Oral history interview with Mary Miller, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Mary Miller
INTERVIEWER: Linda Danford
DATE: September 17, 1990
[Begin Side A]
LD: Miss Miller, can you tell me when you came to UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro] and in what capacity, with what position?
MM: You mean as a student?
LD: Well, you were—you came here as a student? Oh, I didn’t know that.
MM: Oh, yes. I came here right fresh out of high school at the ripe old age of sixteen.
LD: So, you are an alum and a faculty member?
MM: Right.
LD: Oh, I see, well we are getting double value for our money. [laughs] And when was that?
MM: In 1937.
LD: And you’ve spent all four years of your undergraduate—
MM: I spent four years here, and then I came back to get a master’s degree in housing and home management a few years later.
LD: And what was your undergraduate major?
MM: Home Economics.
LD: Home Economics—?
MM: Back then it was a home economics major, period. You didn’t specialize as much as you do now, although there were majors in some of the areas. But I guess home economics education is where most everybody went, and then you went out and taught home economics in high school.
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LD: But you came back and got a graduate degree?
MM: Yes.
LD: And did you teach anywhere else before you—well you must have taught someplace else before you came back here?
MM: Oh yes.
LD: Where did you go first?
MM: Well, I had to get out of high school. That was just “not my dish.” And after I got my master’s, my first college teaching job was in Chickasha, Oklahoma [Oklahoma College for Women]. And that was a women’s college. [pause] There I was teaching primarily clothing construction. I knew something about it, but not as much as I needed to know. I found that every high school student in Oklahoma was best-in for a fashion show put on by the clothing construction classes. And that meant about three showings, and it was an all-school event. The drama department staged it—wrote the script. It was a Broadway production. Well, that was not what I had in mind for a career, so I went to Cornell [University, Ithaca, New York] that summer to—primarily to check out their offerings in design and their placement service. And that was how I found the place at the University of Connecticut [Storrs, Connecticut]. I went there as a housing research person and taught something, and then I went back to Cornell and started work on a degree in housing and in design in the Department of Housing and Design. They had presumably a two-track doctoral program, but I found myself getting more deeply in the housing research, and I never wanted to be a housing research person. I was looking for design, but finding it just extremely difficult to get into any kind of design program because they said, “Oh, you’re home economics,” and just immediately shut the door in your face. And as it turned out Cornell really did not have strength in their design program, but you sort of landed these jobs if you say you want to do something, then go do it. So I got into the design field simply because I said I wanted to, and it was kind of a learning on the job situation. I went from Cornell; I hopped around so much. I went from Cornell to Michigan State [University, East Lansing, Michigan], where I taught a course called the House and It’s Furnishings, [door slams] and then I went back to Cornell, and then I took a job at the Rochester Institute of Technology [Rochester, New York] to teach—the job description was to teach retailing students how to be decorators, and it was an enormously frustrating thing, but I was becoming more and more aware of the challenge that that field had and always trying to find a design program where I could plug into and find out what I was doing. But after five years there, I sort of gave them an ultimatum—either I get a design program or I’m not coming back. So I took a year off and went down to New York. All of my friends had dribbled down to New York, so I thought it was time for me to move down. So I took a job at Lord & Taylor [department store] selling yard goods by the yard, and it was one of the most wonderful years I ever spent. Didn’t make much money, but I lived in this women’s residence, which didn’t cost very much, and the food was wonderful. I was walking distance to the Met[ropolitan Museum of Art], to the Museum of Modern Art, to Fifth Avenue—to the [Greenwich] Village. It was just— 3
LD: It does sound wonderful.
MM: It was just ideal, and I made lots of wonderful friends. While I was—it was one very slow afternoon at Lord & Taylor, and this older man and this very attractive younger woman came in, and they were looking for the most gorgeous bedspread in New York. And we got into a conversation, and he says, “Well, why don’t you come out to Columbia University and check that program out?” So I called to make a date with him and this nice lady answered the telephone, and she says, “Oh, he’s not here anymore; he retired.” But she says, “Why don’t you come out and talk with me?” So I went out and that’s how I got into the doctoral program at Teacher’s College in art and education. And I had a ball because I had all of my hard academics out of the way at Cornell, so I took painting and design, and I saw all of the operas, and I went to all of the art shows and it was a wonderful party group, and so it was a really wonderful experience. But then I felt that I needed to get back to North Carolina because my mother was in a nursing home. And I had to write a dissertation, and I knew that I could teach The House and its Furnishings here with both hands tied behind my back, which is what I did. I came back here for three years. I would go to school and teach the courses, and I would come home and work on my dissertation. So when that was finished, the next stage was—well, I was hoping to get my dissertation rewritten for publication, and my advisor had been quite eager to see this happen, and I had a lot of encouragement. But before that could happen—well, before I get off of that, my dissertation had been on perception—environmental perception—and I had tied that to interior architecture, and it was a subject that yet has to be truly explored. Maybe one of these days I will get some of that material back.
