting jobs that I was involved in. I won’t name the other two schools, but … basically became a finalist at all three, and one of them was Skidmore. And I didn’t know much about Skidmore. I heard …. I knew the name, and, situated on the West Coast I really didn’t know much about the liberal arts colleges on the East Coast, but we, Marie and I, wanted to come back to the East Coast if we could, and I knew by then I wanted to be a president at a liberal arts college. Um, the University of Redlands was actually a bit of a larger school, we thought of it as a liberal arts university, it’s kind of medium-sized., and very interesting, and had a bunch of good stuff going on, and it’s a great school, and the undergraduate school is terrific there. Still is. And it’s gotten better and better, after I left. But, I wanted a liberal arts college. And so, um, we went through a number of interviews with some various schools and that spring of 2003, I was a finalist in three different searches and came in second in one of them and the other two were Skidmore and this other school which was very good and actually ranked higher than Skidmore on US News and all this, and had more resources, but, um, Marie and I thought that Skidmore really would be the place for us, and a lot of things resonated with … with us and with what we’d learned about the college through the interview process and all that, and so we … LG: What struck you, in particular? PG: Well, I mean first of all I loved the, um … I loved the motto, Creative Thought Matters, and what that meant and what that said. And, of course, Marie’s in theater and music, and, you know people think of creativity as the arts, and all this, and we’ve been through this conversation at Skidmore all my time here, but what I took that to mean was that creativity matters everywhere. And that’s what the college was saying. And that motto had just come into existence. LG: Who did that? PG: Well, it was at the, Jamie Studley, right at the end of her time, because this — it was 6 �already there by the time I came. And some people don’t remember that [laughs], and I’ve gotten credit for it, … um, I’ve … SUE BENDER: [laughs] LG: [laughs] We had this discussion, Phil and I. PG: I love taking credit for things I didn’t do, but, um … but it had just come into being, and the process that brought it there, Michael Casey was involved in that, very heavily. And you know, you had an outside consultant who came in and actually talked to people and listened. And mostly those exercises result in failure. A school spends some amount of money, more than people would imagine, creating a new motto, a new phrase or something, and they go with it for four or five years and then they say, “Yeah, this isn’t that great, you know, it’s just not working.” But Creative Thought Matters came out of a process that, right, it fit the college, it really expressed something that was there, and the fact that it has persisted over all this time shows that it was really the right thing. And I thought this was great, because I loved the idea. People weren’t talking much about creativity back then. Today everybody talks about it. It’s a big deal. But back then it was very rare, and … so one of the things that attracted me, and us, to Skidmore, was that this was part of their presentation at the time, the search committees of the college and all this, and we talked about that. Secondly, the strong sense of community that, um, that we felt and people talked about, and when we went on campus we felt that and people cared about the campus and the college and they cared about each other, and … you know, no place is perfect and all that, we know, but … but that was something that was, seemed very distinctive at Skidmore. I mean … LG: Were there any surprises? PG: When we came? LG: Yeah. PG: That’s … people always ask that. Um, I don’t know that there were any particular surprises. Um, again, liberal arts colleges are all kind of alike in a lot of ways, right? They have small classes and faculty members care about students, and, … you know, nice campuses and all this. I mean there’s just a … and a lot of schools, when they’re trying to tell prospective students why they should come, they talk about those things, and I always thought, “Well gee, talk about those things, but why does that send you to Skidmore as opposed to, you know, Denison or any place else?” But I thought Skidmore really had something with Creative Thought Matters. And one of the things that, one of the other things that I always talked about, I always thought was important, and that Skidmore was already talking about, was interdisciplinarity, you know, with the liberal studies curriculum. And, ironically, when I 7 �was cleaning out my office at the University of Redlands I had a box of books underneath it, that had just gotten shoved in there for whatever reason. And I’m going through these books and two of them were the liberal studies curriculum from Skidmore college. Which I’d gotten, you know, at some point in my Dean … Deanship and Vice Presidentship and all of this, and I’d looked at it but I hadn’t really read through it and I thought, “Well this is, you know, kismet here. This is…” [laughs]. LG: That was kind of neat for everybody involved. PG: Yes! LG: Faculty and students. PG: It was a marvelous program! And it was interdisciplinary, and it really brought people together. I mean, you guys know all this, you lived through it. But I’m just saying so that was something that I thought was enormously interesting and important about the College, that they had developed this curriculum, even though it hadn’t completely been finished, right? I mean there were parts of it, so it ended up being this first year curriculum. But I thought that was great. And even though one of the first things that happened when I got there was to basically put that curriculum in mothballs and create First Year Seminars, which I also thought was the right thing to do, and so on … but it retained the commitment to interdisciplinarity with the requirement that every seminar have an interdisciplinary component, not just as an add-on but built in. And the fact that the Skidmore faculty could teach that seminar — you know, sixty sections a year, forty to sixty, I mean it depends on the … it grew over time — was a tribute to faculty who understood the importance of those cross-disciplinary connections. I mean you have to be rooted in your own discipline — you have to have that. If you don’t have that, you have nothing to bring to the table. But to understand that there’s a wider world out there. And, what I came to learn, pretty early on in Skidmore, was that faculty members did not feel a proprietary sense about their students. I had experienced, at other places, faculty members in certain departments that will remain unnamed, who thought they owned their students. And … owned in a sense that if a student wanted to, you know, double major or spend time somewhere else or something they said, “Oh no, you can’t do that. You have to be here.” None of that at Skidmore, that I ever saw. And I thought that was marvelous. And so, you know, was that a surprise? Maybe a small one, but it fed into or grew out of what we’d already seen. So those were things that really attracted us to Skidmore. The sense of interdisciplinarity that people understood. And I’ve always been interdisciplinary, my work cuts across lots of disciplines, that’s what I always did. And that Greek seminar was an example of that. But, and so to find a school that had that in its DNA and that cared about community and cared deeply about students, which again would be true of most liberal arts colleges. And the last thing was that it had enormous potential …enormous potential, because it seemed pretty clear to me that there were things that the school wanted to do and could do that it couldn’t do yet. LG: Like what? 8 �PG: Well, the search, I’ll give you… I’ll answer that in a second, but the, when I was talking with the search committee at the end of the, at the end of the, you know, interview, first interview, and I remember this, they asked me, “Well, ok, so what … what challenges do you see at Skidmore? What are some things? And I said, “Well there are three of them: endowment, endowment and endowment.” [laughs] I mean, the endowment was about $150 million back then and I thought, “my God, I mean, here’s a school that is a strong liberal arts college, and it has all these things going for it and everything, and only a $150 million dollars in the endowment? How can this be?” And, of course, we all know the history of how, how that came to be. Yeah, I mean a lot of things went into that. So that was one of the things that had to happen. Um, you know the potential was — it’s in my inaugural talk, actually, I mean I’ve said, addressed — you know the first thing to figure out is, “Ok, we say Creative Thought Matters. Well, what does that mean?” You know, “What does that mean in classrooms and curriculum, what does that mean for students? How do we live that?” And so that was an interesting challenge. The other challenges had to do with, it was very clear that there were things that needed to be built here, starting with what became Zankel Hall. I mean that was already designed, right? It was already on the books, but … it had already won an award! [laughs] It was one of the best unbuilt buildings in America! You may remember this. LG: [laughs] PG: It won an architectural award for that. Um, you know that building needed to be built. And, as it very quickly turned out, there were other things that were pretty obvious. I mean we needed to get more students back on campus. We needed to get students … there were too many students living out among human beings in Saratoga Springs. You know, college students should not live with human beings, they should be on a campus, right? LG: laughs] PG: And so, we were fortunate enough to be able to build the Northwoods Apartments very quickly, and we borrowed money and it was easy because we were bringing students back, and so that was revenue stream right there and that took care of the cost of … LG: By bringing them back what did you hope to accomplish? PG: Well, the first thing we wanted to accomplish was to get, again just to get them back on campus where they needed to be, instead of … to be less of a commuter campus. Number two, the students who were living off campus were juniors and seniors, right? And so there was this huge unbalance, imbalance, of too many first year and second year students on campus and the, and so the campus was too immature. Number three, when so many students are living off campus, they clear out at night and so there’s a kind of vitality drain, there’s an energy drain that happens, and as soon as we opened those residence 9 �halls the energy level of the campus kicked up. And you didn’t have all these students driving cars back and forth. And the other part was Moore Hall. You know, getting rid of Moore Hall. Which the trustees realized, even … even before I did. LG: The Pink Palace. [laughs] PG: Yes, the Pink Palace, where we live today. We live on the site of Moore Hall in a townhouse there. Um, I mean you know, to have this residence hall, which was good in its own way, aside from the facade, um, for years and years, and students actually liked living there, but it’s two miles away. I mean, so again, so to get those students back on campus, that was huge. To build Zankel Hall, to give music a real home and to make a space where you could bring people together on campus. You know, Zankel Hall is just amazing; we were fortunate to be able to do that. Um, and, you know, just to find ways to give, bring the resources here so that the College could do what it wanted to do. What people wanted to do in the classrooms, what people wanted to do in departments. I mean there were just places where there were needs. It’s the first strategic plan. You know, if you look at the strategic plan from 2005 to 2015 there were four goals in there but the title of the plan was “Engaged Learning.” So how do we strengthen that? What does it mean? And I wrote the preface to that, which I still like. The preface was really about “What is liberal education? What does it mean? What could it mean at Skidmore? And what about our distinctive identity?” So those are all things in the preface of that strategic plan. LG: And what did you mean by “engaged?” PG: Well, having, I mean it’s the difference between active and passive, to start with, you know. I mean, and again this was not some new idea. Um, the revolution in pedagogy that happened in the ’80s and the ’90s, and you guys lived through this, was a discovery of … that there was a difference between students learning and professors talking, right? I mean, people sort of figured out, “wait a minute.” I mean, I, I grew up, and we probably all did, at the time when we thought teaching was performing. And I love to do that, I love to lecture. But the discovery that really if you want to talk about how students learn, you need to do more, and you need to rethink what your classroom looks like and what you’re doing, and all that. I mean, so that was a major, a major revelation, I think, and revolution. Particularly in the ’80s and ’90s. Along with trying to get more diversity in student bodies, and all that, and what it meant to do that. LG: So, would you consider diversity as one of your big challenges? PG: Well, it was, and it was the second goal in the strategic plan, you know, that we need to make Skidmore a more diverse place. The number of, the percentage of students of color was about eleven percent back then, and the number of international students was, you know, point three percent, or something, I mean there just… and so, we, to make Skidmore College for the 21st century, we needed to make it a more diverse place. And the faculty was not any more diverse than the student body. And so, that strategic plan said we have to change that. And, you know, so the first thing we tried to do was to 10 �increase the number of scholarships, you know, to be able to bring students to campus who hadn’t been coming. We needed to expand our outreach in admissions. The very first thing we did was just to expand the HEOP program, because that was a place where there was, you know, sort of a center of diversity on campus. The problem was people thought that every student of color was an Opportunity student, even back then, which wasn’t true. Wasn’t even true back then. So we had to move past that and say, “No, it’s not the case that every student of color is in the Opportunity Program.” But, expanding the Opportunity Program was a way of bringing more students of color, and not just students of color but some, you know, white kids who were from disadvantaged backgrounds and so on. But that was a start. And then we set some very ambitious goals, and worked on domestic diversity first, and then we went for international diversity. And, you know, the result is it’s a completely different student body today. LG: So, you mentioned endowment and diversity. What were some of the other challenges that you … you faced? PG: You know, one interesting challenge, which was not quite on the scale of the others, was governance. I’d thought a lot about governance as a professor and as a dean and vice president and all that, and when I was being interviewed, I met with, I think it was, well it became the Faculty Executive Committee, I forget what it was called back then. LG: CAPTS. PG: CEPP? CAPTS? LG: CAPTS. PG: CAPTS? Well, CAPTS was the promotion and tenure committee. SB: That’s personnel. LG: Well, it had to… SB: Educational Policy. PG: CEPP, CEPP, it was probably CEPP. LG: Ok. PG: But whoever it was, I mean it’s a group of faculty leaders who were involved in governance. And I asked them, how many … LG: See the governance was Committee on Academic Promotions and Tenure. PG: Well, that was … 11 �SB: They both … PG: Now let’s not argue [laughs]. That was the Promotion and Tenure Committee. CAPT. LG: But they, in my mind, focused on … anyway. PG: Anyway, so I met with a bunch of faculty leaders and I said, “Now, how many … how many faculty positions are required in the governance system?” And I knew the answer to that because I’d read the faculty handbook and I’d counted them up. And it was like … twice the size of the faculty or something … whatever it was. I mean it was some factor, and I gave them that number and they were all kind of surprised. I said, “You know, you’ve got so many different committees and so many different people on this, it’s like, it’s taking all this energy. Is all that really necessary?” You know, “Is there a more efficient way to do this?” And so that was a question that I asked, coming in. And that’s something that, that we’ve wrestled with over the years and I think made some progress. And, you know, you never quite solve that battle, but if you look at the difference between what the governance system was in 2003 and what it was in 2020 when I retired … there were some new committees, which were great, um, and some committees that had morphed … LG: Like what? PG: Um, CIGU, the Committee on Intercultural and Global Understanding, which I started as a committee with a different name around the time of that, of that, um, first strategic plan. And it morphed into CIGU and it’s still there and I think it’s been a very important committee; it has given a lot of good advice. Um, the IPPC grew out of the IPC, and there was another committee, there were actually, there was a Budget Committee, right, whatever, Faculty Budget Committee, and then there was a third committee, which was kind of an all College committee, which involved students and so on, and so we were able to get rid of those two committees and to combine them into the IPPC, which … LG: Stands for? PG: Yes, right, the Institutional Policy and Planning Committee. So, it’s a strategic thinking committee that also dealt with policies. And it was a College-wide committee, so it had faculty, students, staff, and … people periodically would ask if that committee was too big, and isn’t it unwieldy, and I said, “No, it wasn’t unwieldy.” I mean, people get in there, we got a lot done. Um, so I think we did manage to reduce, and the Budget Committee, it became the Budget Committee, was something, but separate Budget Committee I thought was unnecessary, and this other committee that was like the College Life Committee or Campus Committee, that … we got rid of that and that became this. So we did some of that, and over the years people have, I think, successfully reduced a few positions here or there. It’s hard to … to get fewer people involved in shared governance because people know it’s important. Anyways, so that was one of the things. That’s kind of a small thing, but my thought was that people are having to spend an awful 12 �lot of time on this, and, you know, you just need to, it’s really important and if you are in it you need to do it well. Not everybody is going to do it well, and you need to make sure you’ve got time for other things. So that was one of the little things we did. And the Alumni, you know, we needed to bring … the Alumni engagement was not where I thought it needed to be. We needed to work on that. Fundraising, we needed to gear up. We needed to increase the annual fund. I mean, you know a lot of stuff revolved around money, um, but that was enormously important. So those were some of the things. LG: Any disappointments over the years? Things that you wanted to happen that didn’t? PG: [laughs] How much time do we have? What time is this? LG: [laughs]. PG: You know actually, the truth is not that many. Um, I wish that I could have — we, it wasn’t ever I, it was always we. I wish we could have raised more money. You know, the endowment now is over half a billion or is around there. The first strategic plan set a goal of … I think it was 300 million. Yeah, we wanted to double the endowment and people thought that was ambitious. Well, we actually hit that pretty quickly. Um, the two capital campaigns were successful, and both of those raised more money than people thought initially they would. Um, the first one was aided by the untimely death of Arthur Zankel, which was a tragedy. Arthur was a wonderful former trustee, and he’d sent two sons to Skidmore. But he named Skidmore, I think, the number one recipient of the residuaries in his will. And we ended up with, 45, 46 million dollars from that bequest, which was transformative in a lot of ways. I mean that gave us the lead gift for the Zankel center. That gave us endowment. That gave us money for scholarships. That created the, um, Arts Management program, um, … and you know, with some endowment from that. And so that was an amazing gift. And it also put Skidmore on the map with some other people who hadn’t perhaps noticed the College as much, but when that kind of a bequest comes through, people pay attention. Um, it started a relationship with Carnegie Hall, because they were the number two recipient of the residuaries, and of course there’s a Zankel Hall there, and Arthur had been very strongly involved, very much involved; the family is still involved with Carnegie Hall. And, um, I got to know, as a result of that, the director of Carnegie Hall. I’m blocking on his name right now, which is a scandal, I shouldn’t … wonderful guy, it’ll hit me in a minute. And he was just starting up the program that became Connect. Connect, right? It had a different name back then. And so one of the things that we talked about early on was having those fellowship students come up to Skidmore and perform, and so that’s where that all came. Who was that? Clive! Um, Gillian? Gillian. Yeah. Clive … his last name begins with a G. Wonderful guy, very smart, very creative. Um, and so that was a relationship that Skidmore was able to forge with this major cultural institution in New York City, which was great. Um, and … so you know, a lot of good things happened as a result of that. LG: One thing you haven’t talked about … 13 �PG: Ahh. LG: Way back, you were a sports coach. PG: [laughs]. LG: Do you want to talk about that? PG: Well, LG: It’s a different part … PG: For one … for one semester. It was the fall of what turned out to be our final year at Denison, and our son was a freshman in high school and was on the football team and, I won’t go through the long saga of how I got this, but I was invited to become a … a volunteer assistant coach on the football team, and I really didn’t, I didn’t know much about coaching, and the real coaches were very generous and taught me a lot of what I needed to learn, and it was a pretty interesting program at a very small school. And so I became the coach for the freshmen and the reserve team. I was a defensive coach, defensive coordinator, and I loved it! It was one of the most fun things. The only reason I could do it is I was on sabbatical from the college in that fall, I mean I was doing other work but I didn’t have to teach, and so I could, I could go to practices and do this. LG: And you could use your philosophical skills? PG: Well, I’m not sure how … LG: In the defense. PG: Only once or twice. But. And I won’t go into details because we are running out of time, but that … LG: Did that … PG: They did give me a little plaque that said Philosopher Coach, or something, which was kind of funny. LG: Did that have any effect on anything that you were, anything having to do with athletics at Skidmore? PG: No, I mean I’d always thought that athletics were a valuable part of the student experience. Both our kids were athletes. Jason went on and played football at Princeton and Elizabeth played water polo at Santa Clara, which is a Division 1 school. She was team captain by the time of her senior year so, you know, I saw first-hand how important sports are. And they were both good students, you know, so. I mean Jason did alright … you know, he became a cardiothoracic surgeon, so. And Elizabeth did alright, too … you know, she’s 14 �involved in the film industry. Um, I thought athletics were important. I mean they’re not the be-all and end-all. And I really liked, one of the things that I very much liked about Division 3 was I thought athletics were in their rightful place. In Division 1 it’s a different story, you know. But Division 3 athletics are a complement to the academic core of the Institution. LG: So, one last thing I want to ask you is, what have you been doing since you retired? PG: [laughs] Um, let me just go back before we get to that, because we, you talked about athletics. I mean, one of the things that I am proud about at Skidmore was the growth of athletics over the years, and you all will recall that my first year, my freshman year as president, I received a recommendation that we needed to get rid of hockey, right? That there were too many programs in the athletic department. We couldn’t support them at the level of funding that we had. LG: You’re talking about field hockey or ice hockey? PG: No, ice hockey. Ice hockey. Men’s hockey. And it was unbalanced and it was unbalanced in terms of Title IX — I mean there’s all these reasons — and the program wasn’t that great at the time, and so on. And so I made the decision to eliminate hockey. Right? Remember this? And that created an uproar, among both the hockey players and their parents, and a lot of students on campus thought this was awful. A lot of women students thought this was awful. Get rid of the hockey players on campus? No thank you. Um, and I understood that. And a lot of male alumni from the ’80s and the ’90s came out of the walls and said, “You can’t do this. This is really important. It’s important to us.” And I said, “Well it’s important to you? Have you ever contributed to the college to support this?” “No, we don’t do that.” “Well,” I was like, “Guess what?” And so we went through a period of negotiations with those guys and the number of parents and everything and it was really, a really interesting process, and after several weeks, months, I guess, probably six weeks of discussions, and Michael Casey was involved with that as well, the Advancement Office was convinced that we had come up with a plan, and with commitments from these alumni, who had not been supportive of the college, to be supportive. And we came up with various things and, that convinced Michael Casey that it was a legitimate plan and we could follow through on this, and that in fact there were numbers here that said “Ok, we could make this happen.” I mean I never wanted to get rid of hockey. What I wanted to do was have a strong athletic department that we could afford. And that, we came up with a plan not just for funding hockey but for doing more with funding of the athletic program as a whole, which was underfunded terribly at the time. Still is, but it was much worse back then. And we created FOSA, Friends of Skidmore Athletics. First time there was ever any serious fundraising around athletics. And we brought hockey back. And that was fine, it was easier to do that than to get rid of it. And, by the way, the hockey team is undefeated this year, as far as I can tell. LG: [laughs] PG: But, you know and we brought Gail Cummings-Danson in as Athletic Director a few years 15 �later, and one of the things that she did — she did two things — she created a lot of things — she’s done very well over her time here. She created the Hall of Fame to honor Skidmore athletes over time, which was a wonderful thing and it’s terrific over there in the Athletic Department. And, uh, they actually made me a member a couple of years ago, which was kind of fun. But she created the Thoroughbred Society, right? An honorary society to honor student athletes who had a GPA of … I forget what the … 3.6? 3.4? It’s pretty high to get in there. And the hockey team actually won the team award a couple of years ago for the mens’ scores, and I think they’ve done that several times in a row, so. You know, to honor our student athletes for their academic achievement is, I think, exactly in keeping with what athletics should do in Division 3 schools. So anyway, I’m very proud of how that worked and it came to be. So you asked me about …? LG: What you’ve been doing since you retired. PG: Oh. LG: So, Phil, why don’t you talk to us about your relationship with students as they came in and then through the years. PG: Yeah. Um, you know I talked before about being a teacher, and I loved being a teacher. I loved seeing what happens to students over the course of a semester and over four years, and that was very much at the heart of my professional identity. And, when I became a Dean and Vice President, [clears throat] excuse me, out at Redlands, I tried to do a little teaching. And I did a few, a few classes, but I always ended up feeling I was cheating them because as an administrator something invariably comes up, right? Something happens that you have to drop everything and deal with, and I always felt like when that happened the students got shortchanged, so after a while I stopped teaching. So, I really, at the University of Redlands, I really didn’t have much contact with students and I, … my main constituency was always the faculty, right? So, I had a lot of contact with faculty members. And when I became the President, one of the things that I looked forward to was to be in an office where, as part of the responsibilities, were to connect with students and to have, you know, to know what was going on in the student body as much as you can, and all that sort of thing. So that was something that I looked forward to. And it was always the case in every Presidency to which I applied or I spoke to the search committee, there were always students in there. I was always interested to hear what the students had to say and what they had to say about the school and all that. So, when we came to Skidmore, I looked for opportunities to talk with students and there were two major ways, I think, that that happened. Maybe, three — here’s two. One was in larger settings: so every year during Accepted Candidates Days I got to give a talk, a sort of welcoming talk and a why you should come to Skidmore talk, as part of that program, and I thought that we did that very well. And one of the things that really helped was when we got Zankel built, and to be able to have Accepted Candidates Day transpire in that space. I mean, my goodness, you know, in this beautiful space — what a great statement about the College. And I loved giving those talks to new students, or prospective students and their families, and they’d been accepted, and … and so I enjoyed that very much. And then when they … when they actually arrived in the fall, in 16 �the opening fall convocation, I also gave a talk. Presidents do this, right? And many Presidents change that talk every year and they talk about, you know, liberal education and a bunch of stuff, and I thought that — the Dean of the Faculty always spoke at that and I always thought, “Well, that’s what that person should do … should talk about liberal education and, you know, those kind of things,” which I love to talk about, but what I thought the students need to hear from me was, “Here’s how not to screw up your college career.” [laughs] You know, “Here’s what you need to do, and by the way, parents, this part is for you too.” And so I talked to students and parents and said, here are, you know, five things, six things, eight things to think about to get started well and to finish well. And so we’ll come back to that later, but I always enjoyed giving that talk because I thought it was important. I thought that they, it’s the one moment when they are actually sort of paying attention and might be able to hear some of this. And if their parents heard it and liked it, that they could reinforce it over the years. And I think they did. And a lot of parents came up to me after those talks and, you know, we’d talk about it and everything, and … I actually met a parent just last spring at a Skidmore event who was a father of a graduating senior. And we’re chatting and he’s a smart guy and we had gotten to know him and his wife a little bit because they were, you know, advancement prospects and they actually made some nice donations to the College and everything, but one of the things he said, just spontaneously, was he said, “I still remember that talk that you gave them freshman year. We talked about that a little bit.” And I thought, “Well that’s music to my ears.” Um, so those were the big things. I always met with students in the governance committees, where, like IPPC, especially, where there was a strong student presence. And I always got to know the student body president, the SGA President, and some of the other class leaders, from time to time, and made a practice, certainly, I’d say over the last ten years when I was there, of taking members of the cabinet and going to the Student Senate at the beginning of the year and meeting with them and talking with them and hearing what’s on their minds, and, you know, talking about what we were trying to do and all that. But working with the students, the SGA President and some of those students, was always fun and interesting, to see who they were over the years. And then at a certain point we created office hours, President’s Office Hours, and I think Mark is still doing that. And you know, students could just drop by and whatever. Um, and so, and you know, you’d meet students informally, you’d run into them in different contexts. And we had student groups over to Scribner House. Something that Marie and I said from the very beginning is that the College President’s house should be the living room of the college, and we really tried to invite people in, you know, for receptions, and that’s partially why we came up with — and it was really Marie’s idea — Skidmore Cares. We wanted to do a holiday reception as a focal point for building, one point of building community. And we always had student performers there, the a cappella groups. And, I don’t know, there were just a lot of opportunities to kind of get to know students over the years, and that was really fun. For a long time, we had our dog, Summit, a chocolate lab, and of course that’s a great ice breaker with students. And I always had this, this image of taking walks on campus with the dog, and frankly I ended up doing that less than I thought I would, but I brought him on campus to, you know, events when it was appropriate, whenever I could, and of course students loved that because they missed their dogs. So, you know, I loved talking with students. But again, I never taught — well that’s not true, Marie and I did teach a seminar once, we co-taught. 