Oral history interview with Jean Buchert, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Jean Buchert
INTERVIEWER: William Link
DATE: January 19, 1990
[Begin Side A]
WL: I’d like to start just by asking what brought you to this institution—when you came here,
how you came here and what your background was before you arrived here?
JB: All right, let me know if I’m at the proper volume, okay? I came here in the fall of 1957
as an assistant professor. I had finished my degree at Yale [University] the previous
spring, a PhD in English language and literature with a specialty in the Renaissance. I—
for the previous two years while finishing my dissertation, I taught as an instructor at the
University of Rochester in New York. I was thirty-five years old when I came here.
Previously, I had spent several years at Yale as a student with a year away at
Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship [merit-based grants for international educational
exchange for students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists and artists, founded by
United States Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946] because my field of research interest
is Italian influence on Elizabethan literature with a kind of special interest in the
Elizabethan translators who were very active and important at the time, culturally as well
as in literature. Before that I had taught for three years as an instructor in English as the
University of Missouri at Columbia, which is where just before that I had finished my
bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English.
I had almost four years out in the middle of my undergraduate career working for
the US Army ordinance department during World War II as a kid of a general factotum
and administrative secretary in San Francisco. I did this because I started college after a
year out after high school working my way through in a typical state university situation.
And after two years, I had become exhausted from working forty-hour weeks (sometimes
in three different jobs total) and carrying a full academic load. And so I stopped in World
War II in order to accumulate some money and get a new perspective on what I was
doing, and I found that a very interesting experience. So actually in my academic career,
perhaps my background has been somewhat unusual in that I have done administrative
work, and I have been a civil servant and I have done a number of things like that in the
hard, practical world out there which sometimes has had quite an influence on my views,
for example of faculty governance and the kind of administration I think might occur in
the academic world and seldom does in terms of efficiency.
WL: But you—so you got around a good bit. You started up; you grew up in the St. Louis
area?
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JB: In the St. Louis area. And, of course, the only opportunity for me to go to college was to
go down to the state university at Columbia and work my way through as more than half
the students at that time did. And I always found that helpful in dealing with the students
here.
I think—you know, in this sense I’m not what people around here think of as a
typical “Ivy Leaguer.” Of course, a lot of people that I met at Yale right after World War
II were not typical “Ivy Leaguers” either. There were, of course, very few women there.
There were no women undergraduates, but many of the men had come to Yale on the GI
Bill [provided college or vocational education for returning World War II veterans
(commonly referred to as GIs) as well as one year of unemployment compensation]. And
so I was in graduate school at a highly-competitive time when many things were going
on. And one of the interesting parts of it was the ferment occurring in Ivy League
education through the advent of the kinds of students who would not have had the
privileges of the Ivy League without the GI Bill.
WL: A whole new population was coming in—
JB: Yes, yes. We had, of course, the next population [sic] many old types too. We had a good
many at Yale, as you would expect, of men who were educated at the best prep schools,
had done—were doing—all three degrees in the Ivy League, were very bright, very
committed scholars of the most privileged backgrounds. So they were one group; the GIs
were another; in a sense the women were another. There weren’t too many of us women
there, but maybe ten out of one hundred and ten in the English department in all stages of
degrees were women.
WL: What was—of you can just make some general comments on women in academics within
19—
JB: Well, the middle ’50s is when I finished—when I was in school and finished.
WL: Was this a period of expansion or—?
JB: No, the time that I was at Yale we were hit very hard by the Korean War and its
aftermath, and money was tight. Jobs were very scarce in the humanities. A great many
people in graduate school in the humanities fields when I was at Yale had great difficulty
finding jobs anywhere. And this was a very interesting thing. As an example of this, Yale
traditionally hired for its own instructors’ ranks the PhD finishing that year who had been
the senior Sterling Fellow. And yet for a couple of years that I was there, the department
had to hesitate over whether they could hire even that person, not considering anyone
else. So jobs were extremely scarce, and that’s one reason I came here.
