Oral history interview with Vance T. Littlejohn, 1989 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
Interviewee: Vance T. Littlejohn
Interviewer: William Link
Date: October 23, 1989
WL: I’d like to begin today by talking about how you first came to [unclear], about your background, where you were born, [unclear].
VL: I was born in Middle Tennessee, Murray County on a farm, where I always described it as the sunset between my house and the railroad. And I graduated high school in 1928, salutatorian. Then I went to Bowling Green [Kentucky] to attend the business university that is now the school of business in Western Kentucky University, after the university burned down and it was transferred to western Kentucky. Then I was in my senior year in 1931 (I was going to summer school all the time and then taken work before I entered in the fall of 1928.), and I had one semester to go and the personnel director came to me and said, “There’s a job in western Pennsylvania. I know you haven’t finished, but they want somebody to teach business in the high school.” I said, “Okay where is it?” He said Jeannette, Pennsylvania, 20 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. I said, “Okay, I’ll take it.”
So I checked out of school with one semester to go and taught up there in February ’31 until the end of school, and then I came back and spent twelve weeks at summer school to finish up my degree. I taught in high school up there and went to evening school for eight years. In the process I got a master’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh. So I wanted to teach college and I wanted to do graduate work, post-master’s degree program. So a friend of mine said there’s a job in South Carolina; they were looking for a young instructor.
I headed from Pittsburgh to South Carolina in the summer of 1938, early summer, and I came through Greensboro. They said the head of the department at the women’s college in South Carolina is visiting professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I needed to go over there and see him; he’s the one you’d see in South Carolina. So I had an interview with him and found out that there was a vacancy in Greensboro, Woman’s College [of the University of North Carolina]. So then I talked with [Dr. Albert] Keister, the acting head of the [economics] department, because Taggart had asked for a leave of absence and gone to Washington.
WL: Taggart?
VL: He was the originator of the school of business education department at the Woman’s College in 1933 and he was here until ’36 or ’37 and he took a leave of absence and went to Washington and Dr. Keister was made acting head. But Dr. Keister said, “You’ll have to go back to Washington and talk to Dr. Taggart.” So Dr. Taggart approved Dr. Keister’s recommendation, and I was appointed as an instructor. I never did get to South Carolina 2
to see what they had down there. My wife and I—Katherine—I married her in Pittsburgh—came here in ’38. It was the fall or summer. So I served as instructor, but my main job was supervising student teaching and teaching some of the elementary courses in the department.
WL: Tell me a little more about your department.
VL: The Department of Business Education? As a matter of fact, the first year I was here the graduating class of the whole college was approximately five hundred; one hundred of those were in business education, and about seventy-five were in home economics. It was really home economics and business education that had the great majority of the graduates, more than any other department, and that was true ’39, ’40, ’41 and on through the war [World War II, 1939-45 global war]. We had 100-125 students graduating each year out of about 500-600 in the college class. And there were, I guess, eight members of the faculty. The program really started in the junior year. We did have some work the sophomore year. The program had basically a liberal arts-based student with their business education professional training built on for two years of liberal arts. They also took advanced economics and other courses that they wanted to take. Some of them had four years of language. We graduated about one-fourth of that program—total program, I guess—in that specialized training.
We were not a part of the School of Education. We were a separate department. I reported, every department head reported, directly to the dean of administration. We didn’t have what you might call a president or chancellor as dean of administration. When the college was incorporated into the university system, it was considered a liberal arts college, the woman’s liberal arts college of the university system. He was dean of the liberal arts college for women.
WL: [unclear]
VL: That’s correct. We worked on the philosophy that an educated teacher must first of all be an educated person, and we were very strong for the liberal arts program all the way through. A lot of people criticized us—said, “You are anti-liberal arts.” We were not. We were very supportive and always contended that a college graduate certainly should have a liberal education in addition to professional training. So that was the philosophy all the way through. And the college, even in 1973 was held to that promise.
WL: Was there a graduate program [unclear]?