17 �You know she was teaching in Theater for pretty much the whole time we were there, and still is teaching in Theater. Um, we taught a first-year seminar together. It was on leadership in liberal education, and what I always say about it is, the first thing is, well the marriage did survive. So that was a good thing. It was touch and go sometimes, but we did. Um, and because of my responsibilities she ended up bearing a little bit more of the burden of some of the advising and so on, but we tried to share that. And we enjoyed it and we got to know those students really well and one another, and so that was great. But that was the only time we did it. I gave a lecture to the, to the liberal studies students my first year, when it was still a program, and then, so that was that. But every year in the fall we invited all the first-year students over to Scribner House for receptions around the honors code. And you know, with their first-year seminar teachers and all that, and that was something that we did, you know, so we did like three or four of those receptions, or three or four days with two receptions per day, you know, to get them all in. And that was an interaction with students that was a lot of fun. So there was a fair amount of interaction with students. LG: Have you been doing anything of interest that we should know about since you retired? PG: Well, funny you should ask. [laughs] So I talked about the … I do have views about retirement, and you guys are in this, and I really think that the people who have trouble are the ones who retire from something and don’t know what they’re going to do. And this is no … this isn’t rocket-science, but I think this actually is important. And I, so I wanted to retire to something. So, I have an office in town, had to have some place to put all my books and everything, which also was part of saving the marriage. If we hadn’t had that, there’s no way we would still be together, but I wanted to write. And I never found the time that I wanted to write, even as a faculty member, because I was always doing all this other stuff and I never published as much as I wanted to. And, certainly as an administrator, you know, I feel like I was writing all the time, but not … And I gave talks and contributed things to various publications but. Anyway, I wanted to write and I had a couple of books in mind. One that I’d been working on for some time about liberal education and democracy, which is still a work in progress, and I’ve co-authored with that Bob Weisbuch, who is a professional friend and was actually on the Board of Trustees for a period of time while I was President. But I also wanted to take that firstyear address to new students and parents and turn it into a book. You know, a little book of guidance for new students and their parents, because I liked it and I thought it was important and I thought it would be pretty easy to do. — Well, it took two years to do that, and, um, it became longer, of course, and it got organized in slightly different ways and so on, and when some earlier versions were read by some of my colleagues in, you know, different places, and they said, “Well you’ve got to put some student stories in there. You can’t, you know, have all this stuff about what they should do.” And they finally convinced me, so now it has student stories, and from a number of Skidmore students, because they’re the ones I knew, with their permission and their assistance, and they reviewed the stories to make sure I was accurate. But then I put in other stories of other people who were more in the public domain, and so it’s now full of lots of stories. And it’s … I found a literary agent and through his good efforts we found a publisher and it’s being published July the 9th, 2024. So, we’re still working on this book, but it’s um, 18 �so that’s been an odyssey. But I feel good about it. I think it’s … and you know there are a lot of books out there that tell students what to do in college. More than one would think. But I don’t … none of them has been written by a college president, as far as I can tell. And none of them has … this book, the title of the book is called Honor Your … it’s Honor Your Freedom: Winning Strategies to Succeed in College and in Life. And it really talks about more than just how to deal with your naked roommate or Where to Go Find, you know, which is the title of one of the books that’s out there “How to Do Your Laundry When You’ve Never Done it before.” This kind of thing. There’s a lot of practical down-to-earth stuff in there, but it also talks about why liberal education is still important, and by the way, if you think you can succeed in the 21st century workplace with a narrow college education, you’d better think twice. And, by the way, one of the most important purposes of getting a college education is to prepare yourself to be an informed, responsible citizen, which is a phrase that I loved coming from the Skidmore mission statement. And that is not part of our conversation. It’s becoming more of our conversation today, but it really dropped out of the conversation about college in the ’80s and ’90s, much to our detriment. And so there’s that in there. But then it’s “What about freedom? How do you think about it? What is this new freedom you’re experiencing?” And so there’s some talk about that. And, you know, “How do you make plans for your life and how do you carry them out and how do you take care of yourself because, by the way, you are responsible for yourself, your physical and your psychological well-being.” And so there’s a lot about that stuff. And then, um, take good risks. That’s one of the chapters. Earn a victory for humanity, which is something I talked about in those talks. And begin now. Your college career starts when you set foot on campus. LG: Are there any other things that we should, that you want to talk about? That you want to tell us? That we haven’t talked about? PG: Well, let me just say that there are two chapters for parents at the end of the book. So, anyway, that’s my little shilling for the book. Um, so I’m kind of excited about this book and I’m hopeful that it will receive a good reception. Um, anything else? Um …I mean, obviously I’ve sort of talked nonstop here, there’s a lot more of the memory dump that I could give you. You know, one of the things that I think is part of this project, and that you’ve asked people, and that people always ask, you know, “What are you proud of?” And we’ve talked about a lot of those things, and I am proud of what we were able to build. Presidents love to build things because, you know if you put in a new curriculum it will last for a while and then it goes away. That first-year curriculum that I was part of creating at Denison went away, you know, some time ago. It lasted longer than most, but now it’s gone and so there’s no trace of that. But if you build a building, it’s going to be around for a while. So I am, actually … and I do think that spaces, and I said this at the end of the little evening they put together a couple weeks ago about the Glotzbach era, that space, you know, we are physical beings and the spaces we inhabit are important. And Josephine Chase said that in her charge to the architects for the new … new campus, right? And I mean spaces are important in how you construct them. Winston Churchill said we build our buildings and then they build us. And he was dead right on that. And so I was very proud of the work that we did over the years with Zankel, the North Woods residence halls, the Sussman Village residence halls, the redo of the dining facility to 19 �make it not just a feeding station, but a place where community could actually happen. And it’s still, I think, one of the highlights of the campus tour. We redid Saisselin. And then of course CIS. I mean there were other things but CIS … . And the, and the athletic facilities. And I'm glad to see that the College is going forward with the tennis and the wellness thing, and that’s all very good, but CIS was really the biggest need for the college. Part of Skidmore’s reputation, a major part of it, was always that Skidmore was an art school. First of all, it was a women’s school, right? And people were still saying that, right, when I was there. I’m saying, “No, it’s co-ed, and it’s been co-ed since the ’70s, thank you very much.” And “Oh, Skidmore, it’s that art school.” Well, we have great programs in the arts, performing arts, visual arts, very strong. I think the visual arts department … you know, I'd put that up against any visual arts department for any liberal arts college in the country. And, you know, same for music, by the way, I would say that. Theater was always very strong, and so on. Dance, I mean, the dance department is routinely listed as one of the top ten in the country. I mean, this is just amazing, right? That's all there. But of course, there’s so much more to the college. It’s much, much more than just the arts. Great strength in the arts, but strength in all this. And what about our business program? You know, most liberal arts colleges don't have that. And I think our business program is strong and interesting. But science has always been, and you guys know this, has been really important at Skidmore, going back to the nursing program, which is a very science heavy program, which is why it ultimately failed in the end and had to be gotten rid of. LG: Some of that had to do with money, and being down in New York City. PG: Yeah, I mean, that was part of it. But I think that the major reason that it went out of existence is that it was such a science intensive program that a lot of the students who were attracted to that shifted over and went to medical school. I mean, medical schools opened up to women, and, you know, and it's hard to remember that. LG: I remember that. I was here then. PG: Right. Yeah. Now, if you say that to, to nursing school graduates, they get pretty upset because of, “we didn't want to be doctors, we wanted to be nurses.” And that's true. Fair enough. But I think the times changed. And so anyway. But, but Skidmore had always had strong sciences in the, the natural sciences and you know, and then sociology, anthropology, psychology were strong, and physics and chemistry and I mean, the, the physical sciences and the life sciences, biology were strong, but they, they did not have the facilities that reflected the quality of what was going on in there, you know, health and human physiology today. Also, a department I’d stack up with anyone in the country at a small school. I mean it's just amazing. And so, as you guys know, Dana Science was really pretty cool for the ’90s, but it had aged out, and I believe there were some parts to that that were never completed. I think that was part of it. And so it really became clear that we needed to do a major science facility. And when we started talking about it with the faculty, and really the design of this thing came out of the faculty, which is a marvelous process. You know, the idea quickly came about to bring all the sciences together. The physical and biological sciences — put them all in one place so there could 20 �be interactions and synergies and the cross-disciplinary stuff that was, again, so important, that we talked about before. So that was, you know, became a major, major project, as we all know. And I do believe there were times when I was the only person on the planet who actually thought we could do it, because it was a very expensive project, as we all know. And it went through a lot of stages. And Scott McGraw talked about that a little bit at the event the other night, so I won't go through all that now. But, the fact, and when we started fundraising for that, Marie and I would go out and we’d talk to alumni and they’d say, “What do you … what is science? That wasn't really part of my experience when I was at Skidmore. I don't get this. Why are you building?” So we had to talk to a lot of people about how science is integral to liberal education, which was something that I’d always argued and I’ve, you know, gave talks about that when I was a, a Dean and a Vice President at Redlands. And, you know, even going back to Denison days. I mean my interdisciplinary work was generally with psychology and philosophy, biology and so on and so on. And I always thought philosophy was science, you know, that science was always integral to liberal education. And so that was something that, that absolutely had to happen for Skidmore, really to realize its full potential and to make a statement to the world about the strength of the science programs at Skidmore that really are, really quite amazing in all kinds of ways. And so that was a really important goal. If you want to talk about things that I'm proud of and successes, the fact that we got that done, before I left. I mean, funded. It’s not, still not quite finished yet, although I met with Dan Rodecker, I saw Dan Rodecker today at the veterans’ event on campus, and he said that they’re projecting that the renovations in new and old Dana will be finished in June. Which means people can really move back into there, because there was, you know, there were people … you always want to under-promise and overdeliver. So you think, well, you know, maybe that might go into the fall and so on. But he thinks it’s going to be finished in June. So that means that everybody who's going into that complex will be able to be there for the start of the academic year in 2024. And I just think that’s amazing. And we’ll dedicate that complex in the fall of 2024, and that’s going to be a great celebration. So that’s something I’m proud of. LG: Good! PG: I mean, a lot of people did it, and the faculty were amazing. And I'll just tell one other story because it deserves to be in the record. When we identified the architects to build this building, and there were, you know, people who’ve built science buildings all over the place, and colleges and universities, and that's one of the reasons we picked them, we figured they could do it. We said, now you're going to be working with faculty in 11 different departments. 10, 11, whatever it was at the time. And they've been working on planning this thing, and they're going to work with you to, to come up with the design. And they said, “Whoa, we're not sure we can do this. We've never worked with that many people and departments. Are you sure this can happen?” And we said, “Yeah, it'll happen.” And about, I don't know, 5 or 6 months into the process, they were saying, “We've never seen collaboration like this.” And I thought, that's a tribute to the Skidmore science faculty, you know, the people who really … and the way people leaned into the design of that building. One of the things that I said at a very early meeting … and actually I think Karen Kellogg repeated this the other night, is that this building also 21 �needs to ooze creativity out of every pore. This building has to somehow instigate the idea that creative thought matters. And I said, I don't know what that means, but that’s you guys. You need to figure that out. It needs to be a building that fosters creativity. And interdisciplinarity. And I think they came up with one that did that. So that’s something that I think has helped propel Skidmore into, you know, the 21st century. To have that, to have that structure and to be able to bring the sciences together, I think there’s going to be an explosion of creativity that, you know, we’ve not seen before … because of all the synergy that that’s going to create. And you know, that's a really good and exciting thing, and it's already changed the student body because the number of science majors has gone up from, what, 25 to 35%, something like that. It really makes it a more attractive place for everybody because everybody has to do science. It's a place where students gather. They're already in there a lot. It's a place that attracts students like a magnet, whether they're science students or not. So I think that was the last piece, from my watch. LG: Thank you. This has been really very, very instructive and fun. PG: Well, thank you for inviting me. I appreciate the fact that I was able to get these things on the record, and I hope that I was accurate, [laughs] or pretty accurate anyway, in remembering things that happened. But, thank you for doing this project. And I do think it's exciting to have these … LG: It’s been fun! PG: … reminiscences on the record. 22 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Lynne Gelber Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Philip Glotzbach Location The location of the interview Saratoga Springs, NY Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio Recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:09:14 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Sue Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit July 31, 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Philip Glotzbach Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource November 10, 2023 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Description An account of the resource Phil Glotzbach, Skidmore president from 2003-2020, grew up in the mid-west, received his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Notre Dame and his Ph.D from Yale in 1972. After years as a professor in the philosophy department at Denison, he became department chair, then Vice President for Academic Affairs. At the University of Redlands in Southern California, he was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. In all these institutions, his interest was in interdisciplinarity and student/faculty/administration interaction which attracted him to Skidmore. He was instrumental in growing the endowment which allowed for funding and building Zankel Hall, the Center for Integrated Sciences and the Northwoods Apartments. Since retirement, Phil has been actively working on a book titled, “Honor Your Freedom: Winning Strategies to Succeed in College and in Life”. Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Active Learning Arthur Zankel CIGU College Governance Creative Thought Matters Diversity Encore Connect IPPC NCAA Scribner House Receptions Strategic Plan 2005-2015 Thoroughbred Society https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/30b19af9f85eb73e5e4335654729bde6.jpg b86c829683627fdcdbeac9e14ecd416e https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/6af1b596e0a6c860c4f0fc85fef2a38a.m4a 8cc556c87e8a7395f2184c915bc6183b https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/f6780462d8781d59e67b7bd6d28f5dac.pdf 1e28a7af457893117c89af7bf7be06a3 PDF Text Text Interviewee: Carolyn Anderson Years at Skidmore: 38 full-time (1981- 2019) Interviewer: Lynne Gelber Location of Interview: Saratoga Springs, NY Date of Interview: November 7, 2022 00:00:00 Header 00:00:24 Grew up in Westchester County, NY, near NYC; frequently attended theater in NYC. 00:01:08 Started college at Briarcliff, worked at HB Studio in NYC, took some theater courses at Vanderbilt, then completed degree at Middle Tennessee State U, majoring in English and Theater; graduate degree in Theater at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. 00:02:30 Started teaching at Emma Willard School, became Executive Director of the Albany League of Arts, began teaching one class at Skidmore, then 1981 began teaching full time. 00:04:12 Skidmore theater faculty at that time: Alan Brody, David Rosengarten, Rebecca & Dale Bendalsom, Larry Opitz, plus Joan Lane was an assistant, did some management training. 00:05:33 Anderson taught Voice and Speech, Acting, and American Theater History. 00:06:23 Also taught seminars for plays, exploring the intellectual/academic aspects of the texts. 00:07:58 Was Chair during planning/building of new theater; both joyful and challenging. 00:08:41 Had shared a theater with Dance Department and office space in multiple locations. 00:09:50 Worked with Opitz to create an intimate theater design for the new theater that brought the student actors closer to audience; at this age their vocal instrument is still developing. 00:10:43 State of the art equipment: a joy to prepare students, a challenge because cost. 00:11:05 Must continually update equipment to prepare students for professional theater. 00:12:00 Supportive administration. Theaters are complex structures so they cost a lot on their own, in addition to requiring frequent equipment upgrades. 00:13:05 I learned applied components of theater during graduate & undergraduate school. 00:13:25 Needed to teach applied; plus wanted to provide the seminars to teach the intellectual/thinking part. 00:13:41 Lynne Gelber taught a 4-1-4 course with Alan and saw that combination in one class. 00:14:16 “To me … the most exciting part of starting a play is doing the research…” 00:14:45 Worked with many Skidmore presidents and interims. 00:15:26 Felt tremendous support from administration; blessed to have a theater department in a college that values the arts. 00:15:52 Had to convince people: “If we didn’t have this equipment … no point in doing it.” 00:16:15 Department provided Karl Broekhuizen with arguments for why more funding was needed, and he convinced the board. Very generous donors, including Jean Bernhard Buttner. 00:16:44 Also, Alan Brody made difficult decision to sell NYC property (nursing building). �00:17:49 Community relationships — Skidmore is a vibrant place because of its arts, music, theater, dance, and lectures, and people from surrounding communities come to campus for that. 00:18:20 Skidmore’s events often reviewed in local media - indicates importance to community. 00:19:12 College theater programs can often offer works that local groups can’t; eg. “big plays.” 00:20:42 Skidmore students post graduation: many well known in theater, plus in other fields. 00:22:21 Has long been a Board member with Capital Repertory Theatre. 00:22:57 Retired 2019. Still working with Capital Rep, which is moving to new space; also writing (drawing from teaching experience to share ideas); birdwatching and gardening. 00:24:38 A challenge: helping people know that theater is more than an applied art. It can provide skills relevant to a variety of fields, including research skills, quick thinking, etc. 00:25:43 As chair, a joy: making it possible to hire guest artists, eg. Anne Bogart and Will Bond. 00:27:00 University Without Walls was a valuable resource to people already working in the arts; provided them with a chance to earn degree. Sad to see it go. 00:28:25 Curriculum reconfiguration challenge solved by varying the number of production credits that would be required - provided a range of credits for students to decide. 00:29:55 Skidmore governance structure important “because we have a say in how things go.” 00:30:15 An honor to be on the Committee on Academic Appointments and Tenure — entrusted with being both thorough and fair; also, learning about colleagues work “made me feel much closer to the College.” 00:30:55 Also served on Committee on Academic Rights and Freedoms, Faculty Council, plus ad hoc hiring committees and task forces; eg. one examined the needs of the Music Department this task force work led to construction of the Zankel. 00:32:56 Also worked with the Women’s Studies group (eg. Mary Stange and Kate Berheide); “I always tried to teach something in our curriculum that would support that program, Women in the American Theater … Women Actors Throughout History … .” 00:33:48 Physical changes on campus. Had worried that growth would destroy the beauty, but it didn’t; still a beautiful campus. 00:34:49 Eg. new athletic center, new science building, library renovations, Tisch, Zankel. 00:35:35 Students: now more people of color, and “people are freer to be who they want to be.” 00:36:24 Increase in men: Still more women in theater program — “that always is the case in theater, I think, but … there certainly have been more men, and that’s really helped.” 00:37:29 END � https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/eb0fd5515e0a1fb72837e61b210ea6b1.pdf 90b92ac08fc6f586fdebfd94918d5d10 PDF Text Text Interview with Carolyn Anderson by Lynne Gelber, Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, Saratoga Springs, NY, November 7, 2022. LYNNE GELBER: It’s November 7th, 2022, and this is Lynne Gelber with Carolyn Anderson and Sue Bender doing the interview. And, it’s really nice to have you, Carolyn. Why don’t you start by telling us a little about where you grew up? CAROLYN ANDERSON: Well, I grew up in Westchester County, New York, right … very close to New York City, Chappaqua, Yorktown Heights. Right on, near, the now Metro North. So, I was able to get into the city quite a bit and see a lot of theater growing up. Which was, I think, one of the reasons that I decided to go into this world of theater. LG: What were your favorite things that you saw? CA: Oh, I think the first thing that I saw was when I was, I think it was in the fifth or sixth grade, a production of Threepenny Opera. LG: Oh! And where did you go to get your training? CA: Uh, well, I started my college career at Briarcliff College in Briarcliff Manor, New York. And then I did some work at HB Studio in New York City, on Bank Street. It is still there, I believe. Then I was at Middle Tennessee State University. Did some courses at Vanderbilt in Theatre, too, but ultimately finished at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN. And then I went to graduate school at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where I majored in Theater. LG: What took you down to the South? CA: Oh [laughs]. Well, that’s a bit of a personal question, but it’s ok, I’ll answer it anyway. I was attracted to someone who lived in the North and I followed him all the way to Tennessee, where he was in school. And that actually turned out not to be a good idea [laughs]. But the school was fine because I was able to major in English and I studied with a lovely poet named Virginia Peck, and so majored in English and Theater there. LG: And, what brought you to Skidmore, and when? CA: Oh, ok, sure. I started my teaching career at Emma Willard School in Troy. And, a former chair of the Theater Department, Alan Brody, his daughter Elise was a student at Emma Willard. And he would come down to see the plays and he talked to me after, one time, and he said, “Gee,” he said, “You know, if you ever decide you want to teach college students, I’d love to have you.” So, I thought about that but I stayed at Emma Willard for a while. And then I ended up actually working as the Executive Director for a regional arts council called the Albany League of Arts. And Alan convinced me that I should start teaching at Skidmore. “One class only,” he said, “Just one class!” [laughs] So it was a beginning acting class. And then he said, “You know, maybe your Board will allow you �to teach a little more.” And I said, “I don’t think so.” I said, “I know they will not. It’s not fair to them; I can’t do that.” So, he … LG: This was the Emma Willard Board or the? CA: No, pardon me, the Arts Council board. The Arts Council board. And so, it ultimately turned out that after a couple of years I left the Arts Council and started to teach full time at Skidmore, around 1981. I started out as a guest artist and then moved to a tenure track line a couple years after that. LG: And who else was in the department at the time? CA: Well, Alan Brody was, of course. And David Rosengarten was there. And two designers … Becky and, you know, I’m embarrassed to say I can’t remember … this is what happens [laughs] when you get to be my age, right? You forget names … Bendalsom! Rebecca and Dale Bendalsom! Got it! Yeah. And I’m trying to think it through, was anybody else? Yes, we had a secretary … she was really an assistant in the department who did a lot of the management training. Her name was Joan Lane, who passed away recently. Umm, I’m trying to think … other? I think we were it. I think we were it. Oh, and Larry Opitz, of course, as a designer! And actually, I think when I first came on, he may have been on sabbatical … I don’t recall, but yes, Larry Opitz, of course! And he was primarily a designer at the time, and also designed for, at that time, the José Limón Dance Company, and had quite a career with them. LG: I’m just curious what courses you taught and what was the most fun? CA: Ah, at that time I taught Voice and Speech, and I taught Acting, and I taught American Theater History. The most fun was the, for me, the American Theater History course because the students really had no idea that the theater HAD a history, and going back to the colonial era. So, it was always sort of a lot of “ah-ha” moments from them. But I enjoyed that tremendously. I liked the Acting class too. That was lovely to teach. LG: What was the most challenging? CA: Of the classes or …? LG: Well, let’s start with the classes and then move out from there. CA: (laughs) Ok. The most challenging courses during this time, certainly it would be the history course, but also, we, and this was at Alan’s design, we also created seminars for all of the plays that we did. And this is one of the things that I thought was just wonderful about Skidmore, because it allowed us, as we are known today and certainly yesterday, as an applied art, but this gave us a chance to broaden the academic discourse within our program and throughout the college, so that people could see that theater does have a tremendous intellectual component. And so, I really valued that and tried throughout my �tenure as Department Chair, and I know this is true of Larry, too, to always engage the students intellectually in the material that surrounds the actual play text. So, that, to me, was the most fun and challenging also because you had to engage people from other departments who maybe would wonder, “Why should I come to the theater to speak about this?” But I think after a while people really began to understand what our goals were with this, trying to really tie in to the liberal arts more thoroughly. LG: When did you become chair? CA: