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2 40 188 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/9c7785a845311869cfa3e9230982d755.jpg ee45cb3daf65ddb9189468ee9d591e3e https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/f71d57ac659af55e3ca037490acbf1c7.mp3 049063cbe0cecdb29a4550a5b426c3ed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Nuesi, Chelsea Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Elvira Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Elvira Ramirez Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/18/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Elvira talked about her experience with racial and linguistic prejudice in Puerto Rico and in the United States. Language A language of the resource Spanish, English Class language Latinx Nuyoricans Prejudice Puerto Rico race https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/a29cee28316369a53c4847eb0c390ab7.jpg 05689b9a3157974c5b6bba595f93d46e https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/3ae6e456236033358e0607a638b5e450.mov 090298b5af9f87ede0effdeea0538580 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Marques, Allison Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Lauir Marques Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Lauir Marques Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/19/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Larry talked about how moving as a young boy affected how he views his own identity and others identity. Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource oral history Abstract A summary of the resource. This is an interview between a father and daughter, where they discuss his experience of moving from Brazil to the United States when he was still in grammar school. He moved in 1971, to Garfield, New Jersey with his mother and step-dad for the economic opportunity. They talk about his struggle of moving to a country without speaking or understanding the native language. He gained friends despite the language barrier and proved himself to his peers as someone who is intelligent. Since he moved at such a young age, his view of identity and nationality never became a central idea to how he defined himself or viewed others. He found himself transcending ethnic lines and able to connect with everyone, never finding the need to seek out those within the Brazilian community. assimilation bilingual Brasil Brazil family identity language Latinx migration oral history Phenotype https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/84ac9e5ae5ca46415795b171e7a58e91.jpg 029f35487196f0dcd4d1f8f4259573ba https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/389af031aec1842d6123fb59b21c962a.mp3 8e24dc5b61fdd6b58c81ba06f8f146a1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Abrams, Alison Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Juan Sanchez Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Juan Sanchez Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/24/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Juan talked about what it was like to be a Latino male at Skidmore and Saratoga. Language A language of the resource English Abstract A summary of the resource. Juan is a sophomore at Skidmore and spoke a great deal about his pride as a Dominican which he truly connected to when he came to Skidmore more and was exposed to the othernessd posed by the majority white school and town. He spoke of his family in Brooklyn and their expectations for him as a first generation college student. His binationalism came up as well, Juan pointing out that although born in the US, he does not fully feel welcome within the country and upon visits to The Dominican Republic found that he was again looked down on as a yankee. To deal with his fear he found solidarity with Skidmore's Raices and spoke of wanting to give a voice to latinx on campus and in the future in government.  Dominican Republic family Gender Latinx Saratoga Skidmore College student https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/6b8039020c1309b0f1aa2f536c251c3c.jpg bd43fb2d7a9a2e08324d95539cb8a07d https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/676e559c658050c0b9081c067496fc3d.mp3 e54b4a7e69b21fae0505c30efb5d3692 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Little, Mackenzie Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Samantha Garcia Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Samantha Garcia Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/24/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Samantha spoke to her experiences as a child of Dominican immigrants and what the challenges of college have been in distinguishing her identity as an individual from her home life in Brooklyn, NY. Language A language of the resource English Abstract A summary of the resource. "In the interview with Sam, she talked about the experiences she’s had as the child of immigrants from the Dominican Republic and self-identifying as Dominican-American. As the interview progressed, the topic of family became more prevalent and Sam focused in on the contrasts between her life at home, where they watch Spanish-language television and her parents work long days and her experiences at college. She talked about the beauty standards of Dominican womanhood, and her relationship with her mother. The difference in her appearance from her time at Skidmore and her time spent at home was a significant piece of her identity. With one foot in the cultural belly of Skidmore and her college-experience, and another foot in her Brooklyn, Spanish dominant home, Sam speaks to cultural boundaries and what it is like to be standing over one. bicultural culture Dominican Republic family Gender Hair identity language Latinx oral history Skidmore College Skidmore student https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/1d0decd7cae4c8d9a9cf92264140ab8a.jpg 185661567a4eee1e90ba5472de63fc8e https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/91b2e1568aae5055163a8066e45bc9fa.jpg 93b17503f47209eb550474d315dfac68 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/bec16166dc13cdee04ba6bfff7561d69.mp3 dca55be6b4bf9e3e7f0f75b931343105 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/80022f46ff004e89bae726a6f81e2703.m4a c2f648c11b50f43b4e7fcbcbeccfcc47 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Zepeda-Carranza, Bryan Bailon, Charles Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Maria Lander Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Maria Lander Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/27/17 3/31/2017 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource In one interview Maria Lander discussed the impact of U.S. culture in Venezuela. In the other, Maria talked about her experience living in the U.S and how she has trouble with identity because of the way that people in the country view her and the Latinx community. Listen and watch: <iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/214432592" frameborder="0" width="640" height="360"></iframe> <p><a href="https://vimeo.com/214432592">Interview with Maria Lander</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user39722229">MDOCS</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p> Language A language of the resource English Abstract A summary of the resource. Maria Lander is from Caracas, Venezuela and emigrated to the United States about 20 years ago. She is currently an Associate Professor for Spanish and the Chair of the World Language Department at Skidmore College. In this interview, Maria talks about her experience in the U.S and her identity playing a huge role in her life. She explains the reason behind why she is conflicted with her identity and how sometimes she feels guilty using the term Latina. This is connected to the way people in the U.S portrays the Latinxs community and the stereotypes the people in the countries have for these groups of people. Maria Lander is a professor here at Skidmore who emigrated from Venezuela to pursue a PhD at Brown University. After finishing her studies, she decided to settle in the U.S. after meeting her future husband and starting her own family. On occasion, Maria has visited her native country again allowing her to experience a unique perspective as a woman that was raised in the country before the effects of a political transition that shook the country. Maria still communicates with her friends and social acquaintances from her undergraduate studies through social media as a medium to discuss and debate various topics including politics. As an immigrant from Latin America, Maria’s perspective of the U.S. is imperative in analyzing the latinx identity. bicultural culture foreign identity immigration influence Latinx Oral hisotry Skidmore College Skidmore faculty Spanish Professor Venezuela https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/1182585b8ec2914de675b08ff26c3cb6.jpg 2fa58ae7a1971b4f71094219f2855c4e https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/a9dca358374c4fc446367e71746941b9.m4a 6b75089c5be99e432f7d614eb8c7a33b https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/b80ebec90a6a1e903a48da5d2d79a01b.m4a f49dffed3d61a0194718e6a536f2d552 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Hocker, Anna Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Cinthia Duran Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Cinthia Duran Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/27/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Cinthia talked about her hometown of Quito Ecuador, and her experiences both at home and abroad Language A language of the resource English Abstract A summary of the resource. In this interview Cinthia Duran, a young Latin American woman from Quito, Ecuador, discusses her cultural background. Cinthia is a sophomore and an international student at Skidmore College. The piece primarily focuses on Cinthia’s relationship with her home country, diversity within Quito, the increasing number of gangs in the city, how dance allows her to express her cultural heritage, and her international travels. Cinthia interweaves her experiences as a student in Italy and America, and reviews how these explorations have added to her identity as a Latin American woman. Cinthia also discusses American immigration policy, in relation to Ecuador, by sharing the stories of friends who have attempted to immigrate and/or travel short term to the U.S. but have been rejected. Finally, Cinthia reflects on her own identity as a Latin American instead of a Latina, and how her experiences have further encouraged her to travel and help those around her. dance Ecuador identity immigration Italy Latinx oral history race Skidmore student Tricultural Trilingual https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/a57beaee0088c74ff5f8ae6e0c76784e.jpeg dc68dc0127979af1ef772cdfdaaec1ef https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/83f19109e3855d945e1d2c9f287f6419.m4a 409ddf3608e7d09b63fe0a190a77a7e4 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/19ebc8fe1c7418a3c211d974c58b8a4b.m4a 9dc5d09db586a2753b9787d2fc0921d5 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Smith, Clare Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Esteban Acosto Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Esteban Acosta Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/27/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Esteban discussed being the child of immigrants from the Dominican Republic in the United States Language A language of the resource English Abstract A summary of the resource. Esteban Acosta is a First Year Skidmore student , who grew up in New York City. Both of his parents came to the United States in 1994 from the Dominican Republic. His parents decided to come to the United States to receive greater economic benefits. In his interview , Esteban tells the story of his parents immigration story. He discussed his identity as a child of immigrants and as a child of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Additionally, Esteban discussed issues of race and racial profiling. bicultural culture Dominican Republic family identity immigration Latinx Skidmore College Skidmore student https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/1995eae01e88df09afb896563ba739f8.jpg 39ab459dafea23dd08b5278bed10785a https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/a4b9e8b1f70149fcc424203c4a69cb75.mp3 dfb8b54ac4c5e64e5d2614e594082476 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/4e1700ff9a491e2f76b48a66d40fde12.mp3 3f500814a2f85189620058fb537108c4 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/fddd33a9b906dc9004f5047812b204d8.mp3 306818ddc6eab0f10a7edad18fd7ecd3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Maria, Cristal Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Cristian Fernandez Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Cristian Fernandez Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/27/2017, 3/31/2017 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Cristian talked about his experiecne growing up in a household with a woman as the breadwinner and about his racial and ethinic identity and how it intersects with gender. Language A language of the resource English Abstract A summary of the resource. Cristian Feranadez is sophomore and Business and Political Science double major at Skidmore College. He is the son of Dominican immigrants. His mother is a legal U.S. resident who immigrated when she was 9 or 11 years old, in 1976 or 1978. His father is a U.S. citizen that immigrated at the age of 13, in 1979. Cristian's parents emigrated in the midst of political and economic instability on the island, when political tensions between Juan Bosch's supporters and Joaquin Balaguer's supporters were felt. A large flood of Dominican immigrants arrived in the U.S. starting in 1980. Cristian's parent's immigrated right before this wave, possibbly contributing to his parents' unusual access to education and resources. This would later affect his household composition with a breadwinning mother, and his access to private, higher education at Skidmore. Dominican Republic ethnicity family Gender identity Intersectionality Latinx oral history Phenotype race Skidmore College Skidmore student https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/a3c6de964e9d0c5ffae417dcf4bf9023.jpg e72aecd7864005e4c32335f4b24d4830 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/7184a8e95d459547a89e78ea836e75c0.mp3 3f231166f5baa8549fbfc37ae95706bc Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Florada, Dresita Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Margarita Florada Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Margarita Florada Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/28/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Margarita talked about her experience of moving from Puerto Rico to Boston and her identity as a Latina Language A language of the resource English Abstract A summary of the resource. Margarita Florada participated in an interview conducted by her daughter, Dresita Florada, over Skype. She discussed her transition in moving to Boston from Puerto Rico in order to attend school at Boston College. She studied law and is currently a Dean at a community college in Massachusetts. She and her Irish American husband raised their two children , 23 and 19, in Boston, Massachusetts. She confronted her discourse with her Latinx identity in regards to the gender roles that were imparted on her which she did not wish to adhere to. Because of this she feels less connected to Latinidad as an identity, however, even though that disenchanted her from it and urged her to raise her children with different ideals in regards to gender, she will always identify as a Latina. She also further discussed her identity in regards to her own diverse cultural background which includes Lebanese and Corsican heritage. Issues surrounding the current Puerto Rican debt crisis and whether or not she thinks independence or statehood would ever be a possibility for the island are discussed. College Economy education ethnicity family Gender immigration Independence Latinx Politics Puerto Rico race Workplace Relations https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/cac5acb27735c0580181f8f8d7336ac4.png a9237ecdfa5cda0325ad06e407a9338a https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/39f49b1e9e23afffe191440f4161e38d.mp3 853a51a8514c49f1420419e1aa5630a3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Costello, Teague Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Vilmary Fuertes Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Vilmary Fuertes Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/28/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Vilmary discussed her experiences in moving from Puerto Rico to the U.S. for educational purposes, her development into becoming a physical therapist right out of college, and her assimilation into the U.S. and eventually Saratoga Springs. Language A language of the resource English Abstract A summary of the resource. Vilmary Fuertes grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico and moved to Miami while in college to finish her education in the U.S. She went to school for physical therapy and worked incredibly hard to take classes in English, which was a language she was still learning to master. Out of college Vilmary was immediately offered a job in Physical Therapy and began working. Vilmary is now a mother of two sons and lives with her family in Saratoga Springs while continuing to practice Physical Therapy. Her husband is also Puerto Rican and together they keep Puerto Rican culture and traditions alive through holidays, language, and visits back to the island with their sons. Throughout Vilmary’s experiences in transitioning into U.S. society she has kept an optimistic perspective towards discrimination and ignorance towards her identity. Although, she has experienced many rude encounters Vilmary sees the best in people, but still holds an understanding and sympathy towards the discrimination of the Latinx population in the U.S. assimilation community culture Discrimination education family Gender identity language Latinx Proffession Puerto Rico https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/129cddbb76a6548f013c5b233823272d.png 6c435cbe6bbedfb2e1542d5cb2ddcd92 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/dc46c6f4cf03a09bce151722994b17a4.mp3 678b40a975074f268cddf6ee8df40de5 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/fe909565983e25b87bdb67fe6e597f0e.mp3 dd556bf6625e288c0b0462c4e8fd05e3 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/00d3fe0e753b9197ea6f3d474783c94a.mp3 dc4eb20b6d9a66569ae18de33e9c5630 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview El Gharsi, Alia Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Samuel Cruz Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Samuel Cruz Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/28/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Samuel talked about how he grew up in the Dominican Republic while his mother and siblings lived in the United States, with the hopes of being prosperous. Once he was old enough and his mother was able to secure him citizenship, he moved to New York city to reunite with his family, attend school and succeed, given his new and better opportunities. Language A language of the resource Spanish, English Abstract A summary of the resource. Samuel Cruz was born and grew up in the Dominican Republic with his grandparents and cousins. He moved to the U.S. in 2012 when he was 16 in order to rejoin his mother and siblings who had immigrated earlier in search of opportunity and hoping to establish themselves in the states. In order to succeed, anonymous’s mother placed him in English courses after school and encouraged him to read, listen, watch and speak in Spanish less so that he could assimilate to his new community. Initially, he worried that he would face discrimination because of his accent or other ethic markers that revealed his foreign status. He also had to adjust to the different social and cultural norms in America, initiating a period of self reflection where he began to explore and reshape his identity. As he became more fluent in English, culturally integrated and educationally accomplished, by gaining entrance into a private liberal arts college, he recognized how fortunate he is and felt gratitude for the sacrifices his mother made to support him and his siblings so that they could have a better life. bicultural bilingual culture Dominican Republic ethnicity family identity immigration language Latinx race Skidmore Skidmore College student https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/1c293cbef03a391c6f751f04a04758b5.png ccbe890d506667c0168dcd449a03f81c https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/da34013c3eaefbe09c7b257eedf054b9.mp3 ce15a804d86b18a4ff7da38288dd05d6 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/f3ae8c28636eea1743b1569456748e27.mp3 e51a1151d072a5b43b0005e9c5c01fe2 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/fe373d2e0ff8206d252c5213e22f0472.mp3 cef187a6cdb381959dd06a31fb2c3e66 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Rodriguez, Daisy Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Samantha Velez Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Samantha Velez Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/28/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Samantha shared her experiences, what she know of her parents' experiences, and the role that being Chicana has played in different parts of her life. Language A language of the resource English Abstract A summary of the resource. Samantha Velez is a Chicana born in Bushwick, NY and raised in Ridgewood, Queens. Towards the beginning of the interview, she gives background information of the experiences her parents have shared with her. Both of her parents crossed the border from Mexico to the United States at seperate times, to get a better life for themselves, and for Samantha's older sister. Both of them came during the 80s and they became documented in 2008. This is during the time of the Great Recession where undocumented immigrants were seen more as the source of the economic struggles of Anglo Americans. This is also two years after the first marchs, opposing the Sensenbrenner bill, and encouraging the need for legalization. As the interview progresses, Samantha talks about her familial ties, the influences this has had on her, her cultural ties due to her parents, and she gives a general comparison of the experiences she's had in school up until Skidmore college. Chicano culture ethnicity family Gender identity immigration Latinx machismo Mexico oral history race Skidmore College Skidmore student https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/d497ba3cb00ddeaa20a030400a0faa81.jpg dcc0f6ff7ceb2708f063716778c72fe6 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/08a8cccca0bc25914b62ced8f98ba55c.mp3 3f4f7b031f4fb8421b4ad66dd2b42256 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Sandoval, Alicia Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Arielmy Morel Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Arielmy Morel Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/28/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Arielmy (Ariel) talked about moving from her home country of the Dominican Republic to the U.S. and life as an Afro-Latina in both the U.S. and D.R. Language A language of the resource English, Spanish Abstract A summary of the resource. Arielmy was born in the Dominican Republic in 1998 and moved to the U.S. at the age of three with her older brother and her mother to join her father in New Jersey.  In this interview we discuss her migration story and the reasons for her migration north, yet the focus is her life and experience in the U.S. Ariel identifies herself as an Afro-Latina. Ariel reflects on what it means to be black and latinx in the U.S. as well as how she is seen and treated by U.S. society. Ariel also speaks about her education and her experience with bilingual education and as a latinx person in the education system.  Finally, Ariel reflects on her identity as a mixed-cultural being, as a bilingual being, as a person of color, as a woman, as an immigrant, as a U.S. citizen and as a student. https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/b61094f1393bf3b1b9f80c8141308290.jpg ad63cbd061da7551bd531fedac062e9a https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/b796c9caaa93fcd2d3f2950747773f2d.mp3 762436727176ac5d57f11ac0d209a54d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Harripersad, Reshma Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Daniela Menchaca Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Daniela Menchaca Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/29/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Daniela talked about what it was like to live as a Mexican-American in the Texas, and her connection to her Mexican cultural heritage. She speaks on overcoming stereotypes and the issues she faced to come to college in New York._ Language A language of the resource Spanish, English Abstract A summary of the resource. Daniela Menchaca was born and raised in a San Antonio, Texas, very close to the border which played an essential part in shaping her connection to her Mexican cultural heritage. Since her hometown was close to the Mexican-American border, she has close ties and was raised in a culturally Mexican environment and is very proud of her connection with that. However, as someone who is "white-passing" she has struggled to establish her Latinx identity in both her own hometown and at college. Therefore, she addresses being between American histories and Mexican histories, both aspects of her identities. As someone from a low socioeconomic status, she has fought against stereotypes and underfunded educational support in order to attend college. She speaks on how her parents have influenced her view on education and the support that she has had from individual teachers to be where she is.  bicultural education ethnicity family Gender Hispanic identity immigration Latinx machismo Mexico oral history Phenotype Politics race Skidmore College Skidmore student Southwest Texas https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/336c79fbc4f2c1ea5b69ce5f06bae709.jpg 77297fecc96e0837d2bf41d56621aba4 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/c57257f42443d0ab0b65c2db54c146d9.mp3 28c647a6b95e8098a77b1fe62c1ff085 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/d06dd1ad9afe4c93888d9659a49a0ba0.mp3 7bc03340c902067294189955d2a0775c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Genniger-Goldfarb, Lauren Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Luis Mazariego Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Lorenzo Q. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/30/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Lorenzo (name has been changed) talked about his experience coming from El Salvador to the U.S. at the age of 10. Language A language of the resource English Abstract A summary of the resource. I interview Lorenzo Q., a twenty two year old man living undocumented in the U.S. Lorenzo came to this country from El Salvador at the age of 10 with his parents, and speaks on his experience transitioning into a culture and a language that was completely foreign to him. Because he was not informed on U.S.-El Salvador relations back home, he had no prior expectations or perceptions of this country before his arrival and was both excited and nervous at the prospect of his move. Since then, he has experienced everything from forced summer school and bullying to helpful teachers and ESL classes. He also wishes to somehow reconnect with his family in El Salvador, but finds that difficult because of his immigration status. Now he doesn't see much hope for citizenship due to the election of Donal Trump, but is still determined to stay in this country. El Salvador Idenitity language Latinx race school https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/f861993b114c100c3263b37845a092c0.jpg c567d45deea3a7a40f90b4fc5c337722 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/76435908edb223aba598d3c046c4a656.mp3 c9cc240c82a791c9e84da66dda16fc63 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mulhern, Hayley Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Beatriz Loyola Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Beatriz Loyola Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/30/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Language A language of the resource English bicultural culture education family Gender identity immigration language Latinx Mexico migration Nationality oral history Skidmore College Skidmore faculty work https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/cc0a57de6b7f5a64d11ad86c4f3cce23.jpg 80b47f090ebb7d9a1eac7bce32a28cb3 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/ac6545dd2a7e210889e3dda6a442147d.mp3 37a2c28a987db6b947bc59dcd34e7664 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Tierney, Elise Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Yessica Alcantara Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Elise Tierney Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit 23/04/2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Yessica Alcantara Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/30/2017 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Yessica talked about moving to the United States from the Dominican Republic and it's impact on family dynamics, racial/ethnical self-identity, and future opportunities/dreams. _ Language A language of the resource English Abstract A summary of the resource. Yessica immigrated to New York City from the Dominican Republic when she was 4 years old. As she explains, immigrating to the United States was always part of the plan for her family but it wasn’t until her father passed away that her mother began taking serious action to make that dream a reality. Yessica explains that her family immigrated to New York for better economic opportunities with the help of her uncle who already lived there. Yessica discusses her transition to the United States; the fear of deportation before she got a green card when she was 10 years old, her conflict with belonging both domestically and in the Dominican Republic, and the impact of immigration on her family structure and relationship. Yessica spoke about her struggle with identity both racially and ethnically based both on stereotypes and standards place upon her by her family which she internalized as well as external societal pressures and perceptions. Finally, Yessica discusses her longing to be back in the Dominican Republic which she looks back on fondly but concedes that she has experienced a lot of opportunities that would not have been afforded to her in the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic ethnicity family gender_ identity Latinx migration oral history race Skidmore College Skidmore student https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/59773922820231423385e2c9cd16de48.jpeg b7bde71a2085cbf827146f954c4065ef https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/4ab6fe186e7c48b967e76bd3041179a2.mp3 83271aeea5c5b6bca0d309c8370951e8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Hernandez, Lhia Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Luisa Pina Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Luisa Pina Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 4/1/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Luisa expressed the impact and reasoning of her immigration_ from the Dominican Republic to the Washington Heights on her life, as well as briefly comments on Dominican and American politics. Language A language of the resource Spanish Abstract A summary of the resource. Luisa Pina is a mother of three in her mid to late 40s that immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic over 10 years ago with her two oldest daughters. She and her daughters came to Florida on vacation and stayed with one of the few relatives she had in the United States. In thinking only about her daughters, their quality of life, and opportunities here in the United States she decided to stay. About moving to Washington Heights, she mentions the advantages of living in a Latinx community as an immigrant and the differences between life in the United States versus Dominican Republic. Luisa comments on the impact Trump’s presidency and campaign has on her community as well as the influence of the Dominican government in people’s everyday lives while she lived there. This oral history tells essentially the story of an immigrant who despite being very family oriented moved away from loved ones to provide a better, safer life for her children. community culture Dominican Republic family Foreign Politics immigration Latinx Politics race Spanish https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/830109b742f808acb56bb0858fe60c85.jpg c0069a0323c122400b21eb30643d74c0 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Skidmore College Office of Communications Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Scope Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Steve Gerritsen, '06 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/c05cbd552fa37056d27dce89acff4fa7.mp3 78bd7bed3b9103e6322e53f0beede5e7 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/5b9ec5cc331896b10b72dccac4b23d9a.JPG 3cac6b3b978486bf280afc016ae0921d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Moore Hall Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Skidmore College Office of Communications Description An account of the resource Windows Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Steve Gerritsen, '06 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/157b5cd8e8ac2f18a489cb24e41a36e3.jpg 0989777059a6598786199edcf934657d https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/c34b4f19bb060bee38c19abc1a8ac298.JPG 9108b92bcd0b4cc6ae878d34096a9444 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Moore Hall at Night Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived http://www.skidmore.edu/scope/summer2006/features/index.htm Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Skidmore College Office of Communications, Scope, Summer 2006 Description An account of the resource Moore Hall at Night Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Steve Gerritsen, '06 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource Many people who have worked or studied at Skidmore College or lived in Saratoga Springs or the surrounding area carry the memories that help us tell the stories of our communities. This collection offers a glimpse into our past in the voices of those who have shared their stories. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Pink Palace Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 4/29/2015 Language A language of the resource eng Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Plumer, Daniel, '16 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Landis, Margie Monosson, Deborah Wilkinson-Hunter, Susan Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource (c) Daniel Plumer Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 Type The nature or genre of the resource audio recording Abstract A summary of the resource. An audio documentary with reminiscenses by alumnae Margie Landis, Deborah Monosson, and Susan Wilkinson-Hunter, of Moore Hall (32 Union Avenue), more familiarly known to students as "the pink palace." <br /><br />This former residence hall was sold by the College in 2006; a Scope article features&nbsp; <a title="2006 scope article on Moore Hall" href="http://www.skidmore.edu/scope/summer2006/features/index.htm">additional reminiscnes</a>. <br /><br />Accompanying photos show groundbreaking for the building in 1957, and photos of the Hall by John Gerritsen, '06. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 4/29/2015 Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Daniel Plumer Description An account of the resource Audio doc about Moore Hall (the Pink Palace) by Dan Plumer, '16, made as part of Radio Storytelling, Spring 2015, taught by Eileen McAdam Moore Hall oral history Skidmore story https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/3483aa1f117d38860ebb86a6f5c4f66a.jpg f5adbca446787a3ed15b8272ba6b8a07 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/604e1885116f31fb2e9a87a60542b744.mp3 1958a2b04efeae44dbef3020170ff090 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Catalano, Deven Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Hilary Ramirez Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Hillary Ramirez Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 4/5/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Description An account of the resource Hilary speaks about what being a Dominican American, a black woman, and a Latinx woman means to her and the way her identities shape her experience. Language A language of the resource English Abstract A summary of the resource. Hilary Ramirez is a Dominican American and was raised in the Bronx, New York in a community that included Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Black Americans and others. In our interview, Hilary speaks to the formation of her racial identity and the racial fault lines that she has encountered in her family and in Dominican Culture more broadly. She describes the comradery and community she grew up knowing in the Dominican Salons of the Bronx and a tells of a personal journey that led her to embrace her natural hair texture. Hilary also tells the story of her family’s migration to the United States and her father’s escape from the oppressive rule of Joaquin Balaguer. Hilary is a chemistry major at Skidmore College. Dominican Hair Culture Dominican Republic ethnicity family Gender identity Intersectionality Latinx oral history Phenotype race Skidmore College Skidmore student Women in Science https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/a7e75766fdbe52280c48ade1a10d6f04.jpg cfaa27bdd6bdb2ff4770d57c92227d7e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latinx Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Rojas, Isabel Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Karina Gonzalez Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Karina Gonzalez Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 4/5/17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available HI251C: History of Latinx in the U.S. Language A language of the resource English Abstract A summary of the resource. Karina Gonzalez is a first generation graduating Skidmore student, double majoring in Business and Sociology. Her mother migrated from the Dominican Republic and they currently live in Harlem, NYC along with her older brother two older sisters. In the following interview, Karina speaks to her fellow student, Isabel Rojas, about what it means to be a second generation Latina; together, they explore the complexities of her identity as an Afro Dominicana, as well as family dynamics, beauty, gender, and bi-nationality. Afro-Latinx Beauty Bi-nationality bkcultural culture Dominican Republic family Gender immigration Latinx New York City race Second Generation https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/cdf9dfeb0f729c8b9e9dde50388fe498.jpeg 1142c67b529cc1e284cff6f5d3ffbd81 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/055d13ba36dbe7d4c90813dc4a6fb1ae.mp3 491bae90f41d96840b5a326c549dd208 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/9f4be88a5fee31f2c8d017ee1b34dd05.pdf eaf5469b75cc4b30ad1fd2bcd6167453 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/f0203c88a444d9455a8195fe1238bcc9.pdf 644f2d47ccf5b0671e4cb1eaf401353c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Frederick Nelson Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Steve Otrembiak Location The location of the interview Media Services, Skidmore College Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audio recording Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Frederick Nelson Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit 4/26/2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Steve Otrembiak Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 4/6/2017 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. The Skidmore Retiree Memory Project Description An account of the resource Former Skidmore College media technician, Saratoga Native, and second generation Skidmore employee, Steve Otrembiak, recalls his extensive, over 30-year career working in a growing and changing community. As someone who has witnessed the college’s evolution from a number of different perspectives over a long period of time, Steve provides an insightful narrative of Skidmore’s challenges and triumphs and its ability to keep up with a changing world.  Language A language of the resource English Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Frederick Nelson Campus Move Employee Tuition Benefit Program Media Services Staff as Students Tang Museum Technological Changes Transitions in Staff Positions Unionization https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/3081bdedc3e73020aa74452180f8db9f.jpg 8869f64df1d9fc9e987387dff877a623 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/be858e860befcec07fd69dda47ec889d.mp3 bc75d3d47960924b58771e55820e5a56 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/3bf3ab72698aa14d1b4e5b7e47ca9a2f.wav 2a005eb0f720cb9afe4cccf4f2f80015 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/2abd52655158f56eef842464f5084abd.pdf 79da71e07be34a13f33e8aeee90c5812 PDF Text Text Interviewee: Barry Goldensohn Years at Skidmore: 1981-2003 Interviewer: Lena Drinkard Location of Interview: West 55th Street, NY, NY Date of Interview: 6/16/2015 00:00:00.00 Header 00:00:33:00 Born in Flatbush Brooklyn, in an immigrant community. Attended a diverse and eclectic James Madison High School with many famous graduates. 00:01:21:00 Barry’s Sister is the famous choreographer Deborah Hay. 00:04:44.24 Went to college at Oberlin University. Met his wife Lorrie Goldensohn and many close friends. 00:7:52.00 Rob and Peggy Boyers found out that Barry could be hired at Skidmore College because Hampshire does not have tenure. 00:8:31.20 Barry takes us through a day at Skidmore as a Professor. Taught two literature classes and one workshop a week and saw students in between and after classes. Discusses senior thesis informal meetings for a potluck dinner. 00:11:17.00 “A perfect professor of poetry.” 00:15:51.15 Barry discusses the students he stays in touch with. 00:19:03.08 Discusses Skidmore’s approach to education. 00:24:57.13 Barry talks about the writing critiques and workshops he led for students. 00:27:22.15 The writing process. 00:27:26:20 “If there’s one thing I know about my friend Barry Goldensohn, it’s that he dislikes sweet food, sweet music, sweet literature” - Peg Boyers. 00:29:23.22 Rob Boyers and the liveliness of Salmagundi and other faculty members is what kept Barry at Skidmore. “Saratoga’s a one horse town and you’re the horse.” 00:32:22.17 Barry on what makes a successful marriage. 