Oral history interview with Laura G. Anderton, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Laura G. Anderton
INTERVIEWER: Anne R. Phillips
DATE: January 19, 1990
[Begin Side A]
AP: Tell us where you were born, and tell us something about your background.
LA: I'm Laura Anderton, professor emeritus at UNC Greensboro and former associate dean of
Woman's College at the University of North Carolina. I was born in Providence, Rhode
Island, and studied for my bachelor's degree at Wellesley College, completing my
bachelor's degree in biology—in zoology, I should say, in 1940. After that I taught in
Howard Seminary, a girls' preparatory school, just before World War II and joined the
WAVES in 1943.
AP: You were saying that you came here to Woman's College at some point, obviously, after
your time—
LA: The reason I came to Woman's College was because in the WAVES. I met Katherine
Taylor, who was then dean of Woman's College. And she, while she was a student at
Midshipman's School, asked me, who was then her officer, if—after the war was over—
would I please come to North Carolina to be a counselor in one of the dormitories. And at
that time, my father had a heart ailment, so that I couldn't do it. But after the war, when I
was getting my master's degree from Brown University, she issued an ultimatum and said
that she was going to stay on the telephone until I said yes to her request to come to
Woman's College. After I arrived, I taught biology and was counselor and was very much
impressed by the counseling system. The counseling system was instigated by Harriet
Elliott just prior to when I arrived on campus. I arrived in 1948. And it was at a time
when they were trying to improve counseling services on campuses. We went to Chicago
to a conference, and at the first meeting of the conference were Katherine Taylor and one
Elvira Prondecki who had become—later became the director of the Elliott University
Student Center. We were so bored with what was going on at the conference because
Harriet Elliott was so far ahead of her time that what we were instigating, had been
doing, and had been going on at Woman's College for some time, was at that time just
being suggested as possibilities for the future. Let's stop this [interruption].
AP: So you went to the conference and those were some of your thoughts—
LA: At that time—the late 1940s and early 1950s—the college was extremely respected
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throughout the country as being a top level women's college. It was considered in so
many conferences that I attended outside of the state of North Carolina; it was considered
the Wellesley of the South. And it was—the teaching was a major part of—one of the
major goals of the college. Teaching was considered to be excellent, very stimulating.
And the student body at that time was extremely homogeneous. It was made up of
primarily North Carolinians, and although their economic levels varied considerably,
their morals and their ethical standards were very similar, so that I remember that no keys
were issued. No keys whatsoever were issued in the dormitories because there was no
reason to worry about having things stolen. Which was quite a contrast, when people
came from other parts of the country and other ethnic groups and came from other
countries, it was quite different as far as problems connected with stealing was
concerned. However, the change in heterogeneity, which came in the late fifties and early
sixties, brought about a new stimulus so that it seemed to me that in teaching there were
many more points of view represented, and it was very exciting to be able to have
discussions in that way. I'd like to go back and mention one thing, which is something
that I've been very much interested in, and that is a contrast with the northern women's
colleges and the southern women's colleges. And that is that in the North, there were so
many social cliques. And I went to a college where there were very many wealthy people,
and I worked in a self-help dormitory where I waited tables and did other chores and was
at that time was not considered part of the social mainstream. However, in the South, no
one ever knew what the wealth was of the individual. People were all treated exactly the
same—very cordial. It is of interest now, though, that going back to my fiftieth reunion
that is no longer the case—because they've asked me to be their president, and on the
twentieth-fifth reunion when I had done some cancer research, I was taken into the social
fold.
AP: [interruption] I thought you wanted to add an idea at that point.
LA: Of course, Wellesley now has changed, and over 60 percent of the student body is on
scholarship, and I'm sure that has altered as well. But I'd like to now comment about the
very exciting program that we had in the early 1950s. I went to Harvard one summer and
studied general education under a series of courses which were entitled Science and
General Education—it was the Conant courses. And I came back all enthusiastic about
that. We had on campus, on the Woman's College campus, some young instructors who
formed the Young Instructors Group, and we were all very much interested in teaching,
and we were interested in research as well. And we gathered together and had a group—
Warren Ashby for example was one of the instigators who had been in the philosophy
department, and several others I'll think about in a few minutes. But the purpose was to
exchange ideas and good teaching techniques and also to explain our research to each
other because regardless of what research we did, it always seemed to be transferable—
the ideas seemed to be transferable to other lines of research. And it was a marvelous
opportunity to get to know what was going on in research at that time. I say that because
even before research was greatly emphasized, there was a very strong component of
research being important as a necessary stimulus to teaching—to keep the teaching up to
date —and to make it possible for the instructor to feel the excitement of being on the
frontiers of research. And it's of interest now that sometimes people look back and think
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of a time when research began at the University here, but it had been going on for a very
long time. As a matter of fact, when I first arrived in 1948, I asked what facilities there
were for research, and I was given the one research microscope in the biology department
and did research and reported it not only to the Faculty Science Club in the North
Carolina Academy of Science, but to some national meetings as well.