LD: Can you give me just a little amplification on what that—on what you mean by that? Well, that doesn’t—
MM: Well, when I started out, I was thinking in terms of what colors do and what form does and how you feel—the kind of Gestalt [theory of the mind and brain] things. And he got me to looking at the symbolic meaning and the sacred and the profane and some of the more—things—what makes our environment significant and personal. How you—as kind of a symbiotic relationship between yourself and this world that you create for your life and you inhabit—the characteristics of inhabiting. And it just was a wonderful mind-stretching experience. And—but as soon as I got that finished—this was back in the ’60s, when the students were rioting just because somebody else was rioting. There was a lot of discontent with the interior design program because it just didn’t have enough time—enough meat on it. Back then the kids had two or three courses maybe, and then they would have to go out and face the world. And there was some attempt in the art department to build an interior design program and have more design in it, less home economics-type things, but—so I think when Stan[ley] Jones [vice chancellor of academic affairs] got here, the first thing he did was to get Naomi Albanese [dean of the School of Home Economics] and Bert Carpenter [head of the art department] together and say, “Now what are you going to do about this?” I think that he had been deluged by a lot of letters from unhappy alums.
LD: Former students. 4
MM: And a lot of this had been instigated by a member of the faculty who wanted to set up a design program. Well, the upshot of that was that faculty person was dismissed, and they decided to appoint a committee to investigate what the needs were and what could be done, and what an ideal program might be. And somehow I got to be chairman of that committee, and there was representation from the art department and the home economics, both faculty and students, and we thrashed around and we got exactly nowhere for months. And I got the bright idea that if I would go over to [North Carolina] State [University, Raleigh, North Carolina] to the School of Design and talk to someone over there that I could maybe get us out of the deadlock. So Bob Burns, who was head of the Department of Architecture over there, agreed to become a member of the committee, and he helped us to plan a program that would dovetail with the offerings in the School of Design with the hope that there could be transferability between the two programs and it would have the depth and substance of an architecture program.
LD: A cooperative program between UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro] and State?
MM: Well, we set up this thing, which was intended to be a five-year program, but there was a lot of resistance because the Registrar’s Office says, “Well, that’s fifth year. That’s what we give a master’s degree for.” And a lot of people said that it cost too much to go five years. But the—in a field such as—design program with any depth. You can’t jam everything you want to do in five years, so we ended with a compromise. Compromises are sometimes not always the best idea in the world. But the program as we set it up was such that the students, by planning very carefully, they could complete the program in four years plus summers. We gave credit for intern work, which enabled them to get out into the world of work and get some experience. But I think that is pretty much the way it has held up throughout the time. But it was really a four and a half year program, and it worked the kids awfully hard. But it was a step in the right direction. I think that there have been modifications since I left, which is what ought to be. You don’t ever plan something and find it to be static. It has to grow and, as you get new faculty; you get different perspectives and—but I do think that we have a program that is comparable to some of the better programs throughout the country.
LD: And this program—cooperation with State still—?
MM: Well, the cooperation with States sort of depends on the quality of the individual faculty and the quality of the individual student. We have had students to transfer over there. We’ve also had students to be turned down because they didn’t meet their very high-standard admission requirements. So this always has to be negotiated on a one-to-one basis.
LD: Was there a lack of cooperation between the art department and the home economics department over this issue? Or was there—?
MM: Well, there was a lot of tension at the beginning, but once it was settled that it was going to stay in home economics, there was—the question had to be faced whether it would be 5
in the art department, in the School of Home Economics or as an independent school on its own. And Stan Jones said that he couldn’t deal with that, but something had to be settled between the two schools. And Bert Carpenter said that he was not interested in a job training program. His philosophy of art was that you get a broad general education, and then if you want to specialize, you do that at the graduate level.