00:39:50.28 Barry ended up teaching three to four classes a semester with students who know him and one another very well. 00:45:44 “I only retired from teaching not from writing.” The way he taught took a lot of time, so he needed more time for his life. � https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/65e7c7c64e3013ecb9f169b96e98fcb1.pdf 430983a94293ac4a42e5bcafda2e9139 PDF Text Text Interview with Barry Goldensohn by Lena Drinkard, Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, Saratoga Springs, New York, April 1, 2017. Lena Drinkard: This is Lena Drinkard, interviewing for Skidmore Retiree Memory Project. I am with Barry Goldensohn in New York City and it is April 1st, 2017. Barry, I’d like to start off my giving you a chance to introduce yourself and talk about where and when you were born. Barry Goldensohn: I was born in Brooklyn, in an area that used to be called something like Flatbush, and now is probably called something else. Went to grade school and high school in an overheated, immigrant-family community—extended community. Pretty varied, my closest friends in high school were a mixture of Italian, German, Greek and Jewish. The—My high school was just a neighborhood high school but its graduates are Ruth Bader Ginsburg, my sister who’s a very famous choreographer Deborah Hay, and Chuck Schumer, Norm Coleman (used to be governor of Michigan or Minnesota, something like that), five nobel prize winners—Ruth Bader Ginsburg did I mention her? And… full of second and first generation immigrant families where there was a lot of pressure to succeed on the part of the kids. My family came from, my mother’s family came from Odessa, and my grandfather was an officer in the (...) army. They left Odessa after the great purge, the great pregome, that drove all the jews out of Odessa in 1905, after the potential episode. And, it was a family that followed the pattern of Odesza families. There was one gifted child in the family, that was my mother, so the family all sacrificed and sacrificed so she could have her ballet lessons. She studied with a student of Magnitsky who would drive up to the mental hospital that Magnitsky was at at the Hudson and bring him down to teach classes. Which was spectacularly for my mother because he really took a shrine to her, regarded her as very special, sent her off to work at an LA company in New York. Then, she got rheumatic fever, which damaged her heart so she taught ballet for the rest of her life. But my sister had no choice. Choice of a career. Nor did my daughter. My mother started on my daughter right away, working on her flexibility. As an infant, Mind you. [Laughs] But my sister stayed with it my daughter didn’t. I got brought on and put into ballet classes when I was a kid because it was cheaper than getting a babysitter. It took for my sister but it didn’t take for me. I left at thirteen. Being dragged to the studio, I had no ability whatsoever. But again, this was James Madison high school. And then in my junior year I took a national test where the Ford foundation early admission scholarship and I wound up at Oberlin. I wanted to go to Columbia but they had no dorm room’s for students for the first couple of years and it would have been three hours a day commuting from Brooklyn. And Yale had pulled out of it at that point. And I was forbidden to to go University of Chicago by a father of one of my close friends who persuaded my parents that the school had been ruined by John Maynard Hutchins. Remember him? He turned it into a very progressive, wonderful school, but I wound up at Oberlin in the process of elimination. Met my wife and got married there and met my closest, my oldest friends. �LD: Did you start studying poetry at Oberlin? BG: In High School. And had a very good, wonderful teacher. Very inspiring and sophisticated. LD: So how did you end up at Skidmore? BG: I was the Dean of Humanities and Arts at Hampshire College before I was at Skidmore and decided that I was writing too little and was persuaded by a psychiatrist friend, that if I wanted more time at writing I should quit my dean’s job which was too engrossing. So I applied to Skidmore and got a job almost by accident as it turned out. The committee chose me but then it went up to the dean and the president and they said oh we can’t accept him, he’s a dean and he’s probably got tenure and we can’t hire people with tenure. Bob Boyers was giving some lectures at Northwestern University and was sitting on a poetry segment and of all things, the teacher was teaching a bunch of my poems. So Bob walked into the faculty lounge with that teacher, and said to him as he entered the room, oh we tried to hire him but we couldn’t because he’s got tenure at Hampshire. And a voice in the back of the room said, “they don’t have tenure at Hampshire.” So Bob called up Peggy, asked her to confirm that, and if that was in fact the case, tell the dean and tell the committee and I wound up getting invited for an interview [Laughs] That’s enough background. LD: Can you take me through a day at Skidmore as a Professor? BG: Well, a day, interesting. Just teaching literally two literature classes and one workshop a week So, and then seeing students in between and after classes. And I wound up often teaching three or four classes a semester because I had a bunch of students who wanted to do their senior thesis in writing poetry, poetry writing. So they met as an informal group but as a class. And we’d meet in the meaning so there wouldn’t be schedule conflicts with their other classes. Often over a potluck dinner. Then it would go on sometimes into the wee hours at either my house or one of their apartments. So it was kind of a senior seminar, right? Every semester I taught a course I loved which was The Introduction to Poetry. I taught it sort of half as a history of English poetry class and half as a course of methods and different types of methods, different historical periods. Starting with Chaucer and winding up with contemporary poets, spending a lot of time with seventeenth century and nineteenth century. I mixed up along the way. And then I taught seventeenth century poetry. My first lecture in that class was Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Al of the work of John Milton was written in the seventeenth century. Some of the greatest poets in language and we’re not going to look at them at all [Laughs] You’ll have to get them in other courses and I focused on the lyrical poems of the seventeenth century. And then writing workshops, and other intro fiction classes. �LD: When I spoke to Professor Goodwin she described you as the “perfect professor of poetry.” BG: What could she have meant by that? LD: I’d like to know what you think! BG: Well, I was actively involved in making it, and reading it, and teaching it as well. So I brought together a pretty full background in the literature and of course the poets concerned with making poems and how poems are made. Looking at the students, how poems are made, how these particular poems are made. LD: Can you talk about your relationship with the students? BG: As my wife puts it describing her students at Vassar, “Oh you fall in love with a few students every year” and I think that’s pretty true. And I like students and in general, I liked teaching them. I liked expanding their minds, and expanding their knowledge. And I was trying to teach them to love what I love, and maybe that’s what Susan was talking about. Also, teaching writing courses at Skidmore, generally I worked with students for 3-4 years and they got to be my friends. You know, ordinary lit teachers don’t have that experience, working semester after semester with the same students. You know you’ll take one course with Professor Boyers maybe the intro to fiction course and another fiction course but that’s about it. Or a victorian lit course, you’d take a three courses in the course of four years. Anyway, my students worked with me semester after semester after semester. Because you could repeat workshops and so, it was the especially nice part of the kind of teaching I’ve done over the years, that you got to know the students very well. LD: Can you think of one student in particular that you had that had an impact on you during your time at Skidmore? BG: That had an impact on me yeah. Well, Mark Woodward, who stayed around working at Salmagundi. Mark did a lot of work with both Bob and me, and has stayed writing and writing. But in this neighborhood there are a couple of students who, anyone you really know and care about has an impact on you. And I went to a reading earlier, or last weekend, by one of my Skidmore students who lives in Austin now but, showed me a draft of her book, she said, it doesn’t have the dedications in the book so I’ll have to send you a regular copy!. Jardeen Lebair, is a wonderful writer, only student I remember who won both our jury poetry and fiction prize in the same year. Remarkably talented student. But there are a lot of students I stay in touch with. �One of my former students, Laura Marshall lives a few blocks up on the west side. Bruce Baker, who’s a very very gifted student, star of the hockey team and he’s now coaching… he’s deeply involved in the city since he’s graduated with minority education, education of the deprived. So he coaches for different hockey teams ad well as teaching. He started off on the ground floor for Teach of America. He was the recruiter for Teach of America and then he said, “Why am I recruiting people to do something that I should do myself?” So he wound up teaching in the city schools, but one because he was male and because he was white, and because he is movie-star handsome, he became a very popular teacher. So popular, that he decided to have a semi-pro hockey career while he was teaching, so they’d keep him on a semester a year while the other semester he’d be playing hockey. He explained to me how, he lives on this block, so we see him, and of course in his hockey career he’s broken every bone—small—bone in his body. He’s also a coach for Columbia's informal hockey team, it’s not a varsity sport. But I don’t know there’s been a lot of students over the course of the years I’ve come to love and stayed very close too and it’s a significant part of our social life, my relationship with former former students, not only from here but from Hampshire and Goddard. Now, Goddard in the mid-sixties when I got there was a magnet school for the daring and the adventurous student. That resident undergraduate program no longer exists. But my students there were spectacularly good. A lot of them are pulitzer prize winners and guggenheim winners and you know major award winners. One of you I’m sure you know of, the playwright David Mamet, and I’ve had two students while we’ve been here in New York. Naomi Wallace who was a Hampshire student and Mammoth. LD: How would you describe Skidmore at the time that you taught, if you describe Goddard as the school for the, can you fill in the blank for Skidmore? BG: Skidmore had a much more traditional approach to education, like the schools I went to, like Oberlin than Hampshire or Goddard. My Hampshire students—I don’t want to slight them either, two of my senior thesis students went on to win Macarthur Genius awards. Naomi Wallace was one of them and Peter Cole who has been teaching one semester at Yale and the other semester living in Jerusalem and running a press for Israeli and Palestinian poets, crossing a lot of boundaries. But Goddard was more a traditional education in a way for someone who has devoted his life to advanced, progressive schools. Like the progressive high school we started early in the sixties, in the Bay Area with a bunch of quaker friends. That was at the very beginning of a whole rash of progressive high schools that were starting to emerge and people would come, we’d often have more visitors than students. LD: What year was this? �BG: That was ‘62-’65 and I graduated with the first graduating class I wanted to go back to college teaching. But my first graduating class of students went to Reed, Stanford, Santa-Cruz. They were on the board of the student-faculty administration group that was defining Santa-Cruz which is interesting. And other schools within the california system. Interesting group of students. That school, after the people that started it passed it on to other faculty members, it got sort of swept up as a southern most adjunct of the haight-ashbury counter-cultures and it was destroyed basically by that it became a fairly destructive place and only lasted a few years. But it was good for the students who went there. One of the student went to Oxford with a grant and got first in PPE, Politics, Philosophy and Economics, that’s degree you get if you want to be prime-minister. Almost all of the proceeding prime-ministers and most of the subsequent prime-ministers had that degree first. LD: It seems like you really knew and understood each student you had— BG: Oh, I would never say that [laughs] LD: Do you think the types of students changed at Skidmore from when you first got there to when you retired? BG: I’m not sure. I taught for about twenty-two years. There seemed to be always, a leavening of very committed and very serious students. I taught fairly esoteric courses. Seventeenth century poetry, poetry writing, and the Intro to Poetry course, that was the longest draw class of the largest cross-section of students. But by and large, the students who went on to work with me, were a largely self-selected group, so I find it hard to generalize about the general run of students. And I heard one of my students saying to someone else, “Oh I would never dare offer Shitty work to Professor Goldensohn.” With a self-selected crew that knew I expected a lot from them, they worked hard. So, I don’t know if that’s the whole student body it’s hard to generalize but they were always enough of those to keep my classes full. LD: Is it challenging to grade someone else's creative writing? BG: Oh, I hardly think of grades. The really challenging part is discussing them. And how you talk it over in the group, in the workshop and individually. What to say, often the harsh things to say, that will help them see the problems that they are running into. [Laughs] Another overheard conversation. I was talking to one of my students in my office and three of my students were right outside my office, having a raucous so I couldn’t help overhearing, conversation about “You know what he said to me?” “ You know what he said to me?” You know, like throw this away or that’s terrible! Or start over again! But if you’re going to teach writing seriously, you have to be candid about what they’re doing. And it’s hard, you try to be rigorous but teaching �poetry writing, which is the main thing at Skidmore has these contradictory elements. You want rigorous attention to what you’re doing, but you don’t want to lose as in any art, the sense of play in getting there. Because a lot of the most creative work comes with playing with it. Play with it play with i! I told my students. You have to catch your mind at its most expansive and least predictable moments. Often this is helped by just lying down. You know, your mind often releases itself more creatively, at the moment before you fall asleep or at the moment you’re waking up. Or when you’re just lying down. I remember one of my students saying “Oh he thinks we do our best work on our backs!” [Laughs] But it’s being open to the mind at play and not working in predictable grooves. And then showing it to people that will tell you the truth about what you’re experiencing. LD: How do you experience criticisms? BG: Well, Peggy Boyers. Just last week, I showed her a draft of a poem. And she said, “Barry, it’s too sweet!” [Laughs] And I said Peggy, you’re the person I remember saying,” If there's one thing I know about my friend Barry Goldensohn, It’s that he dislikes sweet food, sweet music, sweet literature. I think she’s right. And as a matter of fact, I had written the word “sweet” a number of times and swept them out. She was right, I was giving into the sentimental side of myself. It had to do with being eighty and losing a lot of your friends. You know? And that comes with being eighty. It’s in some ways an apologetic… and how do you keep going when people are dying? People you love are dying? So I took some sweetness out. It didn’t belong in that poem. LD: So it sounds like your identity as a writer… well everyone’s identity as a writer changes throughout their lives, in what specific experiences they are going through, but when you were at Skidmore as a professor, how did you divide your time between teaching and writing? And because you were surrounded by Peggy Boyers, and Rob Boyers and all these faculty members that were passionate about poetry did that inspire you? BG: It’s what kept me at Skidmore. It was Bob and the liveliness of the Salmagundi world he created. I used to tease him by saying, Saratoga’s a one horse town and you’re the horse. [Laughs] But Salmagundi brought conferences together every year, it brought fascinating people every year, so I got to know and be friends with Susan Sontag (who I had actually known earlier from my New York City Days) and George Steiner, and all sorts of fascinating people, intelligent people. I got an offer for both Lorrie and I to teach at University of Florida, just move down there from Iowa, (oh I left out that I taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop for a couple of years) and it enabled Lorrie to get a free PHD because she was a faculty wife. LD: And at the time you were at Skidmore she was at Vassar. �BG: Well we lived in Saratoga, and I would drop her off Tuesday morning on this train and pick her up Thursday night. And she would teach all day Tuesday, all day Wednesday, all day Thursday. As the president of Hampshire said to me, when she found out, “Oh my god that sounds like the kind of relationship where your marriage is going to last forever.” Because there’s just enough space between you. And it happens, we have our sixty-first anniversary coming up, LD: What’s the secret to a long—? BG: Hanging in there. LD: Can you elaborate? BG: Becoming one another’s best friend. My wife says, “learning to understand the things that are difficult about the person you’re with,” which is profounder than “hanging in there.” LD: And she writes poems as well… BG: Yes, she’s my first reader always. LD: What were some of the things you guys did in Saratoga at the time? Because as you said, it’s a one horse… BG: Hanging out with Bob and Peg and the other writers. One of my former students from Goddard, Catherine Davis, I recruited her for teaching poetry at Skidmore and we hung out a lot. And, she called me up and told me I was offered a job at University of Washington for half the work and twice the pay, what should I do? And I said, if I ever heard of a no brainer in my life.. LD: Was there anything about Skidmore that you disliked during your time there? Or what was challenging? BG: Well, it’s hard to say. I’m not a good hater. Let me tell you one of the things I liked a lot. The English Department was very congenial, there was not a divided part department. As a Dean at Hampshire, none of my senior faculty were on speaking terms with one another. That happens in schools and departments. I was the Dean of Humanities and Arts. I mean that’s ridiculous!. Lorrie’s Vassar department was which she called a “dysfunctional family.” We saw one of her colleagues recently and I said, “Oh how is so and so?” and she says, “Urg.. She’s still teaching…” [Laughs] “I mean this is a woman in her late seventies I’m speaking to, still carrying �over the animosity from her teaching years, and it deeply divided… that’s never been the case in my years at Skidmore. The only experience I had like that was when I was at Iowa. The Writing Workshop was loosely related to the English Department. And the English Department had a wonderful guy.. was what the rest of the school called “happy valley” because he was just great at human relationships. He then moved to take over the English Department at Suny Albany, I think his name was John Gerber, and when i took over the Hampshire job, I brought him down to Albany and asked him how did you do it? How did you create such a peaceful environment and unified community? And he said, it wasn’t me, it was the years. It was in the sixties and seventies when everything was expanding and I never had to get rid of anyone for budgetary reasons and all I could do was hire people, and set things up. It was the time, but that underlies his genuine openness to people that made that experience at Iowa so wonderful. What he had to do at Albay was very difficult which was cut down the undergraduate programs because Albany had no right offering a doctorate. LD: What do you think made the English department at Skidmore such a unit at that time? BG: I don’t know, I asked Bob Boyers at the time if it was always like that and he said during the Vietnam war, political divides really split up the department but then they got back together or at least by the time I got there it seemed like a congenial group of people. LD: And then did you watch, sort of, new faculty members come in throughout the years and it shifter? BG: Yeah. One of them, Susannah MIntz, who is chair is getting married so I offered her (.....) LD: And those sort of soirees you mentioned, where you would sit with students and have a seminar at houses? Did that happen the entire time because— BG: Yes, pretty much. After a year, the pattern became that I would have a bunch of students. Say six- ten independent students wanting to work on poetry as their senior projects and I realized I would be dead meeting with them every week as a service session and that they had a lot to learn from one another, so they would sign up for an independent study but we met as a group. The faculty thought I was crazy for teaching three, four classes. But that was fun. It was students who knew me well, and one another well, which means they could speak very cANDIDLY TO one another. I remember students saying once in class about a poem, “that’s the stupidest poem I’ve ever read in my life!” In a thick New York accent and the student who wrote it said, “Oh you know… I wrote it on my way to class and I really shouldn’t have offered it. [Laughs] And You know, students could hear one another say things like that, and they didn’t have to be mandy-pandy with one another. You try to create in your class a series with a respect �one another, as people who are trying to learn to do something very difficult, to write a poem. They had to be able to speak to one another and say I think you should change this. And then those exchanges would be very illuminating. LD: I’ve wondered if we’ve sort of lost something over the years because the relationship you describe with your students, *Lorrie walks in * it feels like there are more boundaries implemented at Skidmore between the Professor’s and the students and each other. It feels like there are more unspoken rules about you know, a maybe more professional relationship established today? BG: Well, I thought my relationship with my students was very professional ​about​ writing poetry. Uh, a greater, are you talking about a greater area of things you can’t talk about? LD: Mhm, yeah. BG: You know, I’ve thought about that a lot. [Lorrie talks to Barry] BG: No one taking a course in seventeenth century who has been sexually traumatized should take a course in Shakespeare’s tragedies or comedies for that matter, or seventeenth century poetry which is often playful and its respect for women was less accompanied with attitudes about male and female roles. Very unusual. One of my favorite eighteenth century poets, was about one of the great boundary breaking woman who was irreverent and a giant figure in her age, her name was Aphra Bayne. I would blush now to recite her most famous poem. You know it’s really hard to say. The pre-selection process that I was talking about I think would have… and also the atmosphere, the free give and take served as a kind of barrier for people whose vulnerabilities would now allow them to do that. Because they were open. It was an open secret, so to speak. Very much self-selected. Just as it is an open secret that terrible things happen in Hamlet and Othello and Macbeth. You can’t taming of the shrew for the instance, is a brilliant comic fantasia on sex roles or gender roles. And the women keep their power. The shrew says you “marry me you marry my tongue.” LD: Okay, well we’re reaching the end of the interview. I’m wondering if there's anything we didn’t get to that you’d like to talk about or share. Maybe a story or some piece of information that you’d like to end with. BG: No, I’d just like to say I really liked teaching at Skidmore. But I put a lot of work into dealing with student papers and was eager to retire at sixty-five to have more time of my own for my own writing. I’ve written three books since then. Lorrie’s written three ever since she’s �retired. We’re… as much as I like teaching, I only retired from teaching ​not ​from writing. Because the way I taught took a lot of time, and I wanted more time for myself. LD: That’s a great place to end .Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I really appreciate it! BG: I enjoyed it! � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Lena Drinkard Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Barry Goldensohn Location The location of the interview New York City Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Lena Drinkard Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit 4/26/17 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview With Barry Goldensohn Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 1, 2017 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Retiree Memory Project Language A language of the resource eng Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. "Interview with Barry Goldensohn," Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project, accessed April 26, 2017, http://ssmp.skidmore.edu/admin/items/show/620 Description An account of the resource Barry Goldensohn came to Skidmore in 1981 as professor for poetry in the English department. In this interview, he discusses everything from the diverse Brooklyn community in which he was raised, to his experiences teaching and writing alongside his wife, Lorrie Goldensohn. He also describes his close relationship with his students—many of which went on to find immense success as writers. Despite his love for teaching, Barry left Skidmore so that he could devote all of his time to his true passion—writing. Academic Rigor Campus Culture Curriculum English Department Faculty and Administrative Relations Faculty and Student Relations Salmagundi https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/ed31850cb6be576a9bc5875267ab30a4.jpg 571e16376084ca21c26b1b973f287e71 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/5d1819f18b44ad194e8e8a898d26085a.mp3 593eb3d4b3322243632583cbf3091463 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/858826f48e4f10200d244a7caffb9f63.pdf d315d7f7d88d58690df2f7b7ba7fe2d3 PDF Text Text Interview with Sarah Goodwin by Lynne Gelber, Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, Saratoga Springs, NY, April 11, 2024. LYNNE GELBER: This is Lynne Gelber with Sarah Goodwin and Sue Bender and Leslie Mechem to interview Sarah Goodwin for our project. We're at the, what is it, the Surrey Inn? LESLIE MECHEM: No, the communications. LG: Communications center, excuse me, on the Skidmore campus today. Did I say it was April 11th, 2024? So, to get started, Sarah, can you tell us where you grew up and a little bit about your early days and then how you got to Skidmore? SG: Sure. I was an Army brat. So, I was born at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and lived at Fort\ Huachuca, Arizona, and thenLG: Fort? SG: Fort Huachuca. LG: Huachuca. SG: It's near Tucson. LG: How do you spell Huachuca? SG: H-U-A-C-H-U-C-A. LG: Okay. SG: Huachuca, where my father actually developed the first drone program for the military. LG: Oh. SG: Yeah. His vision, because he came out of reconnaissance in World War II, was to have drones doing the reconnaissance instead of human beings that were sent off and often didn't come back. But they cut the program for whatever reason, so he spent another year at the Pentagon after that. Let me see. After Fort Huachuca, we spent four years in Germany with the military, which was formative for me because I learned some German and was exposed to Europe. LG: And how old were you then? SG: Four years old to eight years old. Just strangely enough, Germany, we lived in Karlruhe, in �Heidelberg. Those felt like home to me really, actually, throughout my life. I've had a sort of pull back to that region. But I also was exposed to France, and my parents had a passion for France. They spent some time there after the war. So that happened too. All those seeds got planted. Eventually, when Dad retired from the Army, we moved to Palo Alto, California, when I was nine. And that was my mother's hometown, so we moved in with my grandmother and stayed. I was pretty happy to have Palo Alto as a hometown. Even as a child, I recognized that it was pretty special, all those sunny days. You know. And it had been my mother's hometown, so there was a feeling of welcome there for the family that was very nice. It was quite different from the Army, a feeling of continuity, of a connection to the past and so on. When it came time to apply to college, I was drawn to the Northeast for whatever reason. That's most of the schools I applied to were in the Northeast. I wound up going to Harvard as an undergrad. And at Harvard, I majored in English, but I did their comparative literature option so that I could focus on a period instead of the history of English and American literature. I focused on the 19th century and did English, French and German. There was a time when I was in college when all I really wanted to do was become fluent in French and German. It seemed I could not find a way to justify that rationally, but it was a drive that I had. So I spent as much time in France and in Germany as I could and wound up doing a PhD in comparative literature at Brown. Brown was the only East Coast school I applied to. I was still trying to get back to California, but it was the one that offered me a full ride. And so there it was. I liked the program at Brown. I found graduate school really hard. I don't know, just the expectation of work was, as one of my professors pointed out to me, "This is good training for being an assistant professor somewhere." And I thought, "Ooh, is that the life I want?" LG: Did you have a combination of classes and teaching? SG: Yeah. Classes and teaching. Yeah. The first year I had a fellowship. They called it a university fellowship, so I didn't have to teach actually until year three. I can't remember what happened in year two. But it was below poverty level living, but everybody I knew was... You all know what it was like. It was fine. It was very close relationships. I'm still connected with some graduate school friends. I finished my PhD, and I spent time in both Germany and France during my work on my dissertation and applied all over the country. I actually got one offer the year before I got the Skidmore job, but it was a tenure-track job that had been turned into a one-year position at UC Riverside. And I've thought a lot during my life about how differently things could have gone if I'd been doing German and comp lit at UC Riverside instead of English at Skidmore. I mean, you could not get more dramatically different, I think, than that. But when I went out for the interview, I saw teaching German in the middle of these orange groves was going to be a slog, and I just could not see that in the long run actually working out. So for better or worse, I went back on the job market and got the Skidmore job the next year. My committee was delirious. They said, "You're going to love it there." �At that point, I was already a subscriber to Salmagundi. That was all I knew about Skidmore. I was a reader of Salmagundi. I loved it, and I found it very intellectually stimulating. LG: So, did you have an initial interview at MLA [Modern Language Association]or? SG: The initial interview was at MLA. I remember Susan Kress and I'm pretty sure Terry Diggory was there too. Don't remember exactly who else. And then they brought me to campus. And the day after I left the campus interview, it snowed 27 inches. I remember that because I was thinking, "Well, I'm glad I got out of there and, oh wow, what's this going to be like if this turns out?" But the interview went really well on both sides. I loved it here. I could see that this was a place that I would be very fortunate to teach at. LG: And what year was that? SG: That was January of '83. Right. And Ralph Ciancio was chair, and he made the offer. He was, of course, totally charming, as you can imagine. Mimi and he hosted me at their house. It all felt very welcoming. And at the same time, I will not forget my interview conversation with Terry Diggory, who I thought, "Okay, he's got all the brain power I need in a colleague." Just very simpatico, understood exactly what I was trying to do theoretically and went straight to the heart of the meat of what I was working on. Then I also remember Tom Lewis because he was so irreverent. That was good. LG: In what way? You want to talk about that? SG: Well, he just said to me, "Do you like graduate school?" And I said, "You know, Honestly, not really." I might as well be honest. I found it kind of grueling, and I won't bore you with that, but it did not feel like a warm and fuzzy experience at all. It was more sort of like the survival of the fittest, and I was never sure on any given day whether I was considered one of the fittest. And so it was just an intensely uncomfortable situation for all those years. LG: Did it have anything to do with male/female? SG: Oh my God, absolutely. I mean it's telling, for example, that I co-edited a Festschrift for our thesis advisor, Al Cook, who intellectually, a wonderful person, but he just didn't have time for women students. But I was one of his advisees, and he dutifully read my thesis. He wrote about five words on each chapter, sort of encouraging me to go ahead and finish it. I mean, it had virtually no feedback of substance. And yet there I was co-editing the Festschrift for him and with these other two guys who were his visible favorites, but I was so used to that. I mean, that was the way things were at Harvard. You were invisible so much of the time. And by the way, I spent a year in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure des Jeunes Filles. LG: Oh. �SG: Yes. And the jeunes filles were allowed to sit in the back of the room while the normaliens sat in the front with all of the illustrious professors, and they tutored them. I mean, they were on informal terms with those professors. Our housing was on the outskirts of town, [French 00:09:50]. The Rue Dunois, of course, was right in the center near the Sorbonne. I was just used to it. It was such a norm. So when I got to Skidmore, it was an incredible pleasure that right away, there was a Susan Kress in my interview who, she was phenomenal. She was that perfect combination of professional and welcoming and also, just intellectually just so alive. Phyllis was on leave that semester when I first came, but I did get to meet her. And I think that was whenLG: Phyllis Roth? SG: Phyllis Roth, yeah. I think she was pregnant with Ruth and then maybe gave birth then. I'm not sure. It was right around then because I'm pretty sure when I first met her, she was very pregnant. That was kind of inspiring too. I thought, "Okay, may be possible." It was different. I was very different. And the fact of it having been a women's college felt to me like some kind of mark on its character that was entirely positive for me. LG: So, when you first came, what courses were you teaching? SG: Whoa. LG: If you can remember. It's been awhile. SG: Well, actually, I'll mention that during my interview, Ralph Ciancio took me out to dinner, and we were talking about how everybody in the English department teaches English 105, which I guess it was always English 105, Freshman Composition. At some point, I sort of heaved a sigh. I was just trying to relax a little, and he said, "What are you thinking about?" And I said, "I'm thinking I'd really love to have this job." And he said, "But will you really love to teach English composition?" And I said, "Oh, yeah. I can do that." And it was true, I was ready. I had taught it at Brown. I knew what it was. I loved to teach, and I could see this is a place where loving to teach would be viewed favorably and not with some kind of suspicion that you weren't serious enough. And I felt pretty serious as a scholar. I was ambitious. I'd already had some publication. I thought, "I can do this stuff." But I also wanted to teach. So, English 105 every semester, did I get tired of that? Sure, yeah. All those papers all the time, relentless, just that paper grading mill. LG: Did it also give you a chance to interact with the students though? SG: Oh, there's no shortage of interaction with students. I will say one thing. The English majors were not the same as the students from across the college. And 105 was my chance to interact with students from all over the college. There were more men in English 105, for example, than in your typical English classes when I first began. It evolved. �LG: Because it was a required course of everybody at the time. SG: Exactly, exactly. And then also, Skidmore at that time was more tuition driven, and so a lot of the kids came from very privileged backgrounds. And that was truer of English majors, I think, than of the student body as a whole, I would guess. I don't know that there's any data about that. So there was a certain pleasure in having more of a chance to work with kids who were maybe a little scrappier where they're trying to figure out, how can they turn this education into a leg up somehow when they were done. I remember one English major sitting in my office, and he was doing kind of B work. And I knew he was smart. He was a sophomore, and I just said, "John, where you going to go after college?" And he said, "I don't actually need to worry about that." LG: Oh, dear. SG: And I said, "Yes, you do. Of course you do. You need a life." He looked kind of astonished that I wouldn't take that so seriously. LG: So, what courses were you teaching after that? SG: Oh, 105. And I also taught Intro to Poetry, the 200 levels, so I'm going from 100 to 200. Intro to Poetry. I taught Introduction to Women in Literature. I taughtLG: Had that been taught before? SG: Oh, yeah. That had been there, I'm not sure how long, not that long. And by the way, it didn't count towards the major, so that was a change that some of us did bring about. Yes. That's a story, I don't know, should I just tell that right now? LG: Mm-hmm. SG: We had two 200-level courses, Women Characters and Themes, something like Themes. I don't know, it's been awhile. And neither of them counted towards the major. And so the curriculum committee, which consisted mostly of womenLG: The English department curriculum committee? SG: English department curriculum committee brought a proposal to the department to divide them into Introduction to Women in Literature and then an advanced course in, gosh, it wasn't Women Characters, which by that time was theoretically dated. It might've been just more theory, just something more advanced. Sorry, I can't do better than that. And that the advanced course would count towards the major. And at that time, this was in the '80s, feminist theory was really taking off. It was very interesting. There were controversies within it that were toothy, questions of essentialism or sort of pro-women. Well, I won't get into that. �But anyway, I'm going to say this. The men in the department did not want that course to count towards the major, and these were my good friends. And I was just astonished at the resistance that they put up, including going to the... One of them said, "Well, you can't have that course count towards the major because so many of the readings are in translation." And I looked at them and I said, "Well, what about Bob Boyers' Contemporary Novel course where almost everything was read in translation?" It was like that somehow was prestigious but feminist theory in translation was not prestigious. So we kind of beat them down. There obviously were some men who voted with the women or it wouldn't have passed, but there was that very vocal opposition. And maybe some of them in the end just couldn't sustain their opposition. Yeah. LG: Other courses that you taught? SG: Yeah. Well, see, I'm saving the best for last. LG: Okay, good. SG: Because my absolute favorite course that I taught for decades was British Romanticism. I played with that a lot over the years. I did a lot of different things with it, but I did really love just teaching the canon of British poetry. And I don't think that course can be taught that way anymore of British romantic poetry. What I loved about those poets, the late 18th, early 19th century poets, is that I felt that they were of an age that was very similar to my own. I felt as though 1968 was a definitive year for me where my world got turned upside down. And I think something like that happened around 1789 to '91 for these youthful poets. I read them, and I felt as though they gave voice to the same kinds of anxieties and aspirations and rebelliousness and desires that I lived with. It was so much fun to teach them because the students did not come in to this course really expecting to love them as much as they could. And almost always, they left loving those poets. And I threw in Wuthering Heights because that's such a great romantic novel even though it's a generation later, or I threw in Frankenstein. That was another one which is a dream to teach. I loved that course. That was my main 300-level course and the Feminist Theory course, also at the 300 level. I did teach research seminars on the Brontes. The department turned out a little top-heavy with Victorianists, though, so that course sort of slipped away to me, to my regret, because that was a really fun course to teach. LG: Now, at some point you got into administration or to administering at least the engineer department? SG: Yes. LG: Want to talk about that? SG: Yeah. But before I do, can I just add that I also taught in the liberal studies curriculum. �LG: Oh, good. SG: My LS-3 course on memory was also one of my very favorite courses, and I thought that was a brilliant curriculum. What I loved about LS-3 was that it had a theoretical construct going into it, and you had to teach to that construct, which was the relationship, what was it? Remind me. Between the arts and philosophy. That was essentially, that was at the core of LS-3 and how to theorize but also how to express things aesthetically and the tensions between those two modes of discourse. And to have that put there before the students as this is what you have to learn about in this course felt to me like a validation of everything I loved to do but the students sometimes didn't want. They sometimes just wanted to go with the flow and read for the story, that kind of thing. The other... Oh gosh, I just lost it. What was the other LS course? Oh yeah, I taught an LS-2 course. Sorry, what was LS-2? It felt like sociology to me. But I taught a course on romance that was really fun where we read schlock romances but also Pride and Prejudice. And often, the students would come in there, one student said to me once, "I thought I was going to get some tips." But again, it was a joy to teach. Okay, how did I get into administration? Well, it started being chair of the English department, which is a slippery slope. Department had 30-plus FTEs at the time. Just delivering that writing requirement, it was on one department, it was a huge burden. And I kept trying to find ways to get other departments to assume more of that, and some of them took and some of them didn't. Because I thought I'd rather have Leslie Mechem teaching her students in classics to write than somebody I've had to pull in off the street at the last minute because we over-enrolled the class again. And that sounds terrible, but I am not kidding, sometimes I had to hire people who were seriously underqualified to deliver that requirement. Sometimes they turned out to be really good teachers, but you just don't know. And to be doing that in an unplanned way and then sometimes also what we were paying people, trying to get people on a per-course basis so we wouldn't... I mean, it was awful. But I did navigate all that, and I suppose that gave me some administrative skills. And English was a complicated department in many ways, so I got some experience, just all of the hiring, all of the performance reviews, navigating curriculum reform and the challenges of that. I would say the hardest thing was the reappointment and tenure decisions when there was controversy. And hiring was often almost as controversial but not as bitter, typically, sometimes as bitter. So there would be divides within the department, and you tried to reposition those divides so that they didn't split us down the middle. I got a lot of practice with administrative work. Sue Bender was associate dean when I stepped down from department chair. And I don't know, I think maybe a year or two later you were leaving the position, and Chuck Joseph, who was then dean of the faculty, called me and asked me if I would be interested. I had just stopped chairing. I was really not interested, to be honest. But we had our first female president since the beginning of the college. LG: Who was? �SG: Jamienne Studley. And she called me and said, "I'd really like you to do this." I didn't really know her, but I thought, "She must need it for some reason to have a woman in that position. She's losing a woman." And I wasn't sure who else was even under consideration. So I agreed to do it, and I sometimes think how different my time at Skidmore would have been if I had somehow just said no. It was hard. It was very hard, and Sue did warn me. LG: What were your big challenges in that role? SG: What wasn't a challenge? So, let me say from the get-go that I'm not a very organized person, and I'm not good at saying no. I take on too much. And those were not qualities that worked well in that position, so I did have too much on my plate. People were happy to pile that plate full. It was we were a little shorthanded, and then it gradually became clear that I could not, in fact, manage everything. But things that I loved, let me start right there. I loved it that I got to work with the Tang. I justLG: Good. I was going to ask you about that. SG: The Tang for me was that made everything else worth it. It was transformative for me. I don't mind saying that it changed my life. I had to be intellectually honest and find out what about the work with the Tang actually seemed urgent to me. And pretty soon it all seemed really urgent. LG: Can you go into some depth about what it was that you were doing? SG: Okay. So virtually within weeks, a few weeks, the first summer that I started the job, our then director, whose name, I'm sorry... Sue Bender: Charlie Stainback. SG: ... Charlie Stainback, who was marvelous, right? He submitted his resignation. And we were on a president's cabinet, then staff, retreat when that came in. And we're looking around the table. At that point, Charlie had been reporting to me. I'd probably met with him once at that point. And Chuck said, "Well, I guess you'll be leading the search." So, I had to search for a museum director, which was insane. I mean, I had run many searches, but this was something about which I knew nothing. And so I took advice from all sides, and I will say that there were people on the Tang's, oh gosh, what do they call it? Their advisory board, essentially, who were enormously helpful. Adam, ooh, he just resigned. He just retired from directing the Whitney Museum, actually, where he went after doing the Addison Gallery, Andover. Adam Weinberg, he could not have been more generous in his help and his advice and helped me make it. We were on such a shoestring that year. We did it, if you can imagine, without a search firm. LG: What was his connection to Skidmore? �SG: He was on the advisory board. LG: Okay. SG: And I'm not sure, did he have any other connection? Maybe not. It might've been a networking thing for him. Sue Bender: I think Charlie brought him in. SG: Charlie brought him in? Yeah, it was a good advisory board. It was pretty amazing. Between donors and people in that museum world, they brought in fabulous candidates, not all of whom were actually interested. But we had to figure out how to court them somehow. And I remember when it was Ian Berry, who is now the director of the Tang and was then curator and much younger, but he found John Weber, who was at that time director of education for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. And I called John Weber and cold call, and John said, "I've been wondering if you would call." Yes, he'd sort of had his eye, but someone he knew had applied for the position. And he did not want to apply and compete with his friend, which I just thought, "Okay, very much in your favor." And so we sorted that out. He was going to be in New York, I don't know, a week or two later. And I said, "Well, why don't you just make a little day trip up?" We courted each other, let's put it that way. I thought he would be a really good hire. It was not my decision, but he had the right experience. He had the right eye. I mean, Ian Berry's eye is incomparable, honestly, but you have to know. Then people on the advisory board said, "Go for it." And the search committee, of course, was also at that point fully pulled in. So, that was one of my favorite things to do and then just making sure that it happened, just being the person that John would bring ideas to, and you just don't say no. You say, "Let's figure it out." That was so much fun. LG: All right. SG: What else? Something I hated? LG: Why not? SG: Well, one of the other hats that I wore was overseeing assessment at the college. I found a way, again, to believe that it was urgent. I found a way to believe in it. That was the only way I could do something. I couldn't do it if I didn't believe in it, but I certainly didn't believe in much of the culture of assessment nationally. And so I thought what we really needed to do as a college was talk about, in terms that really made sense to us, what do we want our students to be learning and how do we know whether they're learning it? LG: Was this generated by Middle States? SG: Yes. �LG: Okay. SG: By accreditation. Thank you for asking that. The new standards for accreditation that Middle States had passed involved being able to define the goals for our students' learning and measure their success. And the whole idea of measuring learning to me seems to me wrongheaded, but I come out of the romantic anti-empiricist tradition. But I did think we ought to be able to tell some pretty good stories about it and they ought to be evidence based. I mean, I'm fascinated by the status of evidence in every discipline. I always wish that our faculty could have a multidisciplinary discussion of the degree to which evidence is actually valid in our disciplines. But I think a lot of people don't want to have that kind of conversation because it's kind of scary. But okay, don't let me go down that road. I was sometimes asking people to provide evidence that I myself wasn't sure would be valid for much, given the numbers and given the weakness of the statistics and stuff like that. But I also thought, "Regardless of all of that, faculty need to be talking with each other about what they hope their students are learning because we don't know." We know that our best students are doing really well, but what about all the rest of them? We had so much anecdotal evidence of stellar achievement. I mean, not just anecdotal but hard evidence of stellar achievement from 10% of our students. But I thought there were others that were actually, and I saw it in my department, that were slipping through the cracks that were not learning what we thought English majors should be learning. And they were going out in the world representing the English major at Skidmore College, and we didn't have any way of identifying them early and working with them and stuff like that. But faculty were deeply resistant to those conversations. They saw it, as I said once on a panel about assessment at the Modern Language Association Convention, I said, "I felt like a Vichy collaborator." And I said, "I didn't think like one, but I could see people viewing me that way." And it was hard. It just never stopped being hard. The resentment that people had, the ways that they would see me coming and turn around and walk away. It was the hardest thing in my entire Skidmore career. I don't know. But I just have one more thing to say about it. The thing that motivated me the most thinking about it was that I got interested in where learning not to be racist had a home in our curriculum. And I didn't see that it had a home in the curriculum. There were some courses in sociology, but I didn't see that we were asking our students to think about racism as something fundamental in American culture that we needed to be more knowledgeable about collectively, all of us. And the more I read about that, the more I thought, "This is an urgent problem that is not being talked about enough." And I started seeing assessment maybe as a way to leverage that. And in fact, when I ultimately became a campus visitor for some colleges like us for Middle States and for New England, the New England Association, and if I said to the faculty... A lot of places, there was faculty resistance to assessment. And if I said, "Well, do you agree that a liberally educated person should not be a racist, should not harbor racism?" And people would say, "Yes." �And I said, "Well, do you know where that is located in your curriculum? And how is it being taught? Even if it's located in the curriculum, what are they learning, and are they actually learning it?" That was one of the reasons that I got involved in the IGR program at Skidmore, the inter-group dialog, Intergroup Relations. LG: You want to say what the... SG: Yeah, Intergroup Relations is what IGR stands for. That came after my time as dean, so I want to finish the time as dean first. But that was sort of the pathway that most engaged me after my time as dean. Anything else about being a dean? LG: Well, one of the things that I think would be interesting to note is the increasing diversity of both faculty, staff and students during your tenure. SG: Yes. That was definitely something that was talked about regularly in president's staff. It was something that Chuck Joseph and also the other associate dean, John Brueggemann, and I were very interested in. Pat Oles, who was dean of students most of the time we were there, also very interested in. And admissions was quite responsive, so it was really led by admissions. But that was a slow process, but I think the college was transformed maybe over, I'm going to say a 20-year period. I think it was transformative, ultimately. Yeah. LG: Was it driven because of the need to widen the number of students who were coming to Skidmore? SG: No, I think it was driven by a need to keep up with changes that were happening in the academy. I should mention that when I was in the dean's office, I led our re-accreditation effort with the Middle States accreditation, the regional accreditation. That was a major effort. And one of the decisions that we made was to leverage that process to advance changes that we were trying to make. And so we were trying to introduce a new first-year curriculum. We were trying to strengthen the sciences and position ourselves better to qualify for more major grants than we could then qualify for and ultimately, build new science facilities. And we were also trying to strengthen the diversity of the college in every way in every department. So using those topics as part of the accreditation process helped us to advance the conversations because we were asking people to collect the data on these topics and bring those to us. And let's talk about them and what's the story that we have to tell there. I thought that was a very positive way to leverage accreditation to further change, and that was something I was very proud of. It worked. It worked well. I do remember one particular moment where all of the working groups were gathered in a room, and I asked them, I said, "So, what are the connections among these three things, diversity, the first-year experience, and the sciences?" And they looked at me like, "No connections." They were very siloed in their own strategies. And it was pretty thrilling �when Muriel Poston came in as dean of the faculty and just said, "What do you mean there's no connection between diversity and sciences? You need more students in the sciences, right? And you're losing students in the sciences, right?" You know what I mean? It was very, I mean, just such low-hanging fruit to change our ways. LG: So, what are your fondest memories? SG: Of Skidmore? LG: Of your time at Skidmore. SG: This is not a specific one, though actually, I could tell a specific one. But my happiest moments were in that classroom with the door closed when something landed with the students. And there was that slight hush after it landed, and you saw something