AP: [interruption] Dr. Anderton, when you came here to Woman's College, how did you
view the young women? How did you see them as students when you first came and
what changes did you see that occurred in the student body or in their learning—the
changes over time?
LA: When I first came in 1948, the academic standards were considered to be very high here,
and that was certainly reflected in the courses that I had in biology and the discussions
and in their high standards of excellence. I can't speak for other departments, although
just by reflecting I had the impression that we did get the cream of the crop here as far as
North Carolina students were concerned. I know that compared with the other two
institutions that I had come from, the entrance standards were not as high. However,
there were better students here than I had seen, and the range was just greater. I perceived
it as a very good, high-academic-standard institution, and I think the students had that
same perception. As far as the students were concerned—as I mentioned before—they
were quite homogeneous in their social background and regional background. Most of
them did come from this part of the South. As time went on and in the period when men
came, the first reaction as far as grades were concerned was that many of the standards
appeared for a short period of time to go down. We had some men who found out that
they couldn't make it here, and they flunked out. That was only temporary, however, and
very shortly we began to have a reputation for being very good—even better than other
branches of the greater University [of North Carolina]—at teaching and giving more
emphasis to the individual student, better counseling, so that many people in the area—
even though their parents went to such prestigious institutions as Duke and [laughs] other
institutions in the area which I won't mention—would send their children here because
they had the feeling that they would get more individual attention—and in the end would
come out academically just as well. As a matter of fact, the data which you can get from
two committees that I was on bring that out—that is, the Committee on Pre-Medicine and
also the Committee on Medical Technology, was able to do better than any place in the
institution—was able to do as well as the best in the state. Davidson was the best for pre-medicine,
and we equaled Davidson. We were better than all the other institutions, as far
as getting people into medical school and following their performance and then their
performance as physical therapists and laboratory technicians as well. The data proved
that, and we have it here in our department to substantiate that. So getting back to the
idea of when men came on campus, there was at first a little dip, I think, in the academic
standards. And then it went up because of the stimulus of having men in the classroom
and being more aggressive as far as discussions were concerned. But one thing—I
approved. I was very happy to have the men in class; that was not the case of some of my
colleagues at the time. But the other thing that I wanted to comment about was—prior to
the entrance of many men on campus as undergraduates—of course, they'd been as
graduates before—but before men were allowed to come here as undergraduates, the
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leadership opportunities for women were so much greater. That is, they ran all of student
government. And the first initial reaction was that men began to take the positions of
leadership. Of course one has to look at that in perspective and realize that the efforts for
the more aggressive woman in leadership in general have changed since that date when
men first came on. Now we're seeing a swing back to having women come into more
positions of leadership. But still, having gone to Wellesley, I rather favor personally the
idea of women going to women's colleges if they want to get more practice in leadership.
That I could go on later with more specific questions.
AP: So you do feel that, if women are in single-sex colleges, that they do have more chances
for leadership—it's just a natural perhaps for them to be leaders and to do that is easier—
LA: With women. Yes, I agree with that. Of course, the other aspect of that is that the society
now allows women to participate more in roles of leadership and that you do get practice
dealing with men. So I've tempered my original idea about the great importance of
women being at a women's college.
AP: When you were here, beginning in the late forties and continuing on, what are your
thoughts about dorm life or about campus life both for faculty and for students? Could
you tell us a bit about that?