VL: In the main, teaching in the public schools and junior colleges. As a matter of fact we placed them all over the country, California. We were one of the few programs that had a liberal arts base core, and teachers who had been [unclear] of high school. Until that time, even until—well, our training was for teaching within a business college or a liberal arts college. And most of the business high school teachers were taught the subjects of bookkeeping, typewriting, shorthand, clerical work, and had been educated in a business college. And there had been very few state-supported colleges that had teacher education for a business program. The Woman’s College was one of the few at that time. We placed 3
teachers all over the country.
WL: You mentioned that there were about eight people that formed the department. What do you remember of them?
VL: Well, Pattie Spruill [assistant professor of secretarial science], Maude Adams [assistant professor of secretarial science] were two key persons. Jim Crawford, who is now a professor of business education at Indiana University [Bloomington, Indiana], retired about four years ago. George Joyce [assistant professor in commercial and economics departments] taught— worked in the department. He had a one-year commercial department at the same time. He crossed over. Those were some I think of immediately—and a woman from Asheville—I can’t remember her name. And Miss [Elsie] Leffingwell from Pittsburgh [instructor of business education] taught part of the time. Those were the main ones. And of course, Dr. McKee Fisk [head of the department of business education and secretarial science] was there part of the time, about three years that I was there. He was the head of the department that followed Dr. Keister as acting head when I came.
WL: Before we turn to the [unclear]. How did you become head of the department [unclear]?
VL: I became head in 1948. I became acting head in 1944, and that was before I had the doctorate. I served as acting head from ’44 to ’48 and took the professional training. In ’48 when I got my degree from the University of Pittsburgh, the PhD, I was made full head and professor.
WL: Let’s change the topic a little bit and talk about [what] the college was like in 1938.
VL: Well, in 1938 the census showed that Greensboro as having 37,500 people, and it showed North Carolina Woman’s College, the university, as having about 2,100, between 2,000 and 2,100 students. And I considered the Woman’s College of the university all the time it was a women’s college as being a number one liberal arts college for women in the United States, ahead of the one in Texas, the one in South Carolina—were all in a class with the one that is part of Harvard [Cambridge, Massachusetts].
WL: Radcliffe?
VL: Radcliffe. Our programs for teachers and secretaries was, I would say, comparable to Radcliffe. We were an A#1 liberal arts college, and our students stood up head and shoulders about most of them across the country when they went out as teachers. And they also went out as secretaries.
We had a group—each year three or four or five out of the classroom went to serve as secretaries to congressmen and senators in Washington [DC]. As a matter of fact, the first woman who was identified as having the highest position in the United States of any woman was one of our own students who had gone up through the senators and become personnel director for the Civil Service workers across the country. Mr. [James] “Sam” Ervin [Jr.], Senator Sam [North Carolina Democrat, remembered for his work on the investigation committees that brought down Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954 and 4
the 1974 Watergate scandal], always came to Woman’s College for his secretaries. Some right now are in Washington now having worked with him before he retired and died several years ago.
WL: So they were considered very mature or the elite for secretarial work and teachers?
VL: Yes.
WL: What was the atmosphere on campus when you were a young man?
VL: I was twenty-six when I came. I was accepted. It was very democratic. Even the top people in the School of Education and economics across the board were very, very encouraging and wanted me to be successful. The English department faculty were some of the first people who called on us after we moved to town and the Department of Economics on down the line. We felt at home very quickly in the atmosphere throughout the college. I’d say that morale was very high even though it was during a period when salaries were very low—just coming out of the Depression [worldwide economic downturn in the decade preceding World War II]. I guess you weren’t very much walking around then.
WL: No, a glimmer in my parents’ eye. The morale was high. How would you characterize the [unclear] composition of the faculty was very distinct. There was a high number of women teaching in the college.
VL: Yes, that’s true. But there were a good number of men. Predominately women, I suppose. In our department it was about half men and half women, approximately. I was a—well, that was my first experience teaching in the college, so I never thought much about it—but if it was half women or a third women or mostly women it never occurred to me. I wasn’t really reacting to it as a predominately woman school other than that the students were all women. We had, I’d say, a good number of men. Many of the department heads were men, actually—music, economics, psychology, foreign language, history—so it wasn’t a women’s philosophy all the way through. And there was a fairly close relationship between the students and the faculty. The students were very loyal to the faculty. We were very proud of our students.
