Oral history interview with Sarah "Sally" M. Robinson, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Sarah M. “Sally” Robinson
INTERVIEWER: William Link
DATE: March 13, 1990
[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
WL: I'd like to start by asking you to tell me some first impressions you might have had when you
first, the first time you arrived at the campus here at Woman's College of [the University of]
North Carolina. What things stood out to you? What things impressed you? What things
didn't impress you?
SR: Let's start as coming as a student.
WL: Okay.
SR: Having been on the campus once as a high school student and being impressed with the
people—the seriousness of purpose plus a sense of organization—at the same time an
attractive place, that was the feeling. When I came back as a student, I had been many days
on a bus ride. It was August, no, September. It was hot. And—
WL: September 1957?
SR: September 1957. It was hot, and not one place on the campus in those days was air
conditioned. People were cordial about this and good natured. But it is a shock to a person
whose bloodstream has been—has grown up in Yankee land. And in my case, I, of course,
spent most of my life in the West and was coming directly from the Midwest here.
The good nature and a sense of civility impressed me through the ranks of people.
Adults were courteous to young people. The vast majority of people here were
undergraduate students in the traditional Southern [unclear] with gathering, by then, you
know, a minority, but a visible minority, of graduate students in education and the fine arts,
the MFA program—dance, writing, art, music, and theater.
And we knew that immediately as undergraduates. They probably were counselors in
our dormitories. The people who were hired for managers or counselors were at that time
often second-year students in the MFA or in MS or in MEd programs. The physical
education program was very strong. The music program was one of the better [unclear]—
Home economics and all that’s related to the arts—even to the undergraduates
were—there was an awareness that it was primarily an undergraduate place and one in which
our core education was central. But in the programs and the people that I interacted with
daily there was a sense of enterprise and of cordiality and civility and differences in the level
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of analysis expected on the part of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty. People were
allowed to be at whatever level they were. But there was that constant kind of social shaping
of the appropriateness of content and pushing forward for more answers or challenging
questions and kind of an intellectual interaction. [dog barking]
WL: Was this civility something that came from faculty to students, or was it from student to
student, or maybe both?
SR: Oh, I think it was so clearly soc[ial]—as a part of the social scene here. It was certainly
modeled by faculty to other faculty, and faculty to students, faculty with their graduate
students and graduate students on to undergraduates. And this sort of social complex in
which one—we knew other students of other majors by living together. It was some ninety-something
percent of the campus were living in the dormitories—fourteen halls, each were
either faculty or graduate student counselors—faculty might be half time in another area and
half time in residence life, so that the notion of community was intriguing, even for its time.
And it might have been unusual in its time, of graduate students and faculty and
undergraduate students quickly being caught up into a set of social rules and also idea about
the academic life that permeated dormitory living as well as the library and the Elliott
Center—then it was called Elliott Hall—the ways we were together on campus. There were
little—I'm sure there was a handbook of some kind. Today we have a student handbook.
Then the student handbook— it was much smaller and the rules were many fewer, but they
were strictly enforced.
One of the things that impressed me was the idea that the students' social framework,
as well as things like the honor policy and the norms for library building use and so on, were
so institutionalized that the students wrote tests to give the incoming freshmen. At the end of
the first week of school everybody knew the house rules of their dormitory, the social rules
of the campus and the sanctions relating both to social regulations and honor policy and
academic regulations and were rudimentarily capable in parliamentary procedure—the idea
that this is a very democratic environment in which individual [unclear] systems help us get
there—civil social systems help us get there was very strong.
There were—today we'd probably call them clichés—but kind of slogans of, "It's
people, not systems," "We're important, we're together." All that would have been very
clearly coming through in the dormitory life together. But also, on the other side of that, was
the notion of what had been through the years referred to as responsible freedom was really
the cry of, you know, the organizing principle around the social life of the campus and the
way in which these interacted with each other.
Halls were organized into committees of responsibility and dormitories. Being
very—one of the things that I missed, actually, when I came back to campus was that we
were moving towards social regulations being imposed by the faculty and other EPA
[exempt from the personnel act] staff rather than monitoring as much by students as in my
day. Certainly the honor code was in the hands of the students with one faculty advisor and
very strictly believed and kept. It was kind of an innocent era.