just happened. It was like something went through the room. I don't know. Of course, I almost said, and often, it was a little transgressive, which is why I can't talk about all of them on a recording. But there would be something fun about it. It would be a way that you could connect with those students. They were young people. They were looking for their own way. Part of me was really interested in just the nostalgia of early 19th century literature, but another part of it was, how are they going to bring the future forward? And I would sometimes teach to that. I will say that I also did love teaching in Intergroup Relations. I don't know if we're almost out of time, but I'd like to take a minute with thatLG: Just go. SG: ... because that was so interesting. Muriel Poston, as dean of the faculty, hired, well, sociology hired Kristie Ford as a brand new PhD. And Muriel said to me, "You keep your eye on her." She came from University of Michigan, where the inter-group dialog program had been begun and developed over 20 years, really. And she wanted to start a program here. It was not a short process. I went out to Michigan, and I went through a training process at the University of Michigan in their program and came back thinking, "That was very powerful. I wonder how that would work here." I wound up teaching with Kristie and getting the program launched. And there were things about it that to me were just quite wonderful, and the main one was the strategies that IGR, Intergroup Relations, programs have for creating a classroom in which very hard conversations can happen and giving those conversations time so that they could develop incrementally. So that you would not, if you're talking about race, which is what it was all about, it was these were race-based dialogs, and the classes were based in dialog. And the students, they were composed of half students of color, half white students. That binary over the course of the semester would get richly textured because everybody would see that just being a white person meant pretty much not very much. Because our �white students, overrepresented in the white students were gay students or LGBTQ, students with invisible disabilities or sometimes visible ones, Jewish students who were very interested in racism in part because of their experiences and familiar experiences of anti-Semitism. And those things would surface, and everything suddenly seemed so much more textured. And those were, again, very powerful moments. And similarly with the students of color, I mean, they came from extremely varied backgrounds with very wideranging differences in how much privilege they had and in their familial expectations and socioeconomics circumstances. So, it would take a semester, and I loved that that would play out. It was sometimes quite imperfect. Some groups were more productive than others in reaching that deeper understanding. LG: Now, these were extracurricular groups? SG: No, no. LG: Or they were part ofSG: They were part of the curriculum. And to Skidmore's credit, we were the first college in the country to offer a minor in IGR. And many other schools are trying to do that now. I think the current one is Amherst College. It's becoming clear that that process of difficult dialog is exactly what we are going to need and also that it's not a one-and-done experience, that it takes time to develop it. For our students in IGR, taking one dialog course is one thing, but taking multiple courses and then serving as a peer facilitator for a dialog course was the moment when really, they would just come to shine. The students who left having done the IGR minor in the years when I was active in the program and stayed in touch with them, well, and also, Kristie's done research on this, it changed them. It changed them permanently, and they use those skills in their work. They talk about that. LG: Sarah, what have you been doing since you retired? And what year did you retire? SG: I retired in 2019. My final year before I retired, I had a sabbatical year because I'd postponed a lot during my time in the dean's office. And I did it on condition that I get a sabbatical year for my final year. And my project for that year was co-curating a show at the Tang Museum, which did turn out to be a pretty much full-time position. LG: Right. SG: We created a marvelous catalog that incidentally won a national award for small museum catalog. It was, I don't know, I want to sayLG: Exhibit was? SG: Oh, sorry. The exhibit was called Like Sugar, and it was a classically interdisciplinary, �transgressive, unexpected, fresh, wild Tang show. And honestly, not because of me. I would've curated a much tamer show, but you don't do that with the Tang. So I just sort of, I buckled up and went along. It was just such an intellectually stimulating experience. LG: And who at the Tang? Excuse me. SG: Who at the Tang? I worked very closely with Rachel Seligman, who was then and is still a curator at the Tang, and then also with a faculty group, Trish Lyell in art, who worked closely with Rachel on selecting the contemporary art that was a major part of the exhibit. Nurcan Helicke, who was Atalan-Helicke, I think she... And she was in environmental studies. But we all crossed over different things, but we were looking in part on the environmental impacts of sugar. And then Monica Raveret Richter from biology. Each of us contributed in different ways. I was very interested in, I'm going to say some of the sociological aspects, so sugar and its impact on race and racism in the United States. I had spent a number of years visiting Baton Rouge every February or every spring and had viewed many of the plantations down there. And had also gone, of all things, to Maui and wound up getting really interested in the sugar plantations there. And started to see that there were some themes here and that sugar was one of those invisible things. I'd always thought of cotton and tobacco as being the great products of enslaved workers in this country's history, but I saw that sugar had also played an enormous role and continues to play an enormous role that just needed somehow to be told. So, I would've had a preachier show probably, but at the same time I think it was perfect in the way it came out because it was unsettling. It was visually very arresting, and it wasn't preachy. It allowed for people to draw some of their own conclusions. And one of the things that was especially moving to me about that show that I didn't anticipate was the number of people who privately admitted to me their own eating disorders that revolved around sugar, and that was quite powerful. I thought, "This is just not something that's talked about that much in public discourse." But sugar is extremely powerful in our culture and is being exported by Americans now all over the world with terrible effects. And I thought that was one of the things that came out in the show as well. On the other hand, another thing that came out was sugar is damn fun. Right? And somehow the idea that those very wildly different emotions and lessons could coexist and be true seemed to me absolutely the best of what Skidmore does. LG: Okay. And since you've retired? SG: Oh, since that. I don't know, I'm really busy, just insanely busy, and so that part hasn't changed. I retired into COVID, and I was not insanely busy during COVID. COVID was this incredible hit pause, nothing happens. I know it sounds crazy, but it was restorative for me. Despite all of the anxieties around the pandemic, I was glad that I wasn't trying to teach during that time. I don't know that I could've done it. I think I was exhausted at that point. �But then I started up two reading groups on race and racism during COVID, one for Skidmore retirees and one for members of my college class. I graduated in the class of 1975 at Harvard, and it turned out there were a lot of people who wanted to do this. I won't describe the history of how that came about. It was completely unexpected to me, but it is still going on. And it is extremely time-consuming, very challenging. It's a mixed race group. We meet once a month, but I got roped into another group that meets another once a month that is slightly broader in topic that's about social justice issues generally. But as it turns out, Harvard is also the nexus right now of a lot of controversy related to race and racism and how colleges and campuses are doing diversity, equity and inclusion. And our group does not all see eye to eye on what's happening on campus at Harvard, and we just... I have to say, I'm using all of my dialog skills to keep that going, and it has been a very powerful experience. I will just add that we've also taken a wide detour since the October 7th Hamas invasion of Israel to incorporate more discussion of anti-Semitism in the group. And that was something I had already experienced in the IGR program at Skidmore on a much smaller scale, so it didn't surprise me. But that hasn't made it any easier to navigate. It's been very complicated and well worth doing. We had a meeting just last night that I thought, "Okay, wow, we got through that one." So that's kept me very busy. I also have four grandchildren, two on the West Coast, two here. I'm going to brag and say my daughter just got tenure at Mount Holyoke this spring and lives close enough that I can go visit but, mostly, not just for the day. So, I do shuttle back and forth a bit to Northampton, and that is a source of incredible delight to me, also a whole new generation to worry about, yay. But otherwise, I want to say something that's very weird and to put this out there is a little hard, but I almost never read poetry. And when I do, I find it hard to do. It's like, it's a part of me that isn't ready to be reawakened. And I read obsessively the news with dread and with horror, and that's not altogether healthy. And I sometimes think, "You know, Sarah, it wouldn't be so bad if you allowed yourself some poetry." LG: Anything else you want to bring up? SG: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I started working out, actually, the year I turned 40. And I don't know why in my academic preparation nobody ever talked about making sure that you think about the body, but it is really true. And in retirement, one of the greatest sources of satisfaction is I can work out in as many ways as I want for as long as I want, and nobody is saying, "Better go grade those papers." LG: Thank you, Sarah. This has been a delight. SG: Thank you. SUE BENDER: Thanks, Sarah. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Lynne Gelber Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Sarah Goodwin Location The location of the interview Saratoga Springs, NY Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio Recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 51:28 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Sue Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit April 11, 2024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Sarah Goodwin Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 11, 2024 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Description An account of the resource Sarah Goodwin joined the Skidmore English faculty in 1983 teaching courses in composition, women’s studies, British romantic poetry, feminist theory and participated in the Liberal Studies program.  Her passion was interdisciplinary thinking and courses focusing on student dialogue and diversity.  Intergroup relations were important components which she brought to her role as teacher, English Department Chair and Associate Dean of the Faculty.  Sarah led Skidmore’s Middle States accreditation assessment and later participated in assessments at other schools.  Since retirement in 2019 Sarah has led two reading groups on Race and Racism, one at Harvard and one with Skidmore faculty and staff. Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/878e3a4fa806b9605ac6f26942f32606.jpg 128109595eac0e28fe95caae0b107653 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/481f4b8849648292837e96bc57e93349.m4a 69d3219334afbfa528baa2511fdfdb5a https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/0015f5078efa840e8d501ff9137ae0b5.pdf f91bf649c477a6c5293ca2442c876b1b PDF Text Text Interviewee: Patricia Rubio Years at Skidmore: 1985 - 2016 Interviewers: Lynne Gelber and Susan Bender Location of Interview: Saratoga Springs, NY Date of Interview: April 14, 2021 00:00:00 Header 00:00:33 Born in Valparaíso, Chile; lived in Viña del Mar; attended small, multilingual, private K-12 school in Valparaíso. 00:01:28 Attended Universidad Católica de Valparaíso - 5 year program for a degree in Spanish 00:02:12 Applied for/received Fulbright Scholarship to attend University of Minnesota 00:03:00 Planned return to Valparaíso to teach, but 1973 military coup changed University situation and prevented return. 00:03:35 March 1974 joined Juan Carlos in Spain and they married there in June 1974 00:03:50 Lived in Barcelona for a year and a half; applied to graduate programs in Canada; attended University of Alberta/lived 5 years in Edmonton. 00:04:41 Came to Skidmore September 1980. Juan Carlos taught and Paty completed dissertation; both applied for green cards; daughter Camila born June 1982. 00:05:35 Because couldn’t return to Chile, had intentionally staggered dissertation completions, so if 1st MLA search unsuccessful, they could stay in Canada while Paty completed dissertation. 00:06:28 In 1984 Paty taught a semester at Middlebury College, VT. Paty & Camila moved to VT, Juan Carlos spent weekends there. 00:07:34 Paty applied to positions at Skidmore and Russel Sage. Offered both; chose Skidmore. 00:08:02 Visa and citizenship processes expensive, time consuming. 00:08:53 Now hiring institutions pay the fees; that has helped Skidmore draw foreign faculty. 00:09:39 Taught 101 - 300 level classes in Spanish American literature and culture. 101 is favorite “because students are a clean linguistic slate and they have a sense that they’re really making progress throughout the semester.” 00:10:33 The few Hispanic undergraduate students at that time “gravitated towards Spanish.” 00:11:30 The Spanish-speaking students had stronger oral skills than grammatical; therefore different needs than the non-Spanish speaking students. 00:12:41 Other roles: 1987-1990 coordinated Self Instructional Languages Program (SILP). 00:14:11 In SILP, students develop oral skills using recordings, a curriculum, and meetings with tutors, most of whom are native speakers. 00:17:00 Also: directed Women’s Studies program, chaired Foreign Languages & Literatures Department for 5 years; Associate Dean of the Faculty for 7 years, was Acting Dean when President Phil Glotzbach went on sabbatical. 00:17:50 Helped move Women’s Studies program from a minor to a major, establishing a curriculum in Women’s Studies. 00:18:31 Goal of Women’s Studies 101: provide overview of the field and current/evolving issues, so covered wide range of topics - theoretical, historical, sociological, political. 00:19:27 In June 1997 brought National Association for Women’s Studies’ annual conference to Skidmore. Collaborated with Special Programs and with Women’s Studies faculty to create program. Great ideas - art exhibits, a film program, a book show, presentations, keynotes, etc. 00:24:44 Challenging, but “I discovered I could do this!” Phyllis Roth empowering influence. �00:25:30 Also, administrator roles were empowering — could improve things for the department. Example - stabilizing adjunct courses by making full-time adjunct positions. 00:27:55 Became Associate Dean when Muriel Poston was Dean. Learned to look at things from broader perspective. 00:30:00 Rubio (from Humanities), Poston (from Sciences) perfect team b/c balanced qualitative & quantitative. Learned how to put problems in context to see various repercussions of small decisions for the departments and college. 00:31:32 As administrator, saw Skidmore as a whole Institution,… possibilities, strengths, weaknesses, places to concentrate, who to talk to, who can help? 00:32:00 “It’s fascinating! … those seven years that I was in the Dean’s office, I liked every single one. … I just loved every minute of it.” 00:32:38 Interest in diversity arose first with students — realizing how the Latino students felt… that one of the reasons they came to study Spanish is because they found people like them. 00:33:53 Latino Cultural Society was first Latino student organization - evolved into RAICES. 00:34:17 Another source of interest in diversity was the program itself - Foreign languages … by definition [a] diverse topic …foreign languages, foreign cultures. 00:34:35 And Muriel Poston herself; the first Black Dean of the Faculty in a mostly white institution & white community. Had to go to Glens Falls simply to get hair done. When Poston interviewed at Skidmore, she asked to meet with faculty of color. There were only 5 or 6. 00:35:17 Once Dean, Poston asked faculty to examine department hiring processes to determine usefulness in attracting faculty of color. 00:35:40 When Beau Breslin became Dean, he appointed [Rubio] Associate Dean for Diversity. Skidmore hired consultants to improve hiring processes. Success in that effort due in part to great support from Deans Muriel Poston and Beau Breslin and President Phil Glotzbach. 00:37:35 A position description/ad exhibits “the seriousness of the institution … in terms of hiring faculty of color.” Hiring processes changed, following consultant’s advice. 00:39:12 Retired 2016 00:41:03 Since retiring, annually travels to Chile for several months to help sister run her restaurant and to visit lifelong friends; in summers volunteers with Saratoga backstretch workers, teaching English as a second language; plays golf; on board of Saratoga Film Forum and Saratoga Chamber Players; passionate about working in yard and garden. 00:43:06 Also reads a lot. “Now I’d rather read than write. Juan Carlos taught me that. …at some point he said, ‘I’m done with research. I don’t want to write any more, I want to read.' And that makes sense to me now. It didn’t then but it makes sense to me now.” 00:44:21 END � https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/c65a837e139652e712cc71568c96093f.pdf d1c119146a7bb209bf72eb7cb8c16e85 PDF Text Text Interview with Patricia Rubio by Lynne Gelber, Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, Saratoga Springs, New York, April 14, 2021. LYNNE GELBER: This is Lynne Gelber. I am with Susan Bender. It is April 14th, 2021, and we are interviewing Patricia Rubio for the Oral History Project. So … PATRICIA RUBIO: Thank you for having me. LG: It’s our pleasure and thank you for doing this. PR: Well, my pleasure. LG: Patty, why don’t you tell us a little bit about where you were born and brought up and your early schooling. PR: Sure. I was born in Valparaíso, Chile, but lived from ages six to 23 in Viña del Mar. Valparaíso’s twin city. My three sisters and I went to a small private school in Valparaíso. There were about 600 students between kindergarten and 12th grade, and most of the instruction in elementary school was done in German. So, I was introduced to a foreign languages at age 5 in kindergarten. and graduated from this school thirteen years later with additional solid instruction in English which was introduced in seventh grade. I was very fortunate to have had access to that kind of education. Classes were very small, never more than fourteen to fifteen students; there were seven students in my senior class most of whom I had known since kindergarten or first grade. I interrupted my studies in my junior year to come to live with a family and attend high school in Storrs, CT. in 1962. This was also an important experience in my upbringing. After high school I entered college. LG: In Valparaíso? �PR: Yes. The college system in Chile follows the European model, which means that one has decided in one’s two last years of high school the career one will pursue. From very early in high school I knew that I wanted to teach and I liked literature and history so I pursued a degree in Spanish. So Spanish and Latin American literature and culture with a very solid foundation in syntax and linguistics. It’s a five-year program that included one year of Latin and Greek, theoretical linguistics, syntax and normative grammar. The objective of the program was to prepare students to teach the Spanish high school curriculum which included Spanish, Chilean and Spanish American literature plus Spanish grammar and writing. I had also made up my mind while in college, to pursue graduate study, at least a Masters degree. So, in my last year at the university, I applied for a Fulbright Scholarship which I received. LG: And that was at Valparaíso? PR: Yes, at the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. In those days, this 1969-70, Fulbright assigned prospective students to graduate programs at Universities in the U.S.. In Chile I had begun to pursue an academic career through teaching assistant positions in Spanish American literature. I was approached to teach General Literature, and so a degree in Comparative literature was appropriate. The idea was that I would return from the U.S. with an M.A. to a position that included General Literature as part of my teaching duties. But things happened. The military took over the government in 1973, during my first semester at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The situation at the University in Chile changed and I never returned. Instead of Chile, I left for Spain in March 1974, and married Juan Carlos in June of that year. �LG: In Barcelona? PR: In the Barcelona area. We lived in Barcelona for a year and a half, knowing that it was just a stop in the voyage, and went to Canada to pursue our PhDs in Hispanic literatures and the University of Alberta. We lived in Edmonton for five years which despite the extreme harsh winters we really enjoyed. We staged it so that Juan Carlos would defend his dissertation before I did so that we would have two possible hiring rounds for finding jobs in this part of the world. Jobs were not easy to find. Lynne, you were the chair of Modern Languages and Literatures then and you hired both of us. Thank you for having done so! LG: The rest is history! [laughter] LG: So, when you came here you were not initially teaching but then …? PR: Well, what happened is that Juan Carlos came with an H-1B visa, which allowed him to work and I had a visa that allowed me to live in the country but not to work. We applied for the green card in Juan Carlos’ second year here, had Camila, and waited patiently for the INS to do its work. The process was successful, and we became citizens five or six years later. LG: You came to Skidmore? PR: We both came to Skidmore in September 1980. LG: OK. PR: When we came, I was ABD, Juan Carlos had finished his degree. I had been awarded a thesis scholarship, which would have allowed us to stay for an additional year in Canada. In our first year here I completed the dissertation. I taught at Middlebury College in a one semester replacement in 1984. Camila, who was a toddler, and I moved to Vermont. LG: Camilla was born here. �PR: Yes. Remember LG: I do remember because we decorated the office. PR: [laughter] Yeah. Yes, she was born in June 1982. You gave Juan Carlos a really good schedule according to which he started teaching late on Mondays and ended early on Friday afternoon so that he would be able to drive to Middlebury to spend the weekend with us. It was a tough semester. I had never taught in the US; they had hired me because they needed someone who would be able to teach Spanish American Culture and Civilization. Every class was a new prep. I remember spending every Saturday at the library preparing classes, while Juan Carlos took care of Camila. Sunday was a family day. After we obtained our permanent visa, I applied for several positions in the area, including Skidmore. The faculty had changed the curriculum and passed a foreign language requirement. So the department needed to hire two additional faculty and, as I said before, you hired me. I also had an offer from Russel Sage but of course I chose Skidmore. LG: Thank goodness! PR: Either before or after Middlebury, but during the visa process during which I was allowed to work, you hired me to teach part time: one Spanish language course each in the fall and the spring. If I remember well, it was Intermediate Spanish. LG: As I recall, we were able to use the services of the lawyer for the College, in Glens Falls. PR: That was in order to get the renewal of Juan Carlos’ H-1B. We hired a lawyer from Albany to help us with the application process for the residency visa. In those days, the Institution didn’t have to pay for the process. After the immigration law changed, the hiring institution is responsible for the fees �which are very high. We are fortunate that Skidmore has been able to do that because it explains in part the success the institution has had in hiring foreign faculty in the past five years. A good number of the foreign faculty come with an H1-B visas which is the entry way to permanent residency. LG: I vaguely remember that. PR: Yes. LG: So what courses were you teaching? PR: Where? LG: At Skidmore. PR & LG: [laughter] LG: Thank you. PR: That’s O.K. Well you know that in our department, everyone teaches the whole gamut of courses So I taught beginning Spanish and all the way up to 300 level classes including Spanish American literature and culture. LG: And what were your favorite? PR: My favorite? I always liked to teach 101, because students are a clean linguistic slate, and they have a sense that they’re really making progress throughout the semester. The more fortunate ones, during Christmas break, would travel to a Spanish speaking country where they realized that they could read a menu, could be really helpful to their families in negotiating the cities, reading signs, etc... This was a powerful experience and they would come back really energized and ready for more. LG: How many Hispanic students were there in the undergraduate population at that point? PR: Few. They gravitated towards Spanish courses, thinking that being Latino also meant being Latin American; and some were immigrants themselves. It was very nice to have, particularly at the upper level, students from diverse �backgrounds. They contributed points of view and diverse ideas to class discussion. At the upper level, that is in literature and culture and civ courses, there were always a number of native Spanish speakers, and that was also nice. In these classes we read sophisticated materials and they were able to help their classmates to plough through the texts. Nowadays Latino students are aware of their identity as citizens of this country. Many take Spanish classes because they want to increase their language abilities and learn about their cultural and family backgrounds. LG: As I recall, those students had an oral knowledge. Is that correct? Yes, they did. Their oral skills outperformed their ability to write correctly in Spanish. Often first or second-generation students had the most difficulties because they were fluent but their knowledge of the language was not normative; their grammar was not accurate. Our curriculum back then was mostly intended for non-native speakers and those courses were in many ways not well suited for students who had leaned Spanish at home without formal instruction. LG: And they didn’t have any grammar skills? PR: Most of them did not. The grammar accuracy was all over the place [laughter]. LG & SUE BENDER: [laughter] SB: Spanglish. PR: [laughter] Well, a lot of Spanglish, like, “How are you?” “Nada mucho,” which in Spanish means, “he or she swims a lot.” Very difficult linguistic habits to undo. But this was the Spanish they heard and spoke in their communities, and it worked for them. Many of them were eager to learn normative grammar. �I also very much liked teaching mixed populations of students: US majority students with Latino students. LG: So you had other responsibilities in the course of your career? PR: Yes. it started with the Self-Instructional Languages program. You appointed me as coordinator in 1987 a position that I held until 1990. Sonja Karsen had established the program in the seventies and coordinated it until she retired. LG: Sonja Karsen, who was the … chair of the department? PR: For twenty-two years, right? LG: Until … PR: Until she stepped down and you became chair. LG: Yeah … PR: The Self-Instructional Languages program contributed to the language offerings of the department. It included, LG: Arabic and Hebrew. PR: Yes, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and Russian. LG: Russian, how could I forget? PR: We then added Korean and Sanskrit. SILP was and continues to be a very successful program, it allows the College to offer twelve languages, which is impressive. And it is popular program with students. Years after I had stepped down and began to chair the department, the program was enrolling close to 80 students. The SILP languages continue to be a venue for the fulfillment of the language requirement. LG: Say one or two words about what the Self-Instructional Language Program is. PR: Sure. The focus is on developing aural and oral skills. Students meet with a tutor (most tutors are native speakers), twice a week for an hour. Students have to have prepared the material before coming to the tutoring session, �thus the name of the program. At the tutoring session, they discuss and practice material, and agree on the assignment for the following week. Tutors guide and monitor students’ progress. During my time with the program, students had a textbook and tapes as learning materials. They followed the curriculum developed by the Self Instructional Languages Association. Tutoring groups are small, not to exceed 5 students per language section. When the number of registered students exceeded five, as it often happened in Hebrew, for example, students were placed into parallel sections. This allowed for ample time for discussion and practice and ultimately students had more one-on-one time with the tutor than in a regular class that met three times a week with 15 students. LG: And the instructor is a native speaker except for Sanskrit. PR: And Arabic and Hebrew PR: The person who tutors in Arabic, has a doctorate in Arabic linguistics, and the person in Hebrew, although she was not from Israel, was very successful and probably the longest serving tutor in the program. Both were there when I took over the coordination of the program and remained long after I had stepped down. I believe that Regina Hurwitz still tutors Arabic. LG: Well … PR: At the end of the semester students were tested by an outside examiner. The SILP Association helped us to identify potential outside examiners when necessary. The Japanese examiner came from Cornell, the one for Hebrew from the State University at Buffalo, the examiner for Russian from the U of Albany, etc. LG: And what was your role? PR: As coordinator I met with each student interested in the SILP language before �they registered in order to explain how the program functioned and what their responsibilities would be. It was important for them to understand, for example, that the grade they received in the final exam was the grade for the course. That they needed to work diligently during the semester even if they were not being tested periodically for a grade. Any testing given during the semester was only diagnostic. The program was not open to first year students. The thinking was that there are too many claims on their time that could interfere with the independent study of the language. I also coordinated the tutoring schedules and liaised with the Registrar’s Offic. I hired the examiners and set the final exam schedule. Examiners often were not local. I was also the person to go for tutors and students in case of grievances or problems. LG: What other roles did you have in the course of your career? PR: I directed the Women’s Studies program for four years, succeeding Mary Stange who had been the first director of the program. I thoroughly enjoyed this assignment. A number of my courses in the Foreign Languages and Literatures department counted towards the WS minor and the major. During my time as director, the faculty approved the major. During my time as director, we expanded the WS curriculum to include one intermediate level course and the senior seminar. The WS faculty was very supportive of the various initiatives that we pursued and contributed to various tasks when necessary. Although the program had existed for over a decade, it cemented its place among other interdisciplinary programs once the major was approved. The generation of women faculty that preceded me, and most of whom were tenured professors before I joined the College in 1984, had worked hard in building the program. Most of them were very committed to �enriching and delivering the curriculum, advising students, supervising theses, and in mentoring incoming women faculty. . When I stepped down from WS I became chair of the FLL, a position I occupied for five years. I then became Associate Dean of the Faculty a position I held for seven years. LG: What was, do you think, in all those years, your biggest challenge? PR: Every administrative position brought different challenges; that is what made each so interesting; everyone presented opportunities for professional and personal growth. For example, when I became WS director, the program was ready to move from a minor to a major. The proposal for the major was a collective WS faculty undertaking spearheaded by Kate Berheide and myself. Kate, a professor in Sociology, had experience in WS program design. The WS faculty, had a central role in the discussion and approval of the final proposal. The process took over a year from start to finish, that is from when we began to work on the proposal to college faculty approval. We needed to have all our ducks in a row as we knew that we would face some opposition from a number of principally male segments of the faculty. Although the vote was not unanimous the proposal passed by a sizable majority. It would be interesting to revisit the minutes of that Faculty Meeting. As a result of the major’s approval, student interest in WS grew so that it became necessary, for example, to offer two sections of WS 101 every semester. This was huge because we were able to increase the number of students interested in pursuing the major or minor. On average, during my time as director, we majored about 8 students per year, which was not small for an interdisciplinary program. �LG: Did you teach the 101 course? PR: Yes, I did for the four years I headed the program. It loved the course; the curriculum was broad and interesting; student interest was high and 101 engaged them in a journey of discovery regarding their own identity as women. Although the majority of students were women, there were one or two men per year who were curious took it. There were no male majors during my time s director. LG: And generally, what kinds of things did you cover in that course? PR: It included the history of the US women’s and feminist movements; women’s political struggles and involvement in the fight for the vote, the ERA. Their participation in the antislavery and temperance movements. We studied feminist theory; the history of women’s pursuit for the control of our bodies; the political, social and personal consequences of women’s social roles in patriarchal societies and in the patriarchal workplace; the intersections between gender, race, ethnicity and class. We also read literature, notedly Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale; some poetry. The objective of the course was for students to understand the discipline; the areas of knowledge that define Women’s Studies. To provide a solid base for the rest of the curriculum. LG: Now, what do you recall from those years that you were directing the Women’s Studies program? PR: I recall many things. I recall the importance for the institution of having a vibrant, energetic community of female faculty. We built community by means of, for example, weekly brown-bag lunches, two WS potluck dinners per year which were open to students and staff as well; faculty meetings to discuss issues pertaining the program: curriculum, staffing needs, program objectives, invited speakers, etc. These were always occasions to welcome and recruit incoming faculty, to learn about each other’s teaching and �research. Students were involved in several of these activities: they were part of the Steering committee, and as I have said6 invited to WS sponsored activities. In terms of challenges, the four-day National Women’s Studies Association meeting, in June 1997 was huge. Phyllis Roth, then Dean of the Faculty and Vice-president of Academic Affairs. was approached by Marjorie Prise, then President of the NWSA, about the possibility of hosting the 1997 annual meeting. Marjorie was then Professor of English at the University of Albany, and I was incoming director of Women’s Studies. Phyllis consulted with Mary and me, and we decided to accept the challenge. And a challenge it was!! Mary went on sabbatical and I attended the NWSA 1995 meeting at the University of Oklahoma, in order to meet with members of the NWSA leadership, and to observe how the conference was structured and ran. There were over 500 participants at the Tulsa meeting, and we needed to plan for similar attendance at Skidmore. It exceeds the scope of this interview to detail what the planning and organization for the conference entailed. Suffice it to say that central to its success was the active involvement of the WS faculty, and the collaboration with Sharon Arpey in Special Programs. The Women’s Studies faculty and I worked on the ‘academic’ program, while Sharon Arpey undertook the ‘non-academic’ aspects of the event (housing, food, infrastructure, etc.). She and I worked closely for two years. The conference included a film program, a sculpture show in South Park, a women-faculty art show in Schick Gallery, a large book exhibit in the gym, dozens and dozens of presentations, several keynote speakers, and a healthy dose of minor controversies. �LG: So you were coordinating, what, with the library and with the Tang? PR: The Tang did not exist back then; we had an exhibit at the library on women in Skidmore’s history organized by Mary Lynn who, with some of her students drew materials from the College archive. LG: OK LG: It sounds like it was most fun. PR: Yes, it was. I also discovered that I could successfully work on a large project. At first, when Phyllis said that it would be my undertaking, I said, “Sure, why not” and when I left her office I thought, “By golly! What did I just get into? LG: Very empowering, isn’t it? PR: Yes, it was, and I thank Phyllis for having given me the opportunity and for having confidence in me. Typical Phyllis: she gave opportunities for people to grow and develop. I remember in my first year chatting with her while we walked across campus; at some point she said, “Well, you know, in the future you’ll be chair of the department,” and I thought, Really? Am I hearing right? So going back to your earlier question, Lynne, of major challenges, every one of the positions presented worthy challenges. Chairing the FLL was also a huge challenge. But by then I had discovered that I could be an effective administrator and I wanted to be chair. I had also learned that I could work with various individuals, even with those with whom I was not particularly simpatico. All of that was very empowering, as you said before, and I needed every bit of that experience as head of the FLL. You were chair of the department for a good chunk of time, you know how complicated it is to head a multi-section department; every section has its needs, the whole is �larger than the sum of its parts. I always thought that one of the main challenges in the department was the imbalance of its structure: two large section, French and Spanish, and four smaller sections, Chinese, Japanese, German and Italian, three of which were unevenly staffed. So when Chuck Joseph who was Dean of the Faculty interviewed me for the position, I told him that one of my objectives as chair would be to stabilize the small sections. So that they would feel better in the department, not overwhelmed by the two large sections. It was hard to keep the department engaged in everything, knowing that colleagues in the small sections, often felt that their voices were not as strong as those in the large sections. So I said to Chuck “There are three sections — Japanese, Chinese, and German — that only have one full time faculty and also adjuncts; it is always a problem in Saratoga find good adjuncts for those positions. I told him that I wanted to upgrade the second position to full-time. It would also free tenure and tenure track faculty to participate in the delivery if the all-College requirement. He agreed, and we created a second full-time position in German, Japanese and Chinese. Italian had been stabilized when Giuseppe became chair; at that point we hired a second person into a tenure track position. PR: So that objective was realized, and I still feel proud of it. The other major undertaking was guiding the the self-study necessary for the 10-year review, so once the review was done, I was ready to go. You know? There were other colleagues wanting to be chair and, who had other ideas for the department, and that’s important. PR: Then Muriel became Dean, and after … LG: Muriel? PR: Poston. Muriel Poston became Dean, and after her first Associate Dean, Mark �Hoffman, stepped down — he had only made a commitment for two years, — there was a call for interested faculty in the ADOF position. I threw my hat in. Ultimately, Muriel offered me the position which was an entirely different ballgame. In all the other administrative positions I dealt with specific, more or less narrowly defined tasks: hiring, the schedule, tending to faculty needs, mentoring incoming or pre-tenure faculty, connecting to the DOF, etc. In the Dean’s Office, one gets to see the institution from a very different venue. It was, like, “Wow, this is really something that I’ve never done.” Muriel had a broad and deep understanding of US higher education. She had also worked at the National Science Foundation, was a member of a number of associations of higher ed, was very interested in educational policy, in diversity issues. I learned enormously from her. During the three years that I worked with her she sent me to conferences, encouraged me to meet other ADOFs from different institutions, to get involved in various groups and tasks. For the first time I understood how narrowly I had understood my position and responsibilities at the institution; how little I knew of the big picture of higher education writ large. This is not just the department, this is not just my course, this is not just my research, but this is the institution, nationally. LG: So … ok, when …oh, alright. So when you are talking about writ large, are you talking about things like finances and, are you talking about …? PR: Mmm, I am mostly talking about the academic area. As the ADOF, one of my responsibilities was academic space: labs, research areas, classrooms, studios, etc., When we hire, particularly in the sciences, can we accommodate that person in terms of their lab needs? Finance, not directly, but most everything that one wishes or needs to do is budgetarily possible or not. One of my tasks was to try to find the money; talk to folks in financial �affairs. The same with faculty positions. I was in charge of all non-tenure track hiring. Every one of those positions needed approval from Financial Affairs. What was incredibly interesting fin working with Muriel is that she her disciplinary training was in the natural sciences and for her data is central. So, I would bring an issue to her, and she would say, what is your data? We would discuss it and at some point it became clear that we were interpreting it differently. She, from a quantitative and I from qualitative perspective. She would frequently say, “but the data, Paty, suggests that…” and I’d said, “yes, but not everything is data, Muriel.” Right? “What do you mean?” “Well, there are ambiguities, you know. Look at the data from this perspective” And because she was very smart, she would say, “Oh, ok, fine. Let’s then rethink it.” The process was fascinating. She had the ability of seeing both the particular and the general at the same time. Discussions would begin at the micro level and often by the time she was done with it, we were able to understand the larger implications. I had never worked with a person like Muriel. PR: I wanted to help Muriel to understand the culture of the institution. She came to us from the National Science Foundation. She was an outsider; the only black woman in the upper administration; she had not worked at a small liberal arts college before; and she needed help on how to … and so how to get people to get to know her; she was shy. And I was not always successful in creating opportunities for her to know the faculty. I mean, you know, I was part of the administration, but I was unable to solve the problem fully. So, in that sense, I failed, if you will. My experience in the Dean’s Office, however, was amazing. For the first time I understood the institutional �possibilities and the limitations. When Muriel left, Beau Breslin stepped into the Dean’s position. My job changed in interesting ways as faculty development and diversity were added to my duties. I had learned much from Muriel about the importance and need for hiring diverse faculty across the institution. It would be too long to detail what we did. Suffice it to say that Beau moved along what Muriel had begun; after four years the profile of the Skidmore faculty was beginning to change. It wasn’t easy. Departments were not always ready to shed their old procedures. “We shouldn’t do it this way”, “We have never done it this way”. But finally, everyone bought into it. It was fascinating. LG: Icing on the cake? PR: Icing on the cake, yeah. (00:32:25 ) SB: Could I ask a question? PR: Sure. SB: Talking about the institution, … LG: This is Susan talking. SB: This is Susan talking, yeah. [laughs] We were talking about your Institution wide perspective in engagement, Patty. I know that diversity was a topic near and dear … maybe Lynne was heading in that direction, but near and dear to your heart, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the source of your commitment to diversity and what you believe, over the years, how Skidmore changed in that regard? What some of the successes, challenges were and some of the challenges that still remain? PR: The source of my initial interest was connected to students, really, specifically to the Latino students. When I came to Skidmore, a steady number of them, particularly Latinas took my classes, my lit and culture classes mostly. And as a result, I developed relationships with students, and realized the cultural �confusion of many of them. I taught language courses and Spanish American lit and culture. We did not then have courses on LatinX studies which is what they were really craving for. Mine and other courses in the department could only partially fulfill their need for understanding part of their cultural identity. So, with a little bit of guidance they created the Latino Cultural Society which was the first Latino student organization at Skidmore; it then became RAICES. It helped then to consolidate their position at the institution which was and still is majority white. They brought speakers, organized social and cultural events. They were a diverse bunch with various backgrounds. And then, of course, came Muriel. Muriel Poston, again. You know, the first Black Dean of the Faculty in a mostly very white institution. LG: And white community. PR: And white community. In order to get her hair cut she had to go to Glens Falls … to get her hair done. There aren’t any men or women hair stylists in the Saratoga area who know how to cut or style African American hair. When Muriel visited Skidmore, she asked to meet with faculty of color. Chuck Joseph, then Dean of the Faculty, asked me that morning to put together a group to meet with her in the afternoon. There were five or six of us in the room. One of the first things she did as Dean was to ask chairs and program directors to look at their hiring processes, to interrogate whether it was a friendly hiring process or, whether that hiring process was useful in order to attract faculty of color. We had never been asked to include diversity into our hiring processes. PR: And, … but things really got working when Beau became Dean. SB: Beau? �PR: Breslin. Because Muriel could only take it so far and she was in the office for five years only. Right? As Assistant Dean of the First-Year Experience, Beau was part of Muriel’s staff and part of the discussions we frequently had on diversity. So when he became Dean, he embraced diversity as one of his agendas. And then when he became VPAA and Dean of the Faculty, he appointed me as Associate Dean for Diversity. And we hired Pat Romney Associates, in order to streamline across departments, the hiring process. Uh, there was a lot of screaming and shouting [laughs], “We don’t want to do it this way. We’ve always done it this other way. Why do have to do this?” and Beau was firm. I mean, the success of the diversity agenda is not necessarily mine. I would never have been able to do anything as Associate Dean without the Dean really pushing for it. And Phil also was very much on boar; it became a priority for him. LG: Phil PR: Phil Glotzbach, the President. There were budgetary implications. Pat Romney came to campus twice a year to run a workshop on diverse hiring that began with “this is the way that the ad needs to be written. The diversity statement is not at the end, the diversity statement is in the middle.” I mean, things like that. Because diversity is not an afterthought. Faculty of color, domestic faculty of color are very attuned to how the ads read. The ad says a lot about how serious the institution is in terms of hiring faculty of color. I was in charge of the process, in terms of making sure that every single ad was appropriately written, that it followed the guidelines; there were also protocols regarding the selection of finalists, for the campus visits that every department needed to follow. I was very passionate about this work. It felt so meaningful. I worked very hard with departments and programs and it was a job that I loved and it was successful. I mean, look at the diversity of the �faculty now. It’s huge! And so … but if it hadn’t been, early for Muriel, next for Beau, my interest would have been just my interest, but it would of not have translated in real changes for the Institution. LG: Are there other things that we haven’t covered that we should talk about your career? When did you retire from Skidmore? PR: It’s been five years, so I’ll …[laughs] No, it’s in 2015. But really, I retired in 2016. What happened is, I was due a sabbatical which delayed by retirement date. It was time. Seven years in the DOF, it was time. And I had to choose. You both know this well … as interesting as the work is, it becomes a chore, and the chore for me were the CAPT cases particularly having to read the student teaching evaluations. One year there was a candidate in the dance department where most faculty teach only one and two credit classes. That year I read thousands of student evals. And I knew that the coming cohorts would be larger. We had been hiring over ten new faculty per year: too many evaluations. I just couldn’t do it again. It’s like, “Why did you retire from the English Department, or History, or you name the department?” “I don’t want to read another composition or essay.” Exactly that. So it was time for somebody else to do it. And, … so seven years was a long time. How long were you in the DOF? SB: Four PR: Four, yeah. LG: So, what have you been doing since you retired? PR: Oh, depending on the time of the year. I go to Chile for three or four months or sometimes twice in one year. I help my sister in her restaurant in Santiago. When I am there she can take a vacation; I run her restaurant for �her; it’s a lot of work but also great fun. Most of the time we work side by side which I really enjoy. I’ve lived for 40 years in the United States, and one of the things that I decided when I retired was that I wanted to go back to Chile a lot to visit my sisters, my family. And, I’ve done that. Also I still have a number of good friends I have a dual identity. LG: Friends here or in Chile? PR: In both places but I meant in Chile. Many of them are school friends. The classes were small we made life-long friendships. With four or five, we’ve been friends for what, 67 years? I also read a lot and I do some volunteering, particularly in the summer for the Backstretch at the horse racing track. A large number of the backstretch workers are Latin American. I’ve also taught English there also, in the summer. LG: As a second language? PR: As a second language. Umm, I also play golf. I love the game; I started playing golf with my father when I was 12. LG: Oh? PR: He was a sports person so as he grew older, he gave up tennis for golf. I started playing it again here in the US after not playing it for about 15 years. It brings really good memories from my late childhood and as a young adult in Viña del Mar. When I retired, I first thought that I would complete some research projects that were interrupted by the time I was in the administration. But after a bit I thought: what’s the point? Who will read what I write? �LG: You’ve turned the page. PR: Yeah, I mean, I’d rather read than write. Juan Carlos taught me that. You know, at some point he said, “I’m done with research. I don’t want to write any more, I want to read.” And that makes sense to me now. It didn’t then but it makes sense to me now. LG: Now of course you are on the board of the … PR: Of course, yeah, well, yeah, and I was on the film board when the Film Forum existed, and then you invited me to be on the board of the Saratoga Chamber Players, and that’s been great. And I work in my yard, my garden, which is my passion. [laughs] LG: And how does your garden grow? PR: Oh wow. It does sure grow, when… LG: This time of year. PR: Yeah, this time of year. LG: Anything else we should cover? SB: Nope. LG: Good? PR: Good? Ok. LG: Alright. Thank you sooo, so much. PR: Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure. Thank you for having me. END � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Lynne Gelber Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Patricia Rubio Location The location of the interview Saratoga Springs, NY 12866 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 44:21 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit October 24, 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Patricia Rubio Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 14, 2021 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Description An account of the resource Patricia Rubio began her career at Skidmore in 1983 after graduating from Valparaiso University in Chile and, after arrival at Skidmore, her PhD at the University of Alberta in Canada. She filled many roles at Skidmore - coordinator of the self-instructional language program, Director of Women’s Studies, Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures, and Associate Dean of the Faculty. Since retirement in 2016 she has helped run her sister’s restaurant in Chile, taught ESL to backstretch workers at the Saratoga track, played a great deal of golf and serves as chair of the board of the Saratoga Chamber Players. In this interview she also discusses the complexity of the self-instructional language program, changes in the Women’s Studies program and its evolution to a full major, the influence of Dean of Faulty Phyllis Roth, her work with Dean Muriel Poston, and issues of diversity. Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Oral History Beau Breslin Diversity Emigration to U.S. Latino Students Latino Studies Muriel Poston Phil Glotzbach Phyllis Roth Self-Instructional Languages Spanish American Literature Women's Studies https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/62ba7e0aa9205173d4fdc56de0f5798f.JPG 9e0b0b910b2bc1c9de1669a066c47184 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/46417c11384a8690d42e958c43fbfac4.jpg 7ccc4e82547e6c6dfb1b43aee7a72f82 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Nursing Program brochure cover, 1962. Rory Pond '65 (left); Janet Allan '64 (right) https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/c046380e4468d6b65e635a1e0f9200fc.mp4 74b6075b34c0d6ca7001d6c890f4959b https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/439b811781c7a4c2f5b911171c1715a2.pdf 9ec19f3d8753832f66779ea64c69dd0f PDF Text Text Interview with Janet Allan '64 by Emma Griffin '19, COMPASSIONATE HANDS: Skidmore’s Nursing Program, April 15, 2019. NOTE: Below is an edited version of the audio interview, some information and details have been reordered, removed and grammar corrected by the interviewee for ease of reading. EMMA GRIFFIN [0:00:47]: Where were you from when you decided to attend Skidmore’s Nursing program? JANET ALLAN [0:00:52]: I grew up in Roslyn, Long Island and attended Roslyn High School. EG [0:01:02]: Second question. Did your family have a background in the field of medicine? JA [0:01:07]: No, no my parents had no medical background...I'm a first generation American. My parents immigrated in 1930 from Scotland and they left school in ninth grade. They believed that education was the path to a better life for their children, therefore, they supported my goal to attend college. EG [0:01:24]: Gotcha. Third question, what was your educational background before you joined this program or your work history? JA [0:01:54]: Aside from babysitting, I worked age 12 until high school graduation as a page in the town library, The William Cullen Bryant Library (he lived in Roslyn and was a poet and newspaper editor). I had a social security number from age 12. I worked after school 3 days a week from 4-6 and 40 hours per week in the summer. I was able to save most of my earnings for college. Though Roslyn was a public high school, it was considered an academic high school. 95% of my graduating class went to college. If I hadn’t been a nursing major, Skidmore would have given me two years of college credit for my work in HS. EG [0:02:21]: Gotcha, wonderful, wow! Um, let’s see...ok, part two is program questions, what drew you to the Skidmore program? Why did you want to go? JA [0:02:44]: When I met with my high school guidance counselor in my junior year, he offered only two options for female students; nursing or teaching. I was very shy so the thought of teaching scared me, so I chose nursing. The guidance counselors were woefully behind the times not only in career options for women but about nursing education. He said, ‘Well, you just have to go to a diploma school to get your nursing.’ I wanted to go to college and knew there were nursing programs at certain colleges. This goal was supported by my former babysitter who had graduated from Adelphi University’s nursing program. She encouraged me to apply to several college programs in the State. So, I applied to several schools including Skidmore. I didn’t really think I would be accepted at Skidmore (again my Counselor said that no woman from Roslyn had ever been accepted) or could afford the cost. I loved Skidmore’s nursing program which had an excellent reputation but I had no hope of being admitted. Three of us were accepted �(two nursing majors and an English major). I had only applied to New York State schools because I had earned a New York State Regents Scholarship and a New York State Nursing Scholarship, both applied only to New York State schools. New York State offered a 4-year Regents curriculum to all high schools which required extensive exams at the end of each year. Long story short, I was accepted at Skidmore with a full 4-year scholarship as a work study student. I worked in the library as a freshman and in Health as a nursing aide as a senior. This scholarship and the funds from the Regents scholarships enabled me to attend Skidmore EG [0:04:51]: Wow, that was all determination there! JA [0:04:55]: Well, I was very fortunate. EG [0:04:59]: Yes. Well, let’s see...you kinda talked a little bit about your sense of the program before it started, so it was, I would assume, something that you were very excited about JA [0:05:14]: Yes, I had thought a lot more about nursing and became more excited seeing the curriculum that Skidmore offered as well as the two clinical years in New York City. EG [0:05:39]: Fair enough. Um, tell me what it was like in the program, what was the structure of the program and what classes did you take? JA [0:05:46]: Okay. Well, it was a totally lockstep curriculum. The first year was nearly all science with one required Freshman English course. The sophomore and junior years were in New York City and the courses were year-long with no summer breaks. I don't know if you've had a chance to go to the, archivist and see the material I sent. This was the 1960-1964 curriculum. EG [0:05:50]: Yes, yes. JA [0:06:00]: Okay. So, freshman year involved a year of chemistry, a year of anatomy and physiology that including dissecting a cat in a year-long lab, a semester of microbiology that also included a lab, a semester of psychology and a semester course in nursing history. Lastly, we had an English course required of all freshman. Our schedule was so packed that we had little time for extracurricular activities. We had the cat dissection for 3 hours. We kept our cats in plastic bags in large garbage cans. I had a roommate who was not a nursing major and she wouldn't let me in the room after lab until I showered because I smelled so much from the formaldehyde, it was a very tough academic year but successfully completing the coursework made us all proud, totally bonded and beginning to feel like nurses. The second year and the third year we were in New York City because of the wide range of clinical opportunities offered. We were mostly at NYU hospital in our junior year except for a week at the VA for a TB rotation. In our junior year we rotated to Cornell Medical for maternity, NY Psychiatric for psych, NYU for leadership and in the summer Community Health at the NYC VNA (my placement in Little Italy) or the city Public �Health Clinics. It was a fabulous two years of incredible clinical experiences and the joy of living and exploring New York City. Grateful patients would leave tickets to the theater or concerts at the nursing faculty office in NYU Hospital. One could see a play or attend a concert almost any evening. We mostly didn’t because we were exhausted and had to study. EG [0:08:06]: Oh, keep going, yeah. JA [0:08:09]: I think we were about 30 of us that eventually got through the first year and could continue into the sophomore year in NYC which began in the fall. That summer, I worked as an aide at a county hospital on Long Island. It was a good experience and I learned a lot. To house us in New York City, Skidmore rented two floors in the NYU medical student dorm, which was a 12-story building on the East River at 30th and 1st Avenue. We also housed the NYU female medical students, all 4 of them. How things have changed. The sophomore 12-month curriculum involved skills lab to learn basic nursing skills and rotations in adult medicine, pediatrics and a week-long TB rotation at the VA. We had didactic classes with each rotation. These courses were given in a classroom at the Hospital. We did all of our clinicals (except TB) at University Hospital on 20th St and Second Ave. We walked the 10 blocks down 1st Ave, past Bellevue Hospital and the VA to University Hospital. NYU Hospital was private so we worked with community-based MDs who were very kind to us. We did have to give them our chairs in the chartroom. The skills we learned were pretty basic (bed making, bathing, giving injections, changing a dressing, taking vital signs, and transfer of patients from bed to chair. These seem minor skills compared to what students learn today. We were at the hospital every day for lecture and clinical. The hospital allowed us to eat lunch. Since we did not have any eating facilities at our dorm, we all ate huge lunches and took food back to the dorm for dinner. In the morning students either skipped breakfast or ate cold cereal and powdered milk like I did with my roommates. I can’t stand powdered milk to this day. The junior year 12-month curriculum covered leadership (being a head nurse), maternity, psych and community health. I was placed at the Greenwich Village office of the NYVNA (the premier visiting nurse service in the country) and other classmates were at Public Health clinics. I loved the experience visiting patients in apartments above night clubs, restaurants or stores. My classmate and I took a 30-minute bus ride from our dorm to the office. One patient whom I visited lived in a coal cellar. He had had TB and I had to administer an injectable medicine to him each week. We had a wonderful experience, wonderful patient stories about living in Greenwich. That summer was exceptionally hot so the faculty gave us salt tablets to take every day. At that time, Skidmore did not have Psych and OB faculty. So, we had OB at Cornell Medical Center with the Cornell nursing students and were taught by their faculty. So, we were three Skidmore students paired with seven Cornell University students and we did three months of OB. We had experiences in labor and delivery, post-partum care and the �nursery. Then we went to Columbia Presbyterian and did the same thing, joining the Columbia Presbyterian students for three months of Psych. One outstanding experience was accessing the babysitting service run by the Cornell Nursing program. You could sign up to babysit any day of the week and we often took care of UN diplomats’ children. It was a wonderful experience and I had several regular customers, one was a famous pastel artist. We all returned to the Skidmore campus for our senior year. We had 30 credits to take to complete our degree. The courses had to be in the liberal arts (social sciences, literature and history). We also had a 3 credit nursing issues course. Most of us were hungry to learn something besides nursing and expand our minds and knowledge. My roommate and I poured over the catalog and we picked out everything we wanted to take, most of which were, literature, art courses and American Studies. We ran into problems with upper division courses that required freshman or sophomore prerequisite courses. We needed upper division courses and didn’t want to take the lower-level courses. In trying to convince faculty that we could handle the upper division courses, we found faculty were very uninformed about the nursing major. For example, great doubt was expressed that we could handle the courses and I was told ‘well, all you have been doing is changing bedpans for two years.’ It was pretty shocking, especially what we perceived as a very pejorative or antiquated view about nursing students. But we persisted and many faculty albeit reluctantly agreed to let us take their courses and we all did fine. I loved every course that I took and surprised myself by loving the course on The Romantic Poets. I still have the books. I would just make one other comment. It was difficult returning to campus after two years in New York City. Becoming nurses changed us from girls into very dedicated women. We missed two years of ordinary campus life and I guess had outgrown putting cottage cheese in faculty mailboxes and fraternity beer parties. We had seen babies delivered, walked the streets of New York City providing nursing services in tenements and coal cellars and stayed with patients who died. We were in New York City, in a dorm and there was really no college life. You know, we dated some of the medical students, but there was no real effort on the part of Skidmore to create links with some of the colleges in New York City so that we could have more of a, more of a college life than we had. EG [0:16:29]: Yeah, well, it’s definitely not your normal college experience but it sounds like, wow, transformative. JA [0:16:39]: Yes, it was transformative. The program was excellent and well prepared us for clinical practice after graduation. Skidmore was very well thought of nationally. We had great faculty. EG [0:17:40]: Well, with that, um, let’s, let’s move a little beyond Skidmore. What was your path after Skidmore? What did you do? JA [0:17:48]: My first position after graduation was on the male medical unit in the Bullfinch �building (birth place of ether) at Mass. General hospital. Because BS educated nurses have less clinical experience than Hospital or Diploma educated nurses, the Skidmore faculty urged us all to work for at least a year in a hospital to become more proficient in technical nursing skills. I loved my first position. Despite jitters about not being a “skilled nurse” (meaning having done specific skills like catheterizations over and over) and some mild hazing by the Mass grads, I felt very competent in my skills at the end of a year. The unit I worked on was housed in one big room, with 16 beds, one private room (for alcohol detox) and a nursing desk in the middle of the room. This set up was so different from today’s units. The patients had little privacy. Also different was that most patients had had heart attacks and were hospitalized for a month. We really got to know our patients and their families. One story: A few weeks into working in the unit, a patient asked me what kind of nurse I was. I was startled and wondered if I had made a mistake. I asked him what he meant, and he stated that I didn’t have a black band on my nursing cap (all Mass General diploma grads and the majority of nurses in the hospital had black bands on their hats). After a year in Boston, I decided to see the country and applied for and was hired by the San Francisco Visiting Nurse Association. My sister and I trained across country and set up living in San Francisco. She was a secretary. Because I didn’t own a car, I was assigned to a walking district in an area called the Tenderloin. It was in downtown San Francisco filled with SROs, bars, and shabby restaurants and stores. The average age of my caseload was 85. They were elderly residents living alone on Social Security or pensions in large buildings of SROS. It was a wonderful experience and I loved San Francisco. After three years at the VNA, I decided I wanted to get a master's degree. So, I applied to UCSF and got a master's in Public Health or Community Health and a post-masters in teaching (believe it or not). I loved the master’s program and found that I liked teaching. In 1969 after completing the post-masters, I joined the undergraduate faculty at UCSF. I was fortunate to be hired on a Division of Nursing Grant with the goal of exploring the effects of teaching health science students together. I taught CH and Leadership in the senior year of the 5-year BSN program and had students in an outpatient clinic for CH and for leadership in many other community agencies. In the clinic, we paired nursing students with medical and pharm students and tasked them to interview patients coming to an Internal Medicine clinic. We also organized all first-year health science students into seminars taught by two faculty from different disciplines. The students were paired and had to go into the community and interview a person or family about their health. The students who had such clinical experiences were more positive about interdisciplinary education and had better knowledge about the other health disciplines. This was from 1969-1973. Today, we are still struggling with interdisciplinary education. In 1975, a PH colleague and I wrote a Division of Nursing grant for 3 million dollars to start a Post RN (admitted RNs, BSNs and MSNs) Adult Nurse Practitioner program, the first in California. This was the early days of the NP movement, which was started in the �late 1960s in Colorado by Loretta Ford (nurse) and Henry Silver (MD). The nurse graduates were called Pediatric Associates. We were funded for 3 years to develop this new program. Due to existing prejudice about NPs thinking they were just Junior Doctors, the UCSF School of Nursing refused to accept the grant. Thus, we were housed in the School of Medicine for 3 years. The grant was successful. In 1975, there were no NP graduates to act as preceptors so we had to use MDs. We found many excited and willing to work with the students. We then wrote another Division of Nursing grant for a MS Adult NP program. It was funded, and by then the School of Nursing decided to accept the grant and house us. Since neither I or my colleague were NPs, we decided to go through our own program and I was certified as an NP in 1978. While a program director, I continued to teach and practice as an NP in the Primary Care Internal Medicine Clinic. I was on the faculty from 1969 until 1982 becoming a Clinical Associate Professor in 1981. I was accepted into the USCF/Berkley doctoral program in Medical Anthropology. It was a joint degree in between Berkeley and San Francisco in Medical Anthropology. I was the only health professional in the program and had no background in anthropology. In a year, I caught up with my much younger classmates. I was 39 when I started the program. I did my NINR-funded dissertation fieldwork in Austin, TX interviewing 40 women about how they manage their weight. I had great cooperation from the women whom I interviewed. I completed the PhD in 5 years and was then hired by the School of Nursing at the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor. I was able to get NINR funding again to replicate my dissertation with African American and Mexican American women. This funding and numerous peer reviewed publications enabled me to become a tenured Associate Professor in 4 years and Professor in the following 3 years. Once I received tenure, I applied for and received funding to start the first Family Nurse Practitioner (NP) program in Central Texas. The advent of the role of NP changed MS education in nursing forever and NP programs became the number one major in most MS programs. NPs offered the public a skilled practitioner who combined nursing and medical knowledge and skills to care for patients across the lifespan. The public began to learn the value of nurses and their abilities. I must say that becoming a NP changed the course of my career. Developing NP programs led to involvement in national NP organizations. I served as President of the National Organization of Nurse Practitioner Educators (NONPF). My background as a NP and my publications about the role, led to my 6-year appointment (4 years as Vice Chair) on the US Preventive Services Task Force. The Task Force developed population-based recommendations for preventive services across the lifespan. Medicare used the recommendations to develop polices for funding preventive services. To finish talking about my career, in 2007, I was appointed Dean of the University of Texas Health Science School of Nursing. I served as Dean for 5 years and was then recruited to be the Dean of the University of Maryland School of Nursing in 2002. I retired in 2013. During these yeas as Dean at two Schools, I served on the Boards of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing and American Academy. I retired with over 150 peer reviewed publications. �EG [0:25:25]: Wow though, and I noticed that you, you spent a fair amount of time working in the jobs that you had, but you went back to school a number of times as well. Wow! If I may say so, you are incredibly accomplished. Gotcha. Well, let’s see...I also, you said you, ah, graduated in the class of 1960? JA [0:25:32]: Actually, it was class of ’64. I started in 60. EG [0:25:35]: Gotcha, ‘64. So, I don’t know how much this will relate to you but, um, do you have any feelings about the closing of the program in 1985? JA [0:025:40]: It certainly made me feel sad that the College had to discontinue such a long standing and excellent major. However, at the time that this decision was made, there was, believe it or not, a glut of nurses and also a decreasing interest in nursing as a career. I know that the College made such a decision reluctantly but were impacted by a declining enrollment and rising costs to maintain the program in New York City. I think the expansion of opportunities for women to almost any field also had an impact. I don’t know if having to leave a more traditional college campus experience to live in New York City for 2 years was a factor in recruitment of students. I do feel sad that many nursing graduates do not give back to Skidmore because of their anger at the closing of the program. EG [0:27:09]: Wonderful. Well, yeah, you actually got my last question in there which was, kind of, how your education at Skidmore has impacted your life, but it sounds like it changed your life. JA [0:27:19]: Many big decisions like where to go to college, where to live or what job to take often reflect “turning points” in one’s life. Such periods often are inherently risky because often one choice is to stay the same and the other is to take a risk. For me being able to choose Skidmore was a big turning point. Instead of living at home and attending a commuter school near my home, I spent 4 years living in two incredible places, meeting people from all over the country and making friends who grew up in very different circumstances than I did. That first big move away from home, enabled me to consider and decide to have my first post-graduation job in Boston and then to decide that I needed to learn more about the country, thus the move to San Francisco. My education at Skidmore well prepared me for my post-graduation positions in Boston and SF. I think Skidmore provided the background that enabled me to be a risk taker. As I look over my career, there were many other “turning points,” for example, I was offered to be the VC of a department in the SON at UCSF versus developing a NP program. The later choice changed my whole career. EG [0:28:54]: Gotcha, wow, wonderful! Ok, and then, is there any other, any other memories or anything else that you’d want to make sure that it’s saved for posterity? JA [0:31:03]: I loved New York City and had a great time living there for 2 years. One bonus to �being there was that grateful patients left nearly every day Broadway show or Carnegie Hall music tickets at the faculty office. So, my roommates and I were able to see some wonderful shows. In addition, New York City offered amazing and cheap restaurants featuring food from around the world. I certainly enlarged my Scottish meal palate. Of course, the museums were free, and offered a do-it-yourself course in art history. EG [0:32:07]: Yeah, I never would have thought of that! That’s so cool! JA [0:32:10]: I also sent you some material from my program in 1960-64. The program brochure featured me and Rory Pond, ’65 (she also was interviewed). It is a blast from the past as we are in white skirted uniforms and nursing caps. I would have been a junior (1962-63) and Rory was a sophomore. EG [0:32:20]: Oh, that was you? JA [0:32:21]: Yeah, it was me. Did you see that? I'm the taller one. That's me. EG [0:32:24]: Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that! I’ve been working on the exhibit so I’ve been putting [unintelligible] Wonderful! Oh wow, wonderful! I think this has been amazing, it’s really good! JA [0:34:05]: I have had a great, great career and it all began at Skidmore. Thank you for listening to my story. � Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Janet Allan '64 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Emma Griffin '19 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 34:27 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Janet Allan, Jesse O'Connell Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Janet Allan '64 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 15, 2019 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. COMPASSIONATE HANDS: Skidmore’s Nursing Program Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jesse O'Connell Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio Interview Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. April 5, 2023 Nursing https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/3ab7aabaebe7e5b21ba948a33bd78eac.png b449f1adbf78665e1ba29712e9fa58d0 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/fa9ea7a6aff0d419f1d5c078c840b07a.wav c10c119ea0b5fda02eff80ce9f8a0545 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/4ff84dee8e99c720c48f4b99835c8647.pdf c305531d9962f05245011b904418ef4c PDF Text Text Marah_Evan_ALH.wav Marah Frese-Despins [00:00:05] I'm Marah Frese-Despins. Evan Forrest [00:00:08] I'm Evan Forrest. Todd Shapiro [00:00:10] I'm Todd Shapiro. Marah Frese-Despins [00:00:12] The date is April 15th, 2024. Evan Forrest [00:00:16] All right. So we're going to start with a couple questions about your childhood. So let's start with an easy one. Where did you grow up? Todd Shapiro [00:00:25] I grew up in a town called Newington, Connecticut, just outside of Hartford. Evan Forrest [00:00:29] And what was your family like? Todd Shapiro [00:00:32] I am an only child. My father, Norm, was an industrial engineer. And my mother, Barbara, was a, dental hygienist. And I had a great childhood. No complaints. Evan Forrest [00:00:45] Nice. So what was your early education like? Middle school. High school? And did you like school? Todd Shapiro [00:00:53] Yes. Liked school very much. Liked elementary. Middle school. Went to an interesting, I don't know if it was experimental, but it was a middle school that, had, like, a team structure. So it wasn't the traditional, like, you're in one classroom the whole day. It was sort of almost like a college campus kind of thing where you change, I mean, in middle school, we were in sort of, each, each grade was a wing. And you would you would move between classes. And it was sort of cutting edge for the time in the late 70s, early 80s. Evan Forrest [00:01:35] That's interesting. So do you remember your first job? What was that like? Todd Shapiro [00:01:40] My first and only job. I worked at Newington Bicycle for over ten years. I started at 15. State of Connecticut said that 15 year olds could work like a certain amount of limited hours after school. So before I was even 16, I was working in the bike shop. I'm an avid cyclist. I've been racing since I was, I don't know, 12 years old and started at this job as a stock stock boy, you know, stocking shelves, sweeping floors and then eventually worked my way up to be, manager of the store. Evan Forrest [00:02:15] Nice so you're kind of mixing pleasure with work. Todd Shapiro [00:02:17] That's right, that's right. Evan Forrest [00:02:18] Find something you're interested in. Todd Shapiro [00:02:20] Exactly. �Marah Frese-Despins [00:02:23] Do you want to tell us about your time in college? What undergrad school you went to. Graduate? Todd Shapiro [00:02:28] Sure. Undergraduate, I went to University of Vermont. I did not go to Brandeis because that's where my daughter is going in the fall. So, undergraduate was University of Vermont in Burlington. I was a business major with a focus on productions and operations. So that's everything from, like, statistical process control, industrial engineering. So, yes, I was in the business school, but it had a sort of an engineering bend. And while in school, my, Italian teacher mentioned that I wanted to get into, you know, working in a bike shop and being very into, like, bikes and gear and outdoor things. I wanted to work in manufacturing for an outdoor company. And in a conversation with my Italian teacher, my Italian professor, she mentioned that her husband was the CEO of Nordica, which was the ski company. You know, they made, boots and bindings and and she could get me a meeting with him. So I met this, head of Nordica, US in Burlington, Vermont, and I told him, “Hey, I want to work in manufacturing in the gear industry.” And he was like, “you're not going to do that in the United States.” Like, very little is manufactured here. It's all distribution. So everything is made overseas, imported into the U.S.. And then there's these advanced distribution networks that distribute the products, whether it's bikes or skis or mountain climbing, whatever your hobby is. And he's like, you should look into operations and start to understand the distribution and how it works. And that completely changed my trajectory. I went from focusing on like engineering and manufacturing to, you know, business and operations, and that changed my, my whole course, changed classes. I took, and then, even after college, what I, what I ended up doing. Marah Frese-Despins [00:04:31] Did that affect where you chose to go to grad school? Todd Shapiro [00:04:35] I moved to Boston after undergraduate. I worked for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. And the Museum of Fine Arts had the largest museum catalog in the world. And what that means is all these museums sell product, right? They have gift shops and they sell products. But the MFA had a catalog. We would mail them. This is in the days of the days of old. You would mail catalogs, paper catalogs. People would read them. They'd find. Something they liked. They write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it up, put it in an envelope and mail it to you. To the catalog center. We had banks and banks of people opening these things. They'd take out your order, they'd enter it. Then it would go to the fulfillment center, and we'd pick, pack and ship and send it out. And that's how I started. It was distribution. So I worked there for about six years. I'm in Boston, and I realize, you know, I want more than just I mean, it was very big operation, but it wasn't like an L.L. Bean or, you know, a massive cataloger, so I decided to go to grad school. I'm in Boston. I mean, you got 62 schools to choose from. So I ended up going to Boston University for an MBA. Evan Forrest [00:05:51] Were you, part of any clubs or any other organizations where your time at UVM or in Boston? Todd Shapiro [00:05:58] Yeah, I was on the rowing team at UVM, so I got to travel all over the country racing. That was a fantastic experience. And I also got into logistics with that. I got trained to drive the trailer, so I would drive an 80-foot long trailer CDL, and, yeah, we would caravan all over the country racing, which was fantastic. And then, I was also in the Outing Club, got trained as a first responder, wilderness first responder. So I would drag people off mountains that were injured or hurt. And, my specialty was winter �camping. I actually love the cold. So. Yeah. So you can see where my love of gear and, and outdoor stuff, came from. Evan Forrest [00:06:46] Vermont's a good place to, to do it at. Yeah. Marah Frese-Despins [00:06:52] Do you think any of those experiences helped prepare you for your roles in management? Todd Shapiro [00:06:56] Absolutely. No question. Rowing. You're, you know, one cog in a, in a massive machine. So you've got to, you got to work to get. I mean, it's all the classic, clichés. You got to work together. You've got, you know, you're only as fast as the weakest link. And there's a tremendous amount of finesse and technique in the sport of rowing. There's, there's, you're so reliant on your equipment, right? So it's not just your fitness and your, strategy, but it's, you know, does your equipment work? Is it, you know, is, is the, the machine that you're moving gonna operate efficiently? Is your technique good? Right? Or is, are your oars going to go too deep or are you not, are you going to catch a crab and slow the whole boat down? So, I mean, you can start to see how that translates to a team you're working with, right? If you're on a production line, if you're working on a conveyor belt and you got multiple people and moving parts, you have to coordinate all that. And then in the Outing Club, you know, learning to be a wilderness first responder was just tremendous. I mean, you learn how to not only help people but lead, right? How do you motivate? And, you know, if you're on a hike and someone is injured, I mean, you got to get them out of the woods. So you have to encourage and motivate and, and think creatively of how you're gonna, you know, get this group of people with someone that's wounded out safely. So yeah, it absolutely applies to day-to-day work. Evan Forrest [00:08:35] Team player. Todd Shapiro [00:08:36] There you go. Evan Forrest [00:08:37] Yeah. So you mentioned starting off after college in kind of a smaller, less, I don't know, multinational kind of job. Was it your goal to kind of transition into a larger company with larger duties or. Todd Shapiro [00:08:56] No, there was never a goal. Like, I never was, like, I want to work in a catalog. I mean, when I was looking for a job after school, I mean, you went to the newspaper, you literally opened the newspaper. You looked at the classifieds and you would circle ads that sounded interesting, and you would write a cover letter in an envelope. Snail mail, send it. I sent out hundreds of, of letters, and the one that came back said, “Hey, we'd love to interview you” was the Museum of Fine Arts, and it was a distribution center for product. And I was like, this is fantastic. So yeah, there was no goal of like, oh, I want to, I want to work in a catalog center or I want to do this. So that first step, like each step, whether you're in school or you're playing a sport or you're in a club, right? These are all things that kind of build your, your background and your experiences. And they can each send you down a different path. So once I started working at the Museum of Fine Arts, I was involved in a very large catalog center, and I was like, this is pretty cool. Maybe I want to, you know, see where this could take me. So I worked there for many years. And then it started to feel small. I mean, it's 100,000ft², which is a very big building. There were, I don't know, 5 to 10,000 SKUs which are stock keeping units. So when you go into a store like Target, you know, there's probably 100,000 to 200,000 SKUs in that store. Everything from a pen to a razor to a toothbrush that's each got a unique identifier. So we had about 5000 SKUs at the MFA. And when I started as a recent college �graduate, I was like, this is unbelievable. How am I ever going to keep track of this? Well, by the end of a few years, I was like, this place feels small. I know where everything is. I know how the place runs. So I'm like, what's next? What's next? So that's, that's what got me thinking. And then I started to look for the next, the next big thing. And I, and I just kind of progressed. I went from there. I went to Aramark, which was a very large distribution center, and we did uniforms for every major company. UPS drivers, FedEx drivers, CocaCola drivers, all, you know, every driver needs a shirt, pants, jacket, belt, shoes, socks, hat, company hat with their logo. We did the embroidery. We would do about 60,000 shipments a day. The MFA was 3 to 5 thousand a day. Aramark was about 30,000 to 60,000 a day. And so, yeah, I started, you know, I wanted bigger, bigger. You know, it was it wasn't, “I want to go to a multinational. I want to go to something big.” I just I wanted the next challenge because you start to get stagnant. You start to get comfortable, and you're like, you know, I gotta. I want to grow. I want to grow. I want to do more. Evan Forrest [00:11:55] What did your day to day look like? I know you said your you're shipping off in this specific example uniforms, but what does that mean. So you go into work and you're just boxing up uniforms and selling them out? Like I can't visualize it right now. Todd Shapiro [00:12:08] Sure, sure. So the way I like to describe it is, if you order something online. So I don't know if you guys ever ordered from L.L.Bean or, let's use L.L.Bean. That's the best example in the world. So you you go online and you order a pair of the famous L.L.Bean boots, right? You and 100,000 other people are all ordering this stuff. So in the morning, when a worker in a distribution center shows up, you have to, like, start the system up. Right? And so you print the orders and it's called induction. And you induct this work into the system. So there's stacks and stacks of orders. That are the picklist. So when you are at home and you go, oh, I ordered these boots, and you open up your box and there's a sheet in there and it says, you know, size ten duck boots. And if you look closely, there's probably a little code it could say like, you know, PX-24. Well, that's a location. It's all done with coordinates. You know, these buildings are like 1,000,000ft². That could have a couple hundred thousand locations. It's essentially shelves. It's like the library. You've got shelves with books on them. But imagine you're like, okay, there's a section of all of shoes. There's a section of all the shirts, is a section of all the tents or whatever that these retailers sell. So you will literally grab a stack of orders that are printed in by walk pattern. So there's a tremendous amount of math and like choreography because you have to say, “Okay, Evan, we're going to give you this stack of orders.” You don't want to walk to the back of the building and grab, you know, a hat, and then you got to walk all the way up and grab some shoes and then go over it. Now, you want it efficient so you're assigned a section. You're like, okay, you're going to be in, you know, section P out of, you know, 100 rows or 100 aisles. And each sheet that you take is guiding you on a walk pattern, an efficient walk pattern. And so you'll go and just say, okay, there's a size ten shoes. Maybe for that day you're assigned to the shoe area. So all you’re picking is shoes. Then your racks are profiled. So yes, you're in the correct aisle. But the companies do analysis and they forecast what is going to sell the best. And it's loaded on the shelves in the most ergonomic position. So right here your top selling item is going to be in a very easy to reach place. The thing you sell like two of a year. That's going to be up high because you got to get a ladder to get it. So you're not going to make those picks very frequently. And then what you do is you do reprofiling. So after a couple of weeks of fulfilling, because these websites are, you know, they have the new spring lineup. So you reprofile your racks, you load them from the back with this spring's offering in very efficient locations. Then let's say spring is done and now it's the fall. And it's a whole different thing. Now coats are popular or whatever, you know, outcome the bathing �suits are off the shelf. And now the hooded, you know, sweatshirts are in that key location. So you're constantly reprofiling and readjusting so that you can have efficient pick runs. And you can, you can, you can get this stuff processed quickly. So you, you pick it all, you put it in containers and they're on an automated conveyor belt. That conveyor belt will take it around the building. Then it's got to go to a packing station. So now okay, you pick the shoes, you threw them in a box, they go down the conveyor. Then there's a station that might have to put some what's called dunnage or void fill, like bubble wrap or some crumbled up paper to kind of brace it. Maybe that person request some gift wrap, or maybe they requested a gift message, or maybe there's a second pick. So you put the boots in the box. The box heads down the conveyor belt to your area and you're picking, you know, I don't know, first aid kits, right. You know, L.L. Bean sells everything. So you're like, okay, “they bought boots. I'm going to put the first aid kit, I'm going to put some sunscreen in there.” And then it goes down the conveyor to the next area, to the final station that seals it, puts a label on it, overhead scanner reads it and routes it to one of 50, 60 tractor trailers that are there. So there's some going to the West Coast, there's some going to the Midwest, there's some going East Coast, South, Southwest, and then they route them and they drive them deeper into the mail stream to a USPS or UPS distribution center. So your morning literally starts with, “what am I picking?” Like that's how the whole process starts. Johnny Jones placed an order online, and that order becomes like a pick ticket of what you've got to put in the box. I mean, people don't realize this. They're online. They have no idea what entering that order does and like what that sets into motion to do. Evan Forrest [00:17:24] It's interesting hearing the other side, logistically, because the consumer just sees the computer screen and orders that, and then there's just so much more that goes on to it. Todd Shapiro [00:17:34] Oh yeah. It's unbelievable. Yeah. Marah Frese-Despins [00:17:37] What was the working environment like? There was, was it, were people happy working there? Were you receiving good benefits? That kind of thing. Todd Shapiro [00:17:43] Thing? Well, I'll start with the MFA and then I'll go to Target. So when I was at the MFA, it was a small catalog operation. We probably had 25 to 50 people in the distribution center. And it was sort of a feeling of like, you're working for a good cause, like you're supporting a museum and the artwork. And what we sold was supporting the artwork, right? You would sell prints of Monet or whatever, and the pay was alright, and the environment was not crushing, meaning you didn't have production standards. You know, it was look if, if somebody ordered some note cards or a vase, right? You know, you're not shipping body parts, you're not shipping medical supplies. So, you know, it wasn't like this huge sense of urgency. I also worked at Target. And Target is another world that is backbreaking. There are production standards. The pay is not great. Benefits are okay. And Target distribution centers ship 100,000 packages per shift. So you could be doing 100,000 to 300,000 or more packages a day in the yard where the tractor trailers are, there's 4 million cartons that have to be backed up to the doors and unloaded. And when I got to Target, I thought I made the show. I thought I was in the major leagues. That's what brought me to this area. I was recruited by Target and I was living in Boston, and they said, we're opening a new distribution center in Amsterdam. And I thought Target was going to the Netherlands. And then I learned that it's, depressed factory town west of Saratoga, where all this industry went out of business in the 1960s, and 30 to 50 thousand people lost their jobs. However, it's right on Interstate 90. So big distribution centers, 2,000,000ft² can get their goods and trucks right on the highway. So I was recruited to �open a distribution center that would serve 80 Target stores, came up here and moved up here with my family, started at the Amsterdam facility. And that's when the fun ended. It was soul crushing. And this is why your professor probably asked me to come here. So there's production standards you have to produce. Now I'm in this situation. I'm a manager. I have a team of people who are pick packing, just as I described, like at the MFA or at Aramark. But every quarter you have to pick a certain amount per hour. So let's just say, you've got to do 35 picks an hour this quarter. Every move you make. You are scanning everything. You scan the shelf, you're going to pick some boots, right? Just like in our other example, you scan the shelf, you scan the product, and it'll, it'll be, it'll, it'll give you a confirmation like that's the right thing. If it, if it gives you an error message, it's like, “hey, you just scanned, you know, a bottle of tide detergent, and you're supposed to be picking boots.” So you can see how it starts to take the humanness out of it. It's all like, it's all fed to you. So you have to pick 35 an hour. You got to hustle next quarter, the new production standards. You got to do 40 an hour. You gotta do like 20% more. So that works when you're doing like toothbrushes and boots. But what happens when it's grill season and you got to move a gas grill barbecue? It is. I would literally be going up to people. I'm like, “hey Tony, you know, it's you got to do 40, 40 an hour.” And he's like, “I couldn't even do 30. How am I going to do this?” He's like, “it's grill season.” These things weigh 150 pounds. So, you know, you have to also think of the type of product like someone could be stationed in, like the dental area where it's toothbrushes and toothpaste. Easy. But somebody that's over in grills or tool chests or bunk beds, I mean, you know, think about it like Ikea. I mean, that stuff is just killer. And it was just it, it killed me to press my staff