I became chair after Alan … Alan went on sabbatical, I took over, and then he left, he went to another school, to Texas? Barnard, I think? LG: MIT. CA: Oh, MIT. But I think he did a stop at Barnard, too, along the way, because he did do performances in the Miller theater there. So it was during the time that we were building our, going to build, our new theater, so it was very joyful, very challenging. But it was, I would say, in the ’85, ’86, somewhere in there when we were building the theater. We moved into it, I think, in the mid to late ’80s. LG: And where had you been before that? CA: We shared the theater that is now the dance theater. We shared that space with the Dance Department. With Isabelle Williams, you may recall Isabelle Williams? Yeah, we shared with the Dance Department and we would share the lighting equipment with them, the stage management. All of that was a shared endeavor. And our offices were, for a time, in mobile homes that were set up near the dance theater. And it was not always pleasant to come in and find mice in your [laughs] office and oh …yes. LG: Well, that’s one of the challenges, isn’t it? CA: Yes, that was a big challenge, the little mice. But then when the Green.., the, now-known as the Greenberg Child Center, you know, when they moved in, we were in that office space for a while, too, then we moved out to the new theater. LG: Did you have a role in how the theater was being constructed, and…? CA: Yes, thank you for asking that question. And someone who could give you much more detail on that is Larry Opitz, but the two of us worked on that tirelessly to create a theater that was … that was intimate so that our students wouldn’t have to fight to get their voices to the last row, because at this age they are still developing their vocal instrument, and so we wanted a theater that felt intimate and that would bring the actor closer to the audience. And that’s why we had that thrust theater, it’s a thrust, proscenium thrust theater, is what it is. So, it was full of joy, getting all these new lighting instruments and things. Some of the instruments we used were from the old theater. Also getting a state of the art — at that time, state of the art — dimmer boards and electrics. It was really quite �wonderful. So, we were able to really train our students on some of the best equipment. And now, of course, that’s all changed! [laughs] None of that exists anymore! We can’t even, I’m sure that they couldn’t even donate some of that stuff because now we have incredible equipment in that theater- lighting instruments that can be rejiggered through computers. You don’t have to get up on big tall ladders to move them, unless the designer wants many more lights than you have. So, there’s just a lot of updating that has to happen in a theater, and that’s very expensive. And that’s one of the challenges, is meeting the budget requirements of the College, which you want to do, you want to stay within that framework. But if you want your program to move along with what’s going on in the profession, you have to find ways to sacrifice some things to make sure that your design program is moving along, that the students are able to go out into the professional world after knowing, learning, on the newest equipment. LG: What kind of support did you get from the administration? CA: A lot. We were, I think we were very, very lucky. Karl Broekhuizen, who was the Business Manager, Treasurer, I think that’s his title, at the time — he was great, but he was really tough on us. — He said, “This building was supposed to cost three point something million” and … we got a gift of a million and the other two million were raised, but it ended up costing close to eight million. And, if you understand how theaters are built, [laughs] they cost a lot of money. And I was told, and I could be wrong, but this one contractor told me the most expensive buildings to build are hospitals, prisons and theaters. And, you know, it’s because you have to keep updating the equipment, but also there’s just so much that goes into the construction of a theater. The scene house, the … you know, all that stuff. LG: Where did you learn all of those components? CA: Um, by … a lot of that in graduate school, and in undergraduate school. I mean, that’s really part of the training, you know, and that’s the applied part of the art. You have to know about this. But again, one of the things that I know Alan wanted to do, and certainly Larry and I carried through with, was really bringing the intellectual life to the program — making sure it was there so that the students realized that it wasn’t just doing, it had a lot of thinking, it had to do with a lot of thinking, too. LG: Yeah, I did a 4-1-4 with Alan. CA: Oh, yes, yes! LG: We were reading … now I don’t remember what French play it was, but in the morning — because we would meet with them all day long — in the morning we would study this as a piece of literature; in the afternoon the students got up out of their seats and we ended up doing a scene from that …which we opened to the rest of the community. CA: Right, that’s lovely. �LG: That’s the sort of thing that your department was doing. CA: Right, right. I loved it. It was great. I mean that, to me, is …you know, as a theater director I have to say that the most exciting part of starting a play is doing the research. Doing the deep dive into the author or authors, the, you know, the thematic content, as well as understanding the structure of how the play is … how it’s built. LG: So, who was the president at the time? CA: There was Joe Palamountain, and David Marcell — When Joe was sick, he stepped in to help out. And then after that was … David Porter. LG: Was Phyllis there for a year, also? Interim year? CA: Phyllis was there too. She did an interim at one point, too. And so did Susan Kress, when I was there, so there were a lot of, yeah. Now, Phyllis … LG: Roth. CA: Yeah, Phyllis Roth, right. Phyllis Roth. That’s right, thank you. [laughs] I do remember. She was a good friend to all of us. Definitely so. But I felt that — going back to your point, though — I felt a tremendous amount of support from the administration and I feel, and I know my colleagues do, past and present, probably, that we are blessed to have a theater department in a college that values the arts. So, yeah. LG: The reason I ask is because you had mentioned how much above budget, the original budget, and so obviously that … CA: Well, that was the challenge, I mean that was the real challenge, because we had to convince people that if we didn’t have this equipment, I mean there’s no point in doing it because of what the students need to learn while they’re here. LG: Who did you have to convince, besides Karl? CA: Well, Karl. Well, he had to convince the board, you know. But we gave him some arguments and then they ultimately went ahead with it. And, you know, Jean Buttner Bernhard … was… Bernhard Buttner, excuse me, was wonderful, and you know, very … that whole family, Arnold, Van and all, they were very generous to us, and I think they gave another gift, too. So, we ultimately came up with it. And also, part of this, going back to Alan Brody again, one of the ways that we started the fund for the theater was to sell the nursing building in New York City, and that provided a big leap in funds. But, you know, it was a sacrifice. You know the College has to make those choices. And, I think they made a good choice, frankly. LG: So, when did you retire? �CA: In 2019. 2019. Yeah, it seems like … yesterday, actually! It really does. But, you know I just have been so grateful to have been a part of this Skidmore community, and what you’re doing, you know, really helps us to stay connected with it, which is important. I think that, you know, going back to the theater and to the rest of the College since I was there, our relationship with the town, you know through the arts programs, music and theater and dance, and just all the lectures, the public lectures. I mean this is a vibrant place, just vibrant, and I think … I love the relationship with the community. And the greater Capital Region, too! I mean people come to the Tang Museum. When I was at Skidmore, I don’t know if this is still the case, they reviewed our plays as though, you know, we’re just part of another theater. LG: Who’s the they? CA: Thank you, the Times Union, the Saratogian. The Knick News, which used to be. But they all reviewed our plays and reviewed the art shows. And so, I think we felt like we were all a part of something bigger and important — that we’re bringing Brecht to the community! We’re bringing Chekhov, we’re bringing Beckett, you know, all these playwrights. Shakespeare. So that, you know, we felt like we were making a contribution. SUE BENDER: Carolyn, might you describe some of the opportunities of being a director in a college program? CA: Oh sure! Yeah. Well, one of the opportunities, one of the most important things is that when one’s directing in college, in a college environment, you can direct the big plays. You can direct the plays of Chekhov; you can direct the plays of Shakespeare. Regional theaters can’t always do this, particularly if they have to have so many equity actors in their show for that particular time. They can bring in local actors that are non-equity, but they can’t always bring in the full equity company to do a big play. So, you know throughout my career I was really able to do the work of a lot of important artists. Including Sarah Ruhl — the play that they’re doing right now is Eurydice, which I’ve done before here. And, also, Passion Play, which had a huge cast! So, I feel really lucky that we’ve been able to do that work. LG: And the students, too, would be given enormous challenges and opportunities. CA: That’s well said. Absolutely enormous challenges, to … well first of all, to understand these works, but then to do them. It’s really quite an honor, indeed. LG: Did you have any role to play in the students, after they graduated, in where they went and what opportunities they had? CA: Yes. You know, this is interesting, I’m really glad you asked that question because I was at Skidmore the other night at a rehearsal, helping a colleague … LG: For Eurydice? �CA: Yeah, you know, just watching, helping out a colleague, and in that room were three people who were former students but they were there as employees! So that’s great. That made me feel so good! The other thing, too, is that you can turn on television, go to the movies, and see some of our actors in, you know, important roles. In Mrs. Maisel, The Wonderful Mrs. Maisel, Mike Zegen is in that! He was a student of ours. Zazie Beetz, she was a wonderful student. She was in a couple of big movies, The Joker, and she’s done some series. And, Ian Kahn did a television series called The Turn; he played George Washington. So there … and Jon Bernthal’s been in a lot of films. So, I feel like … and there are a lot of people who do design work too that are, that have their designs done all over the country. And people are in public relations in the theater. And, they are also lawyers, doctors, psychologists, and some of them are running for public office, you know, so they’re citizens, good citizens, and that’s what we want mostly. LG: With good roles to play. CA: With good roles to play! [laughs] Well said. LG: Am I correct in remembering that you also have played a role in the theater in the Capital district? CA: Yes. I am one of the early board members of Capital Repertory Theatre. I’m still on the board. I’m in charge of their Nominating Committee, chair of their Nominating Committee and I’m on their Education Committee. I feel very proud to be doing that. It’s a lot of work, you know, boards are hard workers. But I enjoy it and it keeps me … it keeps me going. LG: When did you retire? In two thousand …? CA: Nineteen. LG: Ok. And what have you been doing since then? CA: Well, working at Capital, doing a lot with Capital Rep, because we just, you know we’re in the throes of moving into a new space, so that has taken a lot of time in terms of, you know, fund raising, getting new board members, spreading the word, that kind of thing. But also, I have been going back through several directing notebooks that I have — for every play that I direct I keep a notebook about the various rehearsals and the process and all that — and pulling out various ideas that I think may help others along the way, so I’ve been trying to write something about that. And it takes time to go through everything, and I realize, not everything is worth saving [laughs]. So … yeah, so I’ve been working on that. I like to do bird … I love birdwatching, particularly waterfowl. I love hiking. And doing a lot of gardening. LG: Are you part of a group that goes out birding? CA: No, I’m not, but I know of groups. I mean, I’m a member of a couple of groups but I don’t, �I haven’t gone out with them. LG: And gardening. CA: And gardening, yes! Yes, I love gardening. Vegetables and all that. So, yeah! LG: Well good. I’m trying to think of what we haven’t covered, Carolyn. SB: [inaudible/whisper]. LG: Yeah, I was getting to the challenges. Um, what are the, what do you think, in the larger sense, what were your greatest challenges? CA: Well, I, and I think I mentioned this earlier, I think, to keep on Alan Brody’s path, that theater is an applied art, but it is more. It can provide skills to students that are useful in a variety of fields. So, that was a huge challenge. Because I would have parents in my office saying, “why should they major in theater?” You know? And you say, “Well, you know, research skills, being able to think fast on your feet…” you know just so many different things. So, I think that is always a challenge for people in the arts, in this day and age particularly, with the economy the way it is. I think the other thing, too, that certainly keeping the budget going in tight, when the cost of plywood goes up for scenic design, the cost of materials goes up, but your budget doesn’t change, so that means you may not be able to have a guest artist. I can say one of the joys, and we feel very proud about this, is that when I was chair — I rotated off and on, chair with other people in the department, but — I was very happy to help bring Anne Bogart here, who’s an acclaimed contemporary director. She’s world renowned, and so we had her here every summer, and that to me was a tremendous joy because we were also able to hire one of her company members as a teacher, Will Bond, and that kind of training is, makes a huge difference in how students approach their physicality and their vocal work. So. LG: Did the students participate in the summer program with Anne Bogart? CA: They were, they could definitely do that. Some of them did. Some of them chose to do that, yes, definitely. Another challenge, a couple of things … one challenge that I feel that, and I don’t know how I still feel about this except I feel bad about it, and that is University Without Walls. During my time it really gave so many people in the theater a chance to do more, people who didn’t have a degree. And, you know, they got their degrees from University Without Walls, working with us, many of us as advisors. And then when the College had to close that program I certainly understood why, you know, I really understood it, but I felt so, I felt very sad about it. LG: Ok. Why don’t you say why, in your opinion, the College closed that program. CA: Well from my opinion it was that they couldn’t afford to keep it, is what I gather was the �main reason. I don’t know of any other reason but that. Maybe they felt, too, that it didn’t quite work with the mission at hand, was part of it also, but I know it was a very valuable resource for people in the arts. Um, the other challenge that I had, which I think we ultimately met but was very difficult for us to get our heads around, was the whole changing of the curriculum, when we were asked to think about reconfiguration and all that. But you know I think we found a way to solve it, but it was hard. It was hard during that era … with my colleagues particularly, just kicked and screamed along the way, but we found a way to solve it for us and I think it works. LG: How did you reconfigure? CA: Well, what we did was we looked at our production work and we changed our production requirement credits so that it could be optional between one and four credits, because the students, at one point in rehearsal, which is the last couple of weeks, are all there all the time, so for counting time, I thought, well, let’s just do that and they could pick. So, if one credit suited them for their coursework fine, or if four did, that was fine. So, it ultimately worked out, but it was a challenge. So that was another one. LG: Carolyn, you did a lot of work outside of your department. Do you want to talk about that? The committees? CA: Sure. Yeah, sure. I think the governance structure is very important to liberal arts colleges because we have a say in how things go. I served on the Committee on Academic Appointments and Tenure for two terms, two full terms, and a term that was a replacement term, so I got to really know a lot of the faculty members and their work. And to me, it’s a real honor to be on that Committee because you are entrusted with being as fair as you can be and as thorough as you can be with the materials provided. I learned so much about what my colleagues were doing and it made me feel much closer to the College. I really valued that work. I was also on the Committee on Academic Rights and Freedom, for a while. And on a committee called, which was called Faculty Council at one point, and I think we were in charge of the elections! [laughs] That was early on. I think Kate Berheide was on that too! Yeah, forgot about that just until you mentioned it. Oh, and then there would be these committees that would pop up, like ad hoc committees for, you know, I was on the search committee for the president, that hired Phil Glotzbach. I was on search committees for the development Vice President, when we hired Chris Hoek. And also Tad Kuroda and I were on a committee, a task force, to examine the needs of the Music Department when they were in Filene and to see if there was a way that that place could be reconfigured or should we build a new music building. And Tad and I, after several weeks and months of dealing with this, decided that they just had to have a new music building, so he wrote up that report and so I was very pleased to be able to help my colleagues in Music. LG: What was Tad’s role at that time? �CA: He was an Associate Dean of the College. Yup. SB: So that was the foundation for Zankel? CA: That was the foundation for Zankel, that task force. And I think at the time Chuck Joseph may have been in the administration as well … or maybe not yet. LG: He was chair of the Music Department. CA: He was chair of the Music Department, yes, that’s right. Because I know Tony Holland. We interviewed him and he took us around to see the cramped space of the Filene building. Yeah, um … yeah, and I, you know I also cherished the work that I did with Mary Stange and Kate Berheide of the Women’s Studies, the Women’s Studies group, and I always tried to teach something in our curriculum that would support that program. Women in the American Theater, you know, Women Actors Throughout History, all that stuff. So, yeah, and Kate Berheide and Mary Stange and then Catherine Golden … so, it was, that was really a wonderful time of growth. And Penny Jolly was very involved with that as well. But, yeah. Yeah, huh. A lot [laughs]. LG: Anything else we haven’t covered that you would like to mention? CA: Um, yeah, yes. I don’t want to take all of your time but I, one of the things that I really have enjoyed over the years was watching the physical changes on the campus. When I first [laughs] this is going to sound really snotty, but at first, you know, coming to work in the morning, into the woods, years and years ago, was just so beautiful! Because I love woods. But then, then we had this big, the campus plan. The big plans for the campus. And after a while, you know, I thought, “Oh my gosh, what’s going to happen to these woods?” You know, “this is just so beautiful and I hate this, I hate this,” and my gosh! Over the years to see how it has, you know, flourished and grown, with the pond and all the trees around it that they protect and take care of, and, you know I really enjoy that, and, you know I was really wrong about that! [laughs] It’s so beautiful to drive on the campus! But … so that would be one thing. SB: What things did you see added to the campus during your time here? CA: Um, well, the theater, of course. The gym, the new athletic center. The science … which was partially, I mean it’s done now, but it was being started, it was starting. Um, the renovation of the library. And also, Tisch was being built, too. Yes, so quite a few of them. And Zankel, of course. Yeah, so I’ve really seen this campus grow, and I just, the physical changes are really quite wonderful. And some of the architecture is really lovely too, yeah. LG: What about the changes in the student body? CA: Well that I am very, you know, when … I’m glad to see that we’re, we have more people of �color, I’m glad to see that we have people who are not … they feel comfortable in being on campus because of how they define themselves individually. That’s changed. You know all of this has changed since I’ve been here. People are freer to be who they want to be and I think the College is really providing, giving a warm atmosphere to have them. LG: Umm, the growing number of men on the campus, since you arrived. What kinds of changes did that bring about in the theater? CA: Well, it, it actually did bring a great change for us, for a certain time. But then, you know, things sort of … we’re getting more and more women still, and that always is the case in theater, I think, but um, yeah, there certainly have been more men, and that’s really helped. [laughs] LG: Um, are there any other issues that we should bring up that we haven’t touched on? CA: Mm-mnn. LG: Well, thank you. This has been enlightening and very enjoyable. CA: Well, thank you for inviting me. I’ve enjoyed talking about this a great deal. Yeah, thank you for doing this project! � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit November 10, 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Carolyn Anderson Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource November 7, 2022 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Description An account of the resource Carolyn Anderson came to Skidmore in 1981 after teaching at Emma Willard and working with arts and theater groups in the Capital Region. She taught courses in theater history and acting and served as department chair. A central focus of her teaching was to develop students’ appreciation of theater as a literary art. She also played a role in the building design of the Bernhard Theater. Carolyn was active in the Women’s Studies group until her retirement in 2019. Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Alan Brody Albany League of Arts Anne Bogart Arthur Zankel Bernhard Theater CAFR Capitol Repertory Theater CAPTS David Porter Isabelle Williams Karl Broekhuizen Larry Opitz Phillip Glotzbach Phyllis Roth Tad Kuroda Theater Department UWW Will Bond Women's Studies https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/006f6146d6cbe2e1072e5168ea2ecdc5.jpg 6c660fc9c717b46a85cfead79ed99466 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/307aa7ae22cc5c820c973f23260465b0.m4a 8eeba3958dc15d004b318073fbad2bf1 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/34e15cf6251afbe5876ba5a50e54cb0e.pdf dd01159a5491494176ff3478eb1ebce7 PDF Text Text Interviewee: Lisa Aronson Years at Skidmore: 32 (1984 - 2016) Interviewer: Lynne Gelber Location of Interview: Saratoga Springs, NY Date of Interview: November 7, 2022 00:00:00 Header 00:00:24 Born 1946 in Detroit, MI; raised there & did undergrad in Art History at Wayne State U, then in 1971 attended Indiana University in Bloomington, IN, for graduate work 00:01:00 Worked various jobs in NYC for 2 years, then traveled in Europe for nearly a year 00:01:30 Aunt, Cyril Miles, was artist in Detroit - very supportive & influential 00:03:21 While writing dissertation taught part-time at Wayne State (in Detroit); first tenure track teaching job was at U of Wisconsin in Stevens Point (3 yrs) 00:03:46 Sought teaching position that was better aligned with areas of expertise (African, preColumbian & Oceanic art); began teaching at Skidmore fall 1984 00:04:10 Interest in Africa stemmed in part from Aunt’s interest in textiles; also, African American studies programs were beginning to be formed on campuses, so it was a viable field 00:05:00 Loved working with Africans, their kindness & receptivity; still many connections 00:05:45 Dissertation: why identical patterns found in different parts of Africa? Ans: Trade & people “taking in these textiles and making them their own … assigning meaning” 00:07:28 Spring 1984 interviewed at College Art Association and then on Skidmore campus 00:08:36 Was hired at Skidmore because of expertise in Africa - replaced previous professor 00:09:34 African art was often combined w/ other areas, “wastebasket definition of art history” 00:10:05 Also taught Western art history survey & even Native American art - stretched too far 00:11:02 African art no longer part of Skidmore art history curriculum 00:11:25 When arrived at Skidmore, Art History & Studio Art were one department 00:12:00 Split b/c different disciplines. Art History akin to Humanities, Anthropology, Religion 00:13:52 The issues dealt with, and the questions explored, were very different from Studio art 00:15:12 Tang Museum a high point; involved with planning committee, later exhibitions, etc. 00:15:30 Committee members visited museums on other campuses, asked questions about exhibition space, storage space, staffing requirements; 00:17:01 Another consideration - what art in Tang collection? How the space would be used? 00:18:25 Instrumental in getting African materials added to Tang collection and in Tang shows 00:18:50 Supported student curated exhibitions of African art, visited Peabody Museum (Boston) with students to negotiate borrowing pieces 00:20:35 Curated exhibition of African Art and the Environment with Tang director John Weber 00:24:01 Served on many committees, including Curriculum (chaired 3 years) & UWW 00:24:39 Enjoyed working with UWW students; especially loved teaching seminar connected to African Art and the Environment exhibition; students more mature, interested, willing to work 00:26:50 Taught classes in Africa through Parsons School of Design. Became better at French �00:28:19 Led Textile Society of America tour to Ghana to study textiles 00:28:56 Skidmore always supportive, paid for travel to present papers, do research, etc. 00:29:52 Some particularly supportive individuals to note: Phyllis Roth, Sue Bender, 00:30:10 For example, Aronson and a colleague received Getty grant for project/book on Nigerian photographer, and Skidmore provided funds for travel to Nigeria during Aronson’s sabbatical 00:31:20 Retired 2016, now writing book about anarchist grandmother, involves much research 00:32:45 Will give paper related to African textiles at conference this spring 00:33:46 Also volunteers at Saratoga Springs Public Library’s used book store 00:34:48 African textiles is a unique field, a non-Western field; a non-Western course requirement was added to the curriculum, so got non-art students; I enjoyed teaching that perspective to them 00:36:10 There was a point when some on campus wanted to eliminate the non-Western requirement, questioned the terminology, whether there were really two viable categories 00:37:17 “I always felt that it was a way to allow students to broaden their understanding of the world and of themselves within the world, to be seen that other cultures handle things very differently than we do.” 00:38:27 Skidmore has a growing number of students from non-Western backgrounds; Taught some students from African countries who hadn’t had a course on African art 00:38:50 Some awkwardness in being Western White woman teaching non-Western topics; eg. when teaching about Native American Ghost Dance, a messy classroom conversation arose 00:39:53 When Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr. spoke at Skidmore, he noted “You don’t have to be African or Black to teach African art.” 00:40:33 Indiana U had an African Studies program & an African American Studies program; it was mostly White people in African program and Black people in African American program. 