It was a time when there weren’t many jobs for women anywhere in English, in
particular, humanities also. And this was the best job I heard of. It was, of course, a well-known
English department because of the quality of the writing program and the quality
of the arts on this campus in general. And then, in addition, I had traveled through North
Carolina once and had liked it tremendously. And I sensed when I cam here for my
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interviews that it was really very much a border state, much like the Missouri I had
grown up in with similar problems as well as virtues, of course. But that it was not the
Deep South, where I could not have survived because I’ve always been a political liberal
who started arguing for racial justice way back when. And I think you know if I’d gone to
Mississippi, I might have been lynched myself, I’m not sure. [laughs] For that reason I
tended not to look at jobs in the deep South, though there weren’t many anyway.
The problem for women at the time I finished my degree, as I see it, in addition to
a general scarcity of jobs, was that many of the women’s colleges were seeking male
faculty members. This was true of the Seven Sisters [liberal arts colleges in the
northeastern United States that are historically women’s colleges. They are Barnard, Bryn
Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley] in general. They sensed,
I think, that they really had developed rather enclosed all-female worlds for their students
and that certain disadvantages of that had begun to appear along with the advantages, and
so they tended to be compensating at that time by having men rather than women.
At the same time, the history of hiring in English in coeducational institutions was
to hire men in English. Definitely a closed club. Recommendations for jobs—pretty much
gone through a kind of “old boy” network, at least in the Ivy League graduate schools.
And no real system in placement yet developed in the graduate schools to ensure that all
the students got the broadest possible opportunities in job hunting. That has happened
since my time, I’m grateful to say.
Yale no longer seems to take the attitude that, of course, anyone worth
considering having—opening a job would know enough to come to Yale and ask. In a
sense that used to be their attitude, and they used to depend on friends of the Yale faculty
in the hiring faculties of the other institutions calling in and asking for suggestions of
finishing students. It was very much a network, which of course worked very well for
many of the men and many situations, but really did very little to help the women. The
women needed something more deliberate and more systematic and more thorough than
that by way of job placement. Now, I’m happy to say that a lot of that has disappeared.
WL: When you first arrived at UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro] or
Woman’s College [of the University of North Carolina] actually—?
JB: Yes, it was the Woman’s College.
WL: —what were some initial impressions of the institution? What did you think of the place?
JB: Well, I was impressed with the top layers of the student body. They were drawn from a
great many places, out of state as well as in state, with a lot of bright, talented women
around in the top layers. They also included, of course, daughters of a good many
prominent North Carolina families. Not necessarily the wealthier ones who might well
have gone to Duke [University] or perhaps gone out of state, but we did have some quite
sophisticated, fairly privileged students along with, who were very bright, the notable
number of bright students who came from an extremely disadvantaged background. So
we had quite a range of backgrounds in the students.
Some of that has, in fact quite a bit of it I think, disappeared since coeducation,
when, quite understandably I think, [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill has
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been a great lure for certain kinds of women students who prefer a state university in the
state. Whereas, you see, when I came it was very difficult for a woman to be enrolled as
an undergraduate at Chapel Hill. If I remember correctly, the women over there were
residents of Orange County or they were students in nursing or pharmacy or a few things
like that.
The others who wanted to come to the state university came here because there
was, of course, a similar situation at North Carolina State [University]. The other
institutions that are now in the system were teachers’ colleges and [University of North
Carolina at] Charlotte was—I forget whether it was a community college or a junior
college at that point. You see, that’s where some of the most rapid change that has
occurred, as a matter of fact, the sixteen-unit system.
WL: So, in those days, there were just the three members of the Consolidated University [of
the University of North Carolina]?
JB: Yes, the consolidated institutions—three of them were clearly of a distinct rank of their
own. With, of course, our campus always being the poor female relation. That was
evident, too, in countless ways.
WL: What ways? Such as—?
JB: Well, professors in English at Chapel Hill would say to me, “Oh, we do like the girls you
send us for the master’s degrees.” Kind of patting us on the head for doing a thorough,
careful job in teaching, which, of course, we did. But basically not, in my opinion, really
understanding, much less acknowledging, the quality of preparation and training of the
faculty over here. I mean, the people in the English department here over the years have
had degrees just as good, just as prestigious as those at Chapel Hill. But somehow or
other, we were always, you know, the “nice female relatives, who were okay. They didn’t
make too much commotion.” And it was all pretty clear to me.
WL: Was the Woman’s College underfunded, you think, as result of this?