to hit these production numbers. And if they didn't do it, I'd have to write them up. So I'd have to say, “you know, Marah. Hey, you know, this week, you know, you've only been doing 26 an hour, and you've got to get to 35 an hour.” And you'd say, okay, we're going to give it, you know, the rest of this week, I need to see some improvement. And off you go. And you do it. Now, what happens if you're rushing and you damage product? What if you're using a forklift and you take down the pallet of goods to pick and you dump it and you just dumped, you know, however many grills or whatever, and they're damaged. Now that comes off of a your, off your, you know, productivity report. And I would just watch us break people, literally break people. And then we would track their whereabouts during the day. So you'd say, okay, “you did. You did 26 an hour. You have to do 35. But I've noticed, you know, every day around 11, you're missing for 12 minutes” and you're like, “oh, I, you know, I had to go to the bathroom” and it's like, well, we've tracked this and it should take, you know, an average person about 3 to 4 minutes to go to the bathroom. You know what I mean? It's this unbelievable, like the conversations you have to have with people. And the only thing I can think of is if you want to walk into a Target or a Walmart or Amazon and you want to spend $4 for, for a shirt or a product like you, you know, the American consumer says, “I want this for five bucks.” Well, where are you going to get that margin? You're going to squeeze it out of your staff, right? You're going to get more efficient. You're going to get faster. You're going to hire less people. You're going to automate. And that was the only thing I could reason with myself to be like, “this is why we're pushing people.” But I eventually left. I could not stand it. I could not stand seeing what we did to people and how we broke them. And I mean, can you imagine having a conversation with someone about how long they spent in the bathroom? Marah Frese-Despins [00:24:21] It'd be horrible. Todd Shapiro [00:24:22] It's horrible. It's horrible. And, you know, here at the time, I have a master's degree, and I'm like, I'm walking around this thing just, like beating people over the head. Yeah, it was terrible. It was terrible. And, yeah, I left. �Evan Forrest [00:24:38] Were you, I assume, perceived as the bad guy or was it like a don't shoot the messenger type thing? Like did they understand that you were just the manager, and... Todd Shapiro [00:24:48] I mean, it's very interesting. Target and Walmart and all these places tend to hire in these roles people that are fresh out of college, fresh out of the military, where they can be molded. Right. I had already been in the in the workforce for 12 or 15 years, kind of running facilities and learning how to manage people. So I developed a very good relationship with my staff, and they realized, “hey, Todd's just doing his job and we get it.” But a lot of the new people that did not have real world experience just drank the Kool-Aid, delivered these terrible messages, and were perceived as the bad guy. They were like, “wow, this this kid's rotten. Like, this is awful.” You know, I had a little more empathy for these people. Like, these people had families, these people, you know, this was a good job for these people in this area. And, yeah, it was, it was tough. It was tough. Evan Forrest [00:25:54] And I assume that there's just managers that were just like you. All over the country as well. Todd Shapiro [00:26:01] There were 26 distribution centers. Target runs 26 distribution centers. Each distribution center employs a thousand people. So there's 26,000 employees just in product distribution. And the facility is run with about 30 managers. So I was in charge of warehousing and distribution. Somebody might be in charge of inbound freight. Somebody might be in charge of outbound freight. Somebody might be in charge of like high value. So about 30 managers in the building runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I worked Thanksgiving. I worked Christmas, I worked, you name the holiday I have worked it, and I would do 80 hours a week. And it was, yeah, it was, It was soul crushing. It was awful. Awful. Evan Forrest [00:26:48] Were there ever talks with your employees about unionizing or things to increase their happiness? Todd Shapiro [00:26:57] I was trained, Target trained all of us in union busting. So here these people would start to organize, and we were trained as management on how to dissuade them and sort of scuttle it. You know, you couldn't say the word union, but there were techniques and phrases that we were trained to use to sort, you know, change the topic, change the, the thing. And Target was very successful. Very, very successful in, in squashing and, you know, union votes and that kind of thing. I mean, it was, it was eye opening, eye opening for me and it, yeah, yeah. It's, and Target is one of the more progressive companies. I mean, if you look at Walmart or Amazon, I mean, these places are brutal. Brutal. Marah Frese-Despins [00:27:56] How did working at Target and having those tough experiences, affect, like, your family life and personal life? Todd Shapiro [00:28:04] It was extremely difficult. My wife and I were newly married, and I was working 80 hours a week. I never saw her. And to this day, we refer to that as the Dark Ages. Target sold me on, they said you're going to work four days on, three days off. You'll work four, ten-hour days, and then you'll get three days off. I was like, “this is unbelievable.” They said, “you'll start at like seven. You'll get out at three.” And that's awesome. That never happened. I worked, pretty much every day I would start, I would get up at 3:30 in the morning to be at the facility at 5 a.m. to do production control. So that description of the pick tickets and everything, you have to sort of orchestrate the printing �and the dissemination of all of that. So you have to kind of figure out your pick runs and things. It's called production control. So, in a facility like a Target, because they have Sunday fliers or they have TV ads, that product has to get to the front of the line so it can get in the stores. Right. Like, imagine they do a big ad campaign and the distribution center forgets to, like, send something. So I was getting up at 3:30 in the morning to drive to Amsterdam, 45 minutes, to do production control at 5 a.m., and I'd work 12 hours. I'd be home at 5 or 6 and I would just, I was a zombie, I would collapse. And then, my wife was pregnant with our daughter, and my daughter, Zoe, was born. And I remember taking off two weeks from work. It took, like, an act of Congress for me to get time off. And I remember holding her. She's an infant, and I'm like, I am leaving this job. I'm never going to see her. Because you work all day getting up at 3:00 in the morning. You can't do anything when you get home. You know, you can't see your family. You can't. You don't even have energy to make dinner. So it was just get up, work, come home, collapse, do it again, do it again. And then having these horrible experiences at work, you would bring all that home. So the conversation was just like, this is, this is ridiculous. So yeah, it really affected, you know, and at least in my experience at Target, extremely high divorce rate, extremely high depression rates in management. I mean, these people are just, everyone is broken. Yeah. Evan Forrest [00:30:39] You mentioned a little bit the comparison between MFA, and Target and that there were production... what did you call it, production... Todd Shapiro [00:30:50] Production control or production standards. Evan Forrest [00:30:54] Standards. Is that what, that's what made the difference between Target and MFA, why Target was so much more soul crushing than MFA? Todd Shapiro [00:31:01] Yeah. Yeah. MFA was more of a familial or, I guess you could call it kind of a family atmosphere because the volumes were lower. It wasn't a Fortune 500 retailer, you know, it's this little museum in Boston. It's a big museum, but there wasthe pressure was not there. You know, there weren't shareholders. There wasn't, you know, there weren't Sunday fliers. There weren't, you know, because we were a cataloger. That's the other thing is you sort of launch these catalogs into the mail or nowadays on the internet, and you just pack your warehouses with the product for that season. So you're kind of like, all right, we're good. We got everything in the shelves are loaded. Let's just fill the orders. But at a Target, it is like 24 hours a day inbound and outbound. And so it's like, it's like sweeping the ocean. It's just, you are never going to catch up. And they know that. And that's on purpose. And it's just to keep you under the, under the thumb and you can never catch up. So you're always like going, going, going, going, going. And that also does not allow you time to think and unionize because you are so slammed. It's, I really feel, it's very strategic in how they build and designed and, and kind of feed these places, so, you know. Marah Frese-Despins [00:32:41] Where did you move next? Like, how did it get better? Todd Shapiro [00:32:45] Great question. So, I was hating Target, and, my wife was on Craigslist. That shows how long ago it was, 20 years ago. So I come home one day and she's like, “hey, I saw this ad in Craigslist. There's a little software company in Saratoga, started at the RPI incubator, and they're looking for people that have retail supply chain experience.” I was like, “huh?” So in all of my jobs, from the MFA, actually going back to the bike shop, to Target, I was always very involved in systems. You cannot run a facility of this magnitude without software and systems to, to manage it and track it. And I mean, it �is, it's mind boggling how much. So when I was at Target, they were installing $80 million worth of equipment and software to take the people out of unloading trucks. And so I started to become a super user. Right. You know, think of any jobs you've had or, you know, whether you're working at a grocery store or you're working at a bike shop or whatever, like there's, there's always a system, right? And you've got to get good at using that system. So in all of my jobs, I tried to become a subject matter expert to like, understand, I would train others and I would learn how they work. So my wife found this thing. She's like, yeah, “this little software company started in some kids dorm room. They built multi-channel retail software.” And so what it is, is it I mean, today you could laugh at it, but 20 years ago it was, “hey, we can run your inventory for your website, for eBay, for Amazon, for take your pick of a couple others.” But it's centralized inventory and it's all done online because years ago you'd have a website, you'd have a brick and mortar store, you'd have everything. Each one of those held the inventory differently. So if you sell hats, maybe you have ten in stock. Well, what if there was a run on them and the store sold them all? The website still thinks there's ten, eBay still thinks there's ten, Amazon still thinks there's ten. But the store sold them all. What these kids did is they centralized it in one single database and did it online, which people weren't doing at that time, so that the store, the website, eBay, whatever your channels were, they could draw on one central inventory master so that if you ran out of stock, it would automatically take it down from the other sites. Conversely, what if a shipment of more hats came in - automatically push them up. So I went to this interview and I had no idea what to expect, and I met with this software team over on High Rock near the farmers market, and they explained that they have built a multi-channel retail system, but they don't know retail. And, you know, do I know how retail works in the backend? And I was like, “wow, this is a match made in heaven.” And so I ended up working for them for three years. It's called Core Sense. They're down on High Rock still. And I learned how to implement software, and I brought my retail expertise. So I became sort of a product manager slash consultant. I helped them build out the system, improve it so the real world could use it. What they built in their dorm room was good, but it wasn't ready for prime time. And then we started to install it. And so I would go to a client site. I could speak the language of retail, at least backend retail, like how do you fill and operate? And I would consult, I would gather requirements. And then these guys taught me about software, I taught them retail, they taught me software, and we went and installed systems all over for this, this new multi-channel retail system. And that's what got me into software. So I've been doing software for 20 years now. Evan Forrest [00:36:52] That's awesome how you could use your, all of your experience to kind of transform yourself into a different role. Todd Shapiro [00:36:58] Yep, yep. Evan Forrest [00:37:01] So going back to kind of, management, we talked about a couple of the bad effects and some of the more unpleasurable experiences. Do you have any, rewarding parts of working in management and having a team that you kind of work with closely? Todd Shapiro [00:37:23] Oh, yeah. When you can manage and create a well-run machine of people, there's no better experience. It's fantastic. Like where I am now. I mean, I consider this group I work with, I've been there for ten years, like close friends, which is extremely rare in the working world. We are such a tight unit. We know each other's roles so well that you almost don't have to talk sometimes. And you can figure things out, get through problems. Solving work problems efficiently and with, with a great team is just an extremely rewarding experience. Yeah. Not having drama like, when you guys get into the �work world, you'll realize, like, there's politics and there's backstabbing, you know, all that, all the stuff you read about. But when you can find yourself working with a team that supports each other, has each other's back, is challenging work, rewarding work. There is no better experience than that. And it's, it's rare, you know, you may only find it once or twice in your career. But when you do, you know, you realize how special it is and how much, dare I say, fun, it can be to, you know, work on this stuff. Evan Forrest [00:38:47] So in an ideal world, if you're working at Target, how could you make that environment better? Todd Shapiro [00:38:57] You can't, you can't, you can't. The machine is too big. At one point, I thought I could, I was like, “oh, I can bring my experience from the working world to Target.” And, you know, I was, I was squashed essentially, like upper, upper, upper management, you know. You know, they're, they're controlling the managers too. Like, it's not just me as a manager controlling the front-line staff, but the executive team is putting the kibosh on the managers because they dangle the carrot for us. So they say, “okay, there's 26 distribution centers. Let's say there's 30 managers. You know, it's like 500, 600 people. We've only got ten slots at corporate in Minneapolis.” These are coveted, coveted roles to run a department in Minneapolis. And they're like, “okay, we're going to, we're, you're all competing with each other.” So no longer are you this unified team to like, improve the distribution center and make it better. It's like, “oh, my coworker, now I'm competing with you because there's only ten slots. There's 500 of us. There's only ten slots. I got to show my stuff, and I got to step on anybody I can to get that.” You know, it's not we rise or fall together. That's how it is with a good team. But in Target, it's step on your coworker to get, to get your opportunity. And, yeah, it's no way you cannot change it, it is too big. There's too much money involved. And, yeah, it's, it's, it's not for me. It's not for me. Some people might like it, but, yeah, you can't change it. Evan Forrest [00:40:50] It almost sounds like there's just so many levels. And then at the bottom, all the levels are kind of just weighing down and creates kind of that toxic work environment where you really just can't be successful or happy. Todd Shapiro [00:41:06] No, no, you can't, you can't. And everyone. So I had like a cohort when I started at Target, and 16 of us had previous real-world experience in that field. The other half were fresh out of military, fresh out of college, and all 16 of us left within three years because we knew life is much better on the outside. And since many of those that stayed have also left and, yeah, it's, yeah. But you know, when you read about Amazon or you read about Walmart, I mean, the stories are true. It's really like, to give you an idea, when we opened the facility, we needed to open with a thousand workers, the building's 2,000,000ft². You need a thousand workers to run it 24 hours a day, 365. Guess how many people we interviewed for those slots? Marah Frese-Despins [00:42:09] Like 5,000, I don't know. Todd Shapiro [00:42:12] Close. Evan Forrest [00:42:13] Well, I was going to say way less. Todd Shapiro [00:42:15] Okay. 8,000. We interviewed 8,000 people. So we opened the back of the building. It was like an airplane hangar, and we would assign people a slot 24 hours a day. We flew in Target. People from all over the country put them up, and we had teams of two and long lanes of, of interviews. And so you'd have a table with two people. �One person would ask questions, the other would notate. Then you'd switch off. 8,000 people and we only hired 700. We didn't even hit the thousand. So what does that tell you? Yeah, you can have a crushing work environment. That guy falls down. You can't hit the production standards. There's 8,000 more willing to come in right behind them. And, uh yeah, it's just it's just an ocean of people. People need jobs, and it's like we'll just churn and burn. And. Yeah, it's awful. It's awful. Evan Forrest [00:43:20] How did those teams of two, like, adequately, evaluate a candidate when there's so many different teams? Todd Shapiro [00:43:31] You have a set list of questions. Again, it's highly organized and choreographed. You have a set list of questions, and, you know, they're leading questions like, you know, if you're, if you're a good worker and you're, you know, trustworthy and all of this, you know, you can sorta tell by the answers. That's why it's two people. Because while you're asking, the other person is taking notes, but they are watching for, like, a tell. You know, could they be lying? Could they, did they get the dates wrong? Like, did they mess up, you know, and then you're like, “okay, this is a, this is a made up resume.” And yeah, it, it's got to be in teams because you're going to miss something like, you know, I could be reading the sheet asking the question, and he's like, you know, they're spacing out, doing something else, or, and then it's all noted. It's stapled in a box and then the next one, and then you got to process 8,000 applications and answers. So there's two boxes. There's like, you know, call them back for a second. Don't call ‘em. So you're sort of making a split-second decision on that. But you can tell I mean, you know, a lot of times it's, it's very apparent. But if you're, if you're not sure, if you're like, hey, maybe, call back for a second, let another team evaluate it and, and do it. Evan Forrest [00:44:56] Sounds like you've gotten pretty good at reading people throughout your years. Todd Shapiro [00:44:59] Yes, yes. Yeah. When you're managing people in, in, in a very physical environment, you really get, you learn people, you can read them. You know if they're having a bad day. You know if they're having a good day. You know what motivates them. You know what de-motivates them. Yeah. It's, it's the only way to survive and get better is to really learn how to work with people. Which is why in this new world of ours, you know, everything is remote. And, I mean, I work in a remote world now. I mean, I implement software at some of the largest retailers in the world, and we do it with teams all over the world, and we've never met in person. I mean, it's just, it's unbelievable. And I feel that somebody knew, like, for example, the two of you, once you graduate, if you were to go to a software development firm, you gotta go to an office. Like, how on earth are you going to learn or whatever your field is. If you're at home staring at a monitor like you need mentoring and you need like, interaction. I mean, I really feel for, for younger people that are starting jobs, like, during Covid or soon after. It is hard. Like you've got to do it in person, learn how to work, learn how to interact with people, and then when you become more senior in your positions, then go remote. But to start off that way is, that's crazy. Marah Frese-Despins [00:46:28] Overall, are you happy to have had that experience at Target, even if it wasn't always great or happy to bring those experiences in the future? Todd Shapiro [00:46:36] Yeah, it's, it's I'm definitely glad I went through it. And look, having that logo on your resume, that opens doors, there's no question. I mean, I could have been a janitor, but people see the red thing on my resume and they're like, oh, you worked at Target. And it's like, yeah. And it's unbelievable how that alone can open doors �and, and change the conversation. And I'm glad I went through it. I mean, I, I would have always wondered, right, like, what is it like on the inside because you think, wow, this is a big, amazing company, you know, everybody loves going into a Target. But had I not done it, I always would have wondered, and I'm very glad I did. Evan Forrest [00:47:20] So going back into time, if you could go back, would you change anything about the way you approached college? Your field of study, knowing what you know now? Or if you could give advice, what would you what would you say? I know you gave the advice of going to an office and getting that human relation, and, but, would you go back and change anything about the way you approached it? Todd Shapiro [00:47:46] No, I, I thought I had a fantastic undergrad experience. I'm super happy I studied business, and I didn't, you know, I didn't go, like, the finance track. I didn't go, you know, the accounting, you know, the classic business stuff. You know, I stuck to what I enjoyed which was operations. And I'm super glad I did. But I will say you can always change. And a quick story. So in the 1990s, right. That's when startups and the internet and all of this was starting to take off. And here I am, an operations guy. Right. Physical product, kind of like a factory. And I remember, starting graduate school, going into the career office, like my first week and saying, hey, “I want to get into IT.” And they laughed at me. They laughed at me. Can you believe that? The career office at BU was like, “what is your background? No! You can't. You're ,you're in like, operations. Yeah. You can't.” And I was just like, “oh my God, I have to get into IT.” And so I graduated in 2002. So 20-something years later, I am so deep in IT, it's not even funny. So I would say, don't ever think you can't change or maneuver. You just got to kind of take stock of what you've been working on and say, “oh wow, what I'm doing now, could I apply this to the area of interest that I've got?” And, and you can do it just because I'm like, “wow, we use systems every day in product distribution. So why couldn't I be on the other side of that?” So whatever your interest is or whatever, there is always a way to figure out how to, how to get to what you want to do. And don't let anybody tell you, you know or laugh at you that you know, you can't make that change. So. Yeah. Evan Forrest [00:49:55] What does the future look like for you in your work environment? Do you just continue to do the same thing or... Todd Shapiro [00:50:02] Good question. That's a good question. I work in a very stressful environment, now, if you must know. Big websites, very big budgets, and very tight deadlines. Our projects run from a year to 18 months to spin up a, you know, a big website. We can have anywhere from 20 to 50 people working on it, developing it, integrating it. I enjoy the work. I enjoy my team. But. Yeah, I'm curious what's next? It's like, okay, you know, am I just going to keep building these things? And, yeah, I almost want to go smaller again. I almost want to get back to that, like MFA bike shop kind of thing. Like more entrepreneurial, you know. It doesn't always have to be big and fast and, multinational, multi-bazillion dollars, you know. It's like maybe do something a little smaller that, you know, a little slower pace where you can have more creativity. Because when you implement these big things, whether you're at Target or you're implementing a website for a major, major retailer, like, you have to fit their standards, right. You know, there's, there's margins. It's nice when you can put your own creativity and spin on something. So if you're doing your own thing, if it's entrepreneurial or it's a smaller company, you can wear a lot of hats and you can try different things and you can make suggestions and get creative. Right. And that, that is where I think it's going for me, is trying to get back to that entrepreneurial, a little more creativity, not pedal to the metal all day long, every day. �Marah Frese-Despins [00:51:47] I think we're about done. Unless you have any more questions, Evan? If there's anything you want to add. Evan Forrest [00:51:54] Not for me. Todd Shapiro [00:51:55] Okay. That was. Evan Forrest [00:51:56] Great. Marah Frese-Despins [00:51:58] See? Other. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saratoga Labor History Digital Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource August 11, 2023 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Eric Morser Language A language of the resource English Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Eric Morser Subject The topic of the resource Labor History Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jesse O'Connell Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Oral History Date Created Date of creation of the resource. August 11, 2023 Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Evan Forrest, Marah Frese-Despins Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Todd Shapiro Location The location of the interview Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio Recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 51:49 Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit September 22nd, 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Todd Shapiro Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 15th, 2024 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Saratoga Labor History Digital Archive Description An account of the resource Todd Shapiro brings 30 years of experience in the retail supply chain, blending expertise in both e-commerce systems and retail distribution operations. Currently serving as the Sr. Director of PMO at DMI, he leads the Program Management Office overseeing large-scale e-commerce platform implementations. Todd and his team work closely with some of the world's largest retailers to build and enhance their online storefronts, integrating new features and driving operational improvements. Prior to his current role, Todd spent over a decade managing retail distribution centers for major companies such as Target, Aramark, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, refining his skills in logistics, supply chain optimization, and operations management. His extensive career allows him to seamlessly bridge the gap between traditional retail logistics and the growing demands of digital commerce. Todd holds a BSBA from the University of Vermont and an MBA from Boston University. Language A language of the resource English Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Eric Morser Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/034917791b0cc79ea4d81fc4785beead.jpg 1984d206379b318c2357509c28edcc10 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/e91f90d5c7b1ce8036440bd286bd8b4a.mp3 cd65fd9b2fdd67078e6cc970a4ab0fc6 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/f88f1a8bf1f29c9298484ad7f9b96adc.pdf 64e6c1ee6cb066ac73f1e44618c7bd55 PDF Text Text Interviewee: Karl Broekhuizen Years at Skidmore: 1981 - 2005 Interviewer: Lynn Gelber Location of Interview: Saratoga Springs, NY Date of Interview: April 18, 2019 00:00:00 HEADER 00:00:27 Born and raised in Holley, New York; 52 people in high school graduating class. 00:00:54 Undergraduate - University of New Hampshire; MBA - University of Massachusetts. 00:01:17 As undergrad, worked in UNH controllers office in a junior accountant position. 00:01:37 Interest in working with new automated information and data processing plus management of not-for-profits, particularly colleges and universities. 00:02:50 Upon completing MBA, hired for a new position at U Mass supporting the graduate school in budget development and administration. 00:03:51 “The graduate school at U Mass at that time … mirrored … what a small college and university would be.” 00:04:26 Between 1967-1977, worked as Business Manager for U Mass Graduate School, U Mass Associate Budget Director, and Assistant Dean of Education (chief business person). 00:05:53 Next 5 years as Treasurer at Colby College, then to Skidmore. 00:06:42 On campus interview with, “… a group of thousands.” 00:09:03 One appeal of Skidmore: “…relative to the competition, Skidmore was a very young institution … opportunity for someone with a different perspective…” 00:09:58 Upon arriving September 1981, ”… annual audit had not been yet completed.” 00:12:11 Initial tasks included “…get to know the place and do some staffing.” 00:13:25 Also upon arriving, plans for a sports center were two-thirds done. 00:14:28 In 1981 the college was used to being under-resourced. 00:15:10 “Skidmore became what it was, and what it is today … because they were all invested in … the vision of this institution…” 00:16:15 “One of the things that we were able to do early on is … try to move our construction program up a notch or two in terms of quality, design, location.” 00:17:10 challenge of “…limestone ledge not very far below the surface. And most, if not all, of the early buildings are three feet higher in the air because it was less expensive to go up than to blast and go down.” 00:17:40 Range of building projects included a residence hall, Harder Hall, Starbuck Center and Barrett conversion into offices, Tisch learning center, the Tang, the Northwoods apartments, the Zankel, and additions to the library and the Case Center. 00:19:19 Changes were “a function of … recognizing a change in how curriculum was developed and delivered.” Also, “tremendous growth in terms of the number of employees.” 00:21:07 Worked with Joe Palamountain, David Porter, Jamienne Studley, Phil Glotzbach. 00:21:34 “Joe, in my opinion, saved this college … saw what needed to be done in terms of bringing this campus in this location to a meaningful presence, and I think he surrounded himself with … a great team, and was able to move forward.” 00:24:36 “[Joe] described … his leadership style as sort of a team approach or what he called a matrix management style … the president’s staff … met weekly around a table and discussed whatever the important issue was in each of our divisions, and decisions were made collectively.” �00:25:45 “…he would recommend to the board the hiring or appointment of the chief academic officer or the chief business officer or whatever, but the appointment was by the board. Deans were not. They reported to board appointed officers, and that worked well, I think, for the times.” 00:26:39 “…one instance … I needed fifty thousand dollars more than the preliminary budget figures … We all talked about it in the room and Dave Long, VP for external affairs, said, ‘I can help you with that. I’ll give you fifty thousand dollars out of my budget.’ No great hassle, no … infighting, we were part of a team.” 00:28:05 David Porter’s priorities were faculty and academic programming. “We would still have president’s staff meetings. He, pretty much, continued with the matrix style of operation…” 00:28:58 Phyllis was interim president during construction on the Tang. “I remember very clearly Phyllis being on the top of an excavator with one of the construction team’s people, coming around a grove of trees, in a hard hat…” 00:29:35 "Jamie was very different … it was much more one-on-one … more decisions got made in her office than in the conference room … different styles, and different times, as well.” 00:32:29 Phil “…was interested in knowing, housing-wise … of some of the things that we were doing in terms of bond issues, for instance, and things of that nature.” 00:33:19 Through his years at Skidmore, Broekhuizen appreciated the eclectic nature of Business Affairs. “I mean, we had dining services and post office and bookstores and computing centers and so forth and so on.” 00:33:44 “In terms of construction, the design process of the Tang was the most interesting to me.” 00:34:56 “… a teaching museum. It would be integrated into the curriculum of the college …” 00:36:38 Search committee narrowed field to three architects for Tad Kuroda and Broekhuizen to visit. “Traveling with Tad … was just an absolute joy. Both in terms of focus on the questions we were asking of the architect …, but also spending free time together. We went to a baseball game out in Los Angeles, for instance … I was the only white guy there. And Tad just tweaked me … ‘What’s it feel like to be a member of a minority group now?’ [laughs]. And it was all said in fun you know, in jest and so forth, but it was just a positive experience.” 00:38:41 Then each architect came to Skidmore to give presentations. “…we had a site picked out …Predock said no … if you want this to be integral to the campus you need to have it on a path where students go, they’ll be forced to go by it or better yet through it. And so he selected this site, made his point, and talked about it growing up out of the ground and it would have this limestone-like exterior and you could go through it or you could go over it, and it was just very very exciting. I mean, he had clearly done his homework.” 00:40:45 “When the search committee came to make its final recommendation, I think it was Predock hands down. I mean I cannot remember a dissenting voice there. And working with him and his colleague, the vendor contractor, was just a joy.” 00:42:12 Another high point was hiring Barbara Beck as the Human Resources officer. She created “… a comprehensive Human Resource function that helped department chairs and faculty with leadership issues and problem solving.” 00:43:21 Restructuring after Dave Marcell left led to the Computing Center reporting to Broekhuizen. Some had suggested it “…be split between academic computing and administrative computing … I kept saying, ‘No, we want one person to be responsible for both areas so there’d be better coordination and articulation of their vision and their role… I just did not want essentially the same general function, computing, … vying for the same resources…’ ” 00:47:00 Skidmore community well served by Business Affairs senior directors. �00:48:03 “…Bob Jarvis, who did a wonderful job, … when he retired … ultimately, I decided to outsource the leadership to …Sodexo… I understand they are doing a fantastic job.” 00:49:55 “I have said … ‘Skidmore College could afford to do anything it chose to do. It could not do everything it wished to do.’ ” 00:50:25 “One of the greatest privileges of my life, to work at Skidmore.” 00:50:31 END � https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/15b306280817ba9b8319bdb96bb85a93.pdf f713a768cc6d9e0020b1a2d821dd321e PDF Text Text Interview with Karl Broekhuizen by Lynne Gelber, Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, Saratoga Springs, New York, April 18, 2019 LYNNE GELBER: Today is April 18th, 2019 and I’m here with Karl Broekhuizen and Sue Bender and this is Lynne Gelber. And we are happy to see you, Karl, after some time. Why don’t we start by having you tell us where you were born and raised and then maybe how you got to Skidmore eventually? KARL BROEKHUIZEN: I was born and raised in Holley, New York, which is about 25 miles west of Rochester, a small town of about eighteen hundred, primarily agricultural. I went to a small, a relatively small school system; there were 52 of us in my graduating class. When I left Holley to go to college, I went to the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire. After that I went to the University of Massachusetts to get my MBA degree. I decided between undergraduate and graduate school that I thought I wanted to be more involved in the administrative side, financial side, of higher education. I had worked for the controller’s office at UNH and got a taste of that. LG: Excuse me, that was as a graduate student? KB: No, an undergraduate. LG: As an undergraduate? KB: Yes. A junior accountant type job. But I noticed, and this was in the early ‘60s, that at the time automated information and data processing was becoming, was coming on the scene. Most of the folks, the senior folks at UNH with whom I worked, were either retired military folks or faculty members who’d left the faculty to come into administration. And they felt, my observation was, they did not, were not fully embracing some of the nascent information processing age, and I felt there might be room for somebody in that arena. Also, somebody who had a somewhat different view of how not-for-profits, in particular — in general, and colleges and universities, in particular, ought to be managed and operated. At the conclusion of securing my master’s degree at U. Mass., the treasurer, who was the Chief Financial Officer at U. Mass. at the time, created three positions to report jointly to him and the dean of a particular college. To help serve, support the Dean in the academic college, administratively, �particularly financially, budget development and administration, but as I say, reporting jointly to the dean and to the treasurer. I was the first one hired in this role, as it turned out my classmate and roommate, apartment-mate, was the second one hired. My posting was to the graduate school, his was to the school of business. The graduate school at U. Mass. at that time had about 52 hundred students, had its own admissions operation, registrar’s operation, the University academic computing center reported there. The associate dean for research was in that office, so it was a very eclectic kind of arrangement and mirrored, in many regards, what a small college and university would be. LG: How long did you stay there? KB: I was there from 1967 to 1977, and throughout that I was the Business Manager in graduate school, then became Associate Budget Director for the University, and subsequent to that there were financial problems and the chancellor requested that I become the chief business person at the School of Education. And I was an Assistant Dean of Education at the time. I had an opportunity for a career change; I took the opportunity. U. Mass. had grown very much when I was there. When I first went there it was twelve thousand, five hundred students, when I left in 1977 it was twenty-five thousand students. With no disrespect to anybody, but the faculty had unionized, it was very different and it was very much political — part of the state, Massachusetts higher education system, it was very difficult to get things accomplished, both in terms of bureaucratic processes and scale. I applied for and was appointed Treasurer at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, which had about sixteen hundred students at that time. And had more control over its own destiny, not that there aren’t campus politics but about two layers was removed. And I was there for five years and then had the opportunity to come to Skidmore in September of 1981. LG: How did you hear about the Skidmore position? KB: I think I probably read about it in the Chronicle of Higher Education. LG: And you had an on campus interview with whom? KB: Well in the Skidmore tradition it was a staff of, it was a group of thousands. I mean it was a day and a half or two days on campus. Joe Palamountain was the president at the time, so I met with him, I met individually with Dave �Marcell, who was the provost, Eric Weller, who was the dean, Dave Long, who was the VP for … development, I think, at the time. Business Affairs staff, Steve Harran and Ted Butler. Claire Olds was the personnel director at the time. Some students, many faculty. Mark Gelber was on the faculty, was a member of the, a faculty member of the search committee. Mary Lynn was on that group at the time. I can’t remember most of the others. Had a very good, a pleasant session with my predecessor’s predecessor, Jim McCabe, who was a former Vice President. But anyway, it was quite an experience. LG: [laughs] So, and that was what year, again? KB: That was in June or early July of 1981, when the college was using, … I don’t know whether, I guess she was a friend, Nancy Martin Archer, Archer Martin was her name, and she was the search consultant. LG: So when you started work in 1981, what challenges did you face? KB: Well, I was not here, I guess I would say thankfully, in one regard, in the bad old, real bad old days, but I was here when days weren’t so good, either, particularly financially. Let me step back for just a second and say one of the things that appealed to me about the Skidmore opportunity was that it was, relative to … I won’t call them Skidmore’s peers, at the time, but relative to the competition, Skidmore was a very young institution and did not have 200 years of hidebound procedures, legacies, histories to have to deal with, and I felt, and Joe Palamountain reinforced the notion, that there was an opportunity for someone with a different perspective and some energy to come in and accomplish things, without having to be a slave to, again, as I say, 200 years of “the way we always did it.” KB: So coming to Skidmore in September, the fiscal year was June 30th, I was surprised, among other things, that their annual audit had not been yet completed. And so, Joe’s team and the board didn’t have much of an idea about how the college stood. And this was, you know, we were less than ten years into co-education, enrollments were a challenge, Louise Wise, the Director of Admissions at the time, was scrambling to fill beds. That year, in particular, the college had what it characterized as an “over-enrollment,” against what they had planned, or they had imagined, I think might be a better word than planned, would be the enrollment, and were renting spaces downtown, in School 7, the Van Dam building, and the community motel, for students. And how do we deal with that thing, that arrangement? We �were running busses, anyway, to Moore Hall, this was two, at least two, more stops. How do they get services, how do you arrange for them to get meals and so forth. So that was a challenge. The board had made the decision, either the previous February or May board meeting, to build a new sports center, which was seen at the time to be an addition to the Lodge. So, that was my first construction project on this campus. And very interesting, very … very different from the style of architecture elsewhere on campus, I would point out. The big job was to get to know the place and do some staffing. The area for which I was responsible at the time was called Business Affairs; it was not adequately staffed. The, then personnel function, now Human Resources, was essentially two people: Claire Olds, former Dean of Students, former Dean of Women and then Dean of Students, and Marianne Castelot and it was very clear that that area, given what was happening in society and on campuses, that area needed to be beefed up and needed to have somebody at its head who was more experienced, professionally experienced, in employment law, among other things, and good practices. LG: So had the architects and plans already been done for that sports center? KB: They were two-thirds done, I mean it was … one of the things I found, coming to Skidmore, and understandably so, was that the college never had, up to that point, sufficient resources to build buildings, design and build buildings that had sort of a common theme, and so forth. So what we needed, the college needed at the time for its dance program, athletics, et cetera, was space. And they couldn’t afford to, yet, to pay for the kind, the amount of space, they needed, with … wrapped in a finer quality skin, if you will, than we had. It was something that, you know, one of the realities of life. When I came to Skidmore, when we finally got the audit for the year ending June 30, 1981, the market value of the endowment was 7.3 million dollars, and the comprehensive fee was ninety-four hundred dollars. So the place, the college, was used to being under-resourced. And, I would say, I said back then, I would say at least up until the point in time that I retired, Skidmore became what it was, and what it is today, in terms of what I would categorize as the middle of the top tier of institutions, independent of the largest colleges, on the backs of the faculty and staff, trustees and students. Everybody uniformly put their shoulder to the wheel and pushed because they were all invested in what this … what the vision of this institution was. They gave fringe benefits rather than salaries, because it was less expensive �to do so. And people were very grateful for that. So, the … whatever story there was behind the now Williamson Kettering Williamson Sports Center, was a function of, “we need the space for our programs; it can’t be a pretty space.” One of the things that we were able to do early on is … and I would, I had, I made the case but I had a lot of support from the academic leadership of the college and ultimately the president and trustees, was to try to move our construction program up a notch or two in terms of quality, design, location. Much of what I know of the early development of this campus comes from, you know, other people … people like Joe and Jim McCabe, Dave Marcell, Erwin Levine, Mark Gelber, and so forth. I didn’t experience it all myself but I observed the results. One of the early things that the college had to deal with was when they acquired this property there was a lot of a limestone ledge not very far below the surface. And most, if not all, of the early buildings are three feet higher in the air because it was less expensive to go up than to blast and go down. [chuckles]. LG: Were there any other buildings that you were involved in? KB: Oh, there was a whole range. Ahh … what did we do, we did a residence hall, we did Harder Hall, temporary space [laughs]. Ahh … we renovated a large space, took Starbuck Center, which was a student social space, at one time, converted it into offices and so forth. Did the same with Barrett, that was in process when I first arrived, but Barrett was another student lounge, student center, at the time. We did Tisch, a learning center. Umm, certainly we did the Tang. I was involved in the planning process, design process, for the Northwoods apartments, the same with the Zankel. I was … I retired before they were, the Northwoods were just about completed when I retired, the Zankel was, we were still seeking funding as I recall. We did the library, additions on this library, during that tenure. We did the big addition to Case Center. LG: A lot of change! KB: Well yes, and the change was a function of, I think, the growing reputation and acceptance, acknowledgement of the student population, potential student population, of what Skidmore was and could be. It was a change, recognizing a change, in how curriculum was developed and delivered. The other thing I would comment on is that there was tremendous growth in �terms of the number of employees. When I came there were maybe 250, possibly 300 employees — faculty and staff. When I retired there was over 600, and now I understand its up over 800. But that’s a function of legal requirements; Title 9, in terms of women’s athletics, greater use of delivering … a need for counseling services, computing services, athletic teams, balancing mens and women’s teams, in terms of offerings, new additions to the curriculum, there’s a lot of new majors and so forth, greater health services, more staff for that. LG: In the course of your years, who were the presidents of the college? You started with Joe … KB: Joe Palamountain hired me, and then retired after six years. The college then hired David Porter, for almost 12 years, Jamienne Studley for four, Phil was here two years, when I retired. LG: You’ve really seen everybody after Val Wilson. Umm …? KB: I mean I, yeah, and I’d like to comment about that. I think Skidmore, this college, is today, is what it is today, in a large part because of Joe Palamountain’s presidency. Joe, in my opinion, saved this college. Val died prematurely, and Joe, who had little institutional experience, he had been provost at Wesleyan, came and saw what needed to be done in terms of bringing this campus in this location to a meaningful presence, and I think he surrounded himself with a good, a great team, and was able to move forward. I think when he chose to retire and the board hired David Porter, at the risk of seeming immodest, I think David was able to do what he did best, which was faculty interaction and support, because he inherited a very good support team. Dave Marcell and EricWeller, Dave Long, … I was part of the team, whether history will decide whether I was a major contributor or not [chuckle]. But that meant that David could rely on those folks to take care of daily operations, doing the stuff that needed to be done, so that he could visit faculty in their offices and focus on his vision for academic and programmatic growth of the college. LG: You were here at the point when Phyllis Roth took a year, two different times, KB: She, Phyllis, was acting president when David took sabbatical, and that was �for like six months, and then in the interim period after David’s retirement, in December, she completed that fiscal, that academic year and the first portion, I think it was, of the following. LG: From your point of view was that seamless? KB: Yes, yes. LG: You might comment on, aside from their different