And the notion of faculty government was—I mean, the student government was
very active. And one was expected to know about it and keep up with what was going on in
it. If you had an issue, take your issue to where it went in a very active kind of sense. This
doesn't mean everybody did. But the student social norm for governing ourselves socially
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and even participating on curriculum committees at the departmental level.
Every curriculum—every department—was expected to have a student curriculum
committee, which was to meet without faculty interference at least once a year and make
recommendations to the faculty council about the—to the department about the curriculum
of that department. And the department was then expected to seriously interact with the
students about the recommendations that came forth.
WL: So you had a fairly elaborate committee structure for students that went down to kind of the
dormitory level?
SR: It went down to the dormitory level; it went down through the academic departments level,
and it cut different ways. It could be across campus with a major emphasis, such as
publication, or it might be within a dormitory for issues having to do with the matters of—
we used to call them "faculty/student teas"—you know, the intellectual and social life of the
dorm itself.
And then it also cut along the lines, especially, in the professional schools—I don't
know how, quite, it worked in the college—of active participation in the enterprise of the
work of the department. I'm kind of rambling about that, but you see what I'm getting at?
I think when I first came I was so struck by meeting a faculty and graduate student
population that was close to us. That wasn't my idea of what going to university would be
like, and, indeed, if it wasn't, I was going to quit college. So it was the collegial, living-in,
residential atmosphere and all the kind of network of relationships that pertained to that.
We had no cars. Seniors and senior people studying social work, seniors on student
teaching and seniors doing—on social work assignments and other kinds of internships—
had automobiles. Nobody else had an automobile except graduate students and faculty. The
life of the campus was very network, much networking.
There was a good attempt, I think, by senior administrators and faculty to then bring
things to us that we otherwise wouldn't get to. Remember, this was before the Greensboro
Coliseum, before the Charlotte Coliseum, before the Dean Dome [Dean E. Smith Center,
sports arena at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill].
I remember a little snippet from introduction to the campus that in 1924 when it was
built, Aycock Auditorium was the largest public meeting facility in the state of North
Carolina. We could all still fit in Aycock Auditorium when I was an undergraduate student,
and so things were brought to us in the sense of very fine dance—for example Jose Limon,
Martha Graham, [Alwin] Nikolai, Erick Hawkins—people we couldn't afford today
probably.
WL: But these people would be on tour? They would come—
SR: Exactly.
WL: —because of the large facility?
SR: The large facility, good facility, and the connections that our dance faculty person, Virginia
Grove Moomaw, at that time, had with the greater world of dance. One had on some level—
and this is a reflection of later years—an awareness that faculty members, while they might
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be somewhat isolated here from the flow of being at the University of Georgia or [University
of] Notre Dame or [University of] Virginia or [University of] Wisconsin, that faculty
members individually and collectively within their academic organizations maintained a
network with the greater world.
So that when we had the Suez crisis [In 1956 Egyptian President Nasser nationalized
the Suez Canal.], we had Lenoir Wright, my history professor, going off to Washington [DC]
to some meeting about the Suez crisis and coming back and telling us about it, the example
of the dance faculty maintaining their network, the example of individual members of the
music faculty being persuasive and convincing about having a particular person come for
what was the university concert lecture series—was an intriguing experience because for its
size there was a great deal here.
Solidarity with the past was very strong. I was here in the time when we didn't
imagine what was next. We never guessed we would become coed any more than people
guessed we would have the Berlin Wall and the Vietnam War and, you know, other later
issues of the sixties. It was a time of kind of catching breath and consolidating. And people
were more or less kind of complacent about the social rules we surrounded ourselves with
and the diplomatic and parliamentary forms that we used with each other.
On some level we probably accepted a certain level of chauvinism about the kinds of
roles that we would take. You know it was—you've heard this saying attributed to Charles
Duncan McIver, I think it's not true—"Educate a woman, and you educate a family." That
was— the assumption was that every woman here would probably raise a family, and some
would do other things.