JB: Yes, I think so, very definitely. Salaries were not very good and, as a result, the teaching
load was very heavy.
WL: What was the teaching load?
JB: Well, twelve hours for practically everybody. You know, I began with six eight o’clock
in freshman English. We taught on Saturday morning. I did not have an elective my first
two years here because—and most of the full professors had only one course in their
specialty. I think John Bridgers [English professor] was an exception in that, to my
astonishment. He held down both the Shakespeare and the Chaucer courses, to my way of
thinking unheard of, but it was done. So that it was a hard-working faculty because also,
of course, some of the work we did in English comp[osition] was remedial. There was
just a frankness about dealing with that, but in a way I wished we still had. I think we
should be frank about those students who need remedial work and give it to them or not
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admit them and—we’ve changed in that respect. We’re pretending they don’t need it
now, officially.
WL: So you had courses that would be not counted for a college credit, but would be—
JB: No, they would count for college credit, but they were much more basic with much more
individual work with the students in an attempt to bring them up to par. And, of course, in
one way it was a very realistic approach to teaching for the situation; that is to say, there
were many students that needed remedial work in English. Most of them, you know, read
a weekly county newspaper at most and had no books at home. And this was true of a
great many of our students who came from small, rural school systems where there
simply were no advantages.
And what we did then to meet the situation, again in a very practical way, was to
require two years of English of every student in the university. And in two years’ time, it
is possible to work literary content against training and composition in a way that will
pay off because, of course, composition teaching is successful in a situation like that only
if you continue it long enough with, you know, repetition of writing assignments, but
with plenty of relief in between them. In other words, it’s the learning principle of
repetition in intervals that works in a situation like that.
And so what happened was that the students got a good deal of background in
reading in the Bible and classical mythology and the essay along with the standard
literary works in the course of two years and then wrote essays and term papers largely
on what they read, and that’s hard work for a composition staff. But it’s the only way of
doing it that I’ve ever encountered that works when your students come with a need for a
lot of work in composition.
WL: How would you describe the faculty at Woman’s College? Was it—what kid of
interaction was there between faculty and faculty and faculty and the students?
JB: You mean in the English department or in general?
WL: Well, both. Let’s maybe just start off generally.
JB: Generally, when I came here, the faculty was noticeably older than average because not a
great deal of hiring had been done in the last few years. The faculty—to go back a
considerable way—the faculty was cut by a lot—I forget how much—in the days of the
Depression. And those who survived worked on cut salaries, but they continued, and they
often taught extension courses in place like Mount Airy as part of their regular load in
order to keep their jobs. And that had stopped pretty much by the time I got here. They
were teaching on campus, but there had not been many retirements, and there had not
been much expansion over the faculty. And so very few noticeably younger—you see
what amuses me, among other things, is that at thirty-five I was one of the younger ones.
Relatively few younger people were being hired, and it was not being done in a regular
way. This is one reason, I think, that you find retirements now bunching up among the
people who were here in the forties and the fifties who are now retiring.
And so that there was a somewhat older faculty than you might expect to have,
clearly divided into two camps: those who were still—even though it was theoretically,
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technically over—those who had been pro-Graham [Edward Kidder Graham, Jr., former
chancellor] and those who had been anti-Graham in the faculty. It’s the only faculty I
ever heard of which by itself virtually managed to oust the head of an institution, but they
had done it under tremendous difficulty and at great cost to themselves because the
differences were never healed that I observed. People had been on one side or the other
and remained ever after during their careers here—very suspicious of each other, not at
all trusting of each other, very different in their views of what had happened. Their
versions of what had happened and so on—it was a divided faculty.
WL: Was this division—did it correspond to divisions in terms of philosophy, a way of
thinking?
JB: Yes. I think one group more or less favored the approach to teaching the curriculum that I
just described. The other one was much more taken with the idea of things like the
humanities courses at Harvard [University]. You know Hum I, Hum II, those famous
courses that were imitated here to a considerable extent—cross disciplinary, but to some
extend also not stressing academic rigor though, of course, it could be in those courses. It
certainly is at Harvard, but some of that got lost along the way here. And some people
who had been pro-Graham simply wanted to tear the place up, you know, completely and
bring in a completely different kind of faculty: very different, essentially rebels by
constitution, if you know what I mean, professional rebels, intellectually and politically.