But a professional design program—it’s one of those things that kids facing a stiff five-year program has to know before he starts out that that’s what he wants to do. Confidentially, not too many students are that—they don’t know themselves that well. So you are automatically faced with a high degree of turnover. But the stronger your program and the more clearly students know what they are getting into before they do, the less likely you are to have turnover. But it was very difficult at first because the students, they were given this pitch about this is a wonderful five-year program, but what’s the difference between the graduates of the five year program and the home economics majors who had a so-called “major” in interior design and home economics. And the competence of the faculty teaching in the “old program” was higher than some of the new recruits of faculty that we were able to get to begin with. It was very difficult to get that started because we had to phase the old program out at the same time we were phasing in the new one. And there was this tension between the two groups of students. They didn’t quite know what these differences would be. And then the funding for that—his was designed at a time when money was much more available than it was when it came time to implement it. So we—I remember one time they funded a professorship so that we could bring in a top quality person, but because we had all these warm bodies to take care of, I asked to have that split into two junior positions. So that’s how we got our faculty built up is just by maneuvering and manipulating. Then we began to have problems with space because we needed a space where every student had his own individual desk that was available around the clock, and they had to be able to work at night. And this was unheard of, so there was one student studio, and every student did his work at home and came to class and showed what they were doing. It got a little bit of attention there, but in this new program—it’s an ongoing—you work there; you work twenty-four hours a day, if need be.
LD: It’s more of a studio-oriented—?
MM: It’s very much a studio program, yes.
LD: Could you give me an idea of the year? Do you remember when the program was actually started?
MM: It was about 1974, if I recall. And I became the first chairman and stayed with that until—I think that I took research leave in ’80-’81. I think was the year that I left, and then when I went to the University of Arizona [Tucson, Arizona] as a visiting scholar in the School of Architecture for that year. And that was a fun year and came back as a faculty member.
LD: I can see the flavor of Arizona in your house to some extent. I don’t know if that predates your Arizona trip [inaudible].
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MM: I don’t think it has much to do with anything. Nobody did much with color in Arizona.
LD: Home economics department, now that the School of Human and Environmental Sciences, has undergone some of the more massive changes.
MM: Very radical changes.
LD: —on campus, and can you talk something about those changes? What direction do you think have been the right ones, and which ones might not have been?
MM: Well, it’s just an attempt to stay abreast with what is happening. A lot of it has to do with what is a university. And this idea of job training the students to go either to manage your own personal life, you know. How do I deal with my own clothing? How do I deal with my house? How do I refinish an old chair?
LD: Is that how you would characterize the old home economics program?
MM: The emphasis was on personal development and being to go out into high schools and extension work and help housewives improve or use their own resources better. And that—it’s a kind of a technical how-to-do-it level. But the university is committed to the generation of new knowledge, which is simply research and publication, peer review publication. And once you get on that track, then you can no longer defend the validity of teaching happy little housewives how to arrange flowers or something like that.
LD: But I presume the student interests must have changed also? About during the ’60s?
MM: Well, I’m not sure that the students’ interest has changed all that much yet because people still want to know “What color upholstery do I want to have with this wallpaper?” You know, “How do I cook an apple upside-down cake?” People still need to know these things, and these are the things that the extension services are able to do because they are mastering communications media, like television and VCRs [videocassette recorder] and writing cookbooks and distributing pamphlets and all. They’re doing a wonderful job, and that is a wonderful network already in place. But by the time you start trying to educate professional designers to go out into a very highly competitive world where the major emphasis is on institutions—like “How do you design a hospital? How do you make it personal and significant and functional?”—you’re getting into extremely complex problems that were never even acknowledged before.
If someone had wanted to hire an interior designer to do a student union building for the university, you’ve got to know a lot more than where to put the sofa because there are all sorts of design process techniques that have been developed largely in the discipline of architecture that are the bread and butter of the way designers think these days. You have to—students now are learning more about design process, and all of the multitude of factors that have to be considered and ways of thinking that simply were not in the books. It’s the new knowledge that has been generated within the last, say, twenty years. And if you got your training before that, you just didn’t get it. It’s a very fast developing field of study, but in the meantime you kind of lose some of the wonderful 7
things that you used to do. And by the time you—there is a lot of conflict because designers—I guess they’re right-brain-dominant people and researchers are maybe left- brain people, and you get all of the left-brain people trying to tell the right-brain people they have to do research and publication that comes up to the standards [laughs] of these professional researchers. And you’ve got somebody in a bind. I think that the art department has pretty well resolved that conflict by recognizing that if you have a painter on faculty, you judge the painter by whether or not he’s able to exhibit in nationally-recognized shows, rather than making him go out and do some sort of statistical study.