It was also true of that era, according to Stan Jones [vice chancellor for academic
affairs] at a much later time, that in that late fifties period ’til the early sixties, a very high
percentage of graduating seniors later went on to the top twenty-five distinctive graduate
schools, a fact that when I returned in 1976 Stan was always fond of quoting. But, you know,
we haven't improved that much, becoming the place that we are now. But at that late fifties
and early sixties era when many of us were beginning to look beyond the obvious choices for
graduate school—that places like [University of California-]Berkeley and Wisconsin, the
University of Texas and Virginia and Penn[sylvania] State [University] were going to be
open to us if we came up with the appropriate qualifications and a sense of academic
discipline.
So that when you say—what impressed me, I think, was the quick immersion for me,
within a semester, within that first freshman semester year, of changing my rather
amorphous ideas about what was going to college and reorienting it toward the expectation
that I would probably not only go to college but I would probably go to graduate school. And
it was a matter of in what discipline, and what should I study and how might faculty advice
about my talents be brought to bear on the decisions [unclear].
WL: I'm interested in the—
SR: Maybe longer than you need—
WL: No, that's fine. I'm interested in the—this self-governing system of—self-regulating system
of behavior.
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SR: Right.
WL: And I'm wondering how it was enforced, how it was violated?
SR: That's real interesting. In the nine—I think I know part of the answer. I mean, I think—well,
I can tell you the answer that was always told to us. In the late 1930s and early 1940s—you
know the name Harriet Elliott [dean of women]. Miss Elliott had the idea that women could
regulate themselves, given—and if one was going to learn behaviors of citizenship, you
learned them by doing them. She brought the ideal of student government at a very high
level of student accountability to this campus.
I'm not quite sure when—maybe in the thirties, maybe in the forties. And the person
who followed her in the dean of student role [unclear] assume it was Katherine Taylor [Class
of 1928, dean of students], and Miss Taylor maintained that ideal and helped to keep it alive.
And [she] chose for the people given leadership, in the dormitories in particular, individuals
who subscribed to that and who she could either educate to the idea or felt had the spirit of
responsible, educational activities into the—it started, I'm sure, in the idea of the dormitory.
But it was complemented in—[Richard] Bardolph [history faculty] might be able to
give us a better idea about this—complemented in and supported in the realm of the
academic as well, so that we had the feeling that the—as students in my time—that the
faculty respected our student government regulations that had to do with social regulations.
And the faculty respected that we thought this wasn't only right for the dorms and now on
the campus, but regulated activity in the classroom as well. It was a mutually supportive
notion.
WL: And the behavior in dormitories was connected to the behavior in the classroom?
SR: Yes indeed.
WL: Yeah. Both regulated by students as well as—
SR: And monitored, yes. And the monitoring, it was very strongly socializing. You almost have
to—it's a member of a inner circle. It was the kind of a sorority function without sororities
that UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro] had in that day. The standards
of behavior, some of them were frivolous but the core idea was not frivolous. The core idea
was moving away from being responsible to parents to being responsible to parents and
social norm of the group and the social norm of the administration.
WL: What would happen if one broke the rules, let's say, broke curfew or—?
SR: Oh, it was very elaborate. It was an elaborate system of points of various kinds, which the
students kept track of through their own judicial committees in the hall. And when a certain
point was reached, then it was a campus-wide judicial action. And the sanctions were very
clear and clearly enforced and consistently enforced.
I've heard faculty colleagues who are now retired say that probably the students were
more consistent and perhaps more conservative than if those same regulations had been
brought to faculty. Students were sensitive to mitigating circumstances. But if you came
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through a locked door and you—came through a locked door, you went to the hall judicial
board, and maybe you were on campus for a week or not permitted to do some privilege—
not enough to interfere with your academic progress, enough to inconvenience you
socially—having to do with leaving campus or where you could go on campus that wasn't
strictly academic.
One of my—I don't want this quoted, but one of my classmates, now deceased, broke
the alcohol policy. And the student group chose—these were all—had to be sort of endorsed
by Dean Taylor or the chancellor or both if they were quite severe—and broke the alcohol
policy in the time that was between sessions, but under the governance of a student group.
And the student group, acting on that, voted that she should not leave campus for a semester,
and Dean Taylor carried it out and whoever the chancellor at the time was. She accepted it,
went along with it. Later in her life said she wished she'd paid attention to that, the signal that
was sent. It would have been helpful for her own health reasons later on.
WL: What would be the worst sort of—that would be pretty severe?
SR: Oh, worst was “Send them home.”
WL: And so you could expel them?