LA: Yes, I can. And to put it into perspective, let's look at the difference in figures. When I
came, the enrollment was approximately 3,000 undergraduate students, and now it's
maybe 12,500 or 13,000. So the change is tremendous. But as a counselor I knew
everyone in my dormitory—when I was counselor at Weil Hall and when I was counselor
at North Spencer, I knew everyone in the dorm. I knew the mothers and fathers; I knew
who they were dating; I knew the place they came from; and there was a very intimate
connection between the student and the dormitory and the counselor. Not only was that
the case, but many events of a cultural nature—that is, the Social Science Forum, the Arts
Forum and the Science Lectures—were all followed by discussions in the dormitory. And
I would get the students in my dormitory to come down, and we might invite a faculty
member, and we would discuss what we heard. We all attended the Arts Forum and the
Social Science Forum and the Science Forum and then discussed it in the dormitory. So
that intimate discussion was something that I doubt would be possible to as great a
degree as it was then. Now the role of the counselor has changed considerably, and it
does not require the intellectual requirement—they just stay in the dormitory, as I see it,
and they take care of more routine events, and they do play the very important role of
getting the student to the proper specialized counselor. But we were more counselors in
the Jeffersonian tradition of being a counselor of everything. And then we did have
specialists—we did have first of all a psychologist and then a psychiatrist, and then, of
course, we began to add those. When I was associate dean, we began to add those—now
that was in the early 1960s. [interruption]
As I see it, one way of describing the change that has occurred in dormitory
counselors is that, earlier in the 1940s and 1950s and into the 1960s, the counselor had a
more holistic approach to the student—just the way doctors with a holistic approach now
are concerned not only with the physical but the mental, the emotional aspects—and that
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was the way the counselor actually considered the student. As a result, there was also a
change in role models, so that the counselor was respected and revered and really copied
as a role model. And this goes into another change which has occurred, which reflects
what's gone on in the country I think also—the counselor took the position in 1940s and
1950s that many of the women would be wives of prominent citizens in the state of North
Carolina and would therefore need to know certain things about etiquette. They would
need to know how to meet people graciously and how to perform at a tea and various
social functions, and they were given practice in doing it just for that particular purpose
and for their own feeling of comfort when they were in social situations. And now that
aspect unfortunately is missing, as it appears to me. But perhaps there are other places
where they get that sort of training for being the wife of a leader in industry or politics or
whatever.
AP: So perhaps, you know, indeed society has changed and, as you say, and perhaps social
graces and the way we approach that idea, that concept—[interruption]
LA: I think the major point is that it seems to me that on campus we might have forgotten a
little bit about the importance of universal manners—that is, consideration for other
people. And these are the things that we expect of our leaders—you know, the president
and his wife, we expect them to be gracious and to be considerate of other people. And
yet in our, perhaps not just on campus but in society in general right now, we've been so
aggressive in trying to get ourselves ahead socially and educationally and also
economically that we've become too egocentric. And we've begun to forget about other
people, and that particular aspect does worry me a little bit. Of course, I know that people
like our present vice-chancellor for student affairs is one who works trying to make
people conscious of their responsibility to other people. But there is something to be said
for a change which occurred in the dormitories and the administration of the dormitories
by the counselors, and someplace on campus that responsibility has to be placed. In our
own department, here in biology, we seem to take a responsibility for our Tri Beta
students. They are the special students. We have parties with them, we talk with them
individually, and perhaps it's just shifted from the dormitory to the academic unit like the
department or the school—and maybe that's where the counseling goes. But there is
definitely a shift.
AP: That's interesting to hear. Speaking of departments, let's think a minute about just your
own teaching in biology. You've told us already. But just tell us a bit more about your life
in the classroom, if you can think of things….
LA: Well, I've been very excited about teaching since 1948, and I guess the most difficult
question in retiring was what was I going to substitute for the excitement and the
stimulation that I get from teaching. And so I'm still teaching, I'm just not paid for it.
[laughs] But the teaching has changed over the years in this regard: the pressures, which
are now felt very strongly, to publish and also the increase in the emphasis on our
graduate school—we've had more graduate students of past years in our program, in
master's degree— this has made it so that there has been greater emphasis on doing
research. And the research has had a great effect on teaching—keeping it right up-to-
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date. Of course, within the past two decades, research in my area has just mushroomed to
the degree that's very difficult to keep up with all the areas, and it has become very, very
exciting in all of these areas. One of the areas that I was most interested in was in cancer
research and in birth defects. And in the early 1960s, I instigated a course here in
cytogenetics, which started with research. I learned the technique from the Wistar
Institute in Philadelphia, came back, and we used the chromosome technique for
identifying birth defects in Guilford County. We were the first group to do that. So the
University had a very real role in that regard in the community, because we did all of the
diagnosis for chromosome defects for not only [Moses H.] Cone [Memorial] Hospital,
but for the County Medical Center. And so I sent my technician out to get the blood of
defective patients. We came back and did that work. We did it free of charge, but we
were able therefore to learn a great deal, so there was a close tie-in with the hospitals. My
research which followed that, which was on cancer research, and we began by growing
cancer tissue in the laboratory in culture here also coordinated with Duke Hospital,
Bowman Gray [Hospital at Wake Forest University] and with Cone Hospital, Moses H.