LD: Scholarly?
MM: Scholarly work, yes. So that’s still being thrashed out in the design field is: How can you—what kind of recognition—
LD: Criteria—
MM: —do you have to—? Can you give the design faculty that represents the generation of new knowledge? And it’s not just moonlighting to do a decorating job or a design job off hours or if it doesn’t make sense or the contribution to new knowledge.
LD: Do you know of a program at all, not to be affiliated with an architecture school?
MM: Yes, I think that some of the stronger programs in the country are a unit, where the broad scope of design is continued because there you have more clout. But home economics has been primarily women, and this has been a women’s college, and one of the sad facts of life is that women do not have the same clout that men have. And the identification with home economics has been an identification with women, but more and more it’s becoming unsegregated. So—because if you look at the field, it’s pretty well dominated by men out there in the business world. Well, I don’t know, women are well represented, I mean at the top levels in interior design. If you look at the national publication and you see who was being recognized, women are very well represented there. But I think that this department has had as good support as this institution has been able to afford. Which doesn’t mean it’s had all the money it needs or wants, but I think in comparison with the way some of the other programs have been funded, it’s done very well.
LD: Were there any major changes in the program or in the department that took place as a result of Stanley Ferguson leaving and [Chancellor William] Moran coming in 1979, 1980?
MM: No, I think that the changes—well, at least in the interior design program had been made under Stan Jones, but the development—
LD: Well, I meant Stanley Jones. I didn’t mean Jones—
MM: Well, he was the vice chancellor of academic affairs.
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LD: Well, I said Stanley Ferguson, but I meant Stanley Jones. And he was the one who sat you down and said, “Naomi Albanese [inaudible].”
MM: Yes, one of the first things that he did when he got here (and he was very supportive throughout the whole process), but one of the things that we demanded was that interior design.
[recording paused]
MM: One of the upshots of the development of the interior design program was that we demanded our autonomy over the program, instead of having the—it was a school and Dean Albanese ran the whole school, and we thought the interior design program was really going to be a design program was going to have to be able make its own decisions. And so we—one of the requirements that we stated very emphatically was that it had to be its own department. Well, there were no departments per se; there were areas. And it was not more than two or three years after that that the School of Home Economics became departmentalized with department chairmen rather than area chairmen.
LD: You had been the chairman of design program before that?
MM: Well, I became chairman when the program was set up, [pause] but there was still the head of the area, where the interior design program—where the old program was continuing for four or five years. And that area was left then with housing and management and consumer economics. And the design part was separated out from that.
LD: What changes have you seen in the department that you have not been satisfied with?
MM: Well, on the whole I think that I’m very satisfied with the way that the department has developed. We started out trying to develop a program that would be more human oriented instead of business oriented or aesthetic oriented. We were trying to develop a program that would incorporate some of the new developments in human—. Well, at Cornell, for instance, the department they call D&E. Design and environment, I guess. But one is research oriented and the other is design oriented. They recognize the split [pause], and the thing of it was, we were ahead of our time, and it was impossible to hire faculty who had that ability to or the philosophy to go out and to make it human centered. Design is—and I think that, as I see it now, they just have recognized that the way design is viewed by most designers is you deal with the aesthetics and you deal with the structure and you deal with the tangible-material aspects of it. But it is very difficult to find people who can—who have the expertise to pull in the research capability of going out and determining what the human needs are and plugging those into the program. I’m not saying they don’t do that, but it’s a special field of expertise. And few designers in the past have wanted to straddle that academic and design thing. It meant that you almost had to be a split brain in order to handle the two parts. So if they can handle one aspect of design and make it successful, you’ll do well what they decide to do. I don’t think that we 9
ever really accomplished the kind of human orientation because there was not the faculty available anywhere in the country. It was just—we were trying to do something that was contrary to where the profession was at.