WL: How did you know, for example, that the students were [unclear]?
VL: Well, the fact that the students could feel free to come in and an open door to the faculty at all times. They were free and they felt free to come in and discuss their problems, whether it was a financial problem or a personal problem. The faculty was very concerned with the students, and the students knew it. If they were in any kind of trouble, although we didn’t have formal counselors as such, I’d say there was an advisory relationship between departmental faculty and the students. And they felt free and easy to come in and talk, whether it was financial or boyfriend problems or whatever it happened to be.
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WL: Other people would describe a certain sense of vision on the part of the faculty, a sense of dedication and mission to arrive at a very level of training.
VL: I would say that’s true, and that the students knew it and reacted to it accordingly. I think it was part of their loyalty. They knew that the faculty was all out for them to get the best education they could get under the circumstances.
WL: How would you describe the social life?
VL: Oh and another thing, at the time I was here that was abandoned probably for six or seven years was that once or twice a semester the students would invite faculty to eat dinner with them family style in the dining room. We’d sit around the table and the students with the faculty mixed in with the students would eat in the dining hall. This was part of the general atmosphere, the close relationship.
WL: Were students invited into faculty homes?
VL: Many. We had students in. And I am sure others did. I was not conscious of how many did, but our faculty did.
WL: I was going to ask earlier about the nature of the social life. [unclear] In an all-women’s college, there are some characteristics of social life.
VL: Well, I would say that on weekends it may have been a women’s college, but it was invaded by Duke [University, Durham, North Carolina] and [University of North] Carolina [at Chapel Hill] and [North Carolina] State College [Raleigh, North Carolina] young men. So that although there was not too much fraternizing between girls and young men during the week, on the weekends the campus was ripe with the young boys and girls leaving campus and going home and going to dances and so forth.
WL: It was a very active place on the weekends?
VL: That’s right. I remember that during the war that we were afraid—as a matter of fact the administration was afraid that the girls would be taken advantage of by the army training place out here, the Overseas Replacement Depot. And they had us patrolling the campus at night—the men on the faculty on patrol at night. [laughs]
WL: Was anybody caught? [laughs]
VL: No, I didn’t catch anybody. It was more of a psychological thing than it was a real hazard to the students.
WL: What kind of restrictions were placed on the students?
VL: The students had to be by a certain hour at night. I didn’t know too much about the operation of the dormitories, but I do know that they had to be in by 11 [pm] at night. 6
They were very restrictive on drinking.
WL: Were the rules generally followed as far as you could tell?
VL: I never heard any complaints among any students I had contact with.
WL: Were there college-wide activities? For example, assemblies?
VL: The college-wide activities were lecture series, concerts—well attended, very well attended. Male faculty served as ushers a good deal of the time for eight or ten years for every affair that was held. I was on the committee that did the ushering for a number of years. The faculty volunteered to do it without any problems. [unclear] And they had four societies, debating societies they called them [Editor’s note: they were called literary societies], and they had a separate house [Editor’s note: it was the Students’ Building] down where the valley between the library is now and the Forney Building. I don’t remember the names of the debating societies. All students belonged to one or the other and they had programs.
WL: So there was a mix of academic and social [unclear]. And they were organized campus-wide?
VL: It was organized campus wide, but not competitive between the debating societies as such. The debating societies were probably a misnomer for it. Maybe it was originally, but gradually it tapered out and within ten years there wasn’t any such thing.
WL: Tell me a little more about the type of students that came where they came from [unclear].
VL: No, I couldn’t tell actually from teaching them whether they were rural or city. They were more or less intermixed and intermingled, and there wasn’t any class distinction between one and another. So I wasn’t sure they were rural girls or small towns or the larger towns. They were a complete mix of interesting attitudes. I didn’t see any class distinction among them.
WL: Democratic?
VL: I would say completely.
WL: You mentioned the war, the Second World War. How did the war bring change [unclear]?
VL: I’d say very little, curriculum wise and the social atmosphere, I’d say very little change. It was very smooth—there was concern, but the interest stayed the same. It wouldn’t say there was any adverse impact upon the goals they had in mind when they came to the college nor in their contact.