SR: Yeah, yeah. Not without—suspension or expulsion we could recommend but couldn't
enforce. So that the university administration had to be convinced that the student sanction
was appropriate.
WL: What about cheating? Was that also student—had an honor policy?
SR: Yes. The honor policy was basically unchanged until early seventies. And it worked. And it
was based on the idea of following the regulations of the honor policy including misuse of
library material and on challenging the individual, the offending individual.
WL: You had an accuser?
SR: An accuser.
WL: A student?
SR: Yes. And the accuser could also be a faculty member if only a faculty member would be in a
position to know, for example, reading two essays that were essentially the same, or
plagiarizing or whatever. But the faculty member then dropped that—let's say it was a
plagiarizing case—to the student governing committee, saying—it was called the honor
court or the honor board. And the faculty member made his or her case, and the individual
defended themselves or answered the charges.
And the board—of about thirteen persons and one faculty advisor—adjudicated that.
That was probably—feelings vary, but that was probably one of the most important learning
experiences was that honor among colleagues, honor among academics as based on this code
of conduct which we have all endorsed.
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WL: Mutual trust.
SR: Mutual trust, yeah. And—which one knew about when accepting the application, I mean,
when applying to UNCG and accepted to come. And those were the days in which the
regulations were accepted as a part of deciding to come to UNCG, then you accepted the set
of regulations surrounding it. And the one side was the student social life, which was more
tolerant, and the other side was just the academic expectations, which were hard and
uncompromising and were very largely accepted.
I mean—it worked because of the weight of student opinion. It also worked because
the faculty helped to—I'm going to come back to the graduate student population again—so
that the faculty inculcated this same notion among the graduate students because they were
teaching as TAs [teaching assistants] or research assistants, or they only worked [unclear] to
their major professors—the notion that we operated as a code of honored scholars here was
in force throughout.
WL: This sort of policy—infractions of the honor policy were penalized by what? [unclear]
SR: Oh, I can't even remember.
WL: It wasn't necessarily expulsion [unclear]. They had flexibility [unclear].
SR: There was flexibility [unclear].
WL: —recommended to the administration, and the administration would act based on—
SR: I think—and as I say, I can't remember. I didn't serve on the honor board. There were
probably recommendations back to the faculty about—similar to the set of codes that we
have now about lowering of grades or allowing to do the work over. It wasn't so different
from what we have now. Only that it was,—there were many fewer stages in the challenge
and many fewer reviews by administrators in the process—room, I thought, for honest
difference of opinion on the part of the student and the faculty member.
And I would think, I mean I would just sort of guess that it was—surprising to
faculty too—someone to be on your faculty hear—that so large a role of hearing the process
and following through would be in the hands of the students with the advice of faculty
members.
WL: This sort of system that you've just described—very interesting system of social and
academic self-regulation—would, I imagine, be more possible in a homogenous academic
community than it would in a very diverse academic community. And yet, Woman's College
was also relatively diverse, wasn’t it? You had people from different places, [unclear]—
SR: Well, we were all women of the late fifties. Very many of us, maybe sixty or more percent,
the first time to go to college from our families. If this is what college rules were, many of us
were into it and accepting it before we quite knew. I think the homogeneity of being all
female had something to do with it—being predominately white and middle class and
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[unclear] upper-lower class, buying into a system that was elite and was [unclear]—[dog
barking].
The women who were black and new when I was a student and international students
were few in number—very elite, well selected and sharing the same sort of cultural norms
about moving into academic and educational roles. So regardless of geographic distribution,
ethnic heritage, racial background, I think we—all of that put in the pot—we were more
alike than different, in my opinion, for our goal, which was to become the educated woman
in one's family.
Now maybe 25 percent of the people—everybody had al[ways]—women had always
come to the Woman's College, or there was kind of a network in the town or in the family, or
among the teachers one had had in school, or the guidance counselors, or your physician—
whatever. But the vast majority of people were here on a kind of unspoken path of
educational mobility.
WL: But they came into a community that had a very strong esteem.
SR: Indeed. The ethos—oh, we had wonderful slogans, you know, "Enter to leave—enter to
leave, leave to serve." If you—one of the marvelous things you might do is to get somebody
to show you all the banners of the classes from the twenties, thirties, forties—the ones that
haven't completely collapsed—the fifties and on into the beginning of the sixties, that—the
banners of the class mottoes tell the ethos of the place.