They have many good qualities. I don’t mean to put them down, but what I’m saying is
they came, they were recruited and were brought in if they were new to join that faction
almost automatically in opposition to the other faculty group.
And one difficulty I had in coming here was in not choosing sides. In fact, at a
certain stage in my department, I was punished for not taking sides, and this was true of a
number of people of my vintage here. In other words, the feud lasted a very long time,
and—well, I—there isn’t any doubt in my mind that Graham had to go. I think he was too
wild in many ways and could not really administer the place which, of course, should
have been his primary job. Was not really that much of an educational leader, which
would be another important part of his job, so clearly it was time for him to go. And then
[unclear] spent a lot of time sewing discord pretty much for its own sake, as far as I can
tell.
WL: Pretty deliberately in other words?
JB: Yes, yes, no question about it and did, if I understand, rather petty things. You know for a
long time there was a very convenient, really quite good dining hall as part of the home
economics school which served as a gathering place at lunch for faculty. And it was very
good in that this was a way for a new faculty member to meet a lot of other faculty
members, especially from other departments, and that’s very hard to do here now. It was
quite easy then. And a few townspeople came because of the publicity—they would come
in and eat.
Well, he at one point decided that there was too much plotting against him at
those faculty tables in that dining room. And so he went through a series of decrees, as I
understand it, about who could sit with whom in the dining hall or he might close it. Now
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you see, that tells you a great deal about, I think, paranoia, pettiness and few other such
qualities. That is not the way a clever administrator goes about dealing with a problem if
he thinks his faculty is plotting against him.
No doubt they were talking about him, there’s no question about that. No doubt
they did plan some of their moves against him in this situation. But to take that as the
way of handling it shows a good deal about the man. And what I picked up from various
commentators is that he was very bright, but essentially quite unstable and immature in
his judgments and in his attitudes toward people. And that simply will not work in the
chancellor’s job here, there’s no question about that.
WL: As you said earlier, in order to get rid of a chancellor requires a great deal of—well, it’s
an unusual thing to happen under our system.
JB: Yes, that’s right. Normally you have to get the trustees to do it, and normally they’re very
hard to budge. They don’t want to believe that a leader that they have chosen is making
any mistakes because that means they made a mistake, and they don’t want to admit it. So
that I think in the history of academic institutions it’s normally very hard to get a
president out unless you can prove he’s misusing funds. I mean, if you can get around to
proving that it doesn’t matter what else you do, you can get him out usually. But that—
otherwise I think it’s very hard.
WL: It’s suggested that the opposition had very strong leadership and—
JB Very much, and what I found was that I knew many of those faculty leaders. They were
near retirement when I came, but they were still around. I found them people of utmost
probity and still very conscientious teachers and leaders in their departments, but I found
theme essentially exhausted by this fight, and I think that’s the pity of it.
And one thing I think those people neglected to do—it seems to be now, you
know, from the perspective of a good many years—is that they failed to take the so-called
younger people and bring them along by grooming them through some kind of series of
leadership appointments in the faculty. These people, out of habit I think, tended to keep
all the leadership roles for themselves—the academic policies, committee of the
curriculum and groups such as that. And to elect each other to these positions. It’s true, of
course, you don’t want an inexperienced person on academic policies. I don’t think that’s
a good idea. He needs to learn, but that’s not where he ought to learn what he needs to
know by way of background. But there are intermediate appointments in the faculty,
which I think could be graded in a sense, and then younger people could be led through
them into positions of leadership in the faculty, and that was not happening. That is very
much too bad.
WL: A number of the supporters of Graham, I have heard from other people, were in the arts.
Is that correct?
JB: Yes, that is true because he cultivated them. And they were very bright people.
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WL: Did they tend to be young people, maybe, or people that have come within the last ten
years?
JB: Well, I’m not sure how long some of those had been on the faculty; somewhat newer, I
suppose. There might not have been—one would have to review appointment dates to see
about that.
WL: But he cultivated them?
JB: He cultivated them, yes. And, of course, they were very bright and talented, many of
them. I was in a unique position, I suppose, in that shortly after I got here (maybe two or
three years), I was made first of all the chairman of the writing section of the arts festival
that was held here every spring. And after a couple of years on that, I was made general
chairman so I dealt with a great many of these people.