00:42:00 “I’ve always felt very fortunate to be at Skidmore” because Skidmore is so supportive of faculty. Even in retirement, funding the retiree program that enable faculty to continue to connect and learn 00:42:56 END � https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/e975fe5264ed50b12f8096004398c929.pdf c677e01541c2f4186b9ba11dde258a70 PDF Text Text Interview with Lisa Aronson by Lynne Gelber, Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, Saratoga Springs, NY, November 7, 2022. LYNNE GELBER: It’s November 7th, 2022, and I’m here with Lisa Aronson and Sue Bender. This is Lynne Gelber. And welcome, Lisa, to the project, and I’d like you to start off by telling us a little bit about your growing up years. LISA ARONSON: Woah, ok, growing up years. Well, I was born in Detroit, Michigan, on the west side of the city, in 1946. LG: Which city did you say? LA: Detroit, Michigan. Lived in Detroit until I went to college, undergraduate school, at Wayne State University in Detroit. Majored in Art History. And then I went on to do graduate work at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. In between that time I went to New York City and lived there for two years, just getting one job after another and enjoying the city. LG: What impelled you to go to the City? Just to get a job, or …? LA: I always was attracted to New York City because it just seemed so bustling and so … there was, you know, you feel like you’re a puppet, you know, being held up by strings. And, I just wanted some independence from Detroit. I wanted to get away from family, including my aunt, who was a very influential person in my life but with whom I needed to get some distance. So I went to New York and got some jobs there, working … LG: Your aunt was? LA: My aunt was an artist in Detroit. Cyril Miles. She sort of took me under her wing and supported me and really, I think, influenced me to go into Art History, so that was, it was a very viable course for me. �LG: But she was an artist, not an art historian? LA: She was an artist, not an art historian, no. And, I used to live at their house, in fact, and when she passed, sadly, at the age of 75, I inherited a lot of the art that she had collected. I have that in my house, so it feels like she’s got a very strong presence in my house. But I needed to get away, and I went to New York and took a job in publishing and the sorts of things that undergraduates get in New York before they go on to graduate school. And then after two years there I went, did a, close to a year, hitch-hiking through Europe, like every young person back then. And I applied to graduate school and got in and then the rest was doing graduate work. I got to Bloomington in 19… let’s see now, when would it be, 70 … um, no, 81. It was 81 … when I got to Bloomington. LG: And did you come directly from Bloomington … LA: No, I’m sorry, it was ’71. It was ’71. I’m getting confused here. Yeah. LG: And did you come directly from Bloomington to Skidmore? LA: No. I, while writing my dissertation I was in Detroit teaching part time at Wayne State University and then I got my first job, teaching job, tenure track job, at University of Wisconsin in Stevens Point, and I was there for three years, but knew I didn’t want to stay there forever. The job was not tailored well enough to my areas of expertise, and so I applied for the Skidmore job and I was hired, and that was … LG: And what were your areas of expertise? LA: African, pre-Columbian, and Oceanic. But mainly African, and that’s where I did my field work. Yup. LG: How come you went to Africa? �LA: Ah that’s a good question. I think my aunt, again, was very influential in sending me there. She was very interested in African art and in African textiles in particular, or just textiles, throughout the world. And, I knew I wanted to do something with textiles and I knew Africa was a good place to do it. The other influence was the African American movement, way back in the early ’70s. And people were beginning to study African art and African American studies and schools were beginning to open up programs in that area, so I knew it was a viable profession and I probably could get a job in the field. And I did. So, that was, I think that was my foray into Africa, and I loved it, being there. It just opened up so many windows for me. LG: Like what? LA: Ah, well, I loved being, working with African people in general. And I know that’s very simplistic to state it that way, but there is something about the African … state of mind and the ambiance and the kindness and the receptivity that I really gravitated towards, and I have maintained a lot of connections with people in Africa. Most particularly in Nigeria where I did my field work. And so I feel very close to things having to do with Africa. LG: And what special things were you doing in Nigeria? LA: Well, I went initially to — for my dissertation, it was my PhD. work — to do a study of African textiles in a particular area. I had noted in my research, library research, that there were patterns on textiles from one area of Nigeria that seemed identical to patterns and textiles in another area, and I wanted to know why. And I basically solved the problem, I figured out that there was a long and enduring pattern of trade of textiles coming in, not only from other parts of Africa into the delta, but from Europe. And it, there was a real receptivity to, for these people, to things coming from abroad, coming �from elsewhere, and taking in these textiles and making them their own. And that was really the essence of my research, was to see how people take things in and take ownership of them by renaming them and assigning meaning to them that has to do with their own culture. LG: So what made you decide to come to Skidmore? And when? LA: Well, I applied in 1984. It was a job that was advertised. I don’t, I can’t say that I was particularly seeking out Skidmore, I mean, you know, the nature of the beast in academia is you go where the jobs are. And so I applied and was fortunate to get the job. LG: Um, did you interview on campus? LA: Yes, in those days we interviewed on campus. First of all, I interviewed at College Art Association, which is the annual organization for art … artists and art historians. I interviewed with Penny Jolly, and with … I think Robert Carter was there in that interview. And also Joan Siegfried. I remember her. And then they called me to … unusual, I received a letter in the mail that I was invited to come to campus, they didn’t call me. Those were the days when [laughs] things were done differently than they are now. And as I came to campus, Penny was not here at that point. She was on sabbatical. So I met Jim Kettlewell and other people in the department, and did the interview and got the job. LA: So you arrived on campus, what year? LA: It would have been in the spring of ’84, in 1984. So I started teaching in 1984. LG: In the fall of ’84? LA: Yeah. �LG: And so you were hired because of your African teaching? LA: That’s right. LG: Is this something that the department didn’t have yet? LA: The department had long time, had long had African as an area, as a subject in their courses, in their curriculum. You might recall that there was someone in the department prior to me, Montêquin was his name … deMontêquin? I may not have the exact name, yeah. And there was a bit of a faux pas with him. He had gone to, he had taken students to Spain and they jumped over a wall at the Alhambra, and they got … do you remember this incident? [laughs] LA: So he was out. LG: That was during the 4:1:4 — it was a January term. LA: Yes, that’s right, it was a January term thing. So, fortunately for me, he lost the job and so they hired me. Now he taught African. He also taught Islamic art and he taught preColumbian art. Which is to say that in those days, our field was, the field of African was often wedded with other areas. My thesis advisor, Roy Sieber, always referred to it as the wastebasket definition of art history; you know, whatever doesn’t fit within the normal Western paradigm, and Asian paradigms, goes there. So, I really had to teach a tall order. And, also, they were asking me to teach a survey of art history, which is a Western survey. So, I felt like I was all over the place. LG: And did you add anything about Africa when you were teaching the survey course? LA: Umm, no. The course was strictly Western art, as I recall. Maybe at some point we sort of introduced a little bit of African, but I don’t think so. I don’t think so. It was strictly a Western survey. And then at some point I even took on the subject of Native American �art, and I taught that. So I was covering a lot of bases. And I have to say to some degree that was to my detriment. I was stretched too far, too wide, and needing to be more focused on my own areas of expertise. And the people that they’ve hired in the department since then were more focused on Africa and maybe African American. But I’m sad to say that Africa is now out of the curriculum. They did not rehire when the last person left. So, it’s the end of that era. LG: Now there, umm, was the department separate, the Art History department separate when you came? LA: Mmn mn, we were all one department. I met with, I remember having dinner at the interview with the then chair of the whole department, who was a Studio person whose name is escaping me for the moment. Um, and, of course I would meet the Art History faculty but it was part of the larger department at that point. And I don’t remember at what point we split from Studio. It was sometime in the late ’80s, early ’90s that we split. LG: What can you tell about that, what brought that about? LA: Well, Art History is a very different discipline than Studio Art, and we always felt that we were closer to the Humanities, we always felt that we were closer to, in some cases, to Anthropology, Religion, and not to Studio Art. The act of making art is a very different thing from studying about the history and whatever around art traditions throughout the world. So, it made sense. I think we had a review, one year, of the whole department and it was strongly urged that we split, and so we decided to do that. LG: Was that review part of the Middle States review, or was that … LA: Could have been Middle States, um there’s another body that does a review, and I’m forgetting the name of it, it mostly is concerned with Studio, but Art History, because we were part of the department, was included in it. So … um, I can’t even remember what organization was reviewing us at that point, but I know that when I went up for tenure … �for, yeah, for tenure, we were still a whole department, and then a few years later we split. LG: So what was gained by splitting, or what was lost by splitting? LA: Well it’s always comfortable to have a larger department as your umbrella, that you’re under a larger umbrella of faculty who take care of you, and we’d always felt like we were taken care of. But, to be honest, we felt that being our own discipline and having control of just our discipline seemed to make more sense, in terms of the kinds of conversations we have. You know, did we really want to be hearing a lot of discourse about how beginning drawing should be taught, and what should, how the basic curriculum of Studio should be laid out. Those aren’t the issues that we deal with, and the questions and subject matter that we address as art historians is much more akin to other humanities areas. I always felt much more connected to Africanists in Anthropology or pre-Columbian in Anthropology. Penny’s work was very much wedded to… LG: Penny Jolly LA: Penny Jolly, to literature and religion and classics and so those were our, that was our family, and not studio art. So… LG: What were the high points of your career at Skidmore? LA: Well, um, high points … there were many high points, like it’s hard to pick out one, but I will say, speaking of the Tang, the Tang became kind of a haven for me. I loved working with the people of the Tang, I loved doing things at the Tang. I was involved in the Tang project from the time of its inception on paper; I was on the committee. I was traveling to various campuses throughout the northeast with other faculty from the college, none of them Studio, as you might recall. LG: Who? �LA: I remember Terry Diggory was on that committee, and I don’t remember who the other ones were, but we went to Bates, we went to Dartmouth and we went to Wellesley and looked at, and also, the other college in Vermont, umm … LG: Bennington? SB: Middlebury. LA: Middlebury. Middlebury, right. And looked at their museums to get an idea of what we want. And so that really got me interested in the museum at a very early stage. And, then when it got built I was so excited about the possibility of doing projects with the Tang. LG: Let me interrupt one second before you get to the project, because I’m interested in that, but … what qualities were you particularly interested in bringing into the Tang as it was being built, and conceived of? LA: Well, we were thinking of very practical things, like what kind of storage space do we need, how much exhibition do we need? What would the staffing look like? Every museum that we looked at, you know they had a certain number of staff members and we needed to know how that worked and how it didn’t work, so we were constantly asking those questions. Um, we were not dealing with the design of the museum, per se … it was, that was taking place on sort of a different level, but we were interested in the mechanics and the collection itself. Do we want to go out and purchase items for the Tang or do we allow gifts to be given to the Tang? I mean there were many, many questions about the collection. What do we do with the existing collection that we have at Skidmore, which, prior to the Tang, was housed, when I first came, it was housed in a house behind the President’s house on … SB: On Broadway? �LA: On Broadway, yeah. And I remember going in and seeing the pre-Columbian … LG: The garage. LA: Yeah! And then it moved to a building where Charlie, the new director of the Tang, the first director of the Tang, Charlie … SB: Stainback. LA: Stainback, thank you for that. Where he was housed, there was a house at the edge of the campus, … anyway, the collection was there, and then it moved to the Tang. And so what happens with that collection and how valuable is it in relation to what else could be done at the Tang? So, those were the questions that we had to ask. [Clears throat] Sorry, my voice is getting raspy. LG: What kinds of things did you want to come to the Tang? What kinds of things did come? LA: Well I was always interested in seeing African material be added to the Tang, and I did, I was instrumental in seeing that happen. LG: In shows or in the collection? LA: Both. We wanted stuff in the collection and we wanted to start exhibiting African art. So, I was, I’m very proud to say this, but I was the first faculty member to curate, to oversee a student curated exhibition at the Tang, and it was an exhibition of African art, and it was based on a collection , well actually I did it, I had done it prior, if you recall, in the student center, in Case Center there was a room that was an art gallery, and I had curated an exhibit of African art there, based on a collection owned by a colleague of mine who did work in Nigeria and had quite an elaborate collection of African art. And students curated that collection. So that kind of gave me the taste for what I could do with African art, and what the students could … which, I found that to be a very exciting way to teach �about African art, was to be able to work with objects. And then when the Tang opened I proposed that we do an exhibition and we borrowed pieces from various collections and also used what we had in the Tang. I remember taking the students who were in the class who were helping to curate; it was a seminar that I taught. We drove to Boston and went to Monni Adams, who was working then at the, volunteering at the Peabody Museum, and she had quite a collection of African art that we ended up borrowing. And the students got to see somebody who owns it, the negotiations you go through to get the objects, and then seeing the objects in the museum and working with them. Very exciting for the students, and for me. LG: Other highlights in your career at Skidmore that …? LA: Well the other one was the, my curating the exhibition of African Art and the Environment with John Weber and that was, to me, an incredible experience. LG: And John’s position was? LA: He was the director of the Tang after Charlie Stainback. I believe he was next after Charlie. And he had proposed, we together came up with this idea, of doing an exhibition on contemporary African art, because so much of the collection is focused on traditional objects, and we wanted to, sort of, bring Africa to the 21st century. So we were going to do a contemporary … and my original idea was to do an exhibition on body arts and things related to the body, including dress, and the whole gamut of themes. But then we went to Senegal, the Tang paid for us to go to Senegal to attend LG: [inaudible] LA: To the Dak’Art, the… what did you ask? LG: Who is the we? �LA: John and I. LG: Ok. LA: John and I went to Senegal to attend the Dak’Art, it’s a play on Dakar and Art, and it’s a triennial, they have it every three years, or a biennial, they have it every two years, excuse me. And it is focused strictly on African, on contemporary African art, and we went to see what’s going on in the field. And as we went around and looked I said, “You know, body art is not as interesting to me as the environment. I think that’s what we need to focus on.” And he said, “Yes! Let’s do it!” So that’s how that all started. And we came up with a wonderful array of objects and artworks, we brought the artists to campus, we wrote a catalog together, and it was very successful. And it traveled. This show traveled. It went to Middlebury and it went to the campus in Virginia, um … the Commonwealth, is it the…? SB: VCU? LA: VCU in Virginia, yeah. Virginia Commonwealth. And then of course it was here at the Tang. I would say those are highlights. LG: Challenges? LA: Well, the challenges are dealing with faculty [laughs] in your department and around, abroad. I mean, you know, we’re not family in departments, we’re just colleagues, and we don’t always see eye to eye on things, and one had to struggle with different perspectives and different ways of viewing things. So that was always a challenge for me. And I always say now that I’m retired that I don’t miss the grading — grading is another challenge that we all had to do — and I don’t miss the committee work and the department dynamics. I don’t miss. Yeah. LG: Were you part of any of the college committees? �LA: Yeah. It seems like I was always on a committee [laughs]. I can’t remember … let’s see, I was on the Curriculum Committee for three years in a row, that was … I chaired the Curriculum Committee for three years in a row. That was … that was quite a challenge. And this was when people were changing their curricula because of the writing component that had been added to our curriculum. Umm, I was on umm, the UWW Committee, I recall. To be honest with you, I’m drawing a blank on the others that I was on. LG: Did you work with any UWW students? LA: Yes, I did. I had some. And those projects were very fruitful. I enjoyed working with them, and oh, in addition I taught a seminar through the Special Programs, I guess it was still UWW at that point, and that was really a high point — teaching that seminar. And actually it was a seminar … LG: The seminar was for? LA: It was for the Masters Program through Special Programs. And it was a seminar having to do with African Art and the Environment, and it was wedded to the exhibition. And it was fabulous. I loved doing that. I loved working with these mature students. There were challenges with it — they had to write a thesis within the space of a week, which seemed ridiculous, but that’s how it went. But to have the show there, and too, we actually had an artist come and talk and do, she did an installation, Nnenna Okore came and did installation art in the Schick Art Gallery, and so the students got to meet her, and … that was really a highlight for me. I loved it. LG: That Master of Arts Program began with an intensive series of meetings and … LA: Yeah, and lectures. �LG: Lectures. And then they went out on their own. LA: Right. Well, they, I don’t know, in this case, … Yeah, they didn’t write the thesis during that first week, but they had to come up with an idea and a prospectus and I know it was a challenge for them, when you think about it. But we read some fascinating texts and … I felt like I was teaching in a way that I didn’t experience so much with my ordinary classes. There’s something extra special about a more adult, more interested, if you will, body of students. Um, mature, more mature, and more willing to do the work without complaining. [laughs]. LG: Did you go with students to Africa? LA: No. I did not. I went to Africa and taught classes in Africa, but not with Skidmore students. Although one of the Skidmore students did go on her own to the program, was in the program that I was teaching in. LG: And which program was that? LA: This was a program initiated through RISD, I’m sorry, um, what’s the art school in New York City, um, … LG: Parsons? LA: Parsons School of Design, yes, thank you. Parsons School of Design, in collaboration with Jerry Vogel, who was once married to Susan Vogel who’s a big name in the field of African art. She was the curator, chief curator of African Art at the Met, and Jerry was very, very involved in Africa in many, many ways, and he created this program and worked with the Parsons School of Design, and I taught in that program for three different summers. It required me to become a better French speaker than I ever had been. A lot of translating going from local language, Baoulé, to French, French to �English, and having to talk to the students about what was going on. So I taught in that program quite a bit, and so I’ve done programs in Africa. I also led a tour through the Textile Society of America to Ghana to study textiles. LG: And who was on that tour? LA: Well this was organized by the Textile Society of America so there were a number of people from the organization, members, who came. And some colleagues of mine from different parts of the country. It had nothing to do with Skidmore, per se. LG: What kind of support did you get from the Skidmore administration for you? For the African component of the program? LA: Uh, I don’t feel that I got support for the African program in particular. I always got support from the college for whatever I did, and I’ve always been grateful to Skidmore for the kind of support that we’ve gotten through the years. Being paid for travel to do papers and whatever. But for the African program, per se, I mean there really was no African program, and I was it. Along with Gerry Erchak and then Sónia Silva, we were it, and then Hedi Jaouad. We were the Africanists. We didn’t have an African Studies program then. There is one program now, although it’s not necessarily Africa focused, I think it’s more African American focused. So, no support at large, but never in need of support. The college always was behind me to help me with my projects. LG: Anybody in particular? LA: Well, Phyllis Roth was very, very sympathetic to our needs, and you, working with her — Sue Bender I’m talking to. Um, my last large publication was this book I co-authored with a colleague of mine on a Nigerian photographer who was active in the 1890s. And this was a big project. We received a Getty Grant to do the project, and then together proceeded to look at collections and go to Africa. We were supposed to go together but, the reason that she didn’t come with me, there were some health issues she had, and �Nigeria wasn’t safe at that moment and so we decided not to go then, but then I went during my sabbatical and the college gave me money to go twice during that sabbatical. And it was absolutely critical for this book because we hadn’t yet gotten the African voice on the meanings of these photographs that had been generated in the late ’90s, 1890s. And so the college was very, very supportive with that. And, um, yeah. LG: Ok, so I think you talked about the major challenges and the major high points of your career. When did you retire? LA: I retired six years ago — I think it’s 2005, wait, 2006, no, I cannot exactly remember. It’s back then [laughs]. It’s about six years ago. 2016… oh, sorry, my mind is like mush. [laughs] LG: And what have you been doing since, Lisa? LA: Since then, well the book came out after I retired, so we still had research work to do on it for another year, so … and then, I got involved in a project about my grandmother. I decided I wanted to write a book about her because she was an anarchist, and she dedicated her life to being an anarchist, to the anarchist movement. And I’m working on that now. I’m writing it now. I gave a talk on the subject to the retirees — you might have been there to hear that, and you too. It’s been a really fun project, though challenging in its own way because I don’t regard myself as an expert on anarchism. I don’t regard myself as an expert on the Russian revolution — I’ve had to do a lot of reading and a lot of research for this. But it’s turning out to be a really fun project. I’m also giving a paper this spring that is on my field, related to my field of African textiles, in honor of a, it’s like a Festschrift panel at a conference to honor a colleague of mine who has retired. LG: And where is that? LA: That will be, it’s the Midwest Art History Conference, and it’s going to be in Minneapolis … I’m sorry, no, um, hmm, where is it going to be? I think Minneapolis is where it is. �LG: You’ve also been very involved with the library in town? LA: Yes, I’m doing a lot of volunteer work — was doing too much when I first retired. I was working at the, volunteering at the … Treasures Thrift Shop and decided I didn’t want to sort through used clothing anymore, decided it wasn’t for me, so I switched to the library and was taking on a lot at the library but now I’ve cut it down to just working on afternoon a week. LG: Doing? LA: I work in the used bookstore, and I work the cash register and help out in any way that Jeff needs help. It’s been really rewarding to work there because a lot of my colleagues and friends come in. I like to be able to help people who are looking for one type of book or another. I feel like I’m really serving the community by doing it. I also was working, and this was another volunteer job that I gave up, but I was doing, teaching English as a Second Language through the library. And that, combined with working in the bookstore, felt like too much. And when I started working on the project about my grandmother I decided to stop doing the ESL. And, so that’s where I am now. LG: Lisa, Susan just reminded us that, your field was quite unique. You want to talk a little bit about that? LA: Um, meaning that it was a non-Western field. LG: Yeah. LA: Alright. And of course at some point, not when I first arrived, but at some point the non Western requirement was factored in to the curriculum, and I fit that category. So I would get a lot of students who were taking this course to fulfill their non-Western requirement, you weren’t necessarily getting students who wanted to take African Art, but, that said, I �enjoyed teaching the non-Western area and I felt like it made sense to be providing that kind of other cultural experience. Constantly thinking of how we do things in the west and how it differs in Africa. Also, what were the relationships between the West and Africa. The history of colonialism, the history of trade, and the like. And so I felt that it was a very rich kind of way to deal with the material. I know that there were people on campus who had a problem with the non-Western requirement and there was a point at which they tried to eliminate it from the curriculum. LG: Do you know why? LA: Well they were arguing, and to me this seemed crazy, is that they could see in their mind that some areas within the Western world seemed as marginalized as maybe Africa was, and that, why would Africa be the … what does it mean to be “non-Western.” Questioning that, they had a problem with that terminology. I thought it was very astute of Steve Hoffman at some point during a faculty meeting in which this whole issue of the non-Western was discussed to point out that people in Asia and other parts of the nonWestern world, are the … in Asia and India and that whole part of the world, use the term “non-Western.” So it is used. But, people were challenging whether it was appropriate to be making a divide between Western and non-Western, as if these are really two viable categories. I always felt that it was a way to allow students to broaden their understanding of the world and of themselves within the world, to be seen that other cultures handle things very differently than we do. So, that was … LG: I think we all share that. From the different disciplines that we come from. LA: Right. But you can see where maybe somebody who focuses on the West but deals with marginal issues within the Western context could argue that there is a kind of cultural “other” within their purview. I mean, I don’t know, it became a very contested issue and I wasn’t comfortable with it. I don’t think the non-Western is, I think it still exists in the curriculum. It is, and it’s here and it should be. And it is, I mean when you hear about �people from other parts of the world referring to us they refer to us as the Westerners versus the non-Westerners, so it’s in their heads as well. LG: We’ve had a growing number of students from non-Western backgrounds. LA: Yes, we do. And I would get a lot of African students who had never had a course in African art — loved being educated about their own cultures, in, more broadly speaking, of course, it’s not just from what country they come from but from many other parts of Africa. That said, teaching non-Western subjects sometimes brought up awkwardness in the classroom, with students maybe feeling that you weren’t, I remember there was a particular issue with a Native American course that I was teaching where I was not being tough enough on the Ghost Dance, that I should have given it a more … nuanced representation, and something that was owned by the Plains Indians rather than something that was in response to the introduction of Christianity. I’ll just say it, put it that way. It created a really messy conversation in the classroom. And, so you can’t, I found that sometimes I couldn’t be … here I am, a Western White woman talking about Africa, talking about Native Americans, and I think some students perceived that as being — it just isn’t right to them. I remember when, who came … Gates came from Harvard, came to speak at Skidmore, and he said very openly, “You don’t have to be African or Black to teach African art.” He said that. And that’s the politics of it. And that’s what some students expect — they expect you to be of their culture or their culture area, broadly speaking, and that always kind of unnerved me a little bit. LG: Good. This has been a really interesting post-script, this hour. This conversation. Thank you for adding to it. LA: I remember in graduate school there was an African American program and there was an African program, African Studies. African American Studies and African Studies. And all of the African Americans were in the African American Studies program and we White people were in the African program, and … I just noticed that, observed that, as a reality. You know, it’s not something that African Americans are necessarily drawn to. �They want to know about their own culture, even though Africa is sort of at the roots of their own culture. And, um, I kind of saw these trends as I moved along in the field. [coughs] Excuse me, I’m losing my voice. Um, an African friend of mine, Nigerian friend of mine in the last ten years was involved with a, her church had a African fashion show, and people came out wearing African clothing, but, she offered to come out to be part of it and they didn’t want her to be part of it because they are African Americans, they wanted to own Africa in their way. So this is just another kind of an issue that one deals with. LG: Lisa is there anything else that we should be covering? That comes to mind? LA: Umm, I can’t really think of anything other than, I … that, and I’ll end it on a really positive note, that I’ve always felt very fortunate to be at Skidmore. I’ve always felt that Skidmore is supportive of what faculty do, and as you compare, and I mean, you know, financially and academically and whatever, … and that’s something that I think about a lot. I mean, even now we have the retiree program, the funding that enables faculty to continue to do things after the fact. So, I very much appreciate that. LG: Good. Well thank you! LA: You’re welcome SB: It’s been fun. LA: Sorry that my voice gave out. LG: Do you want me to get you some water or something? LA: No, I’m good. �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Lynne Gelber Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Lisa Aronson Location The location of the interview Saratoga Springs, NY Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 42:56 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit January 29, 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Lisa Aronson Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource November 7, 2022 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Description An account of the resource Lisa Aronson joined Skidmore’s Art History faculty in 1986. In this interview she traces her academic journey to Skidmore and reflects on the influences that led her to specialize in the study if African textiles. While at Skidmore, Aronson experienced Art History’s establishment as a department separate from Studio Art and participated in planning for the Tang Museum. She reflects here on the challenges and opportunities for teaching a non-western subject at Skidmore, including the unique opportunities created by Tang Museum programming. After her retirement in 2015, Aronson has continued her research and writing and has volunteered with a variety of community organizations. Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Oral History Art Department art history Charles Stainback John Weber Non-Western Requirement Phyllis Roth Skidmore Art Collections Tang Museum UWW https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/9534a0f26186987f52f37bd90cec75f0.JPG 8163c5de0429967e395497e7caf1648a https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/455843183ad46b015a69d5207137ec7d.mp3 685e3c4f64179e380e1e7c26a076b200 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/cd50e1083b7b86078f53e55d88fa4a4f.pdf 37ca0204ae59b643be97a37f55a10682 PDF Text Text Interview with Judy Halstead by Sue Bender & Leslie Meechem (recording tech), Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, Saratoga Springs, New York, October 17, 2025. SUE BENDER: This is Sue Bender interviewing Judy Halstead for the Skidmore Retiree Oral History Project. It's October 17, 2025 and we are in the Scribner Library on the Skidmore campus. Welcome, Judy. Glad to have you with us. JUDY HALSTEAD: Thank you, Sue. SB: Just for starters, could you just begin by telling us, if you would, when and where you were born and briefly describe your childhood? JH: Sure. They're sort of different questions. I was actually born in North Tonawanda, New York, but we left there when I was two, so I don't have any memory. It doesn't have anything to do with how I grew up, really. Then we moved to Schenectady, not a very good part of town. My dad was a janitor at the main plant in GE. Neither of my parents really went to college. One of my parents was definitely an orphan and the other one had, had one of her parents die young. They were married the day after my mother turned 18. I was born three years later. Anyway, then we moved to the village of Scotia, which was a delightful place. I really loved living in the village of Scotia. I played outside, played outside. I was a pretty freerange kid, played out, wandered around, played kick ball in the dead end. Then we moved, trying to do increasingly better schools, although I think Scotia was good, to the Glenville area, but it was Burnt Hills school district, and I had a dog by then. My dog and I really wandered around. I played with my dog a lot. We wandered around in the woods and one of the things we did a lot of was follow streams. One of the first days I was there, this actually could or could not turn up later, but I followed a stream a very, very long ways, till after dark, and we had not lived there very long, so that was kind of interesting. I think playing outside was most of it. Oh, I measured the stream behind my house for about at least a year. I have to find the records. I think I might still have them in the basement, about how deep the stream behind my house was, about once a month for a couple of years. SB: A scientist already. So, could you talk a little bit about your educational journey? JH: So, never got too far, graduating from Burnt Hills, never got too far from here. I went to SUNY Binghamton, raised more than half of the money for that myself, working both during summers and, two or three jobs sometimes, working at SUNY Binghamton. Then I went to RPI, graduate school at RPI, in physical chemistry. It was very unusual for there to be a woman there. There were hardly any women. There was one woman who was a year older than I. Well, she was a year ahead of me in class. She was actually three years older than I. At RPI, but it was pretty unusual to have women, I think even more so in physical chemistry than the other areas. Page 1 of 11 �So working in the lab, I didn't know things that I would be later teaching my students routinely in the labs and making sure that they knew clockwise is lockwise and all kinds of things about the physical world that, I used to take my soldering home in my purse because I didn't like it when the guys in lab made fun of me when I was soldering things. So, the physical chemistry is applications of physics and math to chemical systems. I was interested in small molecules and atoms, vacuum systems, electronic equipment to use to measure the spectroscopy and other factors dealing with reactions happening in gas phases. I actually ended up doing more with atoms, even than small molecules. That was pretty much my PhD work. Then I worked at the health department at long range transport of pollutants. SB: So how did you find your way to Skidmore? JH: Just a quick addition there in between after working at the Health Department, completely different stuff. It was still gas phase, but it was solids, long range transport of pollutants. I'd always been interested in teaching and there was an opening at Russell Sage. I worked at Russell Sage for two years and then I took a visiting assistant professorship at Williams for three years. Then I applied for the job at Skidmore. At the time that I was at Williams, I was married to my boy’s dad, who had started a company in Troy and had at least 30 or 40 employees and the employees had mortgages and things and I didn't think I could wander too far away if I wanted David to ever see his dad. So, I saw the job opening at Skidmore and I applied for it. When I applied for the Williams job, that was the only job I applied for. When I applied for the Skidmore job, it was absolutely the only job I applied for. If I hadn't been hired by January 15, I had applications ready for Ithaca College and Connecticut College, but I was hired by Skidmore. SB: And what year was that? Do you remember? JH: Yes, of course. I remember a lot of things. I was interviewed on December 2, 1986 and I started at Skidmore in August and/or September of '87. SB: So describe the position that you took at Skidmore and the work that you did. JH: I arrived, starting to set up my research lab in August 1987. Classes started in September 1987. I was a physical chemist. I taught Physical Chemistry 1, Physical Chemistry 2. There's labs with physical chemistry. I taught general chemistry. I also taught a Liberal Studies IV course, and I also had undergraduate research students. I'll tell you a little bit about both of those experiences. I had already worked at two small, liberal arts colleges at this point; Russell Sage for two years and Williams for three years. I thought that a lot of things that I brought to my own life and to Skidmore were really from, primarily from Williams. A lot of people, including me, thought that for many years. Thinking about this interview a little bit, I realize that there was a lot of things I was already doing. Undergraduate research for example, when I was at Russell Sage. I'm not 100% sure where I had the idea of what Page 2 of 11 �undergraduate research was or how I formed a very firm idea about that. Williams certainly had influence, but it wasn't always Williams. But I came to Skidmore with a pretty firm idea of what sort of institution I wanted to be at, a little curious about to what extent that was going to work for Skidmore because it was the only job I applied for. My husband at the time had a business in Troy, but he did agree to move to Saratoga, which was very important to me because he was out of town. When I was at Williams, I was commuting from Troy to Williams and that didn't work very well. It actually worked really well, but I didn't want to do it again, not for a tenure track position. Some of the things, just a quick little summary of some of the things that I envisioned for what I wanted in my life and what I envisioned for Skidmore's life were a strong student/faculty collaborative undergraduate research program, which included some very specific things. Rigor within physical chemistry and general chemistry was particularly interesting and I also taught analytical chemistry. In fact, in my first 27 years, I taught 27 different courses. Also, I had a very definite interest in environmental science, which I had come to understand recently, really what I needed to be interested in and knowledgeable about was environmental studies and I was starting to understand the difference between environmental studies and environmental science, and that a lot of other people didn't understand those things. Then I wanted Skidmore to have more, especially at that point, in the way of undergraduate, student/faculty collaborative undergraduate research, including and most especially full-time for students during the summers. One of the reasons that I wasn't trying to set up a lab during the summer was, I already had summer research students at Williams that were funded. I had a grant from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund that I got when I was at Williams, but grants, typically with the permission of both institutions, are transferrable. A lot of the equipment that I was bought at that grant that I was using at Williams was transferrable, so Williams' people signed off on all of that. But I had students for the summer at Williams, and also, the Skidmore daycare center opened the first day of classes or the day before the first day of classes or something like that, in '87. I hadn't even thought that a place could not have a childcare center honestly, because Williams had had a very old childcare center at that point. I'm not sure how old. My first year at Williams, my older child was born, and my first year at Skidmore, my second child was born. Anyway, they're wonderful. Tearful. Moving on. So, I was moving equipment into Skidmore and also moving our house from Troy to Saratoga Springs. So I worked with my students up to, I don't know, the first or second week of August and then I had a couple of weeks where I was moving things from Troy, I'm actually not remembering moving the house that much, but I'm remembering moving the lab. Maybe we got somebody to move us. That would be great. But my son and I would wake up in Troy and I would take him to daycare and I'd work with my Williams students. Then my Williams students would, in August, put things in my Subaru. Then I would pick David up at daycare around 3:00 or 3:30 and then we would drive to Skidmore and unload things and set up my lab. I already had gotten keys to my lab and keys to my office and I already knew where the chemistry department kept carts that I could move equipment on. But some of this was very heavy equipment and I Page 3 of 11 �had to move it from my car onto the cart and then from the cart onto the lab benches in my lab. There was absolutely nobody in Dana Science Center except my two-year-old, David, and me, and David Domozych. So, David Domozych was highly valued. I showed up maybe three times and knew that I could find David Domozych upstairs and we all moved my stuff into my lab. David, my son, was two. I had an ion chromatograph, which is pretty routine now, but was a bigger deal in '87. One of his early words as a two-year old was chromatograph. So, I discovered pretty early, there was a kind of a vibe during the interviews that there was hopefulness that this vision I had for someplace that I would work was consistent with what somebody, somewhere at Skidmore wanted. I didn't entirely get, it wasn't entirely clear that it was that many people in my department. Maybe Paul Walter, Vasantha Narisimahn had done a little bit, some undergraduate research, particularly during the academic year, but nobody'd ever done any research during the summer. Nobody had ever applied for grants. But I think that I started to really get the big picture better when I met David Porter [then Skidmore’s President] because David Porter definitely had this interdisciplinary vision, but also a very clear vision of what student/faculty collaborative research was going to mean for people in the natural sciences nationally in the coming years; at there was, everybody in the natural sciences in at least a three-year position, and that was one of the reasons I was a three-year position is, they weren't, Williams didn't think that they could really expect somebody to be doing really good quality research in less than three years. So they were hiring visiting professors at three-year shots. Everybody was doing undergraduate research with the expectation of publishing in the same sort of journal you would publish in at a university, which really requires a summer experience. That was the very beginning, the late '70s, early '80s, middle '80s was the beginning of an organization named Council on Undergraduate Research, which Stuart Crampton in physics at Williams was very instrumental in. Probably one of the other really big instrumental people, maybe more so probably, was a guy named Jerry Mohrig at Carleton, who was David Porter's next-door neighbor, I think. He was certainly his neighbor. I think he might have been his next-door neighbor. So David Porter was a musician and classics professor, but he had all kinds of visions for Skidmore. We all really liked David Porter a lot. But this vision of very rigorous, but truly collaborative research with students, but during the school year, keeping it going, but for the students to really understand the depth of what they were doing, that they had to be working summers. I came with a grant a year later. Ray Giguere came with a grant. Ray Giguere also already had, was the second person that had the kind of experience that I had already had in chemistry. David Domozych was already here. In '87-‘88, David Domozych and I, with the help or the guidance, or maybe they were doing it more, of somebody in the administration, and I'm not sure who it was, I think it might have been David Seligman, wrote a grant, Keck Foundation maybe, I'm not sure, for a student/faculty collaborative research to be funded by the college. So I had my ASC, PRF money. Ray had some external grant, but the college began to give grants for summer research to other people. I think that David Porter had an awful lot to do with that. I think David Porter also had a lot to do with just the nurturing of interdisciplinarity within the college. So, we had LS [Liberal Studies] I, II, III, and IV Page 4 of 11 �back then. At my interview, I was told that at some point, I was going to be expected to teach a LS IV course, which was, I can't remember exactly what the title was, but had something to do with sciences. It was supposed to be some sort of link between other disciplines and the sciences. At Williams, I was teaching a very upper-level quantum mechanics class, but I was also teaching an environmental science class. More importantly, there was a guy by the name of Tom Jorling, which you guys might never have heard of, but he had a bachelor's undergraduate degree in biology and a law degree, and he had worked quite a bit at different governmental positions as a lawyer, politician, administrator person. Then he worked, for several years, as a tenure track faculty member who got tenure at Williams in environmental studies. Then, I think it was Jimmy Carter who appointed him in a position at EPA and he was back to working in the government. Then he was back at Williams as a distinguished professor of environmental studies at Williams. When I was there, Tom Jorling was chair of environmental studies. I would go to environmental studies meetings that I didn't understand what they were completely. I linked it with science, environmental science because I'd been actually teaching an environmental science course collaboratively with somebody at Russell Sage already. And I was teaching an environmental science course at Williams. But I go to meetings and it's pretty dominated by philosophers, English professors, economists, and Tom Jorling, who's a lawyer. Well, one of the dominant scientists in the group was a guy by the name of Bill Moomaw, who was spending a few years at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where he started a PhD program in environmental studies. That's who I was replacing. That's why I wasn't seeing a presence from chemistry. And there was one biologist and one geologist that were involved. I started going to Tom Jorling's course, which I think actually had the symbol ES100, and it was very law, politics, economics. I'm sure that's the first time I ever heard about the tragedy of the commons, would have been in Tom Jorling's course, sometime before '87. So spring of '87, I guess, while I was still at Williams, I wrote my Liberal Studies IV proposal based on partly what I was teaching in environmental science and partly what Tom Jorling was teaching in environmental studies. It flew through curriculum committee, which I'd been hearing about for many years, because that wasn't really typical. So when I came in, I already had that approved and I probably taught it that year. But I gave it the title of my environmental science course, which was “the environment and the physical sciences”. Students were very happy with it, but I didn't get great enrollment the first year or two. Then somebody in the administration said, "Course is great. You just need to change the title." The title of the book I was using was Environmental Concerns in Perspective. So, I changed the title to “Environmental Concerns in Perspective”. Environmental Concerns in Perspective has been full ever since, probably still is because ES100 has that title still, I think. Then John Thomas asked me if I'd be interested in teaching a course on Loughberry Lake, if I'm not getting too ahead of you. So, John Thomas and I invented what was really the first, before ES100, ES100 was my LS IV course. SB: ES meaning environmental studies? Page 5 of 11 �JH: Yeah, thank you very much, Sue. ES meaning environmental studies. So, we started an ES105 class, leaving space for something that might happen eventually below ES105, but that was primarily on the chemistry and geology of Loughberry Lake, the drinking water supply for Saratoga Springs. But we also had people from the city talking to us about its role in the life of the city and a little bit about politics and economics, but it was largely chemistry and geology. And then at some point, the students in my LS IV class asked for some sort of program that was environmental studies, so I started writing a proposal for the environmental studies major with Ken Johnson, the other senior person in the geology department. It actually went to the faculty floor while I was on pre-tenure sabbatical, but Ken and I met a lot about it and rewrote things a lot. Around, it was passed around '90, maybe '91, for the environmental studies minor. The first student that graduated with an environmental studies minor was a chemistry major by the name of Cheryl Silbert, who married another Skidmore alum Schnitzer, and Cheryl Silbert-Schnitzer has been a full professor at Stone Hill for quite a while. A really long time, actually. Then the self-determined majors started getting flooded by students who wanted to be environmental studies majors. I had a very significant teaching load. There were 105 kids in general chemistry. I just wasn't up, for a while, in trying to make an environmental studies major. I'm sure that some of you realize that to have a major, you also have to get it through the New York State Board of Regents. It's not just the faculty floor. So, I really wasn't up for that for a while, but the self-determined majors committee was really leaning on me for years to get an environmental studies major. At some point, there was an absolutely spectacular woman hired, really initially as a faculty spouse, late '90sish, Karen Kellogg. She was initially hired in biology. She was more interested in environmental studies. I was overwhelmingly swamped with environmental studies stuff. Also, Roy Ginsberg and I applied for a Department of Education grant for international affairs and environmental studies issues across the curriculum and I was managing that for a couple of years, also. I didn't have a teaching load reduction for being director of environmental studies for many, many years. I still had more teaching load than some of my male colleagues. So, Karen was a really big help. With Karen's help, we got out the proposal for the environmental studies major in, I think about 2001, roughly. Of course, it's environmental studies and sciences now. So, I continued to have undergraduate research all along the way. I was doing that initial lab I set up was gas phase kinetics and spectroscopy. Mostly all hand-built glass vacuum work, all entirely hand-built electronics that I designed. None of the chemistry majors were particularly interested in that, but some of the physics majors were sometimes. One summer, to be able to spend the money, I got other grants. I got two other grants, big, substantial grants just for my research, not counting the college student/faculty collaborative research one or the environmental studies student/faculty collaborative research one. So, one summer, I hired RPI students because I needed to spend the money and I needed to get work done and our chemistry students weren't really that interested. But I was having massive numbers of students come to me that wanted to do environmental fieldwork, which I'd done a little bit of. Not even counting the time that I Page 6 of 11 �took the measurements in the stream in the back of my yard, I had also done a little bit of fieldwork in other ways. So, for several years, I was doing both, but with the teaching load I had, I was a single parent. By '91 or '92, I was a single parent. It was actually easier, in my case, to be a single parent than to not be a single parent. The younger one had a lot of health problems. So, there was a variety of reasons why it was easier for me to supervise my environmental science students. I went out in the field with them. I learned, there's a lot of different reasons I knew how to do fieldwork, but I'd learned how to do the fieldwork. I'd learned how to treat samples when we got back to the lab, but I wasn't building equipment from scratch. I wasn't having to repair and maintain equipment that had all been electronics and vacuum gas work that was all built from scratch, either. Also, somewhere along the line, I'd have to think harder than I am right now about the date, the college started the Skidmore Analytical Instrumentation Lab (SAIL) and we hired Lisa Quimby. Anybody know Lisa Quimby? You guys don't know about Lisa Quimby? Well, initially, there was a big grant that I was not one of the ones that wrote, thank you. Appreciate that, that was great. The chemistry department, but there were some people in the social sciences that used it some and there were some other people in the natural sciences that used it some, too. When I use the word science, I'm using the word science that I understand natural science to be, and if you would like to give that whatever interpretation you would like, that's fine. I understand, lots of people could have long conversations on that, but I'm using the word science and the sciences as natural sciences. So, the SAIL lab, we got all sorts of analytical instrumentation. I was able to use a lot of the instrumentation I'd got for analyzing samples from my gas, that I took from my gas phase apparatus into analyzing liquids. Gradually, my research evolved from being gas phase kinetics and spectroscopy (where I got publications with student co-authors, but it was a really time-consuming and difficult process) to supervising students that were doing fieldwork. There's a little while in between there that we also were doing basic analytical chemistry research. Analytical chemistry is the science of how much of what is where basically. Almost everybody could use their own analytical chemist; physicians, lawyers, everybody. How much of what is where is a really important question. I also taught analytical chemistry in the long list of courses I taught. So, I had some basic analytical chemistry equipment in my research lab. I shut down the vacuum stuff. Lisa and other people started using some of my equipment. Some of my research students were using more of the SAIL equipment. If the students needed to have the mode that an instrument was changed in changed or they hadn't, I pretty much would train the students on the instruments. But if there was an issue, something needed to be changed, then Lisa Quimby is, was, and still is director of the, an employee of the college, a staff that's director of the Skidmore Analytical Instrumentation Lab, SAIL. Eventually, as I trained groups of students, they could go out into the field themselves. So that was great. I could actually accomplish something in my office. I had that transition. I had a bunch of papers on Journal of Chemical Education, including some that were pretty hard core physical chemistry, some that were about undergraduate research and how institutions can nurture undergraduate research. One that's kind of a basic quantum mechanics thing. But the last paper I published was about Page 7 of 11 �the relationship between 13 water chemistry variables in seven or eight different streams that are tributaries of the Kayaderosseras and land use patterns. I don't know anything about how to measure land use patterns, but again, the College is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary. We had the GIS lab. A few of my students had taken GIS courses and were really good at it and could determine, sometimes with the professional's help a little bit, but generally from the courses that they had had, determine what the land use pattern was for the areas that we were doing our water sampling. SB: So all of your fieldwork was centered on water, right? JH: All of my fieldwork after I left the Health Department was centered on water, yeah. Which I was also a white-water paddler and a flat-water paddler and, for a while, a white-water instructor, American Canoe Association certified white water instructor. So really fond of water. SB: Well, Judy, in 2023, there was a symposium honoring you and your colleague, Ray Giguere. JH: That was really awesome. That was pretty cool. SB: Can you tell us a little bit about the genesis of the symposium? JH: Sure. I'm just now thinking maybe that is one tiny silver lining on the cloud of COVID because we didn't have, when I actually retired June 1, 2020. So I taught that last semester, including a general chemistry lab that first COVID semester. I divided it up. I was in phased retirement, I'm sorry. I'll get back to your question, Sue, if that's okay. Just give me a minute or two here. It works into the genesis of that symposium. My general chemistry lab, I divided into three sections; the East Coast, the West Coast, and the middle. Because general chemistry lab met from 8:00 to 9:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I could not reasonably expect that California students were going to get up at 5:00 in the morning to come to a remote Zoom general chemistry lab. So I did everything three times that last half of that semester. But I retired June 2020, so there wasn't really, chemistry and environmental studies have been working together and have this awesome retirement party. I was really looking forward to it. Sometimes you can end up with two or three or more retirement parties, depending on the circumstances. I really wanted those retirement parties. Time passes. Oh, well. What happened? And then, I assume it was Juan Navea and/or Karen Kellogg's idea. I really have no idea. Probably Juan and then he talked to Karen or talked to somebody. Then, a couple of years after I retired, I have a hard time saying that I retired because I tend to say, "I graduated," rather than, "I retired." But a couple of years after I retired, Ray Giguere also retired. Ray and I were really, Vasantha Narasimhan had done a little bit of undergraduate research, but in terms of this idea, the students really need to be working 40 hours a week for at least 10 weeks during the summer really started that with Ray and I. Then you really, they have enough depth of understanding of what they're doing to be able to continue to do things for 10 hours a week during the school year and actually accomplish something, but it's very hard for them to get to that point without that. Page 8 of 11 �Because of the pandemic, it was seen that Ray and I were graduating or retiring or summarizing our careers somehow at around the same time. We both kept in touch with a lot of students. I probably didn't have as many students as he did. I'd had an awful lot of students that took ES100 from me. I didn't say, when I was saying that environmental studies program got approved as a minor that eventually, a core course for it was the LS IV course, but we had to un-LS IV it because there was waiting lists just from the ES students, but that became ES100. So, I taught a lot of students from ES100, but physical chemistry tends to not be that big a class. Analytical chemistry tends to not be that big a class. I taught environmental studies junior seminar and a few other things, but they tend to not be really huge classes, whereas, Ray was teaching organic chemistry, which is a much bigger class. But between the students that we had in classes and students that we had in our research program, we both had stayed in touch with a lot of students, and Juan and other people in the department were aware of that and they just wrote all these students and said, "Let's do this." It was really amazing. We had really, I'd have to look back and consult Juan or look at my notes or something, 60 or more students that came for the weekend. We had student presentations. We had presentations by other people on Friday, but student presentations all day on Saturday. The student presentations were awesome. They were all about the work that they were doing at that point in time in their careers. One person had been e-mailing me and emailing me and just couldn't get through to me, but he was one of my very first students and he was e-mailing me, Sue could probably appreciate this, maybe. He was e-mailing me at halstead@scott@skidmore.edu. Scott was a computer that was unplugged a very long time ago, so he wasn't getting through to me. He's at NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology, which I still sometimes think of as the National Bureau of Standards. But the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which he was great. Everybody was great. But they all tied their work back to things that they had done at Skidmore. That was really a terrific event. SB: I can imagine. JH: Yeah. SB: What have you been doing since you graduated from Skidmore? JH: Since I graduated from Skidmore? Do you have a minute for me to tell you something else interdisciplinary I think was important about Skidmore? SB: Sure. JH: So when the Scribner seminars started, I couldn't do my LS IV course, which a lot of people would, because my LS IV course was ES100 and was taught by a lot of people. So, I had to come up with something else. So, I did this course, and we all know by now that I really like water. So, I did a course that was Water: Society, Science, and the Arts. It would change from year to year. It really worked best if I had something else to tie it to that was within the college. Page 9 of 11 �So, the first one, which was awesome, it was so great, was Caroline Anderson was directing the play, Enemy of the People by Ibsen. We also went to, my class and I also went to a whole bunch of, oh, God. I can't think of his name. There was a Travolta movie about water pollution problem in Woburn, Massachusetts. I can't think of it, and Erin Brokovich, and there's all these other movies, too, but mainly the sort of scaffolding for that class was Caroline Anderson's working with her students presenting An Enemy of the People. My students were very familiar with the play before we saw the play. Then we had, it happens in a little town. There's a water pollution episode. There's the mayor and the doctor, and people have different opinions on it. My students became, chose to be different characters in the town that weren't in the play. They met a couple times with Caroline's students. Caroline must have directed that because I would have no idea how to do that, and had interaction between the characters that were in the play and the characters that were not in the play. And then all of their writing assignments were letters to the editor. And another, I'll just tell you about one other one. Another one was the 400th year that Hudson sailed up the Hudson the Tang had the exhibit on the Hudson River School and Ian Berry and Tom Lewis put together this book. The people who have chapters in that, who have little essays in that book were asked to comment on, to present an essay that somehow interacted with a particular piece of art. The piece of art that I had was Seneca Ray Stoddard's picture of Lake Tear of the Clouds, which is often thought of as the source of the Hudson. But, of course, now we know, I'm sure Sue knows that the source of the Hudson is the entire Hudson watershed, not just Lake Tear of the Clouds. So, my essay was about that. I had this one little story, which I'll tell you in a second, that Tom Lewis really wanted me to put in the beginning. I felt like it logically belonged someplace else, because I talked about the amount of flow of the Hudson as you came down the watershed, as all the tributaries came into the harbor. So, I wanted this little story to go in the flow as appropriate. Tom Lewis kept saying, "It's up to you, but I think the story should be moved up earlier." But it was, when I was nine and we had first moved to Scotia-Glenville, my dog and I followed the stream. I went to a stream, which I followed a stream. Then I get to a point where I got across Route 50, not too far from Mayfair Center, if you know where that is. I'm like, "What would my mother think about me and my dog crossing it?" There's no light here or anything. I'm nine years old and I just moved here, but we crossed it, and then all the different things that we found as we followed that stream. That's in that, but that tributary, that's a tributary of the Indian, which is a tributary of the Mohawk, which is a tributary of the Hudson. So that's in there, too. Oh, okay. I've been trying to paddle since I retired. SB: But I have one follow-up question about that. I believe I saw something on the Skidmore website that you did a dialog with an artist whose work was in the Hudson show. JH: Yes. I only vaguely remember that. That's true. SB: Okay. Page 10 of 11 �JH: I took my students. I had two or three different classes that I took kayaking on the upper Hudson also and I took some students to visit dams. They didn't enjoy the dams as much as they did Enemy of the People or the Tang. I don't understand that. My husband and I both really like dams. It's one of the things we have in common. SB: Okay. So anything else, looking back on your Skidmore career, that you'd like to touch on? JH: No, I'm willing to go on to retirement now. SB: Okay. JH: Yeah. I'm not doing white water paddling, sadly, because I really have a lot of arthritis. The hiking that I'm doing is not as aggressive, but I'm still doing more modest hikes. I got here in time today after biking. So hiking, biking. Both of my children, but especially the younger one that lives in Maine, really wanted me to move to Maine for quite a few years. I really love the Adirondacks. I think somebody one time said something about my spreading my love of the outdoors to other students and faculty and I hope that's true, but I do really love the outdoors. People think Maine's so great, but not like the Adirondacks. I really love the Adirondacks and the Saratoga area, but we did end up getting a condo in Maine and we have a threeand-a-half-year-old granddaughter and a six-month-old grandson, so we're spending maybe a third of the time there. Oh, I can't believe I left out another thing I've done is, I've spent a lot of time being involved in the local Unitarian Universalist congregation, where I was a secretary for four and a half years. My husband, Johnathan Fieinberg and Dick Wilkinson and I spent an enormous amount of time over about five years redoing policy for the congregation. My husband and I are also somewhat involved in the Unitarian Universalist congregation first parish in Portland now, but hopefully more. The three-year-old, I think an important point you could make a conclusion on if you like is that our three-year-old granddaughter has now been canoeing with me three times this summer. SB: Thank you very much, Judy. This is delightful, to hear your recollections of your time at Skidmore. JH: It's delightful to see all of you. Page 11 of 11 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Sue Bender & Leslie Meechem Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Judy Halstead Location The location of the interview Saratoga Springs, NY Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio Recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 42:23 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Sue Bender Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Judy Halstead Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource October 17, 2025 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Description An account of the resource After receiving her PhD in physical chemistry from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Judy Halstead taught at Russell Sage and Williams Colleges before joining Skidmore’s Chemistry Department in 1986.  