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WL: Still a stable student body?
VL: Very much so. I know because I had done experimental work for my doctorate during ’44, ’45, ’46, [unclear] collect data and I had students across the department—they called themselves guinea pigs—an experimental study in typewriting. Their biggest concern was their worries over their boyfriends who were in service. That was their major worry. That was tabulated straight through as a factor in my research. Attitudes of the students and the fears of the students were reflected in that. [unclear] Maybe that’s true because it was a women’s college and women students and not men and women. [unclear]
WL: To what extent was there contact between campus [unclear]. Was it cloistered or was there a lot of exchange between [unclear]?
VL: I would say that probably it was more or less isolated as far as I could see from the ongoing activities of the rest of Greensboro. And as far as I could detect, the publicity was more for Greensboro College or Elon College [Elon, North Carolina] and the newspapers publicized more than they did for the Woman’s College. Now I don’t know why I would have had that feeling, but it seemed that way all the way along. And the newspapers and media were more interested in what was going on at Greensboro College or Guilford College [Greensboro, North Carolina] than they were with what was going on at the Woman’s College.
WL: What do you think was the reason?
VL: I don’t know why. It may have been a feeling on our part that there wasn’t as much publicity for the Woman’s College students as the others. And the Woman’s College group did not—. I would say the Greensboro College students had to wear gloves and dress a certain way downtown, and our students wouldn’t go to town and weren’t noticed as much. They fit in with the general population. But the Greensboro College students were strictly dress conscious and had to follow a rather rigorous regiment of dress when they went downtown.
[unclear section]
WL: Was Greensboro College a little a—?
VL: I suppose it was recognized as being more of a society group and dressed accordingly.
WL: Let me ask you a little bit about the relation between the administration and the faculty. In a way I guess there wasn’t much administration at all and there wasn’t a chance that they were [unclear].
VL: That’s correct and each department head reported directly to the dean of administration, and they didn’t go through a system of vice chancellor and vice chancellor this and a vice 8
chancellor that. But I would say that, by and large, the faculty felt pretty close to the administration. As a matter of fact they were. Each member of the faculty was one step removed from the dean of administration. That was his department head. The faculty member would go to the dean of administration with any problem that they might have.
WL: And they would do that?
VL: That’s right. And the advisory committee to the chancellor, the dean of administration is what we called them, was made up of faculty was elected by the faculty. The majority of them were elected by the faculty.
I was elected to the advisory committee in 1944. I was just a kid, and I was on the advisory committee with some of the old timers. You couldn’t do much on the advisory committee. You don’t have enough experience around here. I felt tall on the advisory committee. I was able to talk with the dean of administration and speak out on the committee for three or four years. I wasn’t conscious of any restrictions on my activities, either, supposed or real.
WL: What you are suggesting is that there wasn’t a lot of hierarchy at that time. A young person in his early 30s was viewed as [unclear].
VL: He didn’t feel as though he was out of order if he spoke his own mind about things he thinks about. That was the way I reacted to it. Somebody else may have reacted differently with a different situation or department. I don’t know about that.
WL: The dean of administration was W.C. Jackson [Walter Clinton Jackson’s title changed to chancellor in 1945].
VL: He was dean of administration, I guess, until he left in 1949. I guess—[Edward Kidder] Eddie Graham [Jr.] when he came in to take over—I can’t remember whether he was called chancellor or not. I think he was. That was the darkest period that I spent in my thirty-six years with the university. It was ’50 to ’55 during the administration of Edward Graham.
WL: Tell me more about that.
VL: Well, as a matter of fact, I was on the advisory committee, and he completely bypassed it. He didn’t even call meetings of the advisory committee. He had his own. We called it the FGI—[Marc] Friedlaender [English professor], [Gregory] Ivy and Graham—a special group of department heads that he took advice and counsel from, but he didn’t need the advisory committee. When Graham left, Friedlaender left and went to a publishing concern in New York. Ivy went to California. He was head of the art department. Gregory Ivy. I guess the “G” was Graham and FGI was Friedlaender, Graham, and Ivy.
WL: So a lot of the problem with Graham was that he bypassed faculty opinion?