interests and talents that the various presidents brought, in what ways did their interactions with your area change … or grow? KB: Well, Joe was fairly hands off. He described, when we had our first or second interview, he described his leadership style as sort of a team approach or what he called a matrix management style. Which meant that the president’s staff, which at the time I think it was six of us, met weekly around a table and discussed whatever the important issue was in each of our divisions, and decisions were made collectively, and if … Joe was the referee to the extent that one was necessary, which it rarely was, and by the end of the conversation if, in fact, we couldn’t reach a conclusion, which we often did in one sitting, we all knew what the marching orders were, I mean, Joe would say, “yes, let’s do that,” or “let’s take some more time,” or whatever. And he said, at the time, and there is, in trustee minutes or board books or somewhere, that the president and the vice president, presidents, were what was called board appointed officers. That is, he would recommend to the board the hiring or appointment of the chief academic officer or the chief business officer or whatever, but the appointment was by the board. Deans were not. They reported to board appointed officers, and that worked well, I think, for the times. Oh, I was very, very impressed by one instance that I can recall very clearly, that I had, and this was during budget development time. I had an issue, and I can’t even remember what it was, it might have been in the computing center, where I needed fifty thousand dollars more than the preliminary budget figures required. We all talked about it in the room and Dave Long, VP for external affairs, said, “I can help you with that. I’ll give you fifty thousand dollars out of my budget.” No great hassle, no … what I would characterize as infighting, we were part of a team. And we would all meet, I think it was bi-weekly, one-on-one with Joe, just to talk specifically about things in our areas. Rarely, unless they were personnel, there was rarely any �decision made — it was more information exchange and obtaining perspectives, one to the other. But really the decision making was collective. I think, erroneously, many people thought that that made Joe sort of aloof from the operations. He wasn’t, it was just his style. When David came, again I think he set his priorities as the faculty and academic programming. We would still have president’s staff meetings. He, pretty much, continued with the matrix style of operation and the recognition of a differential between board-appointed officers and other senior members of the community. There were, to the best of my recollection, no major personnel changes during the period between David’s retirement and Jamie’s coming on board that Phyllis had to deal with, in that regard. Essentially it was, the time when, it was time to go to construction on the Tang. And I remember very clearly Phyllis being on the top of an excavator with one of the construction team’s people, coming around a grove of trees, in a hard hat and leading … But that was what I remember as the most visible nonacademic activity that Phyllis got involved in, I mean new activity. Jamie was very different, in my opinion she … I don’t know quite how to phrase it, she didn’t pay as much attention to the notion of separation of board appointed officers and their roles and responsibilities and others. The size of the president’s staff increased, Don McCormack was added to the group … and … LG: And Don was, at that time? KB: Don was Dean of Special Programs — had been, for a great long time. But, not but, his reporting relationship was to Dave Marcell, as Provost, or whoever the chief academic officer was, as Dave had left at that time to go to Rollins. But anyway … things, from my perspective, got much more centralized in the office of the president. She was very hands on, involved in lots of decision making. … LG: So the president’s staff had less of a voice? KB: As a collective, yes, it was much more one-on-one. It was like a wagon wheel, with Jaime as the hub, the rest of us were spokes, more decisions got made in her office than in the conference room. I had been at the college for whatever it was, eighteen or twenty years at the time, had my relationships with various trustees, that gave me a level of independence that a newer, less �tenured, not in terms of tenure, but in terms of time, other officers might have. So like the Vice president for Development or even the faculty, at the time. So, I mean it was just different styles, and different times, as well. LG: And what about Phil? KB: Well we worked together for two years and he was getting his feet under him, again. He was interested in knowing, housing-wise, I guess, of some of the things that we were doing, in terms of bond issues, for instance, and things of that nature. That was the level of his engagement in the Business Affairs area. LG: So Karl, in all of that, tremendous amount of change, what was the most exciting for you, the most pleasant, let’s say? KB: Well I think in terms of Business Affairs, at the time it was a very eclectic kind of division. I mean we had dining services and post office and bookstores and computing centers and so forth and so on. But certainly, in terms of construction, the design process of the Tang was the most interesting to me. Again, many members of a community that views itself as being very inclusive and so forth aren’t aware, I guess, of what’s included in the bylaws of a non-profit organization. The bylaws of Skidmore, at the time, and I’m sure they haven’t changed much, said that the Business Affairs, the vice president for Business Affairs, under the president, is the one responsible for the design and construction of the buildings and the facilities. So, I, when David and the faculty, particularly the art faculty, decided that we should have a museum, and the trustees were not enthralled with that notion, at the time primarily because their vision of a museum was a place where you showed artwork, paintings and sculptures and so forth, and Skidmore couldn’t afford that, given all the other challenges and desires that it had, and David, working with, must have been Bennie Wise, Phyllis at the time, and other faculty, determined that this would be a teaching museum. It would be integrated into the curriculum of the college, and take advantage of the college’s reputation in the arts, “art” arts, but make sure that students were there, involved in that facility, as part of their experience, their Skidmore experience, not just to go and view masterpieces and so forth. And so the board authorized us to do a teaching museum, I convened a group, with recommendations from Phyllis as to faculty members and who �would be there. We got alumni involved in it, trustees involved, and staff, and we had a search committee for an architect. And Tad Kuroda was intimately involved in that and working with Tad was just an absolute joy. We ended up with Antoine Predock. His name was surfaced by Jim Kettlewell, who was on the search committee. We winnowed ourselves down to three architects, the finalists, and Tad and I visited them in their studios. Antoine Predock, Frank Gehry in California, Predock in New Mexico and Robert Venturi in Philadelphia. And traveling with Tad, and these were typically two day visits or whatever, was just an absolute joy. Both in terms of focus on the questions we were asking of the architect and so forth, but also spending free time together. We went to a baseball game out in Los Angeles, for instance, and that worked out very good. Tad was a baseball fan, a big fan. And we watched the Dodgers play, I can’t remember whom, but we were up in the cheap seats because we got tickets last. And the Dodgers had an Asian, Japanese, I think, pitcher who was lightening, he was just very very good, and we ended up in these upper bleachers and … I can’t tell you how many, but I bet you there were at least 25, maybe more, folks there all Japanese or Japanese American. I was the only white guy there. And Tad just tweaked me … “What’s it feel like to be a member of a minority group now?” [laughs]. And it was all said in fun you know, in jest and so forth, but it was just a positive experience. We then had each of these three architects come to Skidmore, make presentations in the Surry, and I kept playing my role, and part — one of my roles was, “We’ve only got six million dollars to fund, to spend. How can you bring your vision in for six million dollars?” Gehry said, “Oh, it might be a little more than that,” but he wouldn’t give us a number. Predock came, and he came at least one, maybe two, days early, met with us and he spoke with faculty. One of the faculty members who we asked to take him on a tour of the surrounding area and of the campus was Ken Johnson, head of the Geology Department at the time. And Gehry was very much into designs that were organic to the site, and we had a site picked out and a facade that would blend very much, with colonial kind of construction and it was up closer to the campus. Predock said no, you don’t … if you want this to be integral to the campus you need to have it on a path where students go, they’ll be forced to go by it or better yet through it. And so he selected this site, made his point, and talked about it growing up out of the ground and it would have this limestone-like exterior and you could go through it or you could go over it, and it was just very very exciting. I mean, he had clearly done his homework. Gehry and Venturi were older guys, whose reputations �were more well established. Predock had a reputation but it wasn’t on the same scale. They came in, did their dog and pony show and left. And I believe, if my recollection is correct, when the search committee came to make its final recommendation, I think it was Predock hands down. I mean I cannot remember a dissenting voice there. And working with him and his colleague, the vendor contractor, was just a joy. One of … Predock would do these clay models and so forth and I remember looking at one that he brought up, … and talked about these sloping roofs, “and we’ll plant grass.” And I said, “no, we’re not going to do that. [laughs] I understand what you’re trying to do, but I’m not going to ask the physical plant crew to be mowing roofs. And this in wintertime and so forth and so on.” But just, and from my, now more just in perspective I think that both the structure, the museum structure, and the teaching aspects of it and the way it helps to both inform and deliver the curriculum and students academic experience has just been a remarkable success. It was a joy to have had a role in that. LG: Anything else that you want to add? KB: Well I would say … hiring Barbara Beck as the Human Resources officer who took, what was really, with no disrespect to her predecessors, sort of a paper processing operation into a comprehensive Human Resource function that helped department chairs and faculty with leadership issues and problem solving. Did a great job in terms of contract negotiations with, seven, at the time, unions. LG: Were you involved in her hiring? KB: I hired her. LG: Ok. KB: With some faculty dissent who thought that the person from corporate, GE, couldn’t be successful in an academic environment. Not true. LG: Ok. Anything else that we haven’t touched on that you have been thinking about? KB: Well, I think that … I can’t quite remember the circumstance, I that that, I guess when Dave left, Dave Marcell, yes, the range of the number of divisions that reported, yes, we were going to do away, they did away with �the Provost title, and it became Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty; Dave’s and Eric’s function was combined. There were then questions about whether, since that sort of had a less diffuse focus in terms of divisional areas of responsibility, more focused on the faculty and academic program, what would happen to the various divisions. And Dave’s was … David Porter said Dean of Faculty would continue to report to the Academic Vice President, though I think it was Associate Dean at the time, and the Director of Admissions would report directly to David, Dean of Special Programs… LG: David Porter? KB: David Porter. Dean of Special Programs would report to David Porter, umm…, oh, Dean of Student Affairs would report to David Porter. Computing Center would report to me. And one of the things that I argued vociferously for, in opposition to positions that Michael Arnush and others took, was, … who was suggesting that the Computing Center be split between academic computing and administrative computing, with academic computing reporting to the Chief Academic Officer of the College. I kept saying, “No, we want one person to be responsible for both areas so there’d be better coordination and articulation of their vision and their role with directors of academic computing and administrative computing.” Ken Hapeman was there at the time, Leo Geoffrion, and Stan McGaughey, and I said, “I just did not want essentially the same general function, computing, vying for resources, vying for the same resources. I want one person to make the case, to be … if they were going to report to me, and ultimately to the president.” And so we did that and I think that worked out very well and it’s still the case today with Bill Duffy, and formerly Justin …, I can’t remember Justin’s last name, being an attendee at the Dean’s staff meetings. So that portion of the loop was better represented, I guess. I think that, it’s not just me, it’s the team that was in place with the support of Joe and David in particular, that the professionalism at the College, in terms of … well the areas in Business Affairs, and not exclusively, but elsewhere, have just come leaps and bounds. And I would say, I have said and I would repeat, again at least for the time that I was privileged to be at the college, that most members of the Skidmore community have … had no idea how well they were served by the senior directors in Business Affairs. The Ken Hapemans, Barbara Becks, Phil Cifarelli, Chris Kaczmarek, umm, we ran into some turmoil for a bit in facility services but got that squared away… �LG: Who was running that? KB: Well when I came it was Bob Jarvis, who did a wonderful job. Colonel Jarvis! [laughs] So when he retired, which many have said that was the worst thing he’d ever done, we had some trouble just getting the right focus and coordination. And ultimately, I decided to outsource the leadership, to Marriott, which became Sodexo, and so forth, but I understand they are doing a fantastic job. We insisted that the employees, the … unionized employees, would remain Skidmore employees, but the leadership would be on Sodexo’s payroll. But they were every bit as much a Skidmore employee. If they had to make a choice between what was right for Sodexo and what was right for Skidmore, Skidmore had to be it. And they were not to wear their Sodexo uniforms on campus. LG: So what was Sodexo’s responsibility, again? KB: Well Sodexo’s role was the leadership of facility services. The professional staff, the foreman and assistant … director and assistant director, but the line folks were our …were Skidmore employees. But I would say, you know, all … and I would take great credit for, well I would take some credit for this in terms of, at the time, the Business Affairs staff, their professional growth and leadership and management style all in service of the academic and student affairs programs at Skidmore College. I think it’s grown; I think the college is well served by it, not without challenges. I would say, I have said to, particularly to David Porter when he showed up, when he arrived, and I said the same to Jamie and I’ve said the same to Phil, shortly after he arrived, “Skidmore College could afford to do anything it chose to do. It could not do everything it wished to do.” LG: And with that, thank you. That was a wonderful ending. KB: A great privilege. One of the greatest privileges of my life, to work at Skidmore. LG: Excellent. Thank you so much. KB: Well you’re very welcome. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Lynne Gelber Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Karl Broekhuizen Location The location of the interview Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 50:33 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit March 29, 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Karl Broekhuizen Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 18, 2019 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Description An account of the resource Karl Broekhuizen came to Skidmore in 1981 as Vice President of Business Affairs and remained in that position until 2005. In this interview he describes his path to Skidmore, including his education and experiences as a financial officer at other higher education institutions. He considers the unique opportunities involved in managing a relatively young institution like Skidmore and reflects on his work with four College presidents. Some of the financial challenges faced by the College across the years, its ambitious building program (especially the Tang), and building reputation throughout his tenure are topics that figure prominently in this interview. Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History College Reputation David Porter Glotzbach Sports Center Human Resources Palamountain President's Staff Studley Tad Kuroda Tang Museum Zankel Music Center https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/4dce70b6d97dff7b5ff8fad59a69f0e8.jpg f5db0150df1738d7a6fd39881c6601f6 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/d750011810159bbca86bef97faed1820.mp3 945f7a959ea00f160e50778476244d5e https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/62e9d0eb7d2e95f4232997a92f857029.pdf e6d26e99a8c113ee0e70c691c1885304 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/825f3e8f368418c84cc5a9f5c2f13892.pdf fda8701158f0b8726dc948502417985f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Andrea Wise Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Louise B. Wise Location The location of the interview Newtonville, NY Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:07:45 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit 04/22/21 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Louise B. Wise Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 19, 2017 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource Louise Beinetti Wise, a 1940 Skidmore graduate, served as president of the then-College Government Association while a student and was active in the Alumni Association after earning a degree in theater. She joined the Admissions staff in 1970, serving six years as director and overseeing an era of growth in applications that continues to this day. After retiring in 1983, Louise maintained her involvement with Skidmore, serving on presidential search committee that brought David Porter to Skidmore in 1987. Named one of Skidmore’s 50 outstanding alumni in 1972, Louise also received an honorary doctoral degree at the College’s 1984 Commencement and an Outstanding Service Award at the 1985 Reunion. In 1983, the Louise Beinetti Wise ’40 Scholarship was created in honor of her talent, dedication and accomplishments. You can hear her describe the arc of her career in this interview.   admissions Campus Move coeducation Honorary Doctorate Joseph Palamountain Nursing Program Outstanding Alumnae Award Outstanding Service Award https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/a275d8c7a87173af01059cdbe36b3fc3.jpg a074bd82cd05aa4316f3a5d3e91b2afb https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/2fbc252c5aea73bfa9ed2151f69f7657.m4a 74ebdcb5df6115f9bc3ed3b6e4d2984f https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/1159c2c8043b62d63f9aab6a77bd4e11.pdf 234c4fd7be4fa9d5320561ed29b0f5cb PDF Text Text Interviewee: Sandra “Sandy” Welter Years at Skidmore: 1984 - 2017 Interviewer: Lynne Gelber Location of Interview: Saratoga Springs, NY Date of Interview: 4/21/2022 00:00:00 Header 00:00:28 Raised East Haven, CT; 1st in family to attend college. After Elmira College graduation in 1971, married & moved to Ballston Spa so husband could work at Skidmore. 00:02:05 Next, earned Masters in English & a permanent teaching certification (SUNY Albany). 00:02:30 Then, taught Saratoga Springs Jr. High/7-9th grade writing to atypical students; developed a creative curriculum featuring special projects — unusual at that level in 1970s. 00:03:25 Paused teaching to have 2 children; wanted to return to teaching part time, but the public school administration was “… just not there yet in terms of …” the job-sharing concept. 00:04:19 Therefore, became curriculum developer and director of the Beagle School and created programs for the public schools Gifted and Talented program while also caring for young sons. 00:04:49 In early 1980s was recuperating from a stroke when friend Bob Miner invited Welter to observe his class at Correctional Facility in Comstock, NY, part of Skidmore’s University Without Walls program. Welter loved it; Director Bob Van Meter invited Welter to teach. 00:08:57 The Comstock students were “intensely interested … they were connecting what they were reading in ways that … I was not used to with younger students. [I] found it extremely stimulating and I thought, ‘I think I could make a difference here. I think I can help.’ ” 00:09:55 Program expanded to include a second correctional facility, over 40 faculty, classes four nights a week, almost 200 students involved, many graduates. 00:10:30 Welter’s role expanded to include advising on curriculum, helping develop final projects, running a skills lab in math, writing and reading, and then being the Director. 00:11:15 Gov. Pataki (elected 1995) removed all of the funding; Welter still ran program for nearly two years, with volunteer teachers and extra books, but then it closed. 00:12:33 Welter stayed on as a UWW advisor for regular, on campus, students. 00:13:00 New Masters of Arts Liberal Studies (MALS) program created, in 1997 Welter joined. 00:13:40 Skidmore, one of earliest MALS programs, attracted students from all over the world. 00:15:30 In the early 2000s, greater pressure on faculty to publish and serve on committees led to decline in faculty participation in MALS, so MALS closed. 00:18:28 Welter granted administrative sabbatical to go to China; “Taught English composition to junior level university students who were being trained as English teachers in China.” 00:19:08 Skidmore had a formal arrangement with the University of Qufu for many years. Initially established by Murray Levith; Skidmore graduates and faculty went to teach there. 00:19:48 “A wonderful year experience. Incredible. And lifelong friends — I’m still in communication with several of my students there and a couple of the faculty who I taught with.” 00:20:04 Welter taught English composition (103, 105) for last four years working at Skidmore. 00:20:30 Skidmore was “… an institution that always seemed to be able to look outside the box, and I am an educator who was always looking outside the box.” 00:20:56 Because Welter ran programs, biggest challenge was nurturing faculty interest in them. 00:21:43 “Murray left the China program and I took on the directorship until it closed.” �00:22:07 “When we first started, there were … no Western influences in the Chinese university system. … By the time we left, the universities were able to train their own teachers to come back and do the work that we were doing, and very well, actually.” 00:23:10 “I actually had thirty three years of bliss! [laughs] I hardly had any problems at all other than struggling to make sure that we had interesting and new and exciting faculty always working with our students.” 00:23:32 Fondest memories? “Mostly center around the students. … Because I dealt with so many different kinds of students at Skidmore.” 00:23:55 At end of Skidmore career, teaching in the English Department was also a positive experience, “…wonderful to watch them come into their own…” 00:24:15 Had ESL experience so worked with international students & HEOP students. 00:25:12 Taught Summer Institute for many years, teaching extra skills to prepare students for Skidmore. “So I guess the students were, are kind of my central focus.” 00:26:15 Also had wonderful colleagues at UWW, MALS, and in the English Department. 00:28:14 “Skidmore went co-ed right when we arrived. And so the men who were at Skidmore [explained in counseling that] their problem was that they were not getting enough food. So Bob, my husband, had to go to the dining services and explain to the little old ladies who were working in the dining facilities that they needed to give the boys more food!” 00:28:55 “And that seemed to me like such an innocent kind of kind issue to be dealing with in the early days at Skidmore” compared to the complicated issues students face now. 00:29:40 Dining was not buffet; was served family style, but not enough for the men’s appetites. 00:30:10 Also, the beds were too short! Led to sore backs and hurt knees “because they were scrunched into these little beds.” “Growing pains” that Skidmore needed to address. 00:30:55 In 1971, classes had moved up to the new campus, but students still lived on the old campus in town, including Moore Hall, “the big ‘Pink Palace.’ ” 00:31:44 A years-long transition process for the old Skidmore campus. Many buildings, now homes and apartments, still have the Skidmore names. Empire State College also owns some. 00:33:20 First experience of Saratoga Springs was so dreary, Welter hoped her soon-to-behusband would not get the job, but he did, and “…here I am 50 years later, very, very happy.” 00:36:51 Welter arrived in China in August 2001, so was teaching in China on 9/11. “I didn’t come back at all during the whole time I was in China; … A year later [I] found that, coming onto campus, … I was going through what everyone went through the year before.” 00:38:28 Different presidents … Joe Palamountain, David Porter, Jamienne Studley, Phil Glotzbach. “David … he was one of the most remarkable human beings. … He always remembered my name. … He came to every department … and sat in everybody’s office and wanted to talk to you. And he came into my teeny little closet of an office in UWW and wanted to know all about it, with huge enthusiasm, and caring and kindness!” 00:40:00 Over the years, faculty regularly raised questions about curriculum, issues of diversity and inclusion, the role of a liberal arts college in the world, how to stay relevant — “I was glad that Skidmore was asking those questions, … I think it kept Skidmore viable and fresh and … I was always impressed with their sincerity and seriousness about our role, our job, as educators.” 00:41:35 END � https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/41a4b4a33275503c3fda918082ab710c.pdf 5afbdc93158b15d8191ceef9f191d82e PDF Text Text Interview with Sandra “Sandy” Welter by Lynne Gelber, Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, April 21, 2022, Saratoga Springs, NY. LYNNE GELBER: This is Lynne Gelber for the Oral History Project of the Retirees, and I am with Sandy Welter. It’s April 21st, 2022, and … Sandy, why don’t you tell us a little bit about where you grew up, and … SANDY WELTER: Sure. Thank you so much for inviting me to this exciting project! I grew up in southern Connecticut, outside New Haven, in a small working-class town called East Haven. My Mom and Dad were factory workers, I was the first in my family to go to college. So, it was a big deal when I went off to Elmira. I went as far as I possibly could from my hometown — I was accepted at Conn College and at U Conn and several other closer colleges and universities, but I really was a … had wanderlust, and I wanted to get as far away as I could, because we never really travelled very far. So I went to Elmira, out in the western part of New York State, got a very, very good education. Went junior year abroad, so I studied at the University of Leicester in England. Met wonderful international students there, was planning on returning to England to do graduate work in linguistics. But, when I returned to Elmira in my senior year, I met my future husband, who was teaching at the college. And so, after I graduated in 1971, I immediately got married and he got a job as the first Director of the Counseling Center at Skidmore College, so my … the day after I was married, having no honeymoon, we actually came to Saratoga Springs and moved into our apartment in Ballston Spa. My husband at the time started his job, and I applied to the graduate program at SUNY Albany, and I got in. And that started my future here in Skidmore. LG: And the graduate program was in …? SW: I was in English and Secondary Education. So, I did a masters in English with a focus in Secondary Ed — so I got both a Masters in English as well as a permanent teaching certification. So, the first seven years after my graduate degrees at SUNY Albany, I taught in the Saratoga Springs public �schools. I was in the Junior High School. I taught 7th, 8th and 9th grade, and I taught writing, most particularly. I also taught more — I taught both, two extremes. I taught all of the Junior High School kids who were kicked out of all their other English classes, ended up in my class, and I also taught all the gifted kids who were bored in their classes. So I developed a journalism class, we developed a newspaper in the journalism class. This was all stuff, in the early ’70s, that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen in the Junior High. We did music analysis, we did a newspaper, we did … you know, we did all kinds of things. And so, I had a lovely five years in the public schools, and then I had my children. I tried to go back to the Junior High because I was very happy teaching in the secondary school. I was tenured at that time public school tenured. But I only wanted to work part time because I had two young children at home. And that was early 1978, ’79, and the administration in the public schools were just not there yet in terms of being able to figure out how one could job-share. I was suggesting, there must be another woman — again, very sexist, but it was — well there must be another woman who wants to job share, so I would work part time and this person would work part time and we would cover all of the needs of the institution. “Nope.” So, I said “fine” and I walked away from my teaching position there. I then was a curriculum developer and a director of the Beagle School, which was an independent nursery school and kindergarten. I worked for the Gifted and Talented program in the school district, the whole district, and I developed programs there, all the while taking care of my younger … my growing sons. Um, in early … in the early ’80s, a friend of mine approached me. I had had a serious medical problem. I had actually had a stroke. With two young children. And I was recuperating at home and quite depressed because I was afraid to do anything. And this gentleman came in to visit and he said, “You know, I think that you should come up … there’s this program that I just started teaching in at Skidmore. You might be really interested - you could be, I think you would be great at this,” and it was … LG: Who was that? �SW: That was Bob Miner, and he was suggesting that I come up and observe his class at Comstock. And he wanted to know if I would be interested in teaching in the Skidmore prison program through University Without Walls. And I, at that point, was looking for a new lease on life, really. I was looking for a new focus. It was one day a week, you know I thought, “This is perfect for me.” It was getting me involved. I had been doing some part-time work for the University Without Walls with many of their adult learners — I was doing prep, composition prep for many of their international students. They had Qatari businessmen who were coming to get their UWW degrees, and when they came to Skidmore they were working on their final projects, and so I worked, I did a lot of work with them in terms of editing and writing and communicating and helping them to get a more academic spin on their final projects in writing. So, I was … LG: Who connected you to UWW? SW: Um, I think … hmm, who connected me? Maybe, um, Mark Gelber? Maybe Barry Targan, maybe … I mean, these were all friends I knew through Sam and Bev Mastrianni, and so they were people in the community but they were also very Skidmore connected. And then I met Bob Van Meter and he heard that I had been doing work with writing and remediation with writing, … LG: At the prison? SW: At … well, in the community. I was doing some community work, and he heard that. And then when Bob Miner recommended me, he said, “Oh I’ve heard of this person.” And I went and I met with Bob Van Meter … LG: Who was, at that time? SW: He was, at that time, the Director of UWW. And then met Larry Ries, who �was the Assistant Director, and Ken Klotz who was the … um, Director of the Prison Program at the time. LG: When was this? SW: Early … it was, um … 1988 maybe? Something like that. LG: Ok. SW: As it turns out, I … actually went up with Bob Miner to observe his class at Comstock, at Great Meadow, the maximum-security prison, and I loved it. I came back and said … LG: And the guys must have loved it too. SW: Well, I mean I sat in the back of the room, didn’t say a word, I just watched, and it was … I thought, this … because these … these inmates, these students, were like sponges! They wanted to know everything, they were so intensely interested in everything they were reading and everything they were writing. They were connecting — because they were adults, they were connecting what they were reading in ways that were so unique, that I was not used to with younger students. And I just found it extremely stimulating and I thought, “I think I could make a difference here. I think I can help.” So, I went back and I talked to Bob Van Meter and he said, “You want to do a comp course?” And I said, “Sure, I’ll do, I can do a basic comp course, I can do a second, you know, like the 103 and the 105, equivalent to what we were doing on campus.” And I did that, and, in fact, we expanded during the next ten years into Washington Correctional Facility and so we had two programs, we ran faculty up to the prisons, those prisons, four nights a week. We had over 40 faculty hired every semester to teach up there. We had, you know, more, almost 200 students involved in the program, many graduates each year, and it was a really dynamic part of the Skidmore community. LG: And your role expanded? �SW: It did. So I went from teaching just the comp courses to becoming a full time advisor up there. So I was doing advising on curriculum, I was helping develop final projects, I was running a skills lab and we set up a computer lab up there so I was doing a lot of basic skills in math and in writing and in reading. And eventually I was asked to take on the Directorship. And so, the last four years of the program I was the … LG: This would be…? SW: Around … we closed the prison program because of lack of funding. If you remember, Governor Pataki came on board and the very first thing he did after he was elected was to close down all of the college prison programs in the state of New York. So, he removed all the funding, closed all the programs down, said this was not, you know, “state TAP money and federal Pell money was not going to educate inmates.” And so, he pulled all of the funding, and because of that, we ran our program with volunteers. Our faculty went up there voluntarily. We had extra books that we could use until they all ran out, and I ran the program for almost two years after that, on a voluntary basis. Um, we weren’t giving credit because we couldn’t, but we were up there still involved with the students who were our students, until we couldn’t any more. And that was between the years of about 1988 to 1998. I think we closed the prison program in about 1998 or 1999. So, then I’m … now I'm at Skidmore, having spent 10 years in UWW, not as much, certainly not much time on campus, I spent most of my time up at the prison. Um … and the question was, “What now?” And so I stayed on as a UWW advisor for regular students for a couple of years, and then, the masters program conception was being developed through Larry Ries and the state of New York and a variety of other people. Lots of support, I think … LG: That’s the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies? SW: That’s correct, thank you Lynne, a Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies. It’s an �interdisciplinary degree so the framework of this graduate degree was to, in fact, bring in at least two disciplines in to the, sort of, core curricular components. And that was unusual at the time. There were several MALS programs across the country, we were one of the earliest and we were also part of the national organization, the Consortium of MALS programs, and that’s in two thousand and something … um, no, I don’t have the dates, but we hosted the national convention here in Saratoga, at Skidmore. We housed everybody at the Gideon Putnam, we had our sessions there … we couldn’t have them on campus because there wasn’t enough room … It’s a national, we had a lot of people coming in. We had several hundred people here, so … . And we had keynote speakers and we had themes and, you know, so it was a … Skidmore was very involved in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies movement. We had graduates who came to us through the UWW program but also from other places, so most of our MALS students were graduates of other institutions from around the world and around the country. And they had a residency, but it was only a one month — a one-week residency — and then another two or three days at the end to have their final projects approved. So, they didn’t have to be on this campus, so we had students all over the country, and the world, actually. Um, so that was a great next step for me at Skidmore. MALS was a great deal of fun, and it grew into a very viable program. Um, the fabric of the college began to change in the early 2000s. And faculty who used to, either because of a need, a desire to, explore pedagogies with other kinds of students other than 18 to 21 year olds, or, because they had particular interests that were not necessarily — did not necessarily fit in to an undergraduate curriculum, they were really very interested in teaching at the UWW and the MALS program. They loved to teach there, they liked the kind of students, they liked the diversity of subject matter, they liked the depth of inquiry that happened at the graduate level. But … and for many, in the early days, it was a very helpful bump in their salaries. I mean, we did pay well and we paid in addition to their Skidmore salary and in the early days of Skidmore, you know, people, faculty, didn’t make a lot of money, so it was a good way of supplementing. By the time the programs were, the UWW, closed and MALS was still involved, faculty had a different agenda. �They really needed to publish, they needed to publish, publish, publish, they needed to be on committees here on campus. Um, more so, I think, than maybe in the past. I don’t know because as an administrator I didn’t, I was on committees but I didn’t have the requirements of that. So, it was more and more difficult to get faculty to help, to be faculty advisors, to supervise independent studies, to oversee final projects or theses, and it got to the point where, I think, Larry Ries, the Director, and some of the later Directors of the Masters’ Program, had to ask, is this really now the mission of the college? And I think eventually the answer was, “No.” It was not. So, the Masters’ Program closed, um … LG: Do you remember the year that it closed? SW: Oh, you know, I … I don’t. I came into the Masters’ Program in 1997 and I retired from it … so, whenever … (uh no, I didn’t because they closed) before I retired. Because then I went on to the English Department and I taught in the English Department full time. So, yeah, and in between there I went to China! [laughs] I nearly forgot to tell you about China! I took a sabbatical, I took an administrative sabbatical, and …while MALS was still running, but when it was struggling, and I was feeling a little frustrated and working very hard and not being able to get much support, and I finally decided, “I think I may need a break.” So, I asked for an administrative sabbatical for a year, I was granted one, and through Murray Levith, I went to the University of Qufu in Shandong Province in China, and I taught English composition to junior level university students who were being trained as English teachers in China. LG: Now did Skidmore have a formal …? SW: Yes, we had a formal arrangement with the University of Qufu, for many years. Initially established by Murray Levith and then we had graduates of Skidmore as well as faculty who went to, over, every year, to teach there. Doretta Miller taught there, Murray Levith taught there, I taught … I think Marty Canavan in the Business Department taught there, and probably �several other people. Lots of graduates of Skidmore College went over and taught as well. So that was a wonderful year experience. Incredible. And lifelong friends — I’m still in communication with several of my students there and a couple of the faculty who I taught with. So. Yeah, so I actually retired … after UWW and MALS and China, I went to the English Department full time, at the very end of my career, and taught composition, English 103, English 105, for the last four years of my Skidmore career. So … and that was great. So I was, I kind of came back to a very traditional academic environment. I’ve had a very storied experience at Skidmore and I thank Skidmore for that, because they were an institution that always seemed to be able to look outside the box, and I am an educator who was always looking outside the box. LG: So, what do you think your greatest challenges were? During all those years? SW: Hmm, well, probably … because I was in the administration, per se, having always done, had to run a program, whether it was UWW or MALS or China, I think it was just … nurturing, my biggest challenge was always nurturing support from the faculty. That was a big job of mine, always. Um, new faculty — I would go to new faculty receptions all the time, introduce them to the MALS program, to the University Without Walls, to the China program, because, again, that was where, possibly, faculty would be interested — I was, by the way, Murray left the China program and I took on the directorship until it closed. The Universities were now, Universities in China were, now having, had enough of their own graduates who could then come back and teach in their institutions. When we first started, there were very few Western, - no Western influences in the Chinese university system, so … we were kind of on the, we and Yale were the two institutions, Skidmore and Yale were the two institutions that were in China at the very early days. Umm, before Tiananmen, you know, during that period. By the time we left, the universities were able to train their own teachers to come back and do the work that we were doing, and very well, actually. So, I guess my biggest challenge was always nurturing faculty interest in these kinds of — I don’t want to ever use the word marginal, but certainly the more peripheral … not necessarily the central mission of a small �undergraduate liberal arts college. I was always doing work in areas that were slightly, um, different in definition of that core mission. So that was my major struggle. I actually had thirty-three years of bliss! [laughs] I hardly had any problems at all other than struggling to make sure that we had interesting and new and exciting faculty always working with our students. LG: So, what are your fondest memories? SW: Ah, fondest memories … mostly center around the students. I mean, I … because I had, because I dealt with so many different kinds of students at Skidmore — I mean, I dealt with the traditional, you know, 18 to 21 yearolds at the very end of my career at Skidmore, when I was teaching in the English Department, and those students were fabulous! I loved them! I always taught freshmen … freshmen or sophomores, and so they were always a little green and they were always a little bewildered and it was always wonderful to watch them come into their own, because they would stop in my office four years later, as seniors, and here were these fabulous grown-up young men and women who made me proud! I worked with a lot of the international students at Skidmore, so … LG: What did you do with them? SW: Again, ESL work. I did a lot of personal, my own personal ESL training, and then brought that to some of my writing courses. So, I did a lot of work with the international students and a lot of work with the HEOP [Opportunity Program] students, who were coming to Skidmore from, um … underprepared, underpreparing High Schools. They were very smart men and women, very, very smart, but their basic skills were not as strong as the kids coming out of, like, Country Day School, you know, or some of the great prep schools that our students come from. So, these young men and women needed a little bit of a leg up, and I taught in the summer, to the …yup, I taught in the HEOP Summer Institute for many years. �LG: That’s the Higher Education Opportunity Program. SW: That’s, thank you, it is the Higher Education Opportunity Program, of which Skidmore had, still has, I’m assuming, a very important program, a very important branch in the both state and federal level of Higher Education Opportunity Program. So, I taught in the Summer Institute for many years, doing a kind of “Boot Camp” with them so that when they came in September they would be prepared, more prepared than they would have been had they just spent the summer at home and then gotten out of their high schools and come to Skidmore. It would have been a bit of a, not only a culture shock but an intellectual shock for them. So, they were able to, we would do, you know, reading skills and study skills and some of the basic cultural experiences of what it was like to experience college in the classroom as well as in the dormitory. So, I did all of that, as well, in the summer. So, I guess the students were, are kind of my central focus. I had wonderful colleagues, both at UWW and MALS, and in the English Department. Again, that was a plus as well. LG: Ok. Are there other things that we didn’t cover? SW: Let’s see, talked about China, my sabbatical, umm, … I don’t know, I mean, it feels like I, … I mean I had such a rich experience at Skidmore, and I … LG: You talked about some of the changes… SW: Yeah, I mean there’s … LG: Can you expand on that? SW: Yeah, sure. When I, I mean … this will be a story that will be interesting to consider what, in terms of change … When I first came to Saratoga, I was not involved. I mean, I was in graduate school, my then husband was the Counseling Director at Skidmore. And, of course, I didn’t … and I met lots of Skidmore faculty through that, we were the young couple, you know, the new young couple at Skidmore, back in the day when those — they were �new young couples who would show up every year and we were it. So, we went to lots of parties and met with lots of faculty, all of whom were extremely warm and very welcoming. I was in graduate school so I didn’t have a lot of connection to Skidmore, but my husband would … of course, being in the Counseling Center, couldn’t talk about his discussions, although, at one time he did share something, which I thought was classic. And, of course it was because he had to share it with the larger Skidmore community, and he said, “Well, Sandy, the boys…” This was when Skidmore went co-ed. Because Skidmore went co-ed right when we arrived. And so the men who were at Skidmore had just started to arrive, and they were in classes, and they would come to the Counseling Center and they would sit down, and, in the Counseling session, their problem was that they were not getting enough food. So, Bob, my husband, had to go to the dining services and explain to the little old ladies who were working in the dining facilities that they needed to give the boys more food. And Bob said, that seems to be the major problem [laughs] that I’m dealing with in the Counseling Center right now is that the men are not getting enough to eat. And that seemed to me like such an innocent, kind of kind issue to be dealing with in the early days at Skidmore. And when I think now about all of the issues that our students face, the complicated issues of, you know, relationships and gender identity and issues of drugs and alcohol and all the stuff that face our students now, it seemed like that was an awfully innocent time when I first got here, to be thinking that these poor men needed to get more food. [laughs] LG: This was at a time when there were not, it was not buffet, in the dining hall. SW: No, they sat and they had to be given food, that was not buffet, absolutely. This was early days when you sat — dressed, you got dressed — and you sat in the dining hall and the food would come and it’d be in family style and there’d be a little bit, and by the time the men got the food, there wasn’t anything left! And they were being, you know, they were starving! [laughs] So … �LG: Were there also complaints about the beds? SW: Oh, the beds were too short! Beds were much too short, and now the … every guy was like, walking around with a sore back and hurt knees because they were scrunched into these little beds. Yeah, there was all these things that Skidmore needed to … there were growing pains, that’s… LG: Did they hang out the sheets? Out the windows, to complain? SW: Oh, I don’t remember that! Oh, I don’t remember that, no, that must be somebody else’s story. All I remember is the story about the food. LG: Yeah, the trustees were on campus. SW: Oh, no kidding! Oh, that’s funny. Yeah. Um, so, you know, I think that’s, just the … and of course, when we first came, when I came to Skidmore, we were still on the old campus. There were still half of … the busses were still going from Moore Hall, the big, the “Pink Palace,” from Moore Hall to Johnson Campus, because there were still classes going on down in the old campus. Which, that, within two or three years … well, not, no, not the residences… . Classes moved, almost always, all