WL: Each class had a motto?
SR: Each class had a motto. Each class had a song. We sang the university alma mater probably
once a week, if not twice a week. People really lived it. The notion of the motto of the
university being one word, “service” was indeed one of the norms [unclear].
WL: Would you sing it in chapel?
SR: Yes. I think the [unclear] chapel may have been going out as I was came in. We used to call
them mass meetings. And that was when everybody assembled in Aycock [Auditorium].
And probably once a month, it might even have been called chapel and had a more
somber—and when we had, for example, the Phi Beta Kappa lecture in which our classmates
were being inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, that was a mass meeting or a chapel. Everybody
was there to hear [unclear] address the Phi Beta Kappas. Now, not everyone was eligible,
because this campus's chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was limited to the people in the BA degree.
But everybody—
WL: Liberal arts?
SR: Well, no, not only liberal arts—I mean, there can be a chemist who would warrant that, but if
their degree is BS, they're not eligible for the Phi Beta Kappa chapter. This was a point of
some contention, as you can guess.
WL: In those days it was only BA?
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SR: Yes. And you might check. It may still only be a person following the BA—
WL: Well, it's not. I'm in the chapter here, and it's liberal. It has to be liberal—the science classes
count as liberal apparently.
SR: Well, see if the science curricula, in fact, do. It'd be a fun thing to check up on—to see when
and if that ever changed.
WL: Where would the banners appear? Would they appear at the mass meetings?
SR: Oh, they would be carried at the mass meeting. And they might be—certainly they were
carried at times like, things called Class Day—it was the end of the year—and certain special
[unclear] mass meetings held once a month or a couple a times a semester. And the
cheerleader of your class would get up and be the cheerleader of your song. It was very—
WL: Cheerleaders would direct the singing of the class song?
SR: Yes, the class song, yeah.
WL: What kind of class—were these songs the original songs?
SR: Oh yes.
WL: Someone would compose?
SR: Someone would compose them and make up the poetry and the lyrics.
WL: And everybody memorized them?
SR: And everyone memorized it and sang it. Yes, you—a goal of the freshman class was to be
able to do this by, oh, I don't know, going away at Thanksgiving, I suppose. Get your class—
the structure of your class government structure organized in such a way that you had a
cheerleader, and you had officers and you had everyone knowing your class song and being
able to sing it. And of course the seniors' songs were better than the freshmen's and sung
better than the freshmen's song, and this happened every year.
WL: But that would reinforce and reemphasize the team concept and the self regulations?
SR: Was very affiliative, very affiliative—and one of the reasons probably because the class
structure was so strong—the notion of allegiance to one's class. And oh, we wore—in each
of four years—in a four-year cycle were colors that were assigned to your class, so that if my
class was classed for blue and white, in the class following me they were going to be gray or
lavender, and the class before that would be green, and the class before that would be red,
you know, the cycling through of the class colors.
The students wore nice looking light wool blazers in the class colors with an emblem
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on the pocket that was of their year. And one of the hardest things for students who fell off
the academic calendar was that they were most aggrieved about not being able to graduate
with their class.
WL: Because of the strong identification?
SR: Yeah, the identification with class was—and part of the reason I think that while there was a
principle, a kind of populist principle of disapproving of sororities. I think there was some
fear that sororities based on some other basis than class year or dormitory hall or academic
program or other ways we already had of affiliating would be divisive and would somehow
break down the sense of campus community. And that they're probably fairly good, you
know, wise assumptions.
It was a place in which there were obvious differences in class background based on
clothes and speech and how you went home for vacation. And some of those things that are
true for students with the least means were very much more noticeable than those of us in the
sort of middle class. We didn't have what we wanted then—to have a campus job to make
for the extras [unclear] extras. But there was not as much emphasis put on that as might have
been if we had the whole sorority function there at that time.
WL: Were the debating societies in existence?
SR: No, I was in the interim period between those debating—you know, when people were
automatically put in the debating society and when sororities and fraternities came to the
campus at a later time. The structure of the dormitory life was very central.
You asked about special people. It's clear to me that people that were—partly
because I was here all the time except for going home Christmas and at the end of the year—
people who were also here all the time are very memorable individuals.