VL: That was one of the things. And his unorthodox conduct, his cavorting. With his wife, 9
Elizabeth, at home, he was out cavorting with some other female—and that didn’t go down very well. As a matter of fact when he left, one of the women he was cavorting with left and went with him. She wasn’t an instructor or a faculty member, but she was a member of the university community in some other capacity. It was just a whole bunch of things. I remember one thing we were discussing at a faculty meeting, I spoke up three or four times, and he ruled me out of order. I had spoken enough. That type of thing happened to more people than I. [unclear]
WL: How would you describe it? A lot of what you are saying may be a personality problem.
VL: I would say so. And an inability to bring the faculty into his inner circle, so to speak. When he bypassed the advisory committee, that was the death knell as far as the community was concerned, the community scholars so to speak, the faculty.
WL: What happened to the advisory committee if he bypassed them?
VL: They had separate meetings, and they would report things to it.
WL: And they went on meeting?
VL: That’s right. And another dark period was when [Chancellor] Gordon Blackwell resigned suddenly after three years. In the middle of the summer he announced he was leaving and going to Florida. That left the university in a kind of tailspin. That was a dark period. That was 1960—I guess 1960—Graham left in ’65 [Editor’s note: Chancellor Graham left in 1956], and I guess it was ’67 or ’68, maybe even ’69. He followed Graham. But in the meantime W.W. Pierson held the fort for about a year between Graham and Blackwell [Editor’s note: Chancellor Pierson was acting chancellor in 1956 and 1957]. Blackwell came and he had three years—and that would be approximately ’69. [unclear]
WL: Let’s get back to Graham a little bit. Was there anything in terms of policies that the faculty wanted to do, things he wanted to do or changes that he wanted to bring in? Or was it more his style?
VL: I’d say it was more his style and general attitude and his personal problems. This is, when it got public, these problems became magnified.
WL: When he came in, he brought in Mereb Mossman [sociology and anthropology faculty, dean of instruction, dean of the college, dean of the faculty, vice chancellor for academic affairs] as part of his administrative team.
VL: That’s right, and Mereb Mossman, in my judgment, through the years she was more of a steadying influence than she was accorded. She was, of course, obligated to Graham, but was at the same time, I think, very uncomfortable. I put her high on a pedestal during the whole process on through the Gordon Blackwell era, and there was Dr. [Otis] Singletary when he came in as chancellor in 1960, I guess. He wanted to do away with—. I had a great respect for him, but he threw a roadblock into the School of Home Economics when 10
they went for a doctoral program in home economics. I was acting dean of the Graduate School at the time because Jay Davis resigned suddenly in 1959 or ’60, and he was dean of the Graduate School but resigned. I was thrown into it as acting dean to take over the mess he had—there were papers piled high on the desk, applications. It took me a month or two to find the desk after Jay Davis had left.
WL: You actually mean students applying?
VL: Yes, students applying for admission. The secretary and I had one heck of a time making order out of chaos out of that. But in the meantime, that’s when the Southern Association Study was thrown on me. I was dean of the Graduate School. The Southern Association. I had enough high blood pressure. I lived through it.
WL: Let’s talk a little about graduate institutions. [unclear] This is a big change coming in to the Woman’s College.
VL: The first graduate programs were home economics and business education back in 1935 shortly after it became the Woman’s College and University before I came to Greensboro. Dr. [Margaret] Edwards [head of School of] Home Economics had gotten approval for a master’s program. And they were the only ones for three or four years. Gradually, I guess about 19—I’m not sure when the Department of English got a master’s program, after we had had the master’s program for teachers in home economics and in education and in business education. I know that in 19—. We didn’t have any doctoral program until 1960. How many master’s programs we had, I am not sure. We had the MFA, Master of Fine Arts, and some other. Dr. Friedlaender was director of the Master of Fine Arts program. I had great respect for him, but he bent over backwards with Dr. Graham.
But in 1960 was the first effort at a PhD program in home economics. I was the dean of Graduate School, acting in the graduate school. I knew Singletary wanted graduate work in home economics to be a distinct school. I didn’t think it was possible. [Unclear] agriculture school like NC State. But we finally got it through his objections after meetings with—
[End of Interview]