And the arts festival was a very wonderful thing. The whole idea of an arts
festival apparently started on this campus, and then was widely copied nationwide. And it
was possible, you see, on a campus that was largely residential and of a good size. What
went on there was that the campus was tied up in this wonderful way for maybe three
weeks in which all kinds of symposia and performances and exhibitions occurred in all of
the arts.
And because of the contacts of the arts faculty—since there was never enough
money by any means to run this properly—through the contacts of our own faculty
members, very prominent people in the arts would come and do a reading or judge an
exhibition or give a lecture for the cost of the travel. I can think of Virginia Moomaw,
who was in dance who had worked with Doris Humphrey [dancer and choreographer]
and some other people like that in dance, for whom Jose Limon would bring his company
down for travel expenses, and they would give us a preview of what then would open in
New York some several weeks later. It was practically free, you know. Everybody would
come and see these wonderful dance companies, and then you would read in the New
York Times several weeks later—well, for the first time anywhere—there’s this new thing
the Limon Dance Company was performing. You’d say, “Who do they think they are?
They can’t recognize Greensboro, North Carolina” [laughs]
But, you know, we have been there too. I remember Dore Ashton, a major art
critic of the New York Times, coming down and watching major musicians and, of
course, the then writing program of which I have more detailed knowledge. We could
bring Robert Lowell [American poet] down because, after all, he was a friend of Randall
Jarrell’s [associate professor of English, poet], so he might be coming anyway. And he
could come down for a reading, and some other very—James Stafford and a number of
very well-known contemporary writers could come, and Corradi [literary magazine]
would judge a panel. And these people would lecture, and, of course in addition to that,
have informal meetings with the faculty and the students in those areas. And this was a
source of wonderful stimulation and approval when deserved and all that sort of thing.
And the fact that all of the arts were involved in this at once, you see, for something like
a three-week period. It was simply marvelous.
Now, many of these people in the arts were very good at this. They were not very
good in general at—as often is typical of people in the creative arts. They weren’t
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terribly good at cooperating with the rest of the faculty on matters of general education or
they were not very good at accepting, you know, the ordinary scud—work
responsibilities of committees and all of this sort of thing. They considered themselves
above it and left it for the rest of us to do. And that is kind of hard to take. So you had a
kind of peculiar temperament that could lead to a contemptuous attitude, if you weren’t
careful. Then if you combined that with the Graham fight, you see, you have a quite
complex situation psychologically and socially operating, while the academic feud is also
going on.
WL: So these people might naturally gravitate towards someone like Graham [unclear]?
JB: Yes, especially if they are given the money, and they are flattered. Yes, that is part of it
too, plus a general rebellion against, you know, the mundane world. So many factors
operate, as I think they always do, where you have differences of opinion among people
with different inclinations and interests. And, of course, if you get someone like Graham
coming in the middle of it, and he is smart, as Graham apparently was, he can capitalize
on these differences and feel them to the point where they become a feud and, of course,
that is destructive. No administrator should be doing that, and that would be my main
criticism of what he did to this institution, along, of course obviously, with providing
various kinds of stimulation. So—
WL: How did a person like Mereb Mossman [dean of instruction, dean of the college, dean of
faculty and vice chancellor for academic affairs], fit into all of this?
JB: Oh, Lord. I’m not a proponent of Mereb Mossman. I am one of the number of women
outside the sociology department who feel that, among other things, she is one of the
most effective anti-feminists any of us have laid an eye on. In general, she cultivated
male faculty members here to the detriment of the woman. This is in terms of salaries,
major appointments that could lead to salary increases, favors in terms of lightened work
loads and all the rest. I can see why, myself, since I am from a coed background. I
understand an all-female world is not necessarily the best and that, when you are running
a women’s college, you may not want much of that. Though, of course then, another
subject is what we lost when we went coed, but I won’t go into that right now.