Katherine Taylor—I worked in Miss Taylor's office as a work-study student from the
first year—first semester from freshman year, every semester thereafter. I learned more
about the organization of the campus and the goals of the university—in that day, college—
how faculty relate to each other and what's in and what's not in in the way of the norms of
professional behavior, of course, from being a fly on the wall in that office than I did in any
course in organization and administration one ever takes, or student teaching, or, you know,
some of those kinds of things. I ended up being a faculty member, putting on a skirt and
wearing hose and going to my work-study job every day.
WL: What did Dean Taylor—what sort of struck you about Dean Taylor?
SR: Well, she was the dean of students, and she was a very strong presence on campus as the sort
of academic leader of these folks who ran the residence halls—the counselors who ran the
residence halls. She was a full professor of French as well, and in my day was probably only
teaching French periodically because she had a full-time administrative job.
But she brought a sense of style to the campus that was very special. She had come
here to the campus as a student herself from somewhere near Salisbury in the twenties. She
stayed and taught on the faculty. In World War II she went away to become one of the first
women officers in the Navy, and then came back. And when I knew her she had traveled a
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little, but other than that had really devoted a lot of attention to making the campus aware—
be aware of the world as well as continue functioning in a sense of a responsible adult
student development.
She had a wonderful phrase. When people would get very focused in on some
personal issue, she would say, "My dear, I think it would be useful if we could all remember
that the sun does not rise over the Music Building and set over the golf course.” [laughs]
Open up the world. Some of her phrases about, “It pays to broaden your horizons,” the sense
of, “Do go away. Don't become so enchanted with the way we do it here that there is no
other way of doing it.”
She was quick, I think, to spot talent and to urge people with that talent to go ahead
and try for that [J. William] Fulbright [Scholarship, international exchange for educators,
scholars, graduate students and professionals]. "Do go on that study tour to France." "Do,"
you know, "break out of the mold," if one asked her opinion.
We had in that day then, too, rather than some area of course building, people called
the class chairmen. And the class chairmen took the place of what is now academic advising.
Class chairmen might be applying from a quarter time to a half time from their academic
department.
WL: A faculty?
SR: Faculty member. And there were four of them, one for each class, and there may be people
like Laura Anderton [biology faculty], (probably Dr. Bardolph took his turn as a class
chairman), someone from education. someone else from the science area and someone from
what we now think of as the professional schools—from music or home economics—and
from the department of physical education.
And that individual—in the case of my class, that was a wonderful historian named
Bernice Draper. She was the person who followed your academic record through four years.
There were only some three hundred that was in my class, I believe, finishing. And the
things that required exemptions—you went to see your advisor and probably your
department head and then on to Miss Draper to see if it could be arranged with the class
chairman so—or taken to the appropriate faculty committee—faculty academic regulations
or academic policies, whatever, so that the faculty chairman of the class was
intermed[iary]—was the interface that you had with the rules in the catalog.
Rules were very seldom set aside, so that people had to really be very careful about
the exemptions they asked for. It wasn't that you couldn't make them. It was just that it
probably wouldn't be granted unless there was a very good reason that was extenuating—if
the circumstances were truly there to make an exception.
WL: Would you have an academic advisor as well as the class chairman?
SR: Oh yeah, almost on the same pattern that we have now in that you're given an academic
advisor in the department who is following your program in your department, but there's
someone in academic advising who is auditing all of this. And I think part of that is the
artifact of the idea that there were Laura Andertons and Bernice Drapers and Dick Bardolphs
and others in the academic advising office.
It was made more manageable, I'm sure, because we all followed the same
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curriculum for the first two years with very few exceptions. Those of us in music and art and
physical education and home economics had work, some of it non-credit, beyond the
required curriculum. But it was a very standard curriculum.
The example of getting an exception to a rule would come, for example, to the matter
of coming in with a foreign language we don't teach here. Suppose someone came with
Chinese and wanted to have their two years of Chinese take the place of the modern
European language requirement—that was the kind of thing [unclear] to the class chairman
and then adjudicated in some way, probably approved in that rather extreme case.
WL: What were the fa[culty]—how would you describe the faculty? I mean, there must have been
great diversity?