The professional societies like the—well, there was the AID [American Interior Designers] and the NSID [National Society of Interior Design] back in those days, who finally combined into one national organization. They are now ASID [American Society of Interior Designers]. That is a business community, and they are in tune with the realities of the business world and how to survive and stay afloat. And we were trying to give the students an emphasis that was not business oriented, but was human oriented. Thinking that when they got out there, they would have to face the realities of the business world when they got there. But, as I said before, the specialized areas—it’s awfully hard to be all things to all people all of the time. But I’m happy to see the way that the program has developed. They have some good faculty.
LD: When did you retire?
MM: Four years ago.
LD: [inaudible] And you were almost there twenty years?
MM: Yes.
LD: What changes did you see in the student body over that twenty year period or, in fact, going back to when you were an undergraduate apart from the obvious addition of males? Did you see any differences in expectation on the part of students?
MM: Oh, I think that the kids that come to college these days are a lot smarter than we were. I came from a small town, a small high school.
LD: Nobody says that, but I’m interested to hear you say that.
MM: [laughter] Oh yes. I was so green and so dumb. These kids know a lot more these days before they ever get to college.
LD: What about their expectations? Do you think they expect something different from their college education now?
MM: Oh, I’m sure they did. We just swallowed anything that anybody put out. These kids, they have much more a notion as to what they want and much higher demands.
LD: They demand more professionally—that they be more capable professionally when they graduate?
MM: Yes, oh yes. Well, I mean there is television, and they’ve traveled, and they’ve got more money to spend, and their whole world is a little more urbanized, but, heavens, I came from a little town about as far back in the hills as you can get, and I’d never been 10
anywhere or seen anything or done anything.
LD: Tell me something about your memories of UNCG in the late ’30s? I want to know something about what that was like.
MM: Well, you asking about the ’30s. That seems like another incarnation. I can hardly remember back that far. I don’t know, what do you want to know?
LD: What was Greensboro like when you first came? Did it seem like a big city, coming from a small town in the mountains?
MM: Well, I think it was more of a city then because you would get on the bus and go downtown, and you were downtown and there were stores and theaters. There was something to do. You get on a bus and go downtown now, it looks bombed or else now they’re coming in with all of these high-rises. But I don’t know of anybody that goes downtown anymore. So, yes, it was the bigger city then, than now because my world was circumscribed by the campus and by where I could walk and to get on the bus and go downtown. Sometimes you even walked downtown. But I don’t know.
LD: You were here when the war [World War II, 1939-1945 global conflict]—you were still here when the war started, weren’t you?
MM: I remember that when I was a freshman in [Professor] Vera Largent’s history class, that Mein Kampf [autobiographical manifesto by Nazi leader, Adolph Hitler] had just been published, and she gave you that book to report on in class, so it was a time—that would in 1910. Let’s see—1937 is when I came, graduated in ’41, so things were—
LD: —heating up [inaudible]. Wouldn’t it have been to the following December when Pearl Harbor was attacked? So you graduated in June of ’41?
MM: Yes.
LD: And that was the following year. I understand that there was a base—there was a camp in Greensboro, but was that not here before you got here?
MM: That was mostly after I left. I was teaching in High Point [North Carolina] while that base was here, and we used to see a lot of the soldiers over there. But no, there was not that much of war activity going on. We hadn’t entered the war.
LD: What do you remember of domestic living in the dormitory while you were here? Were there a lot of rules and restrictions?
MM: Oh, yes. [laughs] It was a totally different world. You had to sign in and out. Yes, they had to know where you were all of the time. They were very strict. You—as a freshman, I can remember that you had “closed study,” and from 7:30 ’til 10 or 10:30 [pm], I guess, you had to be in your room studying or in the library studying. And [pause] I don’t know, 11
it was a totally different world. You could never in this wide world ever subject the kids these days to that kind of restrictions.
LD: Were there housemothers?
MM: Oh yes. Oh yes.
LD: And they took a very active interest in—
MM: Oh, yes. I can remember Katherine Taylor [Class of 1928, Dean of Women, Dean of Students, Dean of Student Services, Director of Elliott Hall] trouncing me because she saw me downtown without a hat and gloves. And that was—I’d committed the uncommittable.
LD: I knew about the gloves, but I didn’t know about the hats. Well, I imagine no pants anywhere?
MM: Oh, heavens no! That was before pants were invented. Nobody would have ever thought about—
LD: How come like, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford [movie stars] were wearing pants in those days?