Cone Memorial Hospital. And we were able to help instigate tissue culture in Cone
Hospital. I think that was one of the things that was so very exciting about it. And it
brings to my mind the importance of working cooperatively to the benefit of both
institutions. For example, both the chromosome studies and the tissue culture studies
gave the hospital a chance to do some diagnosis, and, at the same time, we were able to
keep our students way ahead of any institution, really, in this area. So when they went to
graduate school and they went to medical school, they were far ahead academically in
these techniques and in the theories behind these techniques. So I think that was the most
exciting aspect of it—that along with the developmental biology, which I have taught
since the late 1950s. And this course was included: Living Organisms from the Coast of
North Carolina, such as sea urchins and also frog eggs, and it had to do also with chick
eggs and many other living forms which were used—and we were therefore able to give
the students experiments using living organisms and learning techniques that made it
possible for them to do many of the things which are now being done on mammals today,
but which people object to because of animal rights. But we did them on invertebrate
animals taken from the coast, in which there is no problem connected with animal rights.
Although we were careful, being interested in the organisms, to give them the necessary
food and necessary conditions for their proper physical welfare.
AP: [Interruption] About what year did you begin the work with the chromosome research
and the tissue culture and your work with the hospitals?
LA: We began in 1963 to do the work here. And the following year, we affiliated with the
hospitals and worked on a project with an inherited form of cancer known as familial
polyposis. There were two families, one white and one black, in Guilford County that had
this. So that we not only obtained chromosomes from these families, but we also obtained
medical records of pedigrees that went back as far as eight generations. In the history we
were able to get—medical histories that we were able to get. And we gave all of that
information to two institutions in the state: one was to Duke University and the other one
was to Bowman Gray. So when I finished with that aspect of working with the pedigree, I
gave it over so it could be utilized and so that people could see the same patients.
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AP: I see. You were quite open and quite willing to give research, to give the products, the
efforts of your research—to share them with other institutions. That seems quite
wonderful. Do you want to say a bit about that?
LA: Well, I believe that's the way research should be. Particularly medical research. If you
find out some very important things that would be useful to somebody else who can build
on the research, that that really should be done. When I retired, I did the same thing. I
took the laboratory experiments that I had worked out over a period of twenty-five years
or so and gave them to the next individual. I think that's the way science grows, and that's
the way technology receives—I tried to get that point across to the students, too, because
so frequently, people are very possessive of knowledge, and I don't think that should be
the case.
AP: You feel we need to share knowledge?
LA: Yes, that's right.
AP: That's the best way. [interruption] We were talking earlier today about a collection of
pictures, Dr. Anderton, that you collected, and we had gone down the hall to look at this
collection of pictures. Could you tell us just a little bit about this collection in this room?
LA: Yes, these pictures begin with the head of the department of science, which the biology
department was before it was a biology department. And there is a Miss Dixie Lee
Bryant, who served as head of the department of science from 1892 to 1905. Then the
next head and the first head of the biology department, was Dr. Eugene Gudger, from
1905 to 1928. He was followed by Dr. John P. Gibbler, who served as head of the
Biology Department from 1920 to 1949. He was followed by Dr. Cutter, I believe, from
1952 to 1962. We had a little bit of a break here in the time. Let's see, Miss Helen Ingram
was acting head from 1949 to 1952, so she came before Dr. Cutter. And then in 1962,
acting head Dr. Edmund Berkley served a year. That was followed by Dr. Bruce
Eberhart, who was head of the department from 1963 to 1979, and for whom this biology
building is now named. He was followed by Dr. William K. Bates, who served from 1979
to 1988, and then the last one, the current, is Dr. Robert Gatten. Also in this series of
pictures are pictures which come from a field trip to Hanging Rock in 1900, with the
ladies wearing hats and long dresses down to their shoes. And in that was T.G. Pearson
and several other individuals. T.G. Pearson was a very well-known bird specialist,
ornithologist, in the state of North Carolina.
AP: Is that the reason they made the trip to Hanging Rock, do you think?
LA: Yes, it was a field trip. And by the looks of their clothes—the men with hats on and the
women all dressed up, it's hard to believe how they were able to climb up and down the
rocks at Hanging Rock. Another picture is of the microbiology lab, taken in 1964, and
shows several students who are now faculty members here.
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AP: When you were explaining about heads of the department of biology, do you know
whether the university or earlier, the college, sought women as heads of the department?
LA: I don't know the answer to that. But I think it is interesting that Dixie Lee Bryant was the
first head of the department of science in 1892.
AP: I wanted to ask you also about the administration, when you came here, you said that
Katherine Taylor was instrumental in your getting here. And tell us a bit about
administration when you came here and about administrations that followed. If you
would do that.
LA: When I first came, Walter Clinton Jackson was the chancellor, and he was really a father
figure. I think he thought of the students as being his daughters, and there was a very
close relationship between the Chancellor and the students. That is, of course, quite
possible when there are only 3,000 students. And he knew many by name, and, of course,
he was a very good history teacher, and many of them knew him as a teacher as well as a
chancellor. Let's cut it.
[End of Interview]