SR: There was great diversity of faculty. I thought as a student, and possibly I'm encouraged in
this part here, because Miss Taylor kind of ooh’d and aah’d about what wonderful faculty I
had in my first year, getting started in a conversation that she and I had in interviewing me to
come into her office to work. My biology professor was Laura Anderton, who recently
retired emeritus faculty in biology. The history professor was Len[oir] Wright, one of the
distinguished people in history. A very fine man in French who went on to be—Monsieur
[William] Felt.
You might know Monsieur Felt, by the way, College of Arts and Sciences faculty. At
that time he was experimenting with the kind of whole language way of teaching French. I
was studying in the music department with Sara Holroyd, in English with a man who was
recently back from a Fulbright, who was a Faulkner scholar. So that my introduction as a
freshman was the ideal that the chancellor talks about—that you have the best and most ideal
faculty teaching the freshman courses.
Classes were not larger than twenty-five. The full-time faculty—we had no TAs,
except perhaps in music and home economics, and there might have been some in art, but we
didn't really realize that, and physical education. The faculty were fully qualified to be doing
what they were doing.
They were full time immersed in their research and writing and scholarship. We were
very much aware—I know this isn't an artifact of later days—very much aware of the writing
activity of the people we were studying with, somehow not because of what they said in
class or how they handled material in class, but, once again, that may speak of information
network of the—perhaps it was featured in The Carolinian when Richard Current [history
faculty] wrote still another book on his period in Civil War history.
The pride of the place was just very, very strong. In my class—less than three
hundred graduates—four people earned Fulbrights or distinguished fellowships of other
kinds, like Woodrow Wilsons [national fellowships] [unclear] as we left, one in music, two
in history—I mean, you see how lively the detail is—one in psychology.
WL: Was there a high attrition rate? In other words, what you've described, what you're implying,
what certainly I've heard from other people, the curriculum was very rigorous, very
demanding, and yet a large group of—percentage of students were coming from families that
had never had college—
SR: Right. And coming from high schools that have had [unclear] perhaps their share over the
13
years.
WL: How well did the students hold up in this kind of—?
SR: That's a useful question to have real data. My impression was that—oh, let me tell you a
curriculum strategy that I think will help interpret the real, the numerical data. Almost every
course we took as freshmen was what was called a hyphenated course. In order to get credit
for either semester, you had to complete both semesters with a grade of, probably one of the
two grades having to be C.
So you're in these paired courses. You're in English 101-102, history 101-102, you
know, da-da-da-da-da. And the person in—might not be very sterling in the first semester
and be permitted to stay over to second semester to see if they could earn a C in these
courses.
If we look back in the, you know, the low level that our freshmen can stay in school
and be considered in good standing in the present catalog, it occurs to me from looking at
that, that this may be another one of those artifacts of another era in which the attrition at the
end of the first term wasn't very great for entering freshmen. The attrition at the end of
second term might have been quite high, so that many people were struggling but allowed to
struggle on in second semester and see if they could get their sea legs. Then they might have
come to summer school, and you would or wouldn't see them come back in their sophomore
year.
Now part of that's related to the fact that we lived in freshman dormitories and then
moved into upper class dormitories. So the sense of who you lost gets lost, and because you
didn't move on together and you're not aware of who the others are that are, you know, not
then. I can say that, say for my own class, that there were twenty-four freshman physical
education majors, and sixteen of those eventually graduated. Within ten years of
commencement, five had doctoral degrees.
WL: In physical education?
SR: In physical education or a related field, or dance or counseling, or whatever—
WL: [unclear]
SR: Yeah. It was—that academic standard of the total campus was reinforced very strongly by
the—when people say "Who was memorable in the department?" They're memorable to me
as members of the university faculty. And it's not a cop out to say every one, every person
teaching a physical education when I was here, had some reason to be a memorable person,
probably positive.
I must have been one of the original Pollyannas. I mean, I just thought this was a
wonderful place, and I wanted to get everything these people had to give. And they were
very giving without being smothering. They were very affiliative, some of them more
directly, some less directly. And they had a very good sense, as a faculty, of who to kind of
put a fence around early and who to let take their wandering creative ways. And I was the
one, one of the people they let wander to their boundaries and fall off and come back again.
14
WL: Most of the students in the program—was there a graduate orientation?
[End of Interview]