MM: [laughs] They hadn’t been invented here though. What you wore were a trench coat and dirty saddle shoes. It would never do to have them clean. If you got a new pair, you had to put—scruff them up. And my recollection of the dining hall was—the food was, I thought, wonderful. You’d get the smell of that bakery. It just overwhelmed that whole end of the campus when they took the bread out. I guess when they took the bread out of the oven, they had this wonderful bakery and all of these wonderful coffeecakes and things that. There were better cooks than my mother was [laughs]. I knew that.
But I guess another vivid memory is that we had compulsory chapel. Every Tuesday, I think. Was it at twelve o’clock [noon] or something? And all 3,000 of us got into Aycock Auditorium. And those were pretty wonderful programs. You had wonderful speakers and music, and all sorts of admonitions. And [Chancellor] Walter Clinton Jackson was the head honcho at that time. He was a marvelous man. And everybody had assigned seats. Somebody checked to see that everybody was in their seat at the right time. You were allowed so many cuts, and you didn’t cut. That was before Walker Avenue was closed off, and I can remember that we’d stop traffic for so many minutes coming out of chapel to get to the dining hall. We always had meals served at the tables then. You didn’t go through the cafeteria line; you had to get back and be seated and served. I can remember the white tablecloths and the candles and the—oh, those dinners—.
We had the wonderful concert lecture series. It was much better then than it is now. And I think it was because everybody was required to go. [laughs] Now you can’t—you can charge the kids for it, but you can’t make them go. They don’t have anything like the good lectures that we had, just outstanding people from all phases of intellectual life. 12
But when we would have a concert, everybody had to wear a long dress, and we had a formal meal in the dining room with candles and everything. It could be pouring the rain or snow, sleet, hail, whatever, but you had to go dragging out in that dumb long dress. Sometimes if the weather was too bad, we’d have to dress for dinner, and then we’d go home and change into something else to go to the concert. But not a man around, you know.
LD: Just this long parade of women in long dresses on their way to the Aycock Auditorium?
MM: Oh, yes. They tried to teach us how to be ladies.
LD: Did they succeed?
MM: I don’t know. [laughs] They perhaps did.
LD: Which of your professors do you remember? You mentioned Vera?
MM: Vera Largent. She was wonderful, and Miss [Bernice] Draper.
LD: In the same department?
MM: In history. And another one was Dr. [Marc] Friedlaender in English. [pause] And Dr. [Archie] Shaftesbury in biology. He loved to scare the freshmen. He was a very tall and imposing man. I was a sophomore when I took biology, so I was not as easily intimidated, but he used to rather curdle the air with his language. And, of course, we were not accustomed to strong language of any sort. But there was one story—I don’t know how true it was, but he told one little freshman to “Go to the devil,” and she walked up in front of the class and says, “Well, here I am.” [laughter]
LD: I guess that not something you [inaudible]
[End Side A—Begin Side B]
MM: [George] Pinky Thompson [music faculty] directed the choir, and that was a highlight for me because here you were singing with all the hundred or more other people. It was just a lot of fun. And later on I was glee club, and there’s Mrs. and Mr. [Paul] Oncley. And I guess I adored Mrs. [Alma Lissow] Oncley because she was my piano teacher and that’s when I—she was the first really excellent piano teacher I had ever had. [pause] It’s hard to remember some of these others.
LD: I think you’re doing a very good job. I don’t know if I could name that many of my college professors. [laughs] I can remember the classes very distinctly, but I don’t remember all their names.
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MM: It’s funny how time erases some of these things. It kind of levels things off.
LD: So the undergraduate [inaudible] was—
MM: I guess Katherine Taylor was another very outstanding teacher. I thought she was a wonderful teacher. I had her for French, two years of French. And that was a very memorable experience. She later became one of the resident counselors, and it was in that capacity she dressed me down for not wearing a hat and gloves uptown.
LD: The undergraduate body, the size of the undergraduate body, was it 3,000 at the time?
MM: About that time. Yes.
LD: What programs—what graduate programs were there? Was that the entire size of UNCG? Woman’s College, was three thousand period?
MM: Yes.
LD: So, it was good bit smaller then, and I imagine much more intimate and personal.
MM: Much more personal. Much more intimate. And I think that the teachers were there to teach. They were not there to do research and publication and to become nationally known. They were there as college teachers.