In addition to teaching general and analytical chemistry within her department, Halstead was an active participant in interdisciplinary programs.  In this interview she recalls her pivotal work for two major College initiatives: the development of Environmental Studies and the Summer Collaborative Research Program.  Both of these undertakings have had a lasting effect at the College and on our students, as attested to by the alumni symposium held in her honor upon her retirement in 2020. Halstead also reflects on some of the obstacles faced by women in the STEM disciplines. Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/96149523e7d47ed2f26bebc6b3d00c4f.JPG 32c7cca128253b0263fdb5e57d80e03a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ann Henderson Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 10/18/2014 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Eileen McAdam https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/a923b00f26b6f564bc83709ed9c9544b.mp3 10c95f65ffe6b95e3f41c671e997edd5 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/e2af96bf5c5073b90755905544a10109.pdf 8c5febcb1ce7050a6375360fbdcc7176 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/1bab73aa661e3dd3055aa25aec9aa9c3.pdf 826ebbc7d52f75685bf7b6b6a466b5df Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Eileen McAdam, Sound and Story Project of the Hudson Valley Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Ann Henderson Location The location of the interview Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 45:00 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit November 30, 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Ann Henderson Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource October 18, 2014 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource Ann Henderson, Registrar at Skidmore College and Director of Institutional Research, was an integral part of Skidmore from 1990-2010. In this interview, she talks about the technological changes that occurred across campus including her initiative to move Skidmore to an online course registration system and being part of a selected group of small institutions helping Oracle design a software that would meet all of the necessary registration and advising requirements.  9/11/2001 Campus Culture Dean of Studies English Department Jon Ramsey Phyllis Roth https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/33a9c1282b5735ef4c8d41b1f4ace17b.JPG e0c26cba99a47eb0fe48eeba38394c39 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Don McCormack Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 10/18/2014 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Eileen McAdam https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/f76b79377ef4c3712df693ad448373a7.mp3 93976de11c07153791ae3c90fcbac015 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/d4b815a6eea3e67face4fb62ac1a4f2f.pdf c24dfb564ca69a677c8b870d58413e85 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/566fbb6e717d9acdb9725d5c1ed45894.pdf 202e3da57fd8ab1f2b24a4b992b9d54c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Eileen McAdam, Sound and Story Project of the Hudson Valley Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Don McCormack, Director, Special Programs (Years) Location The location of the interview Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 45:00 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit November 30, 2018 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Don McCormack Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource October 18, 2014 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource Don McCormack, held a variety of roles at Skidmore from 1970-2005 (Faculty in the Government Department, Director of the University Without Walls program, Dean of Special Programs). In this interview he talks about the spirit of campus in the 1970’s with large gatherings of students, faculty, community members and visitors at his house and the Tin & Lint bar; University Without Walls, including teaching in the Great Meadow Correctional Facility; and starting Skidmore’s Jazz Institute. Boys Choir of Harlem Jazz Institute Tint & Lint Bar UWW https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/9b5fc62598f978d8e17650e1a3081c7f.jpg adca20006157629dd5a6b3d32a93cc85 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Anne Palamountain at the Cube Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 10/18/2014 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Eileen McAdam Subject The topic of the resource Palamountain, Anne Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jordana Dym Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Please cite the photographer if you use this photograph. https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/b60aed25c1e4cb0100600aefb1d59eb7.mp3 f2bc5e394b5acd6558f3c6d38293eb04 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/356976c19250c15ad9003f38d71d9dc2.pdf 0eb03c23bcd0aec067380702d8fdb668 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/114d6433b5b634dab978bd9600c9630f.pdf 315c76445ed53535af929525dd00aeb9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview <a title="Eileen McAdam, Sound &amp; Story Project of the Hudson Valley" href="http://www.soundandstory.org/audioproducers.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Eileen McAdam, Sound and Story Project of the Hudson Valley</a> Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Anne Palamountain Location The location of the interview Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 45:00 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit November 30, 2018 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Anne Palamountain Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource October 18, 2014 Language A language of the resource English (en) Has Version A related resource that is a version, edition, or adaptation of the described resource. This interview was used in a memorial video created by the Skidmore College Video team in January 2015, <a title="Anne Palamountain, A Remembrance" href="http://www.skidmore.edu/news/2015/0227-anne-palamountain-video.php">Anne Palamountain: A Remembrance</a>.&nbsp; The video alone can be found on <a title="Anne Palamountain: A Remembrance (video)" href="https://vimeo.com/117927061">Youtube</a> Description An account of the resource Anne Palamountain, wife of Skidmore’s fourth President, Joseph Palamountain, was a vital presence at the College during his 22-year presidency (1965-1986) and beyond. In this interview, she reflects on some her first impressions of Saratoga Springs, the turbulent 60’s, her priorities as Skidmore’s “First Lady”, and the challenges and rewards of her career. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Board of Trustees Campus Culture Campus Move coeducation Collections Employee Tuition Benefit Program Faculty Gender Equity Financial Instability J Erik Jonsson Joseph Palamountain Skidmore History Social Work Department Town-Gown Relations https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/33c7d009b97b5a3241993e0f2f33d99e.JPG 7a3db360e4cd4c7ad1eb4f22671ee017 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/59a91ac6a92dbafb8ea923ebb4a3ce18.mp3 8d350de488d75127de4f61dc95f7ad91 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource David Porter Interview (Sound) https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/500355f8fca789da6ec92f54c7f3c9ae.pdf 3b8ab1741480a09d28d0dcb599d0a2ae Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource David Porter - Log https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/3a3e2a10b43ef636f0c5e179ff56769f.pdf 5452b585741aef9bf1e220a12e607e57 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Eileen McAdam, Sound and Story Project of the Hudson Valley Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed David Porter Location The location of the interview Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:45:00 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit December 13, 2018 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with David Porter Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource October 18, 2015 Description An account of the resource <a title="David Porter, President, Skidmore College" href="http://www.skidmore.edu/skidmorehistory/centennial/leaders/david-porter.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener">David Porter</a>, President of the college from 1987-1999, saw the college through many landmark moments. In this interview he talks about his background in Classics and Music; learning on the job; the recruitment of a more diverse student body; renovating the Library; and the development of the Tang Teaching Museum. &nbsp;A <a title="David H. Porter" href="https://vimeo.com/161512190">video celebration </a>of his life and presidency draws on this interview. Language A language of the resource English (en) Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Commission on the 90's Diversity Divestment from South Africa Library Renovation Tang Museum https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/4a696fa9e7d8091291cc5b0f17a55ece.jpg 0b1a271aa15ea6e7640b7210f8e52221 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/083c43768d6b0471e14b8b6cfe7cab8a.mp3 5178aa558a7baa964e9b5a5259be9ecc https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/235e628838ef9c872ea98d4f21e9a76c.pdf 0fbc3df74bf344cf48cada071e507b30 PDF Text Text Interviewee: Terry Diggory Years at Skidmore: 1977 - 2010 Interviewer: Lynne Gelber Location of Interview: Saratoga Springs, NY Date of Interview: September 10, 2019 00:00:00 Header 00:00:35 Born outside Philadelphia, after 5th grade moved to Long Island through high school. College at Yale and graduate work at Oxford University. 00:01:10 Oxford schedule faster than US graduate programs, therefore started first tenure track teaching job (Skidmore fall 1977), at relatively early age, 26. 00:02:12 Had visited Saratoga Springs as a teenager and “liked the people that I met in interviewing” at the Modern Language Association in NYC. 00:02:32 “a big MLA … the face-off between M. H. Abrams and Hillis Miller … famous event.” 00:02:52 Taught modern poetry [specialty] and “Western Literature: The Classical Period.” 00:03:25 Interest in classical literature from broader interest in literature and in languages. Major at Yale: History, Arts and Letters program. Took Greek, Latin, and other classics courses. 00:04:36 Favorite courses to teach? Different over time. E.g. modern poetry and contemporary poetry. “…joke … everybody I was teaching in contemporary poetry was now dead.” 00:05:15 “Enjoyed the Classical World course … got me involved in…the Classical Studies Ecclesia … a group of people in various departments who were interested in classical studies.” 00:05:53 Included Tom Lewis (English department), Helga Doblin (was teaching classical languages at that time) Penny Jolly (Art History), Darnell Rucker (philosophy) 00:07:00 Highly involved in “the further development of interdisciplinary courses in the Liberal Studies program.” Taught in both Liberal Studies 1 & Liberal Studies 3. 00:07:46 Liberal Studies 3 was the humanities-based division "but all … Liberal Studies divisions looked out from their base to embrace some sort of interdisciplinary work.” 00:08:04 Taught Liberal Studies 3 course on the New York School painters and poets — “interdisciplinary in terms of the arts.” Also team-taught course on Darwinism in Liberal Studies 4, the science-based division. 00:08:42 Chaired Committee on Educational Policies and Planning, (CEPP), “…at the time when the faculty instituted the Liberal Studies program … I’d long had an interdisciplinary interest, and … Skidmore had a culture that was very open to interdisciplinary work.” 00:09:30 Resistance to Liberal Studies? Some simply resistance to change, some departments felt stretched, staff-time wise. “So, it was an interesting political shift in that sense.” 00:10:35 “And many departments really did strongly invest in Liberal Studies … placing themselves in the broader context of service to the college and to all students…” 00:11:15 Also twice English department chair, frequently on department Personnel committee, plus some ad hoc committees including a Presidential Search Committee. 00:13:30 The Presidential Search Committee that hired President Glotzbach. 00:14:08 1970s many big, risky changes for Skidmore “I came at a time when I think a lot of people at the Institution felt that that was at a low point. It very quickly picked up after that, but, because I was new, I didn’t really sense that as a low point because for me it was all new and exciting.” �00:15:29 Low points? Tensions surrounding controversial personnel decisions. “I valued the collegiality, the friendship, that I had with people who were on different sides of those issues.” 00:17:00 Also on the Dean of Faculty search committee that appointed Phyllis Roth. 00:17:14 Tang Museum planning group. “…commitment to making… the mission of the museum … interdisciplinary … That was a spirit that I was very much on board with.” 00:18:20 Toured other college museums and interviewed people about programs there. 00:18:58 Interviewed architects, brought Antoine Predock to Lyrical Ballad bookstore. 00:21:47 Also special: Liberal Studies program and the learning for both students and faculty. 00:23:40 Liberal Studies 1 “a team-taught course drawing on faculty from all different departments. … The faculty teaching in the course would share lectures.” 00:24:49 “Students would meet twice a week for the large lecture and then twice a week in seminar to discuss the reading and connect that to the presentation in the lecture.” 00:25:11 Occasionally featured a guest lecturer with a particular expertise. 00:25:30 David Porter was a regular guest, delivering a piano performance and lecture on creativity and human expression; playing music and being playful. 00:26:43 Retired in 2010, age 59, because college offered early retirement as a cost saving measure during recovery from the great recession. 00:28:19 Involved in and convener for Skidmore’s Retiree Initiative Planning Group. 00:29:14 A coordinator with the Saratoga Immigration Coalition (immigration support). 00:30:12 Service component - recruiting volunteers for English Language Learning programs or drivers to appointments. 00:31:20 Also legislative advocacy work at state and national level. Eg. “Drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants … speaking to the transportation need.” 00:32:41 “Phyllis was really devoted to the institution, … it seemed like she never slept! …She was up in the wee hours of the morning working on her email.” 00:33:15 “That devotion to the college and the sense that our best interests as a faculty were being closely looked after, I think was really important.” 00:33:29 “And she had a sense of vision. She was certainly engaged in the nascent ideas for … the Tang museum.” 00:33:58 “She was thinking about the full arc of faculty careers and so was very interested in developing retirement programs.” 00:34:20 “Phyllis … interdisciplinary mindset … so I think she was very interested in supporting all the divisions of the college.” 00:34:58 The Ren (Renaissance) Group, “an informal group of faculty who gathered to talk across the lines of the humanities and the sciences.” 00:35:35 “I think Phyllis, having been involved in those conversations, was in a very good position as Dean to not only listen to but also to speak for, let’s say, the sciences, as well as the humanities, in developing programs at the college.” 00:36:02 Faculty dining space… “many iterations of that.” 00:37:01 Faculty social culture change “…small village … everybody knew each other.” 00:37:46 Also, “fewer courses were offered during the lunch hour … gave a time when faculty were available to come together.” 00:38:39 "Later… scrambling to eat a bag lunch in my office … made all the more important efforts such as Phyllis’ to develop a dedicated place that was all about faculty coming together.” 00:39:15 Different now. “Of course small villages have their disadvantages as well as their advantages … but … something lost in … bigger institution where people don’t know each other.” �00:39:45 “That even changed in terms of operations like purchasing … with the growth of the college has come a more formal institutionalization.” 00:40:38 Growth in student body, faculty, administration, and “the mode of administration.” 00:41:21 Some nostalgia for the laid back, interpersonal approach 00:42:29 Moseley Lecturer (1992-3). Presented research on Grace Hartigan’s collaborative work with New York School poets, done in conjunction with an exhibit in Schick Art Gallery. 00:45:15 “The flexibility, the willingness on the part of many offices to pitch in to that project … how lucky I was to be part of an institution where that kind of collaboration was possible.” 00:45:56 “The core of the show was a particular series of paintings that Grace Hartigan had done where she had actually written text by the poet Frank O’Hara into the paintings, but … only one of those paintings was in a public collection.” 00:46:53 Skidmore art professor Harry Gaugh suggested contacting Hartigan directly for locations. “…in some cases the person on her list no longer had the painting and I had to do some further detective work.” 00:49:54 “It was interesting … seeing this one set of work by this one artist … in a very different setting … the context in which we first saw them is always part of my memory.” 00:50:31 END � https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/bc7ac2d0f9fba423300a6d08360b0f74.pdf 39bd3e5eb57ee4670f03ac8339575ff4 PDF Text Text Interview with Terry Diggory by Lynne Gelber, Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, Saratoga Springs, New York, September 10, 2019. LYNNE GELBER: Good morning, Terry. This is Lynne Gelber. It is September … TERRY DIGGORY: Tenth. LG: Tenth, 2019, and I am with Terry Diggory and this is the Oral History Project for Retirees. So, would you like to tell us when, or where you grew up and what brought you to Skidmore? TD: Oh, that’s going way back! [Laughs] LG: Well, that puts it in context. TD: I was born outside Philadelphia, spent time there until, through the fifth grade, and then my parents divorced and I moved with my mother and sister to Long Island. Went through high school on Long Island, and went off to college, and after graduate … LG: Where? TD: I went to college at Yale and then did graduate work at Oxford University. And that put me on a fast track because they have a different graduate system so I spent less time in graduate school than would have been typical if I had spent time in America. Which meant that I ended up at Skidmore, my first tenure track teaching job, at a relatively early age. I was 26 when I started teaching at Skidmore. It was the … LG: And you started when? TD: In 1977, fall of ’77. LG: Ok. Did you have other posts before Skidmore? TD: Um, I taught for two years at Yale while I was completing the graduate work, the dissertation, at Oxford, mostly because I couldn’t afford to stay in England much … much longer. �LG: So what brought you to Skidmore? TD: Well, it was a job offer, it was the best job offer in prospect. I already knew … we had visited Saratoga Springs when I was a teenager so I knew something about the area. I liked the people that I met in interviewing and it looked like a good place to start. LG: You interviewed at the MLA? TD: Yes. Yup. LG: In? TD: New York City. It was a big MLA because it was the face-off between M. H. Abrams and Hillis Miller. LG: Oh yes! TD: Famous event. LG: Ok, so, when you came to Skidmore, what were you teaching? TD: Well I was brought here to teach modern poetry, that was my specialty, but … LG: Is that what your dissertation was on? TD: Yes. But, because of the nature of, well Skidmore as a college and our department, of course I taught in a variety of areas. I also had an interest in classical literature so I taught what was then our “Western Literature, the Classical Period” course. LG: Where did your interest in classical literature come from? TD: Well, a broader interest in literature and also an interest in languages. So when I was in college … I hadn’t studied Greek and Latin previously but when I was in college I took both Greek and Latin. In fact I, I was not an English major in college; I was a major in what Yale called the History, Arts and Letters program. And I ended up taking, I took some English courses but �most of my courses were not in English, in fact, and they included courses in the classics. LG: Hmm, interesting. So, who was the department chair at the time, when you came? TD: Well, Bud Foulke was the chair but actually the year that I was hired Bud was on leave and Ralph Ciancio was acting chair at that time. So Bud came back to the chairmanship in the first year that I was actually teaching. LG: What were your favorite courses to teach? TD: That’s tough. Do you mean in terms of my entire career? Because there were different … different courses developed over time. I certainly liked modern poetry and contemporary poetry, although we had a joke about the fact that the longer we waited the more outdated the contemporary poets and contemporary poetry became until finally I realized that everybody I was teaching in contemporary poetry was now dead. And so those two courses. I very much enjoyed the Classical World course that I taught as well. And in fact that got me involved in one of the first interdisciplinary programs that I was connected with at Skidmore and that is the Classical Studies Ecclesia, we called ourselves, at first; it was just a group of people, there was no Classics department at that time, it was just a group of people in various departments who were interested in classical studies. LG: Who made up that, the Classical Ecclesia? TD: Well, Tom Lewis in my department, was a big supporter of that. Helga Doblin was central because she was actually the person who was teaching classical languages at that time. Even though, again, in her case, that wasn’t really what she was brought for but that was a strong interest of hers. And there were people in Art History … oh, I’m trying to think who … let’s see, oh, Penny Jolly, when she came, early on, I believe she was involved in that. People in, of course, philosophy. So … LG: Darnell? TD: Yeah, Darnell. LG: Darnell Rucker �TD: Right. LG: Good. So what other courses besides those did you really enjoy teaching? TD: Well, as the college evolved, one of the big developments that I really embraced was the further development of interdisciplinary courses in the Liberal Studies program. And, that became a big investment of my time and I really enjoyed teaching in both Liberal Studies 1, the introductory course that for a while all first year students were required to take, and then also in the Liberal Studies 3 division. And, again, kind of like … LG: Was Liberal Studies 3 division-wide? TD: It was sort of the humanities-based division but all of them, all those Liberal Studies divisions looked out from their base to embrace some sort of interdisciplinary work. So the course that I taught in that division was on the New York School painters and poets. So in that case it was interdisciplinary in terms of the arts, but I also taught in Liberal Studies 4, which was the science-based division, and I taught, team-taught, actually, a course in Darwinism as part of that. LG: Ok, the Liberal Studies program - when did that start? TD: Um, early ‘80s. And I was the chair of the, of CEPP, the curriculum planning committee, at the time when the faculty instituted the Liberal Studies program. So in that sense, even before the courses were created, I already had an investment in it. But, as I said, about my undergraduate work, I’d long had an interdisciplinary interest. And I had a sense, too, that already, because of my work in Classical Studies and so on, that Skidmore had a culture that was very open to interdisciplinary work. LG: Did you have any resistance to that? TD: Oh sure, yeah, yeah. LG: Which consisted of what? TD: Well, of course, in some cases there’s simply resistance to change. You �know, “this is different. We don’t like it. We like what we’re doing now and we want to keep it that way.” So there was that kind of resistance. There was resistance on the part of departments who felt, in terms of their staffing restrictions, that they were already stretched to offer the courses that they needed to staff their major requirements, let’s say. Um, and they didn’t feel that they could, what they saw as, quote, “giving up staff time” to teaching a course which they regarded as being outside of the department. So, it was an interesting political shift in that sense, in that, I think, to the extent, and many departments really did strongly invest in Liberal Studies, but they were, by doing that, they were placing themselves in the broader context of service to the college and to all students rather than saying “We’re here for our particular discipline.” And I think that affected what was already here in the spirit of interdisciplinary work, but I think that it had a broader effect as the Liberal Studies program took root. LG: In addition to the Committee on Educational Policies and Planning, CEPP, were you on other committees that were significant to you? TD: Yes, especially in my department. CEPP was the major committee that I had several stints on at the college level, with the exception of some ad hoc committees like Presidential Search Committee and things like that, which are obviously important but not a standing committee. But given the fact that the English department is a large department, we have a pretty complex committee structure internally. So, for instance, I, in addition to being department chair at two different occasions, LG: When was the first time? TD: When I was department chair? LG: Yeah, do you know the date? TD: Um, I’m very bad on dates. [laughs] LG: Ok. TD: We could look that up. But, of course the department chair involved me in personnel work, but we also have our own Personnel Committee within the department and when I wasn’t chairing the department, and the chair exofficio sits on the Personnel committee, I was frequently serving on the �department Personnel committee. And that’s one reason why … some people are surprised when I tell them that I never served on CAPT, the College Appointments Promotion and Tenure committee, which is certainly, and rightly so, considered a major if not the major committee for the college. But the reason is simply that, in my case, that I didn’t serve on CAPT was that I was doing so much personnel work at the level of my department that I felt that, you know that’s where, that part of my energy was being channelled and I didn’t have the extra resources, personally, to commit myself to CAPT. LG: You mentioned presidential search. Which president search ended up with you on it? TD: Um, I was on the search committee that brought the current president, President Glotzbach, here. LG: Ok. And your role was just as a member of the? TD: Yeah, yeah, yup. LG: What was the lowest point for you, as a faculty person or as a member of the Skidmore community? TD: Umm, … that’s hard to say because I don’t really think of a lot of low points. Interestingly, even before I started at Skidmore, when we … we moved to Saratoga the summer before I started and we had a house right near the race track but also right next door to the Dean of Students, who was Claire Olds at the time. And I was just getting to know more about the college and I remember talking with Claire, kind of over the garden fence, and this was in August and she said, “Well, things are looking pretty good. It looks like we are going to make our class for this year.” And this was still, at the time, during the 1970s when Skidmore had gone through a lot of changes, risky things like building the new campus, going co-ed, and it was struggling to attract students. So, I came at a time when I think a lot of people at the institution felt that that was at a low point. It very quickly picked up after that, but, because I was new, I didn’t really sense that as a low point because for me it was all new and exciting. TD: I think the low points probably, … again, involved some personnel decisions, �some hiring decisions that were controversial. Some tenure promotion decisions that were controversial. I don’t regret my role in those decisions, but they were always personally difficult because of the tensions that were a part of that, and, you know I valued the collegiality, the friendship, that I had with people who were on different sides of those issues and, you know, you always wonder, “So, am I gonna lose some friends because of these issues?” And I have to say that on the whole I’m very grateful that despite those controversies, that I felt that