But the problem really was really—first of all, though she was incredibly clever at
accumulating and retaining power, (She is one of the best operators on that level that I
have ever watched. And she is terribly smart in that way.) there is serious deficiency
there in that her highest degree earned is a master’s in social work. That doctorate is an
honorary from Queen’s College in Charlotte; it is not an earned doctorate, and the
problem is that she was, and maybe still is, very limited in academic savvy. And she was
taken in by a fair number of academic phonies along the way on campus, who tend to be
men, nearly all men, who could sell her on almost any bill of goods on what their abilities
were or the value of their proposals for the curriculum or for operation of the institution.
She was unable to see through them because they were clever enough to flatter her in the
right way.
I am not saying that a good PhD gives you academic savvy. We all know too
many examples where that does not occur. But I would say that if you have any ability in
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those regards, your perceptions of people and so on, a good academic degree will give
you the standings to go by in judging whether you have an academic phony on your
hands or not. And I found her utterly unable to do that, and I think that the institution
suffered.
Because she also, with her great deal of power, intervened regularly in
departments in matters of privileges and salaries, and very often you would have the
professionals in a department deciding that some untenured member, let’s say, was not
worthy of tenure and promotion because he just wasn’t good enough academically. He
could go to Miss Mossman and some of the other people around and pretty well sell them
on the idea that it was really and “old buddy” kind of department that simply did not want
to let an outsider in who was at all different. And she was unable to see through it. And
since she also, you see, intervened, it meant that some decisions, especially personnel
decisions, were made which should have never have been made.
To her credit, she worked night and day, seven days a week, as far as I knew all
through her career here with the able assistance of a really able office staff led by Paula
Andris [assistant to the vice chancellor for academic affairs], and they got a tremendous
amount of work done.
But I remember also a time when the institution was entirely too big for the likes
of having that office hand out the keys to the university cars, but it did. This what I am
talking about. That’s a perfectly good symbol because it’s so [laughs] petty and
unreasonable. It’s a perfectly good symbol of the degree of control of detail that her
office exercised. And, of course after a while, as the institution got bigger and bigger and
programs got more complex, that method of administration should have been dropped,
and it wasn’t as long as she was in office.
You can talk, you see, about poor administration to a considerable length on this
campus. I think that it has been the curse of this campus—that it has run through a whole
series of bad administrative assistants. The troubles tend not to be with the faculty or the
students. They are sometimes with the money, and it is always scarce. But beyond that,
we do not have a history of anywhere near even second-grade administration here, and
that has been a major trouble.
WL: When we talk about Mereb Mossman, we are talking about a long period of what—
twenty years or so, ’49 to ’71? Was—considerable power was lodged in that office. Did
the—essentially did the chancellors tend to relinquish this power?
JB: I think so. I think she made herself indispensible to a group of chancellors who really
didn’t want to deal with the large amount of extremely onerous detail that is required;
that is the lot of top administrators. And they need to figure out how to handle a fair
portion of it themselves, and they had to figure out how to delegate the rest. And when
you have one period who sweetly and assiduously offers to do practically all of it, you
have got, I think, an almost irresistible temptation, and that is what, I think, happened.
WL: Her preference for male faculty—how do you explain that? What do you think? Was it a
part of the policy to try and make Woman’s College more male?
JB: I think that must have been part of it.
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WL: Could it be personality?
JB: Could be personality too. I really don’t know. I don’t know that much about her
background, but she was of an age where all women had to learn to reckon with that
subject, however they do it. Of course, women since the 1890s in this country have done
various things about that. After all, Yale, I will say to its credit—I can talk about its faults
too—but I would say to its credit, Yale gave the first PhD to a female in this country.
And it happened in the 1890s. So there is a history of women at Yale who have
accomplished academic things through various strategies, I might say. They are not all—
like they’re not all open, militant feminists; not all of them have been ever. There is a
long history of bright women who want to get somewhere in this profession having to
decide what their strategies are. Or perhaps at least, have to be—maybe through their
conditioning—have to be able to work in some way that they can stand with this whole
matter of the fact that academia is largely a male-dominated world.
WL: Especially in the ’50s you said, of course, but especially in the ’50s.
JB: Even today, very much more than one might think. A lot of it is covered up now better
than it used to be. But, no, it is a very much a male-dominated world with plenty of
women thinking that is how it ought to be. That is another factor in the American life.
WL: Mossman—what were her relations like with Graham?