LD: Do you think that’s a better idea?
MM: Well, I think that there’s a place for everything, and I think that the conflict comes when you expect everybody to be everything. I think it would be ideal if you would let the wonderful teachers teach and be recognized for outstanding teaching, rather than trying to force everybody into the same mold and saying that everybody has to be an outstanding scholar; everybody has to get original research, peer reviewed and published in scholarly journals. I don’t think that everybody can do everything equally well. And I think that there are some people who should be scholars and who have absolutely no business being put near a student.
LD: I agree with you. What would you—is there anything else you would like to put on the record or add to the—? These will be in the archives of the library in perpetuity.
MM: I don’t think I have any more perpetuity to add. [laughs]
LD: Nothing more that you want to make sure that you give to posterity?
MM: Well, I’ll probably think of something next week.
LD: I’ve enjoyed the interview, and thank you very much.
14
[recording paused]
LD: This interview is not yet over. [laughs] Miss Miller, can you tell me something about your feelings about your preparation as a home economics major when you graduated in 1941?
MM: Well, I guess it goes back to how naive I was when I came to college. I was not mature enough to be self-directed. I was a nice little girl that did what everybody told me to do. And I fit the bill; everybody thought I was such a nice little girl, but I should have never taken home economics. I was not temperamentally suited for it, and I hated it. But it became one of those things. Because it was hard, I was determined that it was not going to let it get me down. So I stayed with it, even though many of my teachers tried to persuade me to transfer, that I should have been a music major. But I think I was so intimidated by the music faculty, whose philosophy was: this is a tough field to make a living in, and if you could be discouraged, you should be discouraged, and they did everything they could to discourage me. Pinky Thompson was the one, primarily, with whom I spoke. But anyway when I got out, I was the wrong person to ever try to teach high school. And I stayed with that far longer, but I didn’t know anything else to do. I was in a real bind, and when I told Mrs. [Margaret Messenger] Edwards, who was the head of the—she was the chairman of the Department of Home Economics at that time, that I was going to go back to college and study music, she sort of picked me up by the scruff of the neck and said, “You are going to get a master’s degree.” So I did what I was told. I got a master’s degree. But I still couldn’t do anything. I was not prepared to go into a university or a college anywhere and teach a damned thing. It was just a very shallow preparation for anything.
And I think that the great struggle of my life has been to get myself educated. I had—after I got my master’s degree here and did some college teaching in Oklahoma and Connecticut, I thought, “Well, if I go to Cornell, then I’ll get something there that will be useful.” And it turned out that Cornell was not an awful lot better. They had a program—a PhD program in housing and design. And I thought that this would help me get into the design field, which is where I wanted to be. But it turned out that their faculty had had this program ran down their throats. None of them had a PhD. None of them had ever been through that mill, and I think they were rather intimidated by it and resentful of it. And then here I was, still this struggling, little naive backwoods girl from the hills of North Carolina without an awful lot of background. And it was not a good experience. I found that all I was getting was courses in housing, and I did not want to be a housing research person; I wanted to get into design.
LD: What did housing entail?
MM: Well, the man who was in charge of that was an economist. So, to him, housing was housing economics.
LD: As in providing housing for people?
MM: No. No. He said, “This is not design. I don’t know anything about design, and that’s just 15
half of it, I don’t want to know anything about design.” [laughs] But the whole financial base and the economic base of cities and the role of government and the banking industry and the, you know, economic factors that impinge on housing. So I stayed with that, and they finally took the design part of the PhD in housing and design—became a PhD in housing. And I thought, “Well, that won’t make much difference, if I go ahead and finish this doctorate.” But after I had been away from Cornell and went back, I discovered that the faculty person with whom I had had most of my housing courses had been let go, and they wouldn’t recognize, even in that department, the coursework, that I had in that department. So I really had to start from scratch again. And again, being a person that doesn’t like to admit defeat, I stayed with it until I had passed all of my exams, German qualifyings, written finals, had all the material for a dissertation collected, and I dropped it. [laughs] I didn’t care if I ever got a PhD. But, when I got down to New York and got into that other program and I had so much fun with it, and they thought I was smart down there. And that’s how I got my doctorate because it was fun, not because of any other reason.
LD: Yes. That sounds like the right way to do it. I am going to have to end the interview now, I’m afraid. Thank you very much.
[End of Interview]