I was able to maintain friendships with people who were on the other side of the controversy. But it was tough-going through those times. LG: That’s remarkable … umm, what can I say,… ambassadorial work. Were there other committees outside of the department that you served on or other functions that you had while you were here? TD: Well, I was also on the Dean of Faculty search committee that resulted in the appointment of Phyllis Roth. I was on the planning group for the Tang Museum, and that was a really exciting time. I mean to me … LG: Tell us a little bit about that. TD: Well to me, in the time that I served at Skidmore, having the Tang Museum develop here was certainly a real high point. Again, it also speaks, of course, to the interdisciplinary interests of the college, because, right from the beginning of the concept of the Tang there was a real commitment to making this not simply an adjunct of the art department — it was certainly going to feature the arts — but the mission of the museum was very early on determined to be interdisciplinary. So, again, that was a spirit that I was very much on board with. LG: Did you meet with the architects? TD: Yes, we met with the architects. We also did, the first step, actually, other than, you know, just planning meetings, was doing some touring to other college museums to see how they were set up physically, to interview people about programs there. So I remember we visited Colby College, Williams College, Dartmouth, umm, and those were very interesting experiences. And then we did, also, interview the architects. In fact, I think I may have been one of the first Skidmore people to meet the eventually appointed architect, Antoine Predock, when he first came to campus. He came, this was before �he had been selected, but he wanted to get to know more about Skidmore and he came during the summer and, interestingly, one of the first things that he wanted to do was to go … he said, “Is there a good local bookstore?” So we went down to Lyrical Ballad bookstore, in downtown Saratoga Springs, and he just bought a lot of books about area history, Saratoga history and the history of upstate New York and so on. And it turns out that what he was doing with these, he went back to his studio and he used the materials from these books to develop a kind of conceptual sense of the spirit of the community. And, so again, it wasn’t in terms of practical design, but it was almost a visual collage that would symbolize to him something that he would then translate into the design of the museum. And he was very committed, I think, both in terms of his own theory of architecture, but also because he was an architect who had been primarily associated with the west and the southwest, and he was conscious that this would be a commission for him in the northeast, and he … LG: Was he aware of the climate and the snow? TD: Yes. Yes … yes he was. And he wanted to really show us that he understood who we were as an institution and what this region was all about. And I think that was the factor, really, that got him the commission to design the museum. Because, unlike some of the other architects, who basically came in and said, “I’m a famous architect. You’ll have one of my buildings and you’ll be lucky to have it,” what Predock said was, you know, “This is not about me. This is about Skidmore. I want to make sure that the building that we build is really going to be integrated with the overall mission of the college.” And that was, that was very persuasive. And I think that’s what we got. LG: I’m glad you talked about that. Other special moments that you can recall? TD: Well, again the special moments, not so much the committees but the special moments would be going back to the Liberal Studies program and what, especially Liberal Studies 1 meant for those who were involved in it. And again I think for the college as a whole, in terms of faculty development. I mean, obviously the goal was to introduce students to liberal arts education, but in the course of doing that, I think the faculty learned from each other a great deal. And again, there was resistance. You know, some faculty felt, “this is a real stretch for me.” But of course, one of the things that we learned from each other was a broader range of pedagogical strategies. And �the Liberal Studies 1 faculty would meet on a weekly basis and talk about what the topic was for that week, what approach we might take to dealing with the material in our seminars, and then of course there would be the large group lectures and we would be exposed to our colleagues lecturing, which, again, was not something that would normally have been available to us. So that was a real highlight, to me, for the college. LG: Do you want to mention how the Liberal Studies 1 was structured? TD: Sure. LG: For those who aren’t familiar with it? TD: Sure. It was a team-taught course drawing on faculty from all different departments and because every student, every first-year student, was required to take it, we had to have a lot of sections. And there were sections, about 15 students per section, and a faculty member was assigned to the section but then the faculty teaching in the course would share lectures. So, actually because we didn’t have a lecture space at that time, big enough to fit the entire class, we divided up, at one point we actually did three lectures — we did the same lecture three different times. Then we got it down to two times and we, the last space I think we used was the theater, and students would meet twice a week … LG: Palamountain? TD: Palamountain Hall, right. Students would meet twice a week for the large lecture and then twice a week in seminar to discuss the reading and connect that to the presentation in the lecture. LG: And who gave the lectures? TD: It was mostly the faculty who were also teaching seminars, but occasionally, if we felt that a particular expertise was needed that wasn’t already represented by the faculty teaching the seminars, we would ask for a guest lecturer to come in, from another department. LG: Who were some of the guests? Do you remember? TD: Umm, well … �LG: Was David Porter one of them? TD: Yes, David Porter loved to give a presentation … there was a section … LG: He played piano, right? TD: That’s right, there was a section about, it was about creativity, basically, and human expression, and he loved giving a presentation that he thought of as about play, and by that he meant both, you know, playing a musical instrument, but also being playful. And, so, yeah, he would often do the prepared piano — a la John Cage — and show what could be done with that. And he was, of course, a wonderful lecturer as well as a performer, and that was a very special guest appearance that we relied on. He did that a number of years. LG: Ok. Umm, tell us what you’ve been doing since you retired, and when, exactly, did you retire? TD: I retired in 2010, which was early retirement, by most standards, but that was during the period of the, or at least the recovery from the great recession, and Skidmore had offered early retirement packages because they were trying to offload some of the more … senior members off the payroll, as a cost saving measure. And I had not been thinking, frankly, of retiring at that time. Although, you know, I was beginning to look at when retirement might come, say three or five years in the future. LG: How old were you? TD: Well, I was actually 58 when I made the decision and then 59 by the time I retired. So anyhow I decided to take the early retirement package. LG: And that was what, that package? TD: It was a salary plus enhancement, that is, you got a portion of salary on top of your regular salary so you … LG: As opposed to phased retirement. TD: Yes, that’s right. It wasn’t … I went cold turkey. Right, I simply quit teaching �at that point. although I did not stop, cut ties with the college. And one of the things that I had already begun to become involved in was an evolving retiree group, which hadn’t existed at the college. But my colleague Phyllis Roth had been very interested in this as Dean, and when she retired, just a little bit before me, a fund developed in her honor which was designed to fund retiree activities of some sort. And out of that grew what we now call the Retiree Initiative Planning Group. And I’ve continued with that and serve as the convener for that group. So that’s been one of the things that I’ve been doing since retirement. LG: What are some of the other things? TD: Well the main preoccupation right now, since the last presidential election in 2016, … immigration has come into the foreground of national debate, and I became involved, initially through the church that my wife and I attend in Saratoga Springs, in immigration support work in the community. And a number of faith communities and one civic organization, Saratoga Unites, came together to form what we call the Saratoga Immigration Coalition, and I’m one of the coordinators for that. And we do a whole range of support activities, advocacy activities, for … LG: What kind of support activities? TD: We work with local service providers like the Saratoga County EOC, the Economic Opportunity Council, in recruiting, let’s say, volunteers for English Language Learning programs that they offer. We also collaborate with them in a transportation program, because a number of immigrants in our area, especially if they are undocumented, cannot drive, and yet they have children in the school system, they need to get to school appointments, they need to get to grocery stores, they need to get to medical appointments. So we have a cadre of volunteer drivers so that somebody can request, through the staff member for the Saratoga EOC, a ride at a certain time coming up next week, and we will get a volunteer driver to take them to that appointment. So that’s one, that’s the service component. But we’ve also been involved in advocacy work, both at the state and, to some extent, also at the national level in terms of legislation. We were … our coalition was a regional partner in the local, recent effort to get drivers licenses for which undocumented immigrants in New York State would be qualified. So again, that was speaking to the transportation need. �Susan Bender: Terry, I’m going to … this is Susan Bender, I’m going to insert my voice for a minute. I’m just the tech person, but, reflecting back on your interview and what you’ve been talking about, you mentioned that you served on the search committee that ultimately ended with Phyllis Roth’s appointment as Dean. I wonder if you could reflect back on Phyllis’ Deanship and talk a little bit about her contributions to the college in the years that she was here. TD: Well Phyllis was really devoted to the institution, so … she was notorious for, it seemed like she never slept! You would look at the, when she would send out emails you would look at the time stamp on it, and you could see that she was up in the wee hours of the morning working on her email. So, I think just that devotion to the college and the sense that, our best interests as a faculty were being closely looked after, I think was really important. And she had a sense of vision, she was certainly engaged in the nascent ideas for the museum, for the Tang museum. I’ve already mentioned the fact that she was thinking about the full arc of faculty careers and so was very interested in developing retirement programs. And I think she, although of course there’s always suspicion when somebody comes out of the faculty into an administrative position like that, is she going to play favorites? Is she going to…, you know, favor, in the case of Phyllis, the humanities over other divisions of the college? And Phyllis, and I know this personally because of other informal projects that I was involved with Phyllis in, that she, again, embodied that interdisciplinary mindset that I’ve already spoken about, so I think she was very interested in supporting all the divisions of the college. TD: The informal project that Phyllis and I participated in together was another interesting manifestation of the interdisciplinary work, or the interdisciplinary spirit of the college. We called it the Ren group, which didn’t stand for the bird but stood for Renaissance, and the idea that, you know, the renaissance person was somebody like Leonardo da Vinci, who was an artist, a scientist, all disciplines wrapped up in one, and it was just an informal group of faculty who got together especially to talk across the lines of the humanities and the sciences. And I think Phyllis, having been involved in those conversations, was in a very good position as Dean to not only listen to but also to speak for, let’s say, the sciences, as well as the humanities, in developing programs at the college. LG: As a support for that initiative of getting faculty to talk to one another, were you involved in her decision to create a faculty dining space? �TD: Well yes, and of course there are many iterations of that, but I wasn’t involved directly in the planning but I was certainly aware of her interest in developing that. And, you know that’s come and gone, alas. I mean the, each iteration of that plan has come and gone. LG: It was started first in Falstaff’s. TD: That’s right, yeah. LG: Because the students were no longer using it. TD: Yeah. Well actually, early on I think there was a version of it in the Surrey, and then it really took off in Falstaff’s and then for a while it was over in Case Center. TD: Yeah, yeah. That’s been something, that’s also an interesting topic to talk about, and that is faculty social culture. I mean in the time that I’ve been at the college that’s changed quite a bit. We were, when I first came here Skidmore was a small village, and everybody knew each other. The Dean of the Faculty at that time, Eric Weller, was very conscious, also, as Phyllis was later, of promoting the social life. He would always have a big faculty party at his house. I also remember, kind of nostalgically, that, I think, actually, fewer courses were offered, and so the registrar was able to actually kind of schedule a lunch hour into the schedule of courses. So that, maybe … I’m not sure if no courses, but fewer courses were offered during the lunch hour and there was a time, that gave a time when faculty were available to come together. Right. And we would come together in the Spa and you would just show up at a table, and so that wasn’t formally a faculty/staff club or anything like that, but it was just a time when faculty could just sit down and, you know, chat with each other over lunch. And I remember, later on, both because of the pressures that had accumulated on my shoulders but I think also just part of the changing culture of the college that I ended up, for the most part, scrambling to eat a bag lunch in my office, you know, in between meetings or in between classes or something like that. And so I think that made all the more important efforts such as Phyllis’ to develop a dedicated place that was all about faculty coming together, yeah. And, you know, we are a different institution now, we’re not the small village. And of course small villages have their disadvantages as well as their advantages, you know. There’s always that sense that somebody’s �looking over your shoulder and, you know gossip abounds. But, and now there’s not that kind of hothouse atmosphere, but I think there is something lost in the sense of a bigger institution where people don’t know each other. But that even changed in terms of operations like purchasing. I mean I remember early on at Skidmore if you needed supplies for the department office, basically the department chair or the secretary would go out to a local store, you know, buy a bunch of pencils and then walk into the business office and present the receipt and get reimbursed, and that was the purchasing procedure. And of course now you have multiple forms that you have to fill out and you have to go through authorized suppliers and so on, so with the growth of the college has come a more formal institutionalization. LG: When you say growth of the college are you referring to the student body or the administration or the faculty? TD: Well overall. Yeah, the student body has grown, faculty has grown, but also certainly the administration and the mode of administration has changed as well. So, it’s gotten more, you know, obviously some would say more professional, you know, we follow best practices for tracking finances and business measures and so on, which, I’m sure, is certainly to the good in terms of the financial security of the college. But, again I’m still kind of nostalgic for the laid-back, kind of slap-dash approach of doing things. LG: The interpersonal relationships? TD: Yeah, absolutely! Yeah. Because you, … yeah, and that was a personal relationship. I mean, when you walked into the business office, you knew the person that was processing your reimbursement. Or you knew who to call … you know, something … a problem was coming up you’d say, “Oh, well, so and so,” you wouldn’t even think of it in terms of the office, I mean now that’s what you say, “Well, I have to call Facilities about this,” but in those days it was all personal, “Oh, I have to call so and so, she’ll know how to fix this,” [laughs]. SB: Rose Verro. TD: Yeah, right [laughs]. Yeah, absolutely. LG: Are there other things that you want to include in this interview? �TD: Um, no, I think we’ve covered a lot. Umm … LG: Anything that sticks out in your mind? TD: Well, a moment that, you know, personally sticks out in my mind that I’m very grateful for, and again illustrates the collaborative nature of the college, is the opportunity that was presented to me — I was named the Moseley Lecturer one year, and I had been working, the research that I had been doing was, again growing out of my Liberal Studies course on the New York School poets and painters, and I had been researching a particular artist named Grace Hartigan, who worked with poets like Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, people now known as the New York School poets, and I had gotten interested in the possibility of doing a show of her work, and so when the invitation to deliver the Moseley Lecture came I asked if I could use that as the occasion for not only giving the lecture but also doing a show at the Schick Art Gallery. And of course that required the agreement and full collaboration of the art gallery. At that time David Miller was the director of the gallery and he really embraced the idea. So again here’s this, there was no sense of guarding turf, but …you know, this English professor wanted to put on a show in the art gallery, that was fine with him, and we worked it out and he invested a lot of his own effort. LG: When was this? TD: Again I’m bad at dates. Early nineties? [laughs]. And so that required the full collaboration of the art department, but also, because the dates when the show could be done and also the dates we brought Grace Hartigan to visit the college, at that time in connection with the show, but I think the Moseley Lecture had been typically delivered in the fall, but we could only do it in the spring, and so I think my doing that threw off the Moseley calendar, because then it got shifted to the spring, but again the college administration said, “Ok, so we can do this.” So the flexibility, the willingness on the part of many offices to pitch in to that project, it was certainly a highlight for me. And to me it also illustrated how lucky I was to be part of an institution where that kind of collaboration was possible. LG: So the art department was responsible for bringing her work, for guarding them? �TD: Well the art gallery, yes, oh yeah. They brought, it had become a fascinating project for me because the core of the show was a particular series of paintings that Grace Hartigan had done where she had actually written text by the poet Frank O’Hara into the paintings, but the challenge was that only one of those paintings was in a public collection. So, my wife and I went on a cross country tour tracking down where these paintings were and then we had to negotiate with each of the private collectors to bring them to this show. So, you know that, the background there, that was quite an experience in and of itself, going around. LG: Tell me about that a little bit more. Whom did you meet? TD: Well, again, first of all, to start with the idea of collaborating at Skidmore, the first person, when I began my interest in this series of paintings, the first person I actually talked to about it was Harry Gaugh, who was a member of the Skidmore art department and had worked in that period. He had written a book on Frantz Kline, written a book on de Kooning. And I explained to him this problem, so I’m trying … “Harry do you have any ideas how I could begin finding these paintings?” And he said, “Well, why don’t you just write to Grace Hartigan?” [laughs] The artist! [laughs]. You know because he had, again through his own research, had been involved in that world, I think he had met Grace Hartigan. And he said, you know, start with the source. And that was already something that I had learned from my PhD dissertation, which was about WB Yeats and American Poets and my supervisor at that time said, “Write to American Poets and just ask them,” you know, what their relationship to the poetry of WB Yeats was, and how, what they think the influence might have been. So the idea of just going straight to the source was already in my background. So I wrote to Grace Hartigan. Luckily she was very open to the possibility of my working on this project so she was able to give me a list, to the extent that she was aware of where the paintings were, of who had them. It was somewhat out of date, so I … I could work from that list, but in some cases the person on her list no longer had the painting, and I had to do some further detective work. And so we would then get in touch with the individuals and say, “Can we come and photograph the painting?” And so it was interesting, again, seeing this one set of work by this one artist, how these works had ended up in a very different setting. So one work was in a home in the lower Hudson Valley belonging to an art historian. It was an old Victorian house and the painting was up on this dark stairway and she … you know, it wasn’t an especially lavish home, she was an academic and didn’t have a big income, but really �treasured the painting. And then another place we went was a home in Grosse Pointe Michigan. Somebody who was a high-time art collector, and so that was, again, a very different setting, with track lighting for all of the paintings and a big setup for displaying the collection. So we saw the work in very different settings, and of course for me, now, when I see those paintings, their original … the context in which we first saw them is always part of my memory. LG: Good! Well, I think we’re just about out of time. I really appreciate … I thought there were some very interesting ideas that you gave us and I want to thank you again … TD: Thank you. LG: … for spending an hour with us. TD: Thank you! � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Lynne Gelber Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Terry Diggory Location The location of the interview Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 50:30 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit March 29, 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Terry Diggory Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource September 10, 2019 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Description An account of the resource After earning his D. Phil. at Oxford, Terry Diggory was born outside began teaching at Skidmore in the Fall of 1977, offering courses in poetry and the Classical World. He participated programs at the College, broadly including the Classical Studies Ecclesia and the Liberal Studies program. One of the poets in his Liberal Studies course on the New York School, Grace Hartigan, was the subject of his Mosely Lecture in which he connected her poetry and painting. As the College embarked on its program of interdisciplinary teaching leaning, Terry chaired the Committee on Educational Policies and Planning (CEPP) as well as the Curriculum Committee. He also served as English Department chair. Other committees included the search that brought Phil Glotzbach to the College, the search that ultimately led to the appointment of Phyllis Roth as Dean of the College, and the group that planned the Tang Teaching Museum. Since retirement in 2010, Terry has been the convener of the Skidmore Retiree Initiative Planning Group and has also been a leader in the Saratoga Immigration Coalition. Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Antoine Predock CEPP English Department Eric Weller Liberal Studies Phillip Glotzbach Phyllis Roth Tang Museum https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/8d0b9143230256c97c3fbed06a4f374d.jpg ed01d954424e8d184307e264db8d3ce3 https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/c02ab030e3e9195f9e23127654e2546b.m4a 0bf25d81fb7629f9a9820e3562df5a9b https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/657f7b7b3ddb54cc266c51baa3734da1.pdf 3dc664538e36423b499fe2e46c9356c6 PDF Text Text Interviewee: Larry Ries Years at Skidmore: 1979 - 2004 Interviewer: Lynn Gelber Location of Interview: Saratoga Springs, NY Date of Interview: September 24, 2019 00:00:00 Header 00:00:30 Grew up poor, one of 9 children, in Kentucky; attended a Catholic high school in Wisconsin and graduated top of the class — “gave me a new lease on life.” 00:02:01 After HS, worked 2 years as migrant farm laborer, then attended a small Catholic college in Conesus, NY for 2 years until ran out of money, then moved home and finished English degree at Thomas Moore College in northern KY. 00:03:24 Next was awarded a teaching fellowship at Southern Illinois University; earned Masters in English. Then taught for 2 years in Italy at an international high school. 00:03:59 Returned to US and earned Doctorate in English at Southern Illinois University. 00:04:15 Family moved to Albany, where Ries taught English for 7 years at SUNY Albany, and then was an administrator for 2; wife worked reviewing doctoral programs for the NYS Ed dept. 00:05:25 During time at Albany wrote Wolf Masks, a book on contemporary British poetry. Despite publishing, didn’t get tenure, so after working administration, took advising position in 1979 in Skidmore’s prison program. Joe Bruchac was running it at that time. 00:06:00 Program at Great Meadows Correctional Facility was part of the University Without Walls (UWW), an external degree program originally funded by the Ford Foundation. 00:07:20 Originally the program offered both inmates and guards opportunity for 4-year degree. 00:08:12 Also was an on-campus element for paroled men who had done well in the program. 00:08:48 Combination of inmates & guards in same classes led to problems, so dropped guards. 00:09:18 Ries was also a lecturer on campus in the English department. 00:09:30 Ries led prison program from 1980 to 1985, then became Assistant Director of UWW. 00:10:23 Next became Director of the Skidmore Masters Program, another external degree program, though it did include an on-campus element. Ideal was 15 students; sometimes had 25. 00:13:07 Promoted to Skidmore grads and in Adirondack region (b/c few opportunities there). 00:15:03 Many factors led to end of program, including “a changing of the culture,” less focus on external programs, more on campus. Also, remote learning became more common; less need. 00:16:56 Loved teaching Liberals Studies 1 because of the wide range of reading and the opportunity to be educated and then to learn how to transfer that to students. 00:17:45 Working in the prison could sometimes be traumatic, being locked in with tough men. 00:19:30 Still, the men loved many teachers - eg. Betty Balevic, Helga Doblin — “they revered [Helga Doblin] because they never had good discipline before, they only had bad discipline so when someone did that for their betterment, they recognized that and they appreciated that.” 00:22:26 Once while Ries was teaching Death of a Salesman, “we were acting it out and …[one student] says, “But Pop don’t you understand, I’m a failure! I’m a failure!” and all the guys �started crying because it was their life all of a sudden you know, this sense of being a failure … it was such a moving moment.” 00:23:19 A difficult moment: when Skidmore financial support of prison teaching faculty wasn’t as strong as it could have been, considering Skidmore got PELL, TAP and HEOP money for it. 00:26:04 Recruited faculty by personal invitation and word of mouth from other faculty. 00:26:49 Even science courses were taught, although not with labs. 00:27:33 Received grant to bring computers into the prison; 1st program in NY to do that. 00:28:14 Some problems with faculty incl. inappropriate dress; not submitting grades on time. 00:31:40 Special experiences in the Masters program included working with elderly students, including Frank Crone, who did a thesis in religious studies and later funded a scholarship. 00:34:30 Students worked with a faculty advisor aligned with their area of study. 00:34:50 Sometimes hard for adult students who had other obligations, eg. a troubled child. 00:36:44 During initial on-campus seminar, students met with faculty advisor to design their program, which sometimes involved independent study credits, other times students would take classes at schools near them and apply transfer credits toward their Skidmore master’s degree. 00:38:06 Also added some evening classes for local students in the master’s program. 00:38:30 Different experiences than daytime classes, eg. taught “Growing Up In America” to seven women and one man; the man had been seeking his birth mother and found her during the course, and they “mothered” him and “it just worked beautifully as part of the course.” 00:39:31 The night courses allowed the students to “come and have actual discussions rather than work totally on their own and … that’s a better form of education usually than doing something completely independently.” 00:40:08 Enjoyed career at Skidmore, felt fortunate to have different positions and head a number of committees, “which gave me work with the wider community.” 