up to the new campus, but the residence halls, Moore Hall, still used, still was functioning, for many, many years, until they finally built enough dormitories for all of the students to … LG: So, did that impact what you were doing? SW: Um, no. No, it did not. I mean, I just, it was just an interesting transition and it was one in which, for someone who was also involved, because I was teaching, I knew the community, the Saratoga community, having been a teacher, I was very involved in many of the Saratoga projects. I worked on the Art in the Park project and many of the other kind of community-based projects for kids in town. It was interesting to see what Saratoga was going to do vis-a-vis the Skidmore, old Skidmore campus. And that was an interesting conversation for many years. Actually … well, not anymore, but �was for many years, as to what to do with those buildings, how to best repurpose them, were we going to tear — should they be torn down? Et cetera, et cetera. Verrazzano College, which no longer exists, bought most of the old campus … LG: That was Verrazzano? SW: Yeah, that was Verrazzano, and they set up a college, just where the old Skidmore campus was, but they did not last, and therefore many of the buildings were sold to private individuals. And so, we now see that, if you go on the east side, many of the old Skidmore buildings, even with the Skidmore names on them, are now either private residences or apartments, et cetera. And now Empire State has taken over many of those buildings, those buildings as well. So, there’s been a lot of change. When I, the day that I came to Saratoga, … in 1970, March … no, March of 1971, I was not yet married, I was engaged to be married in July, and my soon-to-be husband was up here for an interview for this job at the Counseling Center, and I came up to see what, if we got this, if he got this job, where we would live and what would be, where I would be. And it was March! And we all know what Saratoga looks like in March. It’s muddy, it’s gray, it’s dirty, there’s old snow everywhere, and in 1971, three quarters of Broadway was barricaded. There was … no stores. They were papered over … there was the Church Street News, the Farmer’s Hardware, Glickman’s Store, General Store, and that’s about it. There was very, very little, in terms of … LG: How about antique stores? SW: No, that was Ballston Spa that had, I mean, we had a lot of just open store fronts, barren open store fronts. Um, and I sat in the Red Barn, I don’t know … you won’t remember the Red Barn. The Red Barn used to be where Fingerpaint is now, which used to be where Borders was. While my soon-tobe husband was in his interview with Claire Olds and, … LG: Who was then Dean of…? �SW: She was Dean of the Students, because he had to meet with her regarding the Counseling Center, and then he met with President Palamountain and he met with Dr. Mastrianni, who was doing partial counseling work at the time. And I sat in the Red Barn and was looking … thought, well I could go up and down Broadway, I could go in the shops, I can see what’s going on … Hmmnn. [laughs] Nope! There was nothing! It was freezing, it was cold, it was dreary, I sat in the Red Barn drinking a cup of very bad coffee thinking, “Please don’t get this job! Please don’t get this job! This place is horrible! Oh, my goodness!” And he came out of that and he got the job and here we are, here I am 50 years later. Very, very happy. Happily, Skidmore was a huge part of that happiness, and I raised my two children here and they had a fabulous education in the public schools and went on … LG: What year did you retire? SW: I don’t remember! I have no idea. In fact, I was going to ask you that because it’s not on my piece of paper! You must have it on a [laughs] I can’t remember what year I retired! Four years ago? Maybe? I don’t remember. LG: I’ll check on that. SW: It’s terrible, I … really, I’m sorry. I’m sure you know what it could have … um, twenty … it was December of, I retired mid-year, so it … LG: Was it 2000…? SW: No, oh no, no, because I was … LG: 17 SW: 2017, that makes sense. Yes, 2017. Because I was in China, teaching at the University, in … on September 11th. And … I had just gotten to China. I had gotten there two weeks earlier. I had gotten on the plane and gone over at the end of August and I taught in China from 2001 to 2002 and then I went back in 2004 and 5 to follow up on some things that I had started over �there. But my teaching year was ’01-’02, and I’d been there, and three weeks later, 9/11 occurred. And, I came back after a year, I didn’t come back at all during the whole time I was in China, I was back a year later and found that, coming onto campus, I was … I was going through what everyone went through the year before. And it was fascinating to watch me. I watched myself, I’m going, “Why am I so emotional? Why am I having all these feelings about this?” Because I wasn’t here. I wasn’t there, I didn’t see anything. And they had the anniversary and I was there and I was … you know, Skidmore did some wonderful things during that period for their faculty and their students, so … Anyway, what else? Anything else? LG: I was about to ask you. SW: Oh, I’m very sorry! I think … anything else? I don’t know. I’m sure that when I’m done with this, I’m going to think of twenty things that I wanted to tell … I wanted to talk to you about. Um … LG: So, you saw a number of different presidents? SW: Yes, I did. I came in under Joe Palamountain, and then, … was it Jamienne…or, … LG: David? SW: No, Jamienne…? Oh, David was first. Ok. And David, oh! Whom I adored, adored, adored. He was one of the most remarkable human beings. And he remembered my name, and there’s no reason why anybody should ever remember my name, I was kind of a small cog in a very big machine and he always remembered my name, always came … he was the president, if you remember, he came to every department. He came around and sat in everybody’s office and wanted to talk to you. And he came into my teeny little closet of an office in UWW and wanted to know all about it, with huge enthusiasm, and caring and kindness, oh! He was a wonderful man. A great loss for us, for every… for the world, actually. And then, Jamienne Studley �had her short tenure, and then President Glotzbach, and now President Conner. So, yes, I’ve seen a lot, through many, many. Um … LG: Lots of changes in the administration … SW: Lots of changes. It’s interesting. You know, again, as someone who was totally invested in Skidmore College but I didn’t have a part, I was invested personally but I didn’t own anything because I was always in these programs that were kind of um, different, aside from the main mission of the College, I couldn't really … I had an interesting perspective and I kept watching every five or ten years or so, the same questions — that the faculty were raising the same questions again and again, about curriculum again, about issues of diversity and inclusion, about the role of a liberal arts college in the world, and how were we going to stay relevant. These are all questions that we went around and around for many, many years in different iterations, and I think they’re still valid, I was glad that Skidmore was asking those questions, because it kept them, I think it kept Skidmore viable and fresh and … I was always impressed with their sincerity and seriousness about our role, our job, as educators. LG: Thank you so much! SW: You’re welcome. This is my pleasure, and thank you for inviting me. And I’ll call you up when I have five more things to tell you! [laughs] � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Lynne Gelber Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Sandra "Sandy" Welter Location The location of the interview Saratoga Springs, NY Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio Recording Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit February 3, 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Sandy Welter Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 21, 2022 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Description An account of the resource Sandra Welter began at Skidmore in 1968 as a teacher in the University Without Walls (UWW) program at the Washington County Correctional Facility. She later became a full-time advisor for that program and finally its Director until the program closed in 1998 due to a lack of NY State funding. She then advised in the regular UWW program and, in 1997, in the MALS graduate program. She also taught writing in the Skidmore program at the University of Qufu in China in 2000-2001, as well as in the English Department on campus. She taught ESL to foreign students and worked in the Summer Institute with Higher Education Opportunity students. In addition to her work with these various programs, she discusses in this interview the transition to the new campus and changes in campus life as men matriculated.  Before retiring in 2017, Welter had experienced the college under Presidents Palamaountain, Porter, Studley, and Glotzbach. Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Bob Van Meter coeducation ESL Ken Klotz Larry Ries MALS Opportunity Program Prison Programs Qufu-Normal-University-Program UWW https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/3ddaa63f75e084276464b65808a3d676.JPG d56ace44808e28947c4bbc4d28830c74 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/73df41e1e3a6270c3fc29b7ad96d06a0.mp3 12c1f3109548e26d882bf833705833a3 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/745354ffac9b848ffe27d38816d25afc.pdf f91f0d78fb4203dab87627c6aca7b64a https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/3a6d0a21112d45bf4d0134dd1543adb5.pdf 93a62c42349c324167f38a536a75767d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Eileen McAdam, Sound and Story Project of the Hudson Valley Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Eleanor Samworth Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit December 13, 2018 Location The location of the interview Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Eleanor Samworth Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 22, 2015 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Description An account of the resource Eleanor Samworth came to Skidmore in 1964.  During her tenure she experienced the move to the new campus, growth in student enrollments, inception of coeducation in 1970, expansion of Liberal Studies, and computer use as central to many disciplines.  As chair of the Chemistry/Physics Department she oversaw the inception of Physics as a separate major and an agreement with Dartmouth for an engineering program.  In this interview she also discusses her involvement with the Skidmore Chapter of AAUP, especially a study of salary disparities between men and women faculty.  She remarks on how President Palamountain’s tenure was marked by construction and, during the Vietnam war era, tensions between faculty and administration.  Under the Porter presidency she saw an increase in money raised for student scholarships as well as a growth in student minority recruitment and funds for faculty support and endowed chairs.  Since her retirement in 1994 she has volunteered for a number of local organizations. Language A language of the resource English (en) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dym, Jordana; Stern, Rebecca, '16 Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Eileen McAdam Date Created Date of creation of the resource. January 5, 2016 Date Copyrighted Date of copyright. January 5, 2015 Date Submitted Date of submission of the resource. Examples of resources to which a Date Submitted may be relevant are a thesis (submitted to a university department) or an article (submitted to a journal). January 17, 2016 Date Issued Date of formal issuance (e.g., publication) of the resource. January 17, 2016 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. January 17, 2016 Date Valid Date (often a range) of validity of a resource. January 17, 2016 Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History AAUP chemistry coeducation Engineering Program Eric Porter Faculty Gender Equity Information Technology Liberal Studies Palamountain Physics https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/2ba0679abf67fb682a168d32da1c1dcd.mp4 5d9db19f1eca0fb24a2f6736ec12fc93 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/5f45479bcb553d9e03e7b3a8f7208453.pdf ef8ecb59a5f5aadd2e708721c858d5e8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saratoga County Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Justin Rizzi Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Paul Perreault Location The location of the interview Zoom (Saratoga County) Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Justin Rizzi Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit 10/5/2021 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Paul Perreault Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 22, 2021 Description An account of the resource Paul Perreault, the historian of the town of Malta, gives a general interview of the town's history and how Malta fits into the greater history of Saratoga County. Listen to 9:52 for a description of Malta's formation and foundation, 14:30 and 40:00 for discussion about the famous Malta Rocket Test Station, 32:00 for information about the community of Round Lake, 22:00 and 42:00 for depictions of the importances of the Luther Forest, and 19:43 for a fascinating little-told story about Elmer Ellsworth, the first Union officer killed in the Civil War, born in none other than Malta, New York. Language A language of the resource english https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/3d3ba6e25ec213c5ce6833f2390b733a.jpg 8c9233c56669e0448cc550de09540e1f https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/5161bebc3f9c539450413b65fbda16a1.mp3 30dc242f84c2badb743acef5f7f537f3 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/f72db98d3e5482e19204f0277f3fbda2.pdf ee06e82c7e9b59f0c87866cde1cccfb9 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/3c24f653402b198e9e37f0ecbbef51a0.pdf 2970eb46a2beabcc74dfd00cf0a73704 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Eileen McAdam, Sound and Story Project of the Hudson Valley Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Foulke Location The location of the interview Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio recording Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Robert Foulke Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 25, 2015 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource Robert Foulke was a member of Skidmore’s English department from 1970-1992 and served as department chair for ten of those years. In this interview, he discusses department leadership, changes in the English curriculum, developing a winter term class in Maritime Literature, starting the Writing Across the College program, and his post-retirement travel writing. He also reflects on the importance of a liberal arts education in contemporary society. Academic Rigor Board of Trustees coeducation Curriculum David Porter Faculty Workload First Year Experience Interdisciplinary Collaboration Intergenerational Faculty Relations J-Semester Liberal Arts Education Palamountain student body Tenure https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/b21928342141dc431dbc2269d6df34ce.mp4 d6ecc91982f658b961aef5626d5400d0 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/c7878f999d1588533e63e063bbeabd33.pdf 67f07071c2fa3f51f1af4810ff525015 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/452bdc176daeebe012a7ee24282c0e6c.pdf 7d1c34c62ba7bf45f4b8994ad926bb9f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saratoga County Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Miles Herman Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit 28/4/2021 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Miles Herman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Sean Kelleher Location The location of the interview Zoom (Saratoga County) Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mp4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Sean Kelleher Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 27, 2021 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Miles Herman, Skidmore '23 Subject The topic of the resource Saratoga County (N.Y.) -- History Abstract A summary of the resource. This is an interview with Sean Kelleher, the historian for the town of Saratoga, New York, which includes the villages of Schuylerville and Victory. The interview began with Mr. Kelleher discussing how he became the town historian, as well as his decades-long involvement in Revolutionary War reenactments. He then discussed accession of two collections for the Saratoga Historian's Office, and memorable ways history is taught in for Saratoga. He discussed his research and blog entry about Eden London, an enslaved Black man who served in the 10th Massachusetts Regiment and fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill. He raised interesting issues on the possible conversion of Victory Mills into an apartment complex, exhibiting the manufacturing history of the community and hope for a regional visitor’s center. He discussed the importance of water as a transportation and power sources for County history. Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/304d387294a9afb608981560bc0cb78f.jpg 195e856df84f1c798ef34b41c5702c15 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/5a95f8598a92c15cfc02e134cf5c3f33.mp3 038e222696e81a336fa8991738e51d1d https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/e79692af62e27b8350fb91fb9e687686.pdf e53727de878f873acf60c0c34b98a18f https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/7f4ea665237fe2bd85aa7f626d483d7c.pdf d32cd0c33d356de4121dd3b02b28f8f2 Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Ethan Reardon (Class of 2020) Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Mary Ellen Fischer Location The location of the interview Scribner Library, Skidmore College Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio Recording Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Ethan Reardon Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit April 26, 2017 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:00:49 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Mary Ellen Fischer Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 3, 2017 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Retiree Memory Project Language A language of the resource English (en) Description An account of the resource Mary Ellen Fischer came to Skidmore in 1975 as a professor of Soviet politics in what was then the Government department, now Political Science. She would later head the department and chair numerous college committees, leaving behind a legacy of intellectual excellence, commitment to community and an enduring work ethic. In a background interview, former colleague Ronald Seyb praised her for her leadership in their department and at the College. In this interview, Mary Ellen describes her experiences in these positions and her relationships with campus colleagues. She also reflects on the transition between campuses and the introduction of coeducation, as well as her scholarly travels. Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Campus Move coeducation Departmental Relations Diversity Eric Weller Government Department Intergenerational Faculty Relations Labor Relations/Benefits Town-Gown Relations https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/28081795ff072709d8b89c96ebf79ad3.mp3 b1557e832d26a1e1256b73efa012346c https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/c32c9616b15b137afcdafe99afaa0410.pdf 268447d0d96f03406078941b84899158 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/2cb3d0267c2b5c4b5786368ab152365a.mp4 614132ede777ac68dde6c88d2e649f0d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saratoga County Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Will Kertzmann Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Ben Kemp Location The location of the interview Zoom Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mp4 audio recording Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Ben Kemp Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 30, 2021 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Will Kertzman Abstract A summary of the resource. Interview with Ben Kemp, director of Grant Cottage which included discussion of the history of the towns of Corinth, Greenfield, and Schuylerville in Saratoga County, challenges and programming at the Cottage (in Wilton, NY). He also reflected on ways in which wealthy people had different experiences than "common folk." colonial Corinth glass bottle Greenfield Saratoga Springs schuylerville https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/f9bce7006c931b2eaed235784e38d6e5.jpg 18883315413995f40af946c047c4a9cb https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/8b26d55b932f59a5ef2abbca8a10c621.m4a 5f1678d9abc1289ccfbb2f9fc74d1024 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/98de521eb464ccd78387d86597f88d65.pdf 4ae6bb3425ed95228a9f361a028a0f9e PDF Text Text Interviewee: John Cunningham Years at Skidmore: 1967-2017 Interviewer: Lynne Gelber Location of Interview: Saratoga Springs, NY Date of Interview: April 4, 2022 00:00:00 Header 00:00:39 Grew up in Greenwich, CT; uncle, who was painter, lived with family, normalizing notion of career as artist. 00:01:21 As child, always interested in creative projects, science, & math. 00:01:38 Earned Bachelor’s degree in Physical Chemistry from Kenyon College (OH). 00:02:12 In senior year at Kenyon, took first painting class - discovered the excitement of art:“every mark was unique.” Subsequently decided to apply to Yale to study art. 00:03:24 Kenyon painting teacher Joe Slate supported decision & helped get Yale interview. 00:04:45 Yale interviewers thought it “cool that a scientist …wanted to be an artist.” 00:05:45 Cunningham had no sculpture experience before Yale, though his uncle had studied w/ Jackson Pollock. 00:06:20 “I really loved college! …I didn’t …get all As. I got As in those kind of things that interested me, mostly the strange things that everybody else flunked [laughs].” 00:06:55 Two degrees from Yale: BA in 1963 & MA 1965. 00:07:10 Chemistry background led to job in Yale Geology department neutron activation lab. 00:09:12 After Yale, worked for kinetic sculptor George Rickey; physics knowledge helpful. 00:10:42 A couple of years later began to seek teaching positions & hired at Skidmore (1967). 00:12:18 “At that point, Yale graduates …[were known for creating] teaching experiences that produced … extraordinary results … individuals with just staggering skills.” 00:14:16 In early years at Skidmore, there was a lot of socializing between faculty & parents and faculty & students. When Cunningham interviewed w/ Alice Mosher, she mentioned some faculty who had married students. That wasn’t shocking then. 00:15:55 Also, there was a strong collaborative working atmosphere among the art students. 00:18:20 When Skidmore all women, much student travel; after men began to attend, less travel. 00:19:45 In first few co-ed years, the women voted the men into the offices/leadership positions. 00:20:47 Before became fully co-ed, male RPI & Colgate students attended Skidmore courses. 00:21:02 One Colgate medical student, Ben Cohen, also interested in art. Cunningham insists, “I did not flunk him! [laughs] … He was a really great guy.” 00:22:55 “I was absolutely staggered by the accomplishments and skill of the women at Skidmore… stunned at how high the board scores were… impressed by the accomplishments … and still am, actually.” 00:24:45 The Great Race: originated with donation of huge amount of styrofoam; realized it would be great for making boats, opened up community contest to make boats out of anything and then race them across a pond out in Greenfield. 00:29:12 The old campus had problems with security. New campus building is beautiful, but we lost the faculty studio space, which had been a focal point of student-faculty activity. 00:31:04 During planning for new building, Cunningham spoke to architect and suggested a way to expand his office without expanding costs, so ended up with huge office! �00:32:56 While at Skidmore, “I started my own business, I had patents, I kept going on my scientific pursuits, I published in Nature magazine, … and I was very involved with my teaching … I just generally loved my teaching. My students were great, absolutely great.” “My goal was to present students with really exciting and interesting materials and circumstances where they could really just fulfill themselves, and my goal was to help them do that.” 00:34:41 In 1967, Skidmore art dept. didn’t even have a drill press. By 2017, had 3-D printers. 00:35:33 Upon starting, ordered many tools and taught students to use them. The existing faculty didn’t think it appropriate for women to use tools like bandsaws and compressors. 00:36:52 While sculpting one day, discovered method for craning force; published & patented. 00:40:19 Started company that built Seicon isolator, a device to absorb vibrations. 00:41:10 Started the business because he had presented info about the isolator to Caltrans, who offered to support a bridge project if he could raise $ for it. 00:41:47 No bridge, but raised over $3 million, learned a lot, enjoyed science and art combo. 00:43:12 After the business, time writing about conceptual art. Not yet published, but might. 00:44:41 In retirement, enjoying beach driving and fishing. Also doing 3-D printing sculpture. 00:45:38 To do 3-D art, one must know how to draw well. … “I’m having a lot of fun with it.” 00:47:05 Unlike riding a bike, the software is challenging to get back to after being away. Overall, the CAD (Computer Aided Design) software is “more difficult than you’d think." 00:49:00 “I regard myself as an incredibly lucky man.” I don’t …recall actually having a boss … I came from that generation where faculty would shout and argue with the president at faculty meetings.” Remembers one meeting where “Somebody took a swing at somebody else!” 00:51:30 On introducing students to using computers in the creative process, started incrementally. 00:52:56 Once when there was difficulty getting budget approval for supplies, met with Dean. “He was just so amazed at what I was showing to him … we got some neat stuff, really wonderful stuff.” 00:55:42 “It was just an extraordinary privilege. I had a lot to do! You know what I mean? I had a lot to do!” [laughs] 00:56:08 END � https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/90a540b6ae834d682d09265a71f9886a.pdf 41169655b458e6632df97302f7647052 PDF Text Text Interview with John Cunningham by Lynne Gelber, Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, Saratoga Springs, New York, April 4, 2022. JOHN CUNNINGHAM: This is harder than I thought it was going to be. [laughs] LYNNE GELBER: This is Lynne Gelber. It’s April 4th, 2022. I’m here with John Cunningham, retired from the Art Department, and our wonderful helper Susan Bender. And John, welcome. It’s really nice to see you after so many years. I just want to ask you to tell us where you grew up and how you came to be at Skidmore. So why don’t we start there. JC: Ok. I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. My uncle was a painter and he lived with us for years. So, when I was small, growing up, the smell of oil painting, like, just filled the house, and one of the things about it was, I guess when you grow up that way, you know, the idea of being an artist is just truly a real thing. There’s nothing odd or strange about people being artists — it’s just a thing that people do. I also wonder about the oil fumes. I always kind of feel, looking back on it, who knows? I could have been really intelligent [laughs] if it weren’t for those fumes! And I guess I was always interested in what I thought to be creative stuff. I did lots of projects when I was younger, and I was very, very good at science, and particularly mathematics, and so when I went off to college, at Kenyon College in Ohio, I was a … physical chemistry was my speciality. And I was … [laughs] actually, looking back on it, I tell my students about this and they feel it’s a little bit sick… I was remarkably good at it. I was remarkably good at the math. I could walk up to a blackboard in those days, and write out — actually I needed two blackboards — and write out the proof of the �Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And … I didn’t think of it at the time, I look back and I don’t even think my professors could do that. My senior year in college [laughs] I took a painting course. And that’s when I discovered that being creative really had nothing, necessarily, to do with science. One of the things about science I always thought was interesting, that for a thing to be real, for a thing to actually be considered to have happened, it has to happen more than once! [laughs]. If a thing happens just once — well I guess the Big Bang happened once, so I guess we have to accept that — but if things just happen once, scientists just assume it just really didn’t happen because it must be duplicable and be observed by others. And, and then I discovered art. Did that, you know. You reach out to that canvas and you blot your brush to that surface, every mark was special, every mark was unique, and I discovered that being creative had nothing to do with putting on a lab coat and mechanically reproducing experiments that hundreds of other people had done before. So, I took that one painting course and … LG: Was it the professor or people in the class who inspired you, or … the material? JC: It was me. Oh, and I had a great teacher, very imaginative, Joe Slate, very imaginative and… LG: What was his name? JC: Joe Slate. Joseph Slate. He was a Yale graduate, and one day in the spring of my senior year, Joe said to me, he said, … no, actually, I started it, because I said, “Hey Joe,” I said, “You know, I’m thinking of changing from chemistry and maybe focusing on art.” Joe goes, “Really?!” He says, “You know, I was going to ask you about that,” he said, “but I didn’t want to �change your opinion. I didn’t want to be forward,” he said. He said to me, would you like to go to Yale?” [laughs]. So I said, “Yeah, sure I’d like to go to Yale!” Because at that point it began to dawn on me that being creative was something far more exciting than just donning a lab coat and mechanically reproducing events that were well known and experienced before, but rather there were aspects of being creative that were tremendously exciting, really, really unique, and I was sure art was one of them. LG: So, you went to Yale for an MFA? JC: Yeah, and, with … but I went to Yale. Well first, Joe Slate set me up with an interview at Yale, see — because I had taken no art courses to speak of! [laughs] This one painting course! And I was applying for entrance at Yale Graduate School! But Yale in those days offered a BA and a BFA, and so I went up for my interview and the people there thought it was so cool — this was the old days, you could never get away with things like this nowadays — they thought it was so cool that a scientist person wanted to be an artist. I went up there, met a bunch of people, walked around, talked, and they said, “Okay, you’re in.” [laughs] And for the next 3 years I thought I was a special student, you know, but I wasn’t! I was just a student but I was a student who had absolutely no art experience whatsoever and I was in graduate school, see. LG: But you had had experience with oil painting? JC: Well, I’d done a little bit of, yeah, a semester of oil painting LG: But with sculpture? JC: No, I had no experience at all. Although my uncle, my uncle did study with Jackson Pollock at the … at the Munson Arts Institute in New York. He was a student with him. He said that the most intelligent thing he heard Jackson �Pollack ever say was “Gin is a great cathartic.” Now, I knew what gin was, I’m not sure, even today, I know what a cathartic is, [laughs] but it sounded really funny at the time. So, anyway, I loved … actually, looking back, I have to say, even when I was at Kenyon studying science, I loved college! I really loved college. You know. Although I have to say I wasn’t, I didn’t certainly get all As. I got A’s in those kind of things that interested me, the strange things that everybody else flunked. [laughs]. LG: John, what kinds of … well let me ask you, when did you get your degree from Yale? JC: Well, I have two degrees from Yale. Let me see, one was, I think, in ’63, to my surprise, they gave me a BA, and then in ’65 I got my MA from Yale. Actually, when I was at Yale I got a job — most of my fellow students at Yale got jobs in the Geology department doing, you know, drafting work in the Geology department. And so I went to the Geology department and said, “Hey, all my friends are working here. Have you got a job for me?” But I knew nothing about drafting! And they said to me, “What can you do?” And I said, “Well I know something about chemistry.” Turned out I knew a lot more about chemistry than anybody in the Geology department [laughs] who were accustomed to studying rocks! So, they put me in charge of a neutron activation lab, because that was my speciality when I was in college, and I was really very good at it. And, as a consequence of that — neutron activation is when you bombard a molecule with neutrons, and you create an unstable isotope and that emits radioactivity that’s proportional to the amount of that material in a substance. And we were working on processes where if you took a tablespoon of alcohol and mixed it in Lake Superior, we could measure it. [laughs] But, during the process I got very radioactive, and after my third … third, no second year, or so, my son was just born, the chair �of the Geology department called me into his office and he said, “John, I have to tell you something. You’ve just recorded more radioactivity than anybody else has ever recorded at Yale university!” [laughs] So, that was …I used to think it was funny, I brought my friends to the lab and I would wave my hands in front of the Geiger counter and I always thought it was funny. But you know in those days, who knew! We didn’t know. I always … I wondered a little bit about what the effect was on my health, but here I am at an advanced age and I seem to be doing alright, so! [laughs] LG: Ok, so when you left Yale, what year was that? JC: I think that was in ’65. But I went to, after I left Yale, I got a job working for a sculptor, a kinetic sculptor by the name of George Rickey. LG: And how did you meet George? JC: George sent a letter out to all of the graduate schools saying that he was looking for an assistant. He was looking for somebody who could weld, who could solder, who could do metal work and all these other things, and I could do those things so I responded. And, George and I, we had the most amazing relationship because George was an incredibly educated man, classically educated, and what we would do, he was a kinetic sculptor — kind of think of Calder, in a way, things that balance, you know, center of gravity, period functions, things like that — and we would sit around George’s table, right, in the morning drinking coffee, and on a napkin George would talk physics to me, back and forth, and he would draw these things out on a napkin and then I would go out into the studio and I would make them. And I was very good at the science part of it. One of the problems with George, he had other artists who were assistants and these were people who could make things but they never understood the science of �it, and so I was the first person he ever worked with who understood, you know, things like center of gravity, movements, you know, and so forth. LG: So how come … you only stayed with him … one year? JC: I worked with him for about three years, and at one point, I guess I walked in and I realized it was time for the little bird to fly the nest, you know? And I could easily see that I was getting too comfortable. And so what I did … [laughs] talk about, you know, well luck, talk about luck, and maybe that’s the secret to life, is luck, and being ready to act when that coin flips your way, you know. So, I sat down and got a map, and I was living in a house where, fortunately, we were paying very little rent, and I drew a circle on that map of commuting distance, right, and LG: And where was that house? JC: The house was in Chatham, NY. And … big circle of commuting distance, and within that circle were three colleges with significant art departments. And one was SUNY, one was Williams and one was Skidmore. And, so I just fired them off letters, saying, “Are you looking for a sculptor?” [laughs] And all three of them were!! Can you imagine that? And… LG: Well there was also a significant Yale presence here at Skidmore… JC: Oh yeah, but that wasn’t necessarily a welcoming thing in those days. LG: Oh? JC: Oh yeah. Oh boy, there were politics involved in that decision. Everybody was amazed at Skidmore that they hired me because those other three Yale guys [laughs] were very controversial. And yet, here again, they hired a fourth one, you know! Although I have to say I was a little bit of an outlier. Although come to think about it, I’m thinking … at that point, Yale graduates, with Josef Albers sort of background and direction, flooded the country with ideas about design and creativity that were aesthetically �magnetic, and these people put together very, very teachable experiences that produced just extraordinary results, just extraordinary results! There was a horrific flaw in the entire process, though, … and early on I kind of, I knew exactly what it was, because these people believed, truly believed in their heart of hearts, that they had defined creativity! They truly believed this. And, of course, if you just think about it for a second, the moment you define what being creative is, it ceases to be creative. I can’t understand why more people didn’t see that, you know? Although, as far as a teaching vehicle goes, they were able to produce individuals with just staggering skills. People who could manipulate color and form. We produced students who could draw with skills that you just don’t see nowadays. Our students could sit down with an H pencil and sketch you while you sat and talked to them, you know, they were that skilled. And … LG: So now are you talking about Skidmore students? JC: Skidmore students … well I’m talking about the Yale courses that were developed all across the country. And, of course, I was a part of that, so in that kind of context, I’m probably, as far as a teacher goes, more attractive, you know. LG: So, what courses did you teach when you started here? JC: Well, I taught … LG: And you started here in, again, 19… JC: ’67. 1967. It was an all-women’s school… it was an all-women’s school… Oh, can I tell you …? Okay, so, my very first interview with the chair of the department, Alice Mosher, who was this wonderful, wonderful, brilliant, brilliant woman. So, she sits down and she’s talking about the department and she’s, “Well…” and she describes the department and the faculty, and she’s “Oh, four or five of the faculty,” I can’t remember how many, �“married Skidmore students.” I said, “Oh really,” I said, you know, “That’s interesting.” [laughs] You know, didn’t think anything of it! “That’s good, I guess,” you know? Years later, I can remember talking to my student assistant and I said, “Yeah, when I came here it was really interesting, in my first interview the chair of the department said there were a number of faculty that married Skidmore students,” and the guy went, my assistant went, “What!?” He was horrified! He was shocked! And I, when he was shocked, I was shocked! I thought, “What did I say?” You know, “What did I say?” [laughs]. To make a long story short, there was a period when we started, Lynne, you must remember this, the faculty and the students were really, really close. Really close. The faculty were also close to their parents, the parents would come visit on the weekend, we’d have them over, we’d have Bloody Mary’s on a Saturday afternoon, you know, the drinking age was 18. We had “beer crits” [laughs] every Friday afternoon at 4 o’clock in my studio. And … it was an exciting time. Oh, another thing about it that I thought was interesting, as opposed to my view of artists today, is that we all shared. It was a sistership, it was a brotherhood, it was like, we were all engaged in this wonderful, exciting venture together, you know? Nowadays it’s every man or woman for yourself, you know? There’s not that sense of sharing and communication that existed then. LG: I think that may have been your department. JC: And, oh yes. Yeah, in particular. LG: Not all departments were like that. JC: I think that’s probably true. �LG: There was considerable sharing across departments, by individuals, though. JC: Yeah. No, I think you’re probably right on that. But it was also because, that Yale background, we had this project, we were all engaged in this dream, pursuing this dream, it was truly magical, looking back at it. There was a soul to our involvement with the class, and with teaching, that I think sort of evaporated over the years, you know? I feel privileged to have been able to be a part of it. LG: When you interviewed, did you interview with anybody besides Alice Mosher? JC: Oh yes. Edwin Moseley, who was Dean of the College, and uh, this was funny, so Edwin says to me, in our first interview, he says, “John, have you ever been to Skidmore before?” And I said, “Yeah, yes I have.” Well, I had because my brother’s girlfriend called me up at Kenyon once, I think I was a junior, called me up, this was my brother’s girlfriend, and she said to me, “Would you like to come to Skidmore’s dance weekend with me?” JC: I said, “I’m in the middle of Ohio, I have no way of getting there. Although I have a friend with a car. Can you get two or three of my friends dates and we’ll all drive up together?” And she said, “Sure.” So, we threw a case of beer in the back of a car and drove up to Skidmore. And, LG: Now this was a time when you could drink at 18 in New York but not in Ohio, is that correct? JC: Well, that didn’t slow us down in Ohio. I look back on it now, Kenyon was an all-male school, okay, so all we had to do was drink, you know? Skidmore was an all-women’s school and all they had to do was drink, I think, looking back on it. Davis, Tom Davis, was the chaplain. He told me once, he did a survey at Skidmore, probably a little before I got here, and he said, �“You know, we did a survey and discovered that at any given time, 50% of the girls were at other schools” because it was not that much fun to be, you know, all by yourself alone here at Skidmore, “and the other 50% wanted to leave but couldn’t!” [laughs] And while I was at Skidmore that changed, I have to say. We got co-educational; all of a sudden it was really, really rewarding, it was fun to be at Skidmore. LG: What difference did it make in your department to have men in the undergraduate classes? JC: Well, I have to tell you the first men were really kind of … chancy [laughs]. You ask yourself, Skidmore goes co-educational, what kind of guy would make that choice, right? So, our first candidates weren’t that strong, looking back on it. And I’ll never forget one of my good friends saying to me, “Boy,” she said to me, “You know, you really know when you’re hard up when those poor guys start to look good to you.” [laughs] And the first few years, you’ll remember this, the Skidmore girls voted men into all of the offices — do you remember that? That was also, I thought, really very revealing. But anyway, over the years things sort of evened out. It was a rough time for the college, but I think for those of us struggling through, it was a tremendously exciting time of flux, experimentation, and it was very, very alive. I’m not the only one looking back and feeling privileged being able to participate in that experience. LG: When … before we became a fully co-educational institution, there was four one-four, and, do you remember that men from Colgate would come over? JC: Four-one-four, I think, happened after we were, I’m pretty sure it did, we were co-educational, I think, by then. No? No. Because I was active … yeah, four-one-four. �LG: Because guys from Colgate would come over… JC: Yeah, and I had classes where guys from Troy came over, too. Troy — RPI. Yeah, I had a huge bunch of guys from RPI who would come. LG: Because one of the people who came from Colgate was a medical … well, he was studying to become a doctor, and his name was Ben Cohen. JC: Oh, I remember Ben Cohen! Oh my God, Ben Cohen was this … Ben, oh, it’s annoying, because Ben Cohen, Ben Cohen told the whole world that Cunningham flunked him! [laughs] in three dimensional. And I, here’s my chance to publicly set … I did not flunk Ben Cohen. [laughs] I gave Ben Cohen a permanent incomplete! [laughs] But, ah, no, I remember Ben Cohen very, very well. LG: And I remember Ben Cohen (*see note) because his father said he could not …um, he would not underwrite his college education if he left Colgate and decided not to be a doctor. He wanted to be an artist. JC: Yeah, yeah. LG: And I just am remembering that he then went into UWW instead. JC: Yeah. And I remember Ben Cohen at parties. We used to have student faculty parties, and I can remember on occasion stepping over Ben Cohen [laughs] at parties. But, I did not flunk him! He, actually, that was published in the magazine! I was shocked to see that published! [laughs]. But, no Ben was a great guy, though. He was really a great guy. LG: What were some of the other highlight moments of becoming co-educational? JC: Uhh… I will say this, that when I came to Skidmore as a young man, I grew up in a family with… I have two brothers, I went to Kenyon — it was all male, you know, and so when I arrived at Skidmore I was, as far as women go, I was I think rather shy, and I was absolutely staggered by the accomplishments and skill of the women at Skidmore. I remember going �through their college board scores as an advisor, and I was stunned at how high the board scores were — just absolutely stunned. And, that took me a long time … I got over that shyness, you may have noticed that [laughs]. But I was very, very shy. So, I started from a point of view where I really was impressed by the accomplishments of women at Skidmore, and still am, actually. And I think the guys came to Skidmore and ,all of a sudden, the college environment became whole and healthy, and men brought a very different sort of an attitude toward it, and we all grew, sort of, accordingly, but I have to say, looking back on it, some of my best friends today are women that I met, kind of back then as a consequence of shared activities, you know, and stuff… and men, too. LG: John, what are some of the other highlights from your experience at Skidmore? JC: Well of course we did the Great Race. Do you remember the Great Race? LG: Oh yeah! Why don’t you explain it? JC: Well in those days, see, if you really wanted to get a big crowd of people, all you had to do, since the drinking age was 18, was to get a keg of beer and a huge crowd would show up, see? So, if you had a project [laughs] that you wanted to do, getting it off the ground was really easy! So, about the time we started this I had arranged with — what is it, Monsanto? One of the big chemistry companies — to donate to Skidmore a boxcar full of Styrofoam. And, you have to see a boxcar to really understand how much Styrofoam that is! It’s a huge amount of Styrofoam! And I hadn’t considered how much it was. So anyway, the boxcar arrived at a siding and we had the Skidmore grounds people to take it … the only place we could put it on the old campus was in the steam room, the steam house, where they packed it in there in this great big industrial space and you went in there and you could just barely get �through and all the rest was Styrofoam! So, for years we made Styrofoam stuff. So, there we were in class one day and we’re thinking, “Hey, we’ve got all of this Styrofoam. It’s the perfect stuff to make boats. Let’s have a race!” [laughs] So it started in my class. So, we put posters up and I went and I talked to this guy Braim, who’s a local lawyer who owns — actually there’s a street named after him, and it’s Braim’s Pond; it’s up here in Greenfield, I think. And he gave us permission. In fact, he actually went and hired himself a master of ceremonies, which I thought was really kind of funny, but he really supported us. So, I put signs up and my assistant put signs up, and … I can remember my assistant, at that time, Mary KeatingLeahey, is her name now. So, we got a couple of kegs of beer, we put the kegs of beer on the side of the road where this pond was, and we sat there wondering, “is anybody going to show up?” [laughs] Feeling a little bit silly, but then, again, we had a couple of kegs of beer, at least we could drink beer [laughs] and then all of a sudden, at one point down the end of the road, we saw this car driving around the, it was an old dirt road, driving around this corner with this strange contraption strapped to the roof, and we knew we were good. And all these people showed up! And the pond, a week before, had been frozen, so the water was really, really cold. And so, for a series of years we held the Great Race! And we … what the hell was the prize? I’m trying to remember what the prize was. There was a whole series of rules, and the last rule, I think, was the best — the last rule was that you could cheat! [laughs] We made it very clear. LG: So, the idea was to make something with Styrofoam? JC: With anything. With anything! And the idea, we had a course laid out, see. And one time, since you could cheat, some guys from RPI came in wet suits and, in the middle of the night, and they laid a rope from one end of the lake �to the other, see, [laughs] and they had this contraption that they then tied the rope to and then when we said “start” the people on the other were like pulling on the rope! LG: Now did that ever continue on the new campus? JC: We did it for a couple of years and then I, you know, I … I thought that it was inappropriate for me to continue to be the prime mover of it and I just sort of tried to encourage the student body, just to take it over and sort of step out of it and it did happen, gosh, it still may be on the calendar, The