JB: I think that they were—they acted in concert. Any differences they might have had—I
think there are [unclear]. Any differences they might have had were not apparent to the
faculty here then, from what the old timers have told me. I am grateful to the old timers
because they took me in. I was not an outsider, and most of the younger women were
not—and, in a sense, they protected us in the fight, told us what to avoid and what to
watch out for, or they did me anyway. So I have heard a good deal about the fight from
people who were right in the middle of it, and that is my impression. I don’t recall asking
that question specifically.
WL: To use a term in the 1980s and the 1990s, were some of these women faculty observed as
mentors?
JB: Yes, I think that they did; quite a few of them did. It helped to make life much more
pleasant for the newer, single women. When I came, there was practically no apartments
to be rented anywhere near the campus. I was lucky in that I got an apartment near the
campus in an old house that had been broken up owned by a woman faculty member.
This was very helpful.
WL: Where was that located?
JB: Up on Highland Avenue. The building was torn down for the Graham Building; actually
it was Dr. Gove’s [campus physician, professor of hygiene, and director of the
12
Department of Health] house, the woman from what the infirmary was named. It was a
wonderful old house. It was owned by Anne Shamburger [assistant professor in
Department of Health]; she had a lifetime interest willed by Dr. Gove in the house. She
taught freshman health for many years. So I was able to find that apartment which
helped, and there were very few single men around to date.
I think that single women on the faculty still have a very difficult time with this.
There are very few men around who are interested in dating. There aren’t many men in
town that women find that compatible. Most of the social life of the faculty is pretty well
organized in couples, and women are included—single women are included—part of the
time, but in the case of a good many of them, there was very little of that. Now a few of
the single women have, I think, individually become parts of groups that are largely
couples, but that is still reckoned with, I think, by the single women now on campus as a
problem in social life. And I would say this for the older people—that they took us in.
They gave very nice parties, and we were always included.
WL: That’s—I guess that’s a problem generally?
JB: I think so—very much. It’s a problem in American society. I think most of adult life is
organized on the basis of couples, and single women of whatever kind—widowed,
divorced or whatever—have a hard time constructing social lives for themselves that
include both sexes.
WL: In a relatively small area—I do think that in metropolitan areas that does tend to be a
little easier.
JB: Maybe, though [unclear].
WL: What about student life from the point of view as a faculty member observing student life
and the kinds of activities that women students engaged in?
JB: Well, I have very mixed feelings about it. First of all, the students here—a lot of them
were very active in running their own student government, their own publications, a good
newspaper—far better than it is now—had a good literary magazine. So that women were
much more active as campus leaders in matters of that kind than they are now. Your
know, the minute men were admitted, the women simply abandoned the chief offices and
all these activities to the men. It was very sad to see—to let opportunities, the usual thing.
And this was even for a women’s college—women got more experience in leadership
positions at that age and therefore retained more of these skills. That was the good side.
The bad side that bothered me—having gone to a nice, big, coed state university where I
was accustomed to library and coke dates and being around men a lot just as fellow
students and an occasional dance and so on.
What happened here was that the women were under a lot of pressure to marry
early and to date; that was very obvious. And they tended to get desperate about dating
on weekends. And while some men came over here, a lot of them (students) went
elsewhere. They either went home or they went to the other campuses around where there
were men. And they got pretty unhappy, a lot of them, if they didn’t have a fair number
13
of weekend dates with men in the course of the semester. And one could sense this
tension in the classrooms. I was talking recently at a party with a few other faculty
members who had been here quite a long time. We got together and, I think for the first
time, said how aware we were of this interesting phenomenon of who came back after
Christmas vacation with an engagement ring and who did not and the sheer envy written
on the faces of the other students in a class who didn’t have an engagement ring. In about
sophomore year, it was really apparent then—very sad. And I think the place simply
finally got too big to have that many women in one place. In that respect, it became a
point of pressure. I think if it h ad been smaller, this might have been easier to handle. So
that’s part of it.
[End Side A—Begin Side B]
WL: [unclear]
JB: The academic achievements.
WL: And the focus that they could—during the week, the students could focus very much on
[unclear].