00:40:35 One challenging one was the Benefits Committee, with which Ries had worked for a year to present recommendations that were challenged in one meeting; fortunately, President David Porter backed Ries up and it worked out. 00:43:15 One last memory from the prison program, interviewing one potential student, Robert Chambers, who “was just horrible, just terrible, and we rejected him and he sued the college, on the grounds of discrimination,” Fortunately, Chambers got transferred so suit declared moot. 00:45:23 END � https://www.ssmp.mdocs.skidmore.edu/files/original/fee65f9b6fb5bf9c3d8f1b3988a1ebb9.pdf 286d3ac9ad4b8869290b650a97e7ff47 PDF Text Text Interview with Larry Reis by Lynne Gelber, Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, Saratoga Springs, New York, September 24, 2019. LYNNE GELBER: Good Morning, this is Lynne Gelber interviewing Larry Reis, with technical assistance of Sue Bender. It is September 24th, 2019. So Good Morning Larry, nice to see you. LARRY REIS: Good Morning Lynne, good morning Sue. SUE BENDER: Good Morning Larry LG: Let’s start off by telling us a little bit where you grew up LR: Oh wow (chuckles) I grew up in Kentucky, one of nine children to a German Catholic family, South of the Ohio river not too far from Cincinnati, and we were very poor and when I was 12 years old I got sent to a Catholic seminary up in Wisconsin where I went for four years of high school, which kind of changed my life. LG: How did it change your life? LR: I got an education I was always in trouble as a child and I kinda found out for the first time that I was smart (chuckles) never knew that before, the nuns weren’t very good in the school where I was LG: In Kentucky? LR: In Kentucky, and so I graduated first in my class up there, so it just gave me a new lease on life LG: Was that a different culture? Going to Wisconsin? LR: (laughs) Totally, they made fun of me all the time LG: Because of your accent? LR: Because of my accent, the teachers made me stand up in class and pronounce words that they laughed at when I pronounced them, so it was a weird experience, but it was a good one overall �LG: So where did you continue your education? Did you do that right away? LR: Uh no, I became a migrant worker for two years because after high school, I couldn’t go back home. My father was an abusive alcoholic father who shouldn’t have had any kids, but he had nine and so it wasn’t a good environment. We had a two-bedroom house for eleven people um so I just started working whatever work I could get. So I picked potatoes, picked grapes, you know for $2 before I started going to college. LG: So how did you decide to go to college? LR: (laughs) I didn’t want to pick apples and grapes for the rest of my life um so I um started out in Western, NY. I was out picking the depth of potatoes, and grapes in south of Rochester. There was a little community college down there at the time, a Catholic college called St. Michael’s. I don’t think it’s there any more in Canesus, NY and I went two years there, ran out of money, went home and finished up at Thomas Moore College in Northern Kentucky, a very good, little private college in Northern Kentucky. LG: And from there, where did you go? LR: I went to Southern Illinois University, I got an assistantship - had no money still LG: What did you major in, in college? LR: English, um went to SIU, Southern Illinois University and had a teaching fellowship so I taught two courses and um, got my Masters in two years and then went to Italy to teach for two years, went to Rome and taught in Rome at an International High School for two years and then came back to Southern Illinois. In the meantime, I’d gotten married and had a child in Italy and then came back and got my Doctorate degree at Southern Illinois University in English LG: And what brought you to Skidmore? �LR: Well, I started as an Assistant Professor at SUNY Albany and I was there for 9 years LG: Did you get that job through the MLA? LR: Uh yes, actually it was because of the MLA. I was late that year and they couldn’t go to MLA because Albany got snowed in and that year, (that was the year they got a 30-inch snowfall and the airports were closed) and so they didn’t do their interviews at MLA that year, so they did them later, and I was in the market so they invited me to Albany. So I came up, they offered me a job in the English department and I taught there.- It was a terribly political place at the time. It was just horrible and my wife was reviewing doctoral programs at that time for State Ed and they took away the doctoral program in English at SUNY Albany (laughs) and that put me in a terribly awkward position so they didn’t give me tenure the year my book came out. Then they took me in administration though for two years. LG: What was your book on? LR: Contemporary British Poetry, Wolf Masks was the name of it. So, they did take me in administration for two years, but it just left a bad taste. So I wanted to get out of there and since my wife was working still in Albany at State Ed, we wanted to stay in the area because she had her career fully started and uh so Skidmore had a job opening for an advisor in the prison program and in ‘79 I came up and interviewed and was offered that job. LG: With whom did you interview? LR: Who? LG: Yes LR: Don McCormack, Bob VanMeter, and Joe Bruchac. LG: Okay, and Who was the? That was under the Office of Special Programs, right? �LR: Yes, uh huh when Mark Gelber was Dean LG: Okay and what was Don McCormack’s position at that point? LR: He was head of UWW LG: So, this was part of the University without Walls? LR: University without Walls and Joe Bruchac was running the prison program at that time, so I was hired to work under Joe Bruchac. SB: Larry, could you explain the prison program for folks that might not know about it? LR: Okay, as part of the University Without Walls, which was an external degree program originally funded by the Ford Foundation. Before I got here they had started a program at Great Meadows correctional facility which is in Comstock, New York and it was set up to offer inmates and guards at that time a four-year degree. And when it began they had guards and inmates in the same classrooms and Skidmore faculty would go up there five nights a week to teach a three hour class. One night they would teach one class for three hours and I don’t know how it was before I got here but once I got involved, we had five faculty members going up there five nights a week. It was a big group of faculty offering classes up there and it’s 45 miles away so it was a good trek for anybody to go up there to teach. And in addition to that program, which graduated quite a few students, there was an on-campus element of the program where men who had good records inside the prison and who had done well in the program up there would be paroled to Skidmore campus and they would live on Skidmore campus and complete their education here, and there were quite a few. When I first arrived, there were five men on campus at that time. LG: Was there a problem with the guards being in the same classroom as the �inmates? LR: Yes, so it was a big problem. It turned out that many of the inmates were brighter than some of the guards (laughs) and that caused quite a conflict and that program fell apart quite quickly so by the time I got here, it was only open to inmates LG: Alright, did you have other positions at Skidmore? LR: I was a lecturer in the English department as well LG: Okay, how long were you with the University without Walls? LR: The second year, they made me head of the prison program and I think I did that for five years and then… LG: And what years were those? Do you remember? LR: Well, I came in ’79 so I think in ’80 - ’81 I became head until ’85 I believe then in ’85, I became the Assistant Director of University Without Walls under Bob VanMeter. Don McCormack moved up to be Dean of Special Programs. Bob VanMeter moved up and they made me the Assistant Director, so I got out of jail finally (laughs) after 7 years and so um, then I stayed in that position until whenever we started the masters’ program and I’m not sure what year that was when we started the master’s program because I became the first Director of the masters’ program. LG: Explain a little bit that masters’ program please. LR: Okay, the masters’ program was built on the model of the University Without Walls, which was an external degree program for adult students. And for many years, there had been talk of doing a masters’ program at Skidmore and finally, it was put together by a faculty committee, of which Phyllis Roth was a member, plus a whole host of other people LG: Was Phyllis Dean of the Faculty at that point? �LR: Yes, uh-huh and they put it together, went through all the faculty channels, etc. through State Ed and it became a program. The difference from UWW is that we did have an on-campus element of it. When students began their program, they had to come to Skidmore for a week and take a week-long graduate seminar and I always thought of that as kind of a bar-raising element to see if students could actually do the kind of work that we were going to ask them to do. And they had a research paper to do as an element of that seminar and it was a good way to find out if they had the basic skills that you need to do graduate research. And we washed out maybe 30% of the students at that seminar. In other words, if they couldn’t do that kind of work, there was no way they were going to do it independently afterwards. LG: On average, how many students then would be in a seminar? LR: In the early years, we were almost (laughs) we were almost too successful. We had 20, 25 a couple of times. We wanted to have 15. We thought 15 was the ideal size but there was always pressure for enrollment around here and so if we got 25 (laughs), we would keep 25 and try to make it, but we did really well I know in the early years. I know after a while, they had more trouble filling those seminars. LG: Why was that do you think? LR: I don’t know, I don’t know um, I know we did a lot of advertising. I used to send letters out to alumni of Skidmore. I would send out letters because I thought some of them would like to get a masters’ degree from Skidmore and we did, we got quite a bit. Our first graduate of the masters’ program was someone who had graduated as an undergraduate from Skidmore. And we also advertised…. LG: Do you remember who that was? LR: Katie..oh, I can’t remember her last name, I think it was Katie (laughs) and she �worked with Jeff Segrave and sports psychology was what she was doing, her program. And we advertised extensively throughout the Adirondacks also because people up there didn’t have access to graduate programs, and we were successful in bringing people who had degrees but didn’t have any graduate degrees LG: And these were primarily liberal arts? LR: Yes, they had to be interdisciplinary liberal arts programs…I always thought the program was quite successful I thought especially it served women, the women who got dumped by their husbands after graduate school (laughs) after they worked to put their husbands through graduate school you know, and then the husbands would split. They got their careers started and then these women were left, they had gone to college, but they had nothing else. We had quite a few of them coming back to get their degrees so they could launch their own careers and I thought that was a great use of the program. LG: So, was it low enrollment that made the program disappear? LR: I think it was a whole lot of things including changing of the culture here at the college LG: Can you explain that a little bit? LR: I get this more second hand because I wasn’t here any longer LG: What year did you retire? LR: I retired, well, in 2000, I went on a phased retirement and I retired fully in 2004 and they had four or five directors after me of the masters’ program, but people told me that the college became more inward as time went on instead of out, just the way that UWW collapsed and the masters hung on for a few more years but then that… and the faculty seemed more inward centered I would say, rather than the external programs weren’t as important and maybe, there was a lot of competition in these areas too. When we �started UWW, we were one of the few programs that offered that kind of education and the same with the masters’ program when we started that. We were an exception and I think that as time went on more and more people especially with online learning could do it in a whole host of ways. You could go to SUNY Albany and do most of your work as an external student, so people didn’t need this kind of learning as much anymore either. So I think there are a lot of factors engaged in that plus money (laughs) which is a whole ‘nother issue. LG: what do you think were some of the outstanding moments for you in your career at Skidmore? LR: I enjoyed teaching in Liberal Studies, the original liberal studies program. I taught every semester in LS 1 and I just thought that was a terrific program. I felt that it educated me as well and it helped me learn in a way to transfer that to students and I just loved that. I thought that was terrific, I loved the wide range of reading. If I was a student (chuckles), I would have taken a course like that if they had had it when I was around, so that was it. Working in the prison program is traumatic, you go up there everyday like I did for five, years - six years and hear those bars clank behind you and you’re in there with men, many of them. Comstock is like… LG: A maximum security? LR: It’s a maxi max you know, it’s one of the worst prisons in New York state where Silent Sam was kept, people like that um, and it’s filled with hardened criminals and these are not nice men I mean they (chuckles), they are tough and there are times when you feel your life threatened. One time they had to sedate a man because I told him he had to take a Sociology course and he said I’m not gonna take one of those nigger courses. His father was killed in the New Jersey riots in the black riots and his father was killed there. He �was a big, huge stevedore, he worked on the docks. His arms were that big! And Danny, he told (me), —he was (laughs) an Irish guy with a high-pitched voice —and I said, “Danny, if you wanna get a degree, you gotta do your social sciences requirement.” And he’s like, “Mr. Reis, I’m not gonna do that,” and I said, “Well you don’t have to get a degree, that’s your choice but if you want the degree..” and he just went off, he went crazy, and then they came down and put a needle in him right away, because I don’t think anybody could have handled him if he really got going, and there were things like that, and you know, it was always tricky having women going into that environment. It was always….most of the time, it worked well. I mean Betty Balevic was such a trooper, she was such a… she went up there from Schenectady every semester LG: She was in the Business Department? LR: Yes LG: And what did she teach? LR: She taught Business Management and Betty would go up there every semester and she had to drive from Schenectady up there, which was a long way and the students loved her. Helga Doblin would go up there and the students loved her, they needed good discipline LG: What did Helga teach? LR: She taught Latin and Greek up there and one time (chuckles) I was up there, we have a little office and I see Helga marching down the corridor *boom,boom,boom*, the only way that Helga could do it and I rush out and I said, “Helga what’s wrong?” and she says, “I gave a man a bathroom pass,” it was like high school, they had a pass you know, and only one could leave at a time because with three-hour courses so everybody had to get out the door. And she says, “He’s been gone ten minutes!” and I said, “Oh, you �want me to go and check on him?” “No, I do that!” (chuckles) and she walks, I would never walk into a bathroom in a maximum-security prison. Helga marches in and then a minute later, she has this guy by the ear and she’s brining him back, “You come back to class!” and she brings him back. This guy was a triple murderer (chuckles) and they revered her because they never had good discipline before, they only had bad discipline so when someone did that for their betterment, they recognized that and they appreciated that so she was special that way so.... But the prison, working in the prison was a special time for me here. I think it took its toll over six years, it was very exhausting work and it was night-time work in addition to day-time work, plus I taught a course up there once every other semester. LG: In? LR: In Literature LG: In Poetry? LR: No, well I did teach poetry courses, but I tried to do the general literature you know, poetry, drama, and fiction LG: Was it an Introduction to American Lit or something like that? LR: It was kind of a hybrid course like an Introduction to Lit, but I remember teaching “Death of a Salesman” one time, and we were acting it out and the guys were playing the different roles and one (chuckles) one of the guys was playing Biff, the oldest son of Willy Loman and he says, “But Pop don’t you understand, I’m a failure! I’m a failure!” and all the guys started crying because it was their life all of a sudden you know, this sense of being a failure I mean, it was such a moving moment. I was tearing up but I didn’t want to (laughs) show them that. I was being moved but also the boy there. So it was really great moments like that. LG: What were the most difficult moments? �LR: (long pause) I think the sense that at times, as a prison program we were cut loose on our own and didn’t get the kind of support that we wanted LG: From the Faculty or from the Administration? LR: Both, both and Rick Rosenfeld was my assistant in the program for a while and when we taught up there we would get paid a stipend. We didn’t get paid much, I mean to begin with, I don’t think we ever got paid equivalent to what the faculty got paid so you know, we weren’t paid really well, so when we taught we would get paid $1500 or something like that back in those days and then Don decided that he didn’t think that we should get paid anymore that we should just do it as part of our regular work. So Rick and I decided to go on strike (laughs) and we said, “Well, okay then we’re just not gonna teach anymore in that case!” Why would we do that? You know you work all day doing administrative work, and then you gotta prepare a class and then you gotta go up and teach three hours and you gotta travel an hour to get there and an hour to get home, and you’re just dead! Why would you do that? So they backed off of that, but that kinda thing, I mean, that was kinda..and UWW was turning $100,000 back to the college every year in surplus money LG: And the money was coming from? LR: The prison program LG: State money? Or Federal money? LR: Well, they got Pell and TAP right, every student got a Pell and a TAP grant plus a HEOP grant so there were three sources of funding coming in for every student and you know, we paid our faculty, but there was a huge surplus every year, and we turned that all back to the college, so when they didn’t want to pay us (chuckles), that was like a slap in the face like that’s what I felt maybe when you say difficult, those kinds of things it’s like for �me it would have been a no brainer to say this staff is important in what they’re doing and we got all this money, let’s support them as well as we can, and that didn’t happen all the time. LG: How did you recruit faculty? LR: Personally, I went around and sat in people’s offices all the time and said listen, I got this program (chuckles) I’m trying to run and it’s exciting and I got a lot of faculty that do it, and I think you’d really enjoy doing it. Phyllis (Roth) did it for a semester. LG: Teaching? LR: I forget what she taught. Her field whatever, you know, area of literature she taught you know, but it was mainly personal salesmanship and I think word of mouth from other faculty. Faculty who did it, had good experiences, who talked to other people. LG: Were there any general science courses? LR: Yes, Dick Lindeman taught every semester, taught Geology all the time, who else did we have? LG: Figured field trips would be a problem LR: (laughs) Yeah, a big problem, but Ken Johnson taught up there also. We had a number of people who taught science courses up there. There was no lab, although, when he taught Geology, he would take a lot of samples up and everything but there is technically no lab. They wouldn’t let us do that, and we got a grant finally to bring computers into the prison. We were the first program in New York State to do that. There’s a grant from a foundation in New York City that Special Programs still gets $20,000 a year from them, and I think it goes towards the Jazz Institute and things like that now, but they supported us for many years with money that allowed us to put computers in the prison. That was a real step forward. �LG: Alright, are there any other moments or interactions with faculty that come to mind? Or Administration? LR: Um, I remember I had difficulties at time with faculty. I had a female faculty who refused to wear a bra in the prison (chuckles) and I said, I can’t let you go in anymore. I said that’s cruel and unusual to the men in there and she finally changed but it was so obvious you know, and one of our faculty members with the guys that came out of prison, she would seek them out for sexual activity… stuff is always difficult (chuckles) you know. You’re dealing with adults first of all, who really can do whatever they want, and yet you know it’s not in the best interest of the people that kind of thing. Our last payment to the faculty was always dependent on them handing in their grades, their final grades, and we had some guy in Economics who didn’t stay here and he simply refused to hand in his grades. This was when I was assistant director. Ken Klotz was then directing the prison program at that time, and I don’t know why he was doing this, but he wanted to be paid and Ken said, “Well, let’s pay him and maybe he’ll…” I said, “No, if he’s not gonna do it with good will now, he’s certainly not gonna do it with good will after he gets his money.” And I had a talk with the guy and I said, “This is their money that’s paid for their education and they deserve their grades. If you’re angry at the administrators or something, you can’t hold their grades (chuckles), cause they’ve earned that and they deserve that and they’ve paid for that with their TAP and Pell money.” And Mehmet got real angry with me one time too. Mehmet and I are close friends. LG: Mehmet Odekon in Economics? LR: Yeah in Economics, and Mehmet wanted me to take off that rule about holding the grades until you pay. He said because we’re professionals! And I said, “I know you’re professional but Mehmet, we still have problems with �getting grades out of people. This is the only hold I have to get the grades.” And he stormed out of my office and Mehmet didn’t talk to me for a year after that. We’re very close friends now (chuckles) but he thought I was just being stupid and a hard ass or something and he was a faculty and I was an administrator and he wasn’t gonna take that from an administrator, but that kind of interaction happened a lot. LG: I wanna go back to the Masters program and ask what were the most fruitful experiences in that program? LR: There were so many. We had an older gentleman, he died last year in fact, it was in his nineties, but Frank Crone was his name and he was a donor to the college. He sat on fifteen boards and he wanted to do a program in Religious Studies. He was an old, Jewish gentleman, who wanted to…he had a firm belief that if people could (chuckles) only understand that Christianity and Judaism are really the same thing, that they grew out of the same seed, and he actually wrote a book about this later on, about the book of James, which was one of the apocryphal gospels and he worked with Sheldon Solomon, whom he finally had a blow up with, and Joel Smith was his faculty advisor LG: In Philosophy? LR: Right, in Philosophy and Religion LG: And Sheldon in Psychology? LR: Yes, and Sheldon in Psychology and this guy did a wonderful program and then he funded a scholarship program for the Masters program afterwards and we named it after him. The Crone Scholarship so that was really nice to happen LG: And he got his degree? LR: And he got his degree, and he didn’t need it for anything. This was just pure, he needed guidance in how to approach the subject he wanted to do �LG: And what subject did he want to do? Do you remember? LR: It was just called Religious Studies, I think. You know, it was the overall Master of Liberal Arts in Religious Studies LG: And there was a final paper that they had to write, a thesis? LR: Yes, that’s what he did his paper on, Christianity and Judaism being the same thing. He worked with Phil West also a lot at that time.. He was in English, passed away my goodness, ten or fifteen years ago now, Phil. LG: Okay, any other interesting theses that came out of that? LR: Let me think back, that’s a long way to think back (laughs) There were so many good students and they worked really closely with the faculty which was really good. Every student had their faculty advisor from a department in which they worked. It was just exemplary the way it worked when it worked well. Like all external programs, I think there are times when it doesn’t work at all for a student. The student can’t get through his or her own motivation. I had a student who called me one time and said she had an adopted child from Russia and the child was psychotic, that it been in one of those orphanages. She said sorry, I just can’t find time to do any studies, I’ve got to take care of this child and I said, you really need to take time for yourself, don’t worry about your studies, you got more important things to do. There was this old, Jewish woman who came into the program, she was from Florida. And Rose must have been between 65 and 70 when she came to the program. She was the sweetest woman in the world. She volunteered for everything down there. If any committee or any social work unit needed help, Rose was there. She couldn’t do academic work and she came, and she did our seminar and I looked at her paper and it was just terrible. It broke my heart, but I made the phone call and I talked to her for about an hour and I told her how much I admired her that she didn’t need a degree to do all the �good work that she was doing, that she ought to continue doing everything she’s doing, and just forget about(chuckles) getting a masters degree, and it went well, much better than I thought it was going . I thought I was gonna wind up with this woman crying on the phone, but she finally thought that was the best advice. LG: Larry, it occurs to me, we haven’t said how that program works. There’s the initial seminar and then what? LR: Okay, and at that time they meet with a faculty adviser to set up kind of an ideal program so, if you want to do religious studies, you might take a course in the Bible etc. and then it was up to the student to find the resources for those courses now, one of the major resources is simply, go to a university near where you live and take a course and then have it transferred into Skidmore LG: And that would mean just presenting the transcript? LR: A transcript, official transcript. The second thing would be to do an independent study with a Skidmore faculty member. In other words, if there is material you wouldn’t find in a normal course, the faculty member would help you put that material together into a special course, an independent study, I’m sure the same way undergraduates do at times here LG: And the faculty would be reimbursed for that? LR: Yes, as well as for mentoring the student as the advisor. And the third thing we did, we started after a while, was to start evening classes on campus for local students cause we always have a cadre of maybe 30 students in the program who were roughly from the Albany, Saratoga area and so one night a week we would have a course in which students could come on campus and study. I remember teaching that course one time. I taught a course called Growing Up in America, and I had seven women and one man, and �the man was a man who taught in the music department at the time. He was a classical guitarist and during the course of that course, he was looking for his birth mother and he found her during the course and we were reading all this Growing up in America with “Huckleberry Finn” and all that literature we were reading at that time and the seven women just mothered him like (laughs) he was a lost child and he would come in and tell us where he was in this search and it just worked beautifully as part of the course. LG: And the purpose of that evening course was to build a sense of belonging? LR: Well, it had to fit into their individual programs first of all but it came from a place where they could come and have actual discussions rather than work totally on their own and as all of us know, that’s a better form of education usually than doing something completely independently LG: Is there anything else about your experience at Skidmore that you would like to share? LR: I had a very good career at Skidmore, I enjoyed myself immensely. I always felt like there was a lot of work to do and I was fortunate to be able to have over my career, four or five different positions and I also headed a number of committees while I was here also, which gave me work with the wider community LG: What committees? LR: Benefits committee, what else would I be on? Benefits stuck out because that’s the year we totally redid benefits for retirement at one point and working in the Karl Broekhuisen era and Steve Harren era was quite a challenge (chuckles) when you’re working with money, but we did and that was good LG: And who was president at the time? �LR: David Porter was president because I remember an incident when we had worked a year and we brought out these recommendations LG: On benefits? LR: On benefits and it went to Financial Policy and Planning committee and Karl changed it in one meeting after our year’s work and two faculty members came to tell me this and I was so angry, I kicked him out of my office. I called David Porter and I said, “You asked me to chair this committee and I said I did, and we did this” David intervened, and it got changed back. I was so angry at that time with what Carl did. LG: Do you want to share what the changes were? LR: I forget what they were LG: It was important at the time? LR: It important at the time. It was like the number of years of service you needed, the strange combination of years of service and age before you could retire and get benefits, medical benefits and you’re like tiptoeing through crocodiles working through all this. Pat Lee won’t talk to me either at that time, because we were giving benefits to families and she argued with me that it should only be the faculty members themselves and no one else and I said but our sense of community is different than that but it was that kind of thing so to work a year and try to come out with something then have it changed in a two hour meeting was like Oh” LG: So the impetus was mostly financial? LR: Of course, yeah LG: Anything else you wanna share with us? LR: No, one good thing as an interesting story is that, do you remember the preppy murderer in NYC, strangled a girl having sex in Central Park? His name was Robert Chambers, he applied to our program up at Comstock and I was �assistant director at that time, I wasn’t in charge of the program, but Don McCormack, he was dean at the time, he said, “I want you to go up and interview this guy because it’s gonna be a kind of a touchy interview,” so I went up and interviewed him and it was just, he was just horrible, just terrible, and we rejected him and he sued the college, on the grounds of discrimination, because we would let all these Blacks and Hispanics in the program, and he was like good White boy and he wasn’t gonna sit and take this. So for many weeks, I had to meet with the college lawyers about this cause I was being sued personally as well as the college being sued, and it was just about to go before the judge and he got in trouble and got transferred out and the judge declared his suit moot cause he wasn’t there anyway so we just dodged a bullet on that one (laughs), but that was a big case at the time, little anecdote but kind of interesting LG: Good, well I wanna thank you very much for taking your time to share all these reminiscences with us LR: Thank you, it was interesting LG: The walk down memory lane? LR: Well, you know, the memory isn’t always real accurate all the time so it’s kind of fun to go back and think about things like that LG: Okay, thanks LR: Thank you LG: It’s been a pleasure � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Lynne Gelber Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Larry Ries Location The location of the interview Saratoga Springs, NY 12866 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 45:24 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit March 29, 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Larry Ries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource September 24, 2019 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Description An account of the resource Larry Ries came to Skidmore in 1979 after teaching and working in the administration for 9 years at SUNY-Albany. His initial job was as an advisor in the University Without Walls prison program at Great Meadows Correctional Facility. He later became Assistant Director of UWW and then the first Director of the Skidmore’s Masters’ program, which was based on the UWW experience but required an interdisciplinary approach to study. He also taught as a lecturer in the English Department and Liberal Studies I, required of all first year-students at Skidmore. In this interview he describes his circuitous route to obtaining his PhD and provides vivid accounts of his experiences in many roles at Skidmore. Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Cornstock Correctional Facility David Porter Interdisciplinary Collaboration MALS Phyllis Roth UWW