JB: And, for good or ill, it was tightly structured curriculum with a lot of requirements
designed to shape them up, to give them a good liberal education regardless of what they
majored in. You see, part of what we’d lost too—since at one time we were a major
teacher preparation institution and may be headed back that way was, of course, we had a
Phi Beta Kappa chapter here the whole time that I had been here. It started about the mid-
1930s as a segment of the Chapel Hill chapter and then became independent in the mid-
1950s.
WL: Why was it a segment of the Chapel Hill chapter?
JB: I really don’t know why it was done that way, but it was. And I frankly don’t know
[unclear]. —taking the AB in music are eligible too. You see, it was less of a
conservatory program then than it is now. So that, yes, there was a kind of coherence, a
kind of intensity of curriculum, concentration of curriculum, that made it somewhat a
different kind of place.
WL Was there a—I’ve heard from a number of different people that there was a difference in
student-faculty relationships, at least in the sense of commitment to the program.
JB: Yes, I think that’s true. There was sense of mission in the—you know, a strong
commitment to the—at least in giving everybody more opportunity. You heard more
about that than you hear now in the faculty. People tended to be very conscientious about
their teaching by and large; there were a few exceptions. I found that they studied very
well as faculty members kept up with their fields. Some of them published; not as many
14
as now. There was not the, frankly, very intense publication pressure that there is now in
most quarters of the university. And so there were not all the signals from various
administrators that one now gets that, really, publication is all. Now I knew that our
written regulation say one thing about the balance of publication, teaching and service,
but the fact of the matter is that—from my work in faculty governance, I’ve heard plenty
of evidence of contrary signals that faculty members get. The fact of the matter is that the
teaching load has remained fairly heavy for most of the faculty over the years, and the
publication pressure has multiplied ever so many times, and so something has to give.
And the signals are that the teaching gets less and that service gets virtually nothing
because that is what is happened in a good many parts of the university.
WL: And so the—
JB: —and so the relationships with students are necessarily different. People simply do not
feel that they have the time to spend individually with students that they once really were
expected to spend, that the atmosphere of the place strongly suggested that you spend
with the student. A lot of this is not a matter of written regulation; it’s a matter of all
those other signals and the atmosphere of the place.
WL: [unclear]
JB: Usually, yes. Often two appointments entertaining students in one’s home. All that kind
of thing, which, of course, is a great advantage to a disadvantaged student. They
entertained in a certain way and with a certain degree of finesse and gentility. It’s very
good for them if they haven’t been exposed to that kind of thing before; it helps to round
them out. The dormitories used to do a similar thing, and that no longer happens either.
That is to say, in the past I was invited often to join students before dinner in the
dormitory and talk for a while and then go to dinner with them in the dining hall as their
guest. [unclear] just a little dull sometimes. [unclear] called for [unclear] if you watch it
[unclear] certain kind of formal situation or cordiality but formality. And I used to get
[unclear] and so did most of the rest of the faculty. And all that has disappeared now.
[unclear] something else [unclear] given the interests of teenagers, they’ll find it
pretty dull too. [unclear] a period when that could still work. Reeducating the whole
person [unclear]. We would get [unclear] and Katherine Taylor [dean of students, dean of
student services, director of Elliott Hall] to run in concert [unclear] that would educate the
students in [unclear] lecture topics in a way that would add to what was being done in the
classroom. And they were included [unclear]. Now you don’t find the students [unclear]. I don’t
know many faculty members who tell them they ought to go. I sometimes do when sometimes a
major artist is coming to perform, a musical artist. They’ve told me later they wouldn’t have
thought of going if I hadn’t told them they should go; then they’re glad they did. But the faculty
quite consciously did more of that early on.
WL: [unclear] course was supervised [unclear]
JB: Some of the house counselors were junior faculty members in the 1940s, and, if you haven’t
talked to Gail Simmons [?] about that, you probably should. Catherine Tilley [class of 1938]
brought people like [unclear] Anderson, and they worked in that program as well as [unclear].
15
WL: They were segregated.
JB: They were segregated, but not in the dining room. Students became more militant. Black students
encouraged other students to [unclear]. But we had some very fine black students. Even the more
earlier days of my career, I was secretary of the chapter [unclear]. The fact there was not even a
pretense of discussion in the faculty before the decision was in and to me [unclear], but I always
objected very much to the way it was done. Furthermore, once we [unclear]
[End of Interview]