Great Race, and they put this little notice up, I don’t think anybody shows up! But for years they would do this…[laughs]. LG: Let’s talk about the move to the new campus and how that affected you, how you adjusted to new space. JC: Oh well, the old campus was just a horrible, horrible thing, and the art department was the last to move. And we had terrible problems down there with security, so moving up here was a, just a wonderful opportunity. And, of course, the new building was beautiful. But, there were lots of things that we gave up. On the old campus, because you had all these old buildings, all the faculty had their own little studios. Now, the studio wouldn’t necessarily be a room any bigger than this, but it was your place to work. It was on campus. And, it was very funny, the plans always, always included faculty studios, as part of the future, and it’s sort of remarkable how, over the years, that was just forgotten. But I have to say, one of the things I greatly missed was the fact that my, our studios, the faculty studios, became just a focal point of student-faculty activity, on the old campus, and that we ended up losing. Our colleagues, outside of the department, always kind of … they would look at our building and see the teaching studios we have and somehow assume that those were our spaces, you know, but, really, they �weren’t — we couldn’t create our own work in the spaces reserved for students, and with supplies reserved for students, either. So, in the end I created my own studio, and many of the other faculty did, which meant that activities that used to — professional activities that used to involve Skidmore and my students ceased to exist because I was, you know, elsewhere. So that’s a price we paid. LG: Did you have any role to play in the planning of …? JC: Oh yes, oh yes. [laughs] So, my office was designed between ceramics, and there was another wing that was sculpture. And there was this little space, in between part, was my office, and I remember talking to the architect, “Hey look, do you realize that you could take that front wall of my office and move it forward another 20 feet [laughs] and all we have to do is just pay for a little bit more ceiling [laughs].” I said, “Furthermore, we can cut the expense by not putting any ceiling in, just leave the pipes open,” and so forth. So, I ended up with, I think, the biggest office on campus. In fact, Palamountain came to visit once and he’s looking around this brand-new building and somebody says, “Yeah, and this is John’s office” and Palamountain sticks his head in and then he goes, “How in the hell did Cunningham get this big space?” [laughs] I just happened to be there talking to the architect. [laughs]. But no, it was a beautiful space; I loved my office. And, in fact, when I retired I … for 50 years, I had a place on campus, you know, for 50 years, and it was always there. And that’s … LG: And you retired in what year? JC: I retired in, when did I retire … 2017? Yeah. Is that 50 years? Yeah. Something like that, yeah. So, I miss that office. I really do. Any place in Saratoga, I always had my office. And go hang out, go read, you know. But, �in fact, I haven’t been back to my office. It would make me feel sad. I’m hoping John Galt is in there….laughs] LG: So, were there other highlights that, you know, special moments for you, in the course of those 50 years? JC: Well, I think that, as I was saying before we started the formal part of the interview, I think …for me, I was really involved in doing things. I started my own business, I had patents, I kept going on my scientific pursuits, I published in Nature magazine, … and I was very involved with my teaching, I mean I just generally loved my teaching. My students were great, absolutely great. Wonderful, wonderful people. And, as I got older, I became very selfish, as I may have said, and if I could be on a committee and I thought I could make a difference I’d be on a committee. Otherwise, the hell with it. I think much of the stuff the faculty has to do involves jumping through hoops and I had already jumped through 50 years of hoops, so I just pursued my own heart and what I saw to be my students’ best interests. One of the things with my discipline, by the way, is that, as opposed to my friend who taught Physics, where much of the time he had to regretfully inform them that they just got a C minus, and hence their career as a doctor [laughs] was in question, you know, and suffered terrible phone calls from angry and hostile parents, my goal was to present students with really exciting and interesting materials and circumstances where they could really just fulfill themselves, and my goal was to help them do that. And at the very end I got heavily involved in three-dimensional printing, you know — computer processes. And, in fact, if I would be …one of the things that disappointed me a little bit about retiring is that in the three or four years just before I retired I was really able to bring sophisticated technologies like 3-D �printing to the Skidmore sculpture area, and just as we were getting off the ground I sort of left. [laughs] But I guess it’s ongoing now. In that same respect, when I came to teach at Skidmore the sculpture area had … like, a drill press [laughs]. No, wait a minute, it didn’t have a drill press! When I came, I ordered a drill press! I think they had a hand drill, you know! And that was the only tool they had. LG: So, you had to teach the students how to use the tools? JC: Yeah, oh, and that was … oh I remember the existing faculty were very upset because they didn’t think women should be … it was appropriate for women to use tools like that. Especially when I was ordering things like bandsaws and compressors. So, anyways, usually what I did was, I kind of outfitted Skidmore the way my own studio was outfitted … with like, well, in the end plasma cutters, welding equipment, woodworking stuff. My kind of work sort of spread over a variety of interests. Here is the interesting thing, though, my studio is bigger than my house at home and it has all of the kinds of stuff that Skidmore has, and now that I do 3-D printing, I don’t need any of it. [laughs] I don’t need any of it! I sit down in front of my computer, you know, and I create these drawings — which, by the way, is much harder than it sounds — hit a button, and a couple of weeks later a big box arrives on the front porch. And … I’m thinking that’s the future. That’s the future. That’s sort of the next step that I would have loved to have been able to see. LG: You mentioned that you had patents? JC: Yes. LG: Do you want to talk about that a little bit? JC: Uh, one day I was … I said that science sort of followed me around … I was making a piece of sculpture, right, and so I was reaching down my hands and had these little screen parts and I’m pushing them around, and, all of a �sudden, I saw a way of creating force that I knew nobody had ever seen before. I also knew for [sure-ity] certainty how the pyramids were built, how Easter Island was built, how Stonehenge was put together, and … but it seemed to be such an abstract, difficult thing … I was invited to be a guest lecturer at a Mensa convention once, and I brought all my models and things and at that point I hadn’t figured out the mathematics of it and I invited all of these intelligent people to look at this and see if they could help me kind of figure it out. You could see how it worked! You could see how you could lift something HUGE with a minimum of force, but mathematically I wasn’t able to see the picture until, [laughs] and every time I always say “whatever you do,” I say to my students, “Don’t throw away your old physics book.” [laughs] So I took my old college physics book, put it down, and discovered that I could figure out the math. And in those days, I don’t know if they still have the program, but NYU, which had a “premiero” physics department, had a relationship with the art department, or with the school, with Skidmore. You could go down to NYU and they would give you library services and stuff and help you do research and I went down there with the physics department at NYU. I sent them all my papers about how you could generate, or magnify, force using this principle, and I sent them all my mathematics, and I went down there. And I’ve since discovered that Larry Spruch, who was chairman of the department, was a world famous … world famous physicist! So, I went down to see him and I went in his office and there were four or five guys, and Larry Spruch was sitting in his office, and so I went down there and they were interviewing me about this process. And Larry, who by the way, had the deepest, strongest, most powerful voice of any human being I’ve ever met, he said, “John,” he says, “We’ve looked at your materials,” he says, “and John, it’s just garbage!” he said, “And,” he �said, “we almost just threw them in the trash!” and he actually threw them in the trash! [laughs] So I stood there … and … actually, looking back at all my projects and things, I always had … knock on wood, because there’s always an end to the story, you know, knock on wood, … I always had an ability to know what I didn’t know. Some people don’t have that ability at all, but, so far, I’ve always had that ability, you know, to know what I didn’t know. So, Larry … I’m going, “Yeah, but Larry, you see, you go like this, you go like this,” I go with my fingers, “and it’s an equilibrium and you … that is forcing that…” And Larry goes, “He’s right! He’s right!” [laughs] He says, “John,” he said, “you’d better publish this. We’ll help you publish it in Nature,” he said, “because if you don’t publish this idea,” he said, “somebody else is going to steal it.” That’s what they told me then. So not only did I publish it, but I also patented the constructions derived by it to build seismically isolated bridges and so forth. And I started a company — we marketed, for years, a device that would … absorb all the vibrations from your washing machine, you’ve got a washing machine it goes [wobble sound] like this. Our device would just totally solve the problem. In fact, Consumer Reports tested it, and they said, “We tested the Seicon isolator,” the washing machine isolator, “and it’s the only one we’ve ever tested that actually works!” [laughs] they said. But then they said, “but it’s very expensive!” [laughs]. Which pissed me off, you know? Caltrans … I went and made a presentation at Caltrans. Caltrans said that if I could find the funds to build a bridge, they would supervise it and they would test it, and I made arrangements to do that, but I had to raise the money to build the bridge. And not being a scientist, I didn’t have access, you know, to it. If I’d tried to write a grant proposal ,I didn’t even have the �vocabulary, you know, to do it. So, I decided to start a company — hopefully, my idea was, that we’d earn enough money to do the necessary research, but we got sort of sidelined … involved in other things. But anyway… Learned a lot being a businessman, though. Raised over three million dollars, actually, as part of the project. It was always funny, it’s like, people … I can remember prospective freshmen coming into my office, and usually, often, the father would be openly contemptuous of art as a future …[laughs]. The conversation would come up, “What do you do? What are you doing?” And at one point my company was invited to Bath Ironworks to see if we could apply the isolation system to the drive systems of Navy warships. So, I would say, “Yeah, this is what I’m doing.” [laughs] Only to get an angry letter from this guy saying that I’m supporting the military [laughs] establishment, see! I think it’s really cool, warships are really cool things! Oops! Anyway, so the science things, I sort of, I guess I never did separate it from my other interests, you know. LG: So, does that company still exist? JC: No, it sort of faded … faded out. It faded out. Well, when I was running it, it was going really well, but then I sort of lost interest in making money, and … I had other things to do. I’m really, super glad I did, too, you know, because I think I did … I ended up doing some really, really interesting things that I never would have done otherwise. LG: Like what? JC: Ah [laughs], well a lot of writing that hasn’t been published, okay. For example, I have written, I think, a staggering article about conceptual art, you know, based upon many of my experiences. And one of the things about getting older that I find really interesting, I have lots of things like this that I �haven’t published and I think they’re really, really important — it’s like my article for Nature, you know. LG: So where are you publishing? JC: I haven’t. It’s just living on my computer. Oh, little bits of it, little bits of it kind of go out into the world. But again, since I’m an artist and a sculptor and I didn’t come from a world that published, and things, and I think as a consequence I suffered from that. And I often think that since I’m retired now, I should be taking these efforts and I should be … because I may be gone [laughs] and it will all be forgotten and nobody will care! There’ll be this ton of stuff, nobody will even go through it, they’ll just put it in the garbage. [laughs] LG: So, what have you been doing since you retired? JC: Well, I just bought a brand-new Jeep Gladiator so I could really do substantial beach driving and fishing. [laughs] Okay. And I’m doing three-dimensional printing. I just ordered a work that’s done in stainless steel. It’s sort of an interesting process, it starts off with a powder, a bed of powder, and this laser fuses the powder, that’s how it makes it. And the interesting thing, since it’s in a powder, the form is supported so you can do delicate things, and I’m really interested to see that you could do stainless! It’s a modest size, it’s only about this big, and I’m really looking forward to seeing that. Although, this is interesting, I have, maybe, alluded to this earlier — I truly believe this — I look at the things I make, and they’re made with computer aided design programs, right, which are horrifically difficult to learn, you know, but to use any of these programs, to do them well, you have to kind of know how to draw, alright? And if you don’t know how to draw, you’re forced to lean on clip-art, and other methods, right? And so the quality of the artwork takes a huge hit. Nobody knows how to draw anymore. The people �teaching drawing don’t know how to draw any more. [laughs] Very, very few artists today can draw a flower pot and make it look like it’s sitting on a table top, for example, you know? And that’s one of the things that we used to do at Skidmore incredibly well, years ago. So, even with threedimensional printing, I have a feeling that the kind of work you’re going to see coming out of it is going to be limited, you know, in a way, because you are going to be limited by the innate skills of the creative minds making it. But, I’m not — it sounds like I’m discouraged, I’m not discouraged, I’m having a lot of fun with it. I should have brought some to show you, actually. LG: Will the artists have to learn code? JC: No, no, and I think that’s a huge mistake. I think people think they’re taking the off-the-shelf processes and using them, but they’re devilishly complicated. One interesting thing about software, I remember it being said that you never forget how to ride a bicycle, and that’s kind of true. You never forget how to ride a bicycle, but software, you forget how to do! [laughs] And one of the people my company was doing business with, one of the engineers remarked — he worked for a very large engineering firm — when their designers, when their people who worked with CAD programs, went on vacation, there was always a couple of weeks of down time for them to get back into the drawing because you forget! There’s something about the nature of using the software that, even if it’s sort of intuitive, it does not, it doesn’t stick with you. It’s very, very hard to do. And it’s funny because they have, Skidmore has started the, what is it, the Makerspace? And I always laugh because the people putting the Makerspace together haven’t really been doing three-dimensional printing or using the technology, and the biggest problem with the Makerspace is going to be how are you going �to get somebody to give you a drawing, a CAD drawing that’s adequate to create significant objects. And, I’ve never had a student come to me with those skills. So, it’s very, very... it’s much more difficult than you might think. Anyway, so that’s what I’m doing now. LG: We have about five more minutes left, so I’m curious to know if there’s anything we should include that we haven’t touched on, or that I haven’t asked about. JC: Well, no. Otherwise I should say, I may have said this already, I regard myself as an incredibly lucky man. That I’ve spent my whole life and I don’t think I ever recall actually having a boss, [laughs] you know? Surrounded … LG: I wonder how people like David Porter or subsequent art department heads would [laughs]… JC: I came from the, you know the generation. I came from that generation. I came from that generation where faculty would shout and argue with the president at faculty meetings. Do you remember that? You know? And, life has changed. Life has really, really changed. So, I always, I just assumed those prerogatives. It was a wonderful, wonderful opportunity. And, uh, I have to say I … LG: Whom did you shout at? JC: What’s that? LG: Who remains in your head that you shouted at? JC: Oh, I remember one of our colleagues. Were you at that faculty meeting? There was this fight and this argument and I was looking at this sea of people, you know, and all of a sudden over the crowd I saw this fist go up in the air! Somebody took a swing at somebody else! I don’t know who was the swinger and who was the swingee! [laughs] �LG: What was the topic? I mean what was the controversy? Do you remember? I don’t. JC: Do you remember that Sue? It was when we were meeting in … LG: Was it Filene? JC: No, that hall over here in, what’s its name, LG: Palamountain? JC: No, no down, where are we here … LG: Starbuck? JC: No, no, Starbuck, yeah. One of the, uh …. no, not Starbuck, in, let’s see… LG: Oh, on the new campus? Originally, we were meeting in Filene and then we were meeting in Palamountain. JC: But in Starbuck isn’t there, there’s a big, big meeting room that was big nough for all of us and we were in that room. LG: I think it was Filene, JC: No, no, it wasn’t Filene, for sure, I remember. Anyway, oh tempers! And it’s funny, I have seen a change. When, I think the faculty used to say they were the college and I don’t believe you can say that now. I’m not sure it was a healthy thing to say that, or believe that, but nonetheless I think they, we thought that in those days. LG: Anything else we should ask, Susan? SUSAN BENDER: Yeah, I’d be interested — when did you start introducing students to using computers in their creative process? JC: I started … oh, I actually gave a talk, one of those alumni talks, recently, and I showed some of the work my students did, and, so I started, oh my gosh, eight or nine years ago? But I started off gently. Now, of course, I send off a file and this beautiful finished thing comes back. But we started off with doing things like, um, we have a plasma cutter and you can program that �plasma cutter to cut two dimensional shapes out, okay? And you can create a virtual three-dimensional object and you can cut slices through it, threedimensionally, and with that plasma cutter you can cut out these cross sections. And, you can then — oh the plasma cutter you could cut out your signature, I mean, it does a beautiful, clean job — and, you can weld them all together. So, I got into, we got into the computer thing kind of incrementally, to the point where I am now, where it’s like, yeah, I do the whole CAD program and I will do a three-dimensional thing, and like, little by little by little. Oh, there was one thing, it was about four years ago, where I would submit a budget for the supplies, and nothing would happen, you know, and I was getting so frustrated because it’s like, time was passing and we were missing out, and so I decided to make an appointment with the Dean, and I would bring the Dean all the stuff… LG: Who was that? JC: I probably shouldn’t say. [laughs] Anyway, so, I went into his office, right? And, you know he knew me and I knew him and we’d seen each other around and I would speak up and stuff, and finally I said “Ok, listen, I’ve got to talk to you about … this is who I am and this is what I’ve done.” I showed him my Nature publication, I told him I was a scientist and … he was horrified! He was just shocked. Because his attitude towards artists was that artists just simply weren’t that intelligent. I just got that sense. He was just so amazed at what I was showing to him, because like out of the blue this guy comes up to him and says “Hey, listen this is what we are doing and this is what I want to do with it.” I was saying to him, you know? And I have to say he picked the ball up. He picked the ball up and we got some neat stuff, really wonderful stuff. And then I had to retire. [laughs]No, I didn’t have to �retire, but I did step down at … I’d like to think at the height of my game. [laughs] SB: Get out while the getting’s good? JC: I think I did, yeah. LG: John this has been a delightful hour to spend with you, thank you for sharing some of your stories. JC: I have to say that the entire experience, I think it was staggeringly significant in that it also had a lot to do with people and personalities, it had to do with the times. I know a lot of people, I remember, who was it, the Dean, ahh, what’s her name, … I remember asking her, why so many people retired embittered? So many of our colleagues, I thought, would retire, kind of … just embittered, angry, you know? And I vowed I just wasn’t going to do that. And she said, “Oh well, the student evaluations,” you know, all these sorts of reasons. I never felt that way. I just … it was just an extraordinary privilege. [inaudible] I had a lot to do! You know what I mean? I had a lot to do! [laughs] SB: Thank you John, this has been delightful. JC: Well, you’re welcome, you’re very welcome. END *NOTE- Ben Cohen started Ben & Jerry’s � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Skidmore College Retirees Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Lynne Gelber Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed John Cunningham Location The location of the interview Saratoga Springs, NY 12866 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio Recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 56:08 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Susan Bender Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit October 24, 2022 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with John Cunningham Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 4, 2022 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project Description An account of the resource John Cunningham grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. In this interview he discusses how he combined his interest in physical chemistry and math with the art influence that surrounded him since childhood.  After receiving a BA and MFA from Yale, he joined the Skidmore art department in 1967 when Skidmore was still an all-female institution.  He discusses the influence of Josef Albers and the Yale approach to art that was prevalent among the 3 Yale-trained art professors already on the faculty, the effect of the transition to coeducation, the “Great Race” project to build a floatable object and the move to the new campus.  He further explores the introduction of the computer and later 3-D printing to art students.  Before and since his retirement in 2017 John has pursued science projects including an article published in "Nature" and presentations at science gatherings on building the pyramids.  John has received a patent for the Seicon isolator, favorably reviewed by "Consumer Reports."  Language A language of the resource English (en) Subject The topic of the resource Retiree Oral History Project Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History 3-D Printing 4-1-4 Academic Calendar Art & Science Campus Move coeducation Edwin Moseley Great Race on Braim Pond Josef Alpers Skidmore Social Life Yale Influence on Art https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/cebc75c0763e4696d1989ba590d0ca57.jpg 608b865f56066cebbbd1d387e005451f https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/0cd5b07100cd3d4c80820fdd8df87960.mp3 e55df6db374ed2d8e2c241bea025e143 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/30fe028ce5e2094ee9a34a8ec3501f55.pdf 69c5c72bd1b234c425cefbefb9965fe6 PDF Text Text Interviewee: Ken Hapeman Years at Skidmore: 1981-2005 Location of Interview: Scribner Library, Skidmore College Date of Interview: April 5, 2017 00:00:1:09 Born in Hudson New York, 1944. Grew up in Hudson and went to Hudson High School. Father and grandfather were both from there. 00:00:1:25.00 Upon graduating high school went to RPI College. Brought an artifact from college- a slideroom. Example of how the times have changed. 1962 -no calculators no computers. 00:04:02.00 Graduated from RPI with a degree in psychology. This was unusual, therefore were only seven people in the department. Then went to work in Albany. Got a job right out of RPI at IBM and worked there for 7 years. Then worked at state university of NY then moved onto Skidmore. 00:0:08:05.00 Had the opportunity to go to SUNY to be a technical specialist. Was there for 6 months in this position until the boss left and offered him his job. 60 people were working for him for 7 years. This is where he got management experience. In the end he couldn’t handle this working evirornment so looked at want ads. Skidmore popped up. 00:11:11.00 1981 arrives at Skidmore. As a new employee the college’s endowment was in bad shape. Skidmore received an annual audit saying you might want to consider bankruptcy. Then the campus was given as a donation. At this point everything was basically moved from downtown-few classes maybe still downtown. 00:14:06.00 When coming to Skidmore he was attracted by the thorough interview process. He met everybody and thought it feels like a family. Very easy to make his feelings known and make recommendations. “Closeness is what attracted me to the college.” 00:12:46.00 Thinks Palamountain is a wonderful speaker. “Very commanding and inspiring leader but not sure if he was the best managerial leader.” Extremely likeable which was important to the college at the time. “In the chaos, he was grounded and the right man for the times.” 00:17:22.00 1962-1981.“Times have changed so much.” Only two computers on campus. One supporting academic activities- newly installed in 1980. Data sheets were sent out to Springfield, Mass to be analyzed by consultants. Reports then came back to Skidmore for alumni to look at. �Hapeman controlled both of these computers. 00:21:19.00 The college was in its infancy. “Task was to take all the stuff and put it into a reasonable computing environment for the college” There were computers around the size of a washing machine with 20mg of data – very small amount. At Skidmore there were two small computers and few people had access to them- everyone else had nothing. 00:24:47.00 – His position was director of computer services . It was the first IT position that the college had. 00:27:05.00 Hiring people was important- getting support was helpful. Needed to make it so more students can interact with the computer at the same time. He and others did a thorough investigation to find the right software- in the end they bought a new computer. 00:31:25.00 Everybody was squeezed in. Staff space was in inadequate offices and conditions but eventually things changed. 00:33:20.00 in 1983 AMES came to campus- academic information management system. The administrative system wasn’t perfect but they modified it to fit Skidmore’s needs and hired additional programmers to help out unify the system. 00:36:15.00 David porter- wonderful man – “felt his humanity when you talked to him” “great punner” In the faculty unrest he helped unify them. 00:41:09.00 Interacted with students who worked with him – students who ran the computer system for the high school- amazing kids, used them for lab assistance. Had a “small sampling.” 00:42:29.00 1st half of the 1990s – personal computer started to show up “rocked our boat in many ways.” Everybody wanted a mac but didn’t have the budget. The faculty and staff just began to have their own computers in their offices--- first presence of this technology was in offices. 45:37.00 “Technology was booming of course…” the source of all knowledge resided in the computer center in the 80s and in the 90s that spread to be somewhat of common knowledge. This was a difficult transition psychologically. 48:53.00 By 1995 everything had changed- online registration - nothing is really done by paper �anymore. All automated. 52:52.00 Started with a new system. Banner- works well with an institution like Skidmore – but he doesn’t like banner. It’s successful to be on the same page as other institutions/colleges. 55:47.00 Since leaving Skidmore still converts things from AMES to banner, still has his technical connections here. � https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/f95d49ad4072e26b90d757cb9ecfe693.pdf 276b037d8844667a37a3ffc5f0235c0e PDF Text Text Interview with Ken Hapeman by Max McDermott, Skidmore College Retiree Oral History Project, Saratoga Springs, New York, April 5th, 2017. Max McDermott: Hello, this is Max McDermott interviewing for the Skidmore retiree memory project. I am with Ken Hapemen in a study room. Study room 126 in the Scribner library on a Wednesday April 5th 2017. Ken, Hello How are you today? Ken Hapeman: I’m good how about you? MM: Now to begin our interview, I’d ask if you could tell us- just to be able to get a bit of context of where your story began -could you tell us where you were born, a little bit about that and if you don’t mind, when? KH: Sure, (cough) no I was born in Hudson, New York which is about 30 miles south of Albany in 1944. So I’m 72 years old right now. I grew up in Hudson, um I went to Hudson high school and uh my parents had lived there. My father at least had lived there his whole life so we had deep roots in Hudson. I believe his father had lived there as well. Upon graduating high school, I went to RPI to college. And, actually, brought an artifact with me today maybe this is the time to show it. How things have changed. Of course, this won’t show on the interview but I brought a sliderule. Because as a freshman in engineering at RPI we had to all purchase a sliderule. And we look at the high tech equipment today- the equipment I’m sitting here talking to you with which is made available to you. We had to buy these things. They weren’t that expensive. I think it was 50 or 60 dollars but this was as close as you could come to something that would do a lot of complex math. And these things, you could do a lot with these things. You could multiply, divide - you know logarithmic kind of computations and so this thing which I bought for say 50 dollars back in 1962. I haven’t used it in a long, long time. It sits in my room I pull it up just to bring it up as an example as how the times have changed. MM: Wow, looking at this um I’m seeing I mean I am a complete layman in terms of anything mathematical, anything to do with calculations. I’m seeing a ruler. I see a piece in a middle that slides… KH: Right, yup, and different… MM: I can’t even begin to guess how it works. KH: Well let’s do something really simple. Let’s say you want to multiply 3x2…. It can do a lot of stuff. You put the one over the 2. So that’s the kind of thing it can do. It does a lot of computations. (laughs) So this was the tool that all engineering students had to use. There were no calculators, no computers; this was it. And so, we bought this. I was an engineering student for a few years. I changed majors eventually and so this has sat unused. I really never used it beyond a few classes. And now it’s an artifact. (laughs) �MM: Wow KH: So that’s me. I got to school at RPI. I graduated from RPI. I went to work in Albany. So I spent my whole life in the capital district basically. MM: Ok ok. And you always had an interest in mathematics. Sounds like engineering. KH: Right I went to RPI as an electrical engineering major. I decided along the way that engineering was not for me. I actually would have become a math major. I was very interested in math, but as an engineering major we had to take something called engineering drawing. Which is essentially what you can do with a CAD program today, but we had to do a long hand with a big T-square and a giant board which we also had to buy. And because I spent 2 years taking engineering drawing classes I didn’t take what would have been required to be a math major at RPI which was two years of German or two years of Russian. (laughs) And so there was no way to make that up. So, I switched out of engineering and actually graduated from RPI with a degree in psychology. So, I was unusual, I was about one of seven people in the department at that point. Um hmm it was unusual anyways. And so, I got a job right out of RIP with IBM in Albany and worked there for about seven years. Then I went to State University of NY and worked there for about seven years and then I came to Skidmore. MM: Wow. Before we move onto Skidmore I just want to briefly ask. Could you sum up- what did your experience teach you? From IBM from SUNY Albany? KH: SUNY Central actually MM: SUNY Central, right KH: Um right. This is the office that administrates for all the SUNY colleges and all their campuses. MM: Right, right KH: It’s not on a campus; it’s a central hub. It did a number of things- like centralized application processing at that point and probably still today. If you are going to apply to SUNY you filled out a common application and that was sent to SUNY central, the staff at SUNY central, with data entered the common app and send it to the colleges you said you were interested in. So, we did that service along with, you know, a bunch of other stuff. We ran some site contracts we had a contract with a national library in Memphis to run something called the Medline system, which was a very early search and retrieval service for medical information. And a couple of other things. So, we did that. But anyway, my experiences when I graduated from RPI, again, computing was in such an early phase that while I was at RPI I had taken one course in digital computer design and one course in Fortran programming and that was it. That was my total IT exposure. �Most employers at that point in ’67, when I actually graduated, were looking for students in various engineering majors, which I didn’t have, so I agreed to interview anybody who would talk to any student. I really wanted a job I did not want to go to grad school. So, IBM was one of those companies and I interviewed with them and a couple of others, got offers, decided to go with IBM and they immediately sent me off to 16 weeks of training, which really taught me everything that was the base of my knowledge of computing of IT. It was great. We did programming at a machine level which meant we were actually writing machine instructions for the computers at the time, which were IBM system 360s - big refrigerator like boxes - many of them. And 3 months of that I went back to work for IBM. I was assigned to an IBM customer site, where I had to help them install systems and that taught me again a great deal more. After 7 years things had changed in the IBM working environment so an opportunity to go to SUNY came along and I went as sort of a technical specialist. And I had been there maybe three or four maybe 6 months, I don't know, and my boss the person who had hired me left and recommended me to take his job. So, suddenly I was in charge of this computing center in SUNY central without really ample good experience to do it. But I muddled along and I had about 60 people working for me at that point. And I did that for about seven years. So that taught me a lot about management. I had no management experience. I had a good technical background but I didn't have the management background. About 1980 or so I started warning my bosses at SUNY that the National Library of Medicine contract that we were operating was in danger. We were going to lose it, and the computer center that I ran was built on a structure that depended on funding from a variety of sources, one of which was the National Library of Medicine and was a couple hundred thousand dollars. It was a chunk of money, a significant piece so we lost that contract. And despite the fact that I had been warning my bosses about it, that we had to restructure the financing of the computer center, they told me in 1980 when that contract went away that I had to fire 12 people who didn't deserve to be fired. Who were doing good work, but the money was just not there, so I did my job I fired 12 people. and I immediately started looking at the want ads. That was too much. I could not remain in that environment. And I hadn't started looking more than a month when an ad for a position at Skidmore College came up. I made the jump. MM: You made the jump KH: Yeah MM: Alright, so that's how you came to Skidmore. KH: mhm MM: So you arrived at Skidmore this year is 1981 KH:Right, yup �MM: Ok now I want to know exactly the history of Skidmore from your point of view. Now, aside from technology, aside from any computer science, just as new employee - I'm wondering how you saw the college. As I understand that at this time the move from the old campus was still ongoing. The college had put itself in financial danger from that project and when Leo [Geoffrion] was talking to me he remembered President Joseph Palamountain announcing proudly that after an ambitious fundraising campaign the College could boast an endowment of 12 million dollars. Can that be right? I mean today i looked it up. Today we have an endowment of 330 million could we really have been in a state that far away? KH: Well actually, I really don't remember the number but I know the general feeling was that the colleges endowment was grossly inadequate. So, the number’s probably right. It’s certainly in that ballpark. The college was in bad shape before making the move. They had received an annual audit. A what was it called… let me see if I can come up with the terminology… there’s an auditor's term for this… a non…um, uhh gee I'm not going to come up with it. MM: I’m hoping you're not about to say bankruptcy… KH: No, no, but you know it’s..what it is, it’s a letter from the auditors that says you don't really have the structure to be a successful business and you want might consider, you might want to consider bankruptcy. So it was pretty serious stuff. And the college had a few breaks at this point. They got this campus as a donation I believe from J Eric Johnson and his family. And by the time I came here actually the move was really complete. The only thing that remained downtown were a few students and a few dorms but basically everything was…and I guess there were a few classes taught downtown... but everything basically was here, most of the campus was in place and complete. MM: Ok. Could you tell me about your impression of the school when you first arrived as a place to live and work? KH: Yeah its interesting because where I had been at SUNY central; well, let’s go back to IBM. In IBM I worked in an office in a huge corporation and the layers of bureaucracy above me appeared endless. You know, I knew the people in my office but I didn't know anybody else. When I went to SUNY it didn't seem quite so big, but it did seem extremely bureaucratic. Everything had to go through a process; everything kind of ground to a halt every time you tried to do something. Nothing was easy to do. So, when I came to Skidmore one of the things that really attracted me, on the days that I interviewed here, were first of all the thorough interview process. I met virtually everybody including the President, all of the deans, the department heads of significance. I met everybody, and I felt, wow, this is a place which will feel to me more like a family or a unit I can feel close to. In the sense that I’ll have some contact with everybody from the top down and that was really my biggest impression at the time. It’s a smaller, tighter unit than what I had been in and that I would work.… If I wanted to do something I could explain it to my boss who was at the time was the Provost. It was a position that was done �away with but he was a provost; but essentially, he was the Vice President for Academic Affairs. And his boss was the president. I was two layers down from the top, so it was very easy to make my feelings known and get recommendations and put action on it. Not that the recommendations were always accepted, but many of them were, and I always felt I had a say. So, that feeling when I came here of closeness was really what attracted me to the College. MM: Excellent; happy to hear that. I'm wondering for more documentations of landmarks in Skidmore history. As for President Palamountain whether Skidmore was heading in the right direction under his presidency. Did you have an opinion on him? KH: Yeah well, I had some opinions about him. He was a great speaker so he was very commanding when he stood up in front of a group and talked and so that was inspiring. I would say he's an inspirational leader I'm not sure if he was the best managerial leader. If you get my opinion.... He uh spent a lot of time dealing with data and minutia. He was very interested in data, so well we would get calls to his office because he was working on an old electric typewriter- metal electric typewriter a data entry machine and had a problem with a word processing machine. So, you wouldn't think he would be involved with that level of detail but he was. But I liked the man. He was extremely likable and he was extremely inspirational which was important to the College at that point. MM: That’s good, so he kind of kept everyone together as the chaos was going through. It sounds like it took a lot of effort to move that campus KH: Right yeah I think he was the right man for the time. MM: Now I'm gunna move on. Now your first impression of Skidmore as a computer scientist. where did we stand in 1981. Were we up to date? KH: Well, you know up to date is a funny way to think of it because the times have changed so much. You know, as I brought my little slide rule with me from 1962 (when I bought that slide rule) to 1981, there was a lot of change, but computing and information technology was largely main frame systems with terminals tied to them. When I came to Skidmore what I found was there were two computers on campus. and I was going to be in charge of both of those. One supported academic activities; one supported administrative activities. The one supporting academic activities had been newly installed in the past year, I would say, so 1980. It was a Texas Instruments 990 which was a very inappropriate computer for academic activities, unfortunately. So, the choice I think had been influenced by JR Johnson as head of TI who had given the college so much land. I don't know exactly how that happened, but at any rate they had a computer that they had high hopes for - the academic side of the house- and it was not really doing the job. I would say it was pretty inadequate. On the other side of things - in the administrative computing arena there was a Sperry Univac System 3, which was about half the size of this table were sitting at. It was funny-shaped; it �might have been almost as long as the table but not as deep. So, you know, 5 or 6 ft long by 3 ft wide. It had sort of a desk built in and it was being run by a consultant so there were no employees there except a part-time clerk in the business office. There was an IT consultant who ran it for the college, and they had three or four, maybe five, terminals up in the business office in Barrett Center and nothing anywhere else, and the rest of administrative computing like the Alumni Office and Registrar’s Office, all of which have big needs, were relying on external consultants. The Alumni Office would mail data sheets to Springfield, Massachusetts where there were data entered by the consultant on their computers in Springfield, Mass. and then the reports that came out of the computers came back here for the alumni staff to look at. So, it was pretty slow pretty crude. The Registrar’s Office had a similar kind of arrangement with an external consultant arena. So, the administrative computer only served Barrett Center and it only had about 5 or 6 terminals. The academic computer was located on 3rd floor Palamountain Hall. I just walked by it today to see what it looks like up there and it actually looks remarkably similar. There are offices in the area where there were some computer terminals and there’s a closet that has a computer that’s still sitting there, so things don't look that much different up there. The terminals were two four, I believe, CRT display terminals and a couple of typewriters hooked up to this machine that was it. On the wall there were still a couple modems that were used apparently prior to that purchase to connect over to Dartmouth, which is the way they used to get their service. So, the College was in its infancy to say the least. But you know to say that things were so different..., nobody had an iPhone; you know, nobody had a personal computer.Tthere were no such things; they didn't exist. So, my task was to take all that stuff and try to figure out how to grow it into a reasonable computing environment for the College. MM: Ok for the sake of having images. I always loved having images in my head. I'm a very visual person. When I hear computer, I'm picturing a screen with a keyboard and I type and letters appear on the screen no.… were talking heavy bags of chips and wires. a lot of things that would seem pretty incomprehensible to the average person. KH: Right, yup. The TI 990 was sort of a rack monitor machine that looks like a tall version of that thing behind you, and it had a disk drive which was I believe 20 meg of disk, which is an insignificantly small amount, and it was roughly the size of a washing machine. MM: And uh compared to IBM I'm wondering and SUNY Central, or where else you saw, how do they compare? KH: The IBM environment that I left behind at SUNY Central had a huge computer room; it was probably 300 x 300 ft. And it was huge and it was full of large IBM machines each one of which was about the size of a refrigerator and there probably were 20 or 30 boxes the size of a refrigerator that made this up. Some of them were tape drives. They had huge tape drives; some were big disk drives that look like washing machines again and some were the computer itself. The machines back then were huge and they provided time sharing services only. That �was it, if you had a computer terminal hooked to one of these computers with a video display. That’s was the best you were going to get. A lot of people did what was called batch submission. They didn't have a computer terminal if they wanted to do something; they had a program that would do it for them. They would write data that were instructions on a key punch sheet and would give it to a couple of girls in the department I was working at at that point, which was the Department of Motor Vehicles. That’s where IBM had assigned me. They had two women who were full-time key punch operators. All they did was take the sheets from programmers and others and type that stuff up on punch cards which would get fed into the computer through a card reader. So, that environment would also be crude by today’s standards. Very extremely. But it was huge. But with Skidmore the difference was it was tiny. You know it was (laughs) two small computers, um virtually you know there was no key punch operators there was no card reader there was none of that. Few people had access to the computers and everyone else had nothing. MM: So, I’m happy to hear you say when you arrived at Skidmore on the personal side it did feel very welcoming. It did feel very friendly so that’s nice but as for the computer science side you said, well I have a lot of work to do. So, you were head of what is today known as the IT Department and was then known as Computer Services. KH: Right. It was known as Computer Services when I was hired. The position I was hired into was called Director of Computer Services. And, it was new in the sense it was the first IT position that the College had. The academic computer had been operated by two part-time faculty members who probably got a little course relief for doing the work they did. I'm not sure that was it or if they were still teaching too. MM: I’ll interrupt you here. Leo mentioned the name Margeret Riper is that… KH: Guider it was Guider. She was a math professor and the other professor who spent quite a bit of time on the equipment was someone named Robert Jones who may still be here in the Economics Department. He was here last I knew. MM: Ok, ok ok; and just before moving on Leo also… I haven't confirmed with you what Leo said in the basement of Barrett there was a Burrows B800. KH: No, it was a Univak system, 3 system 80, that was the administrative computer. That was the one being run by consultants. There were two full-time people there from the consultant. Really one full-time person who came and went a lot, was there quite a bit in the basement of Barrett. Thats how we started. When I was hired it was just me that was it. I was the first person and I shortly thereafter hired Leo [Geoffrion], who mostly worked with the academic computing side of the house, and another person Sam McGaughey who worked on the administrative side. �MM: Alright excellent that was what my next question was going to be. So what were the first actions you took as head of Computer Services and would you be making those hires? What else comes to mind of the first steps … KH: The hires were important. I realized very quickly that one person wasn't going to be able to do the job, so I worked to hire those guys which helped a great deal. Another thing was looking for where the weaknesses were in the current system and trying to figure out a preliminary plan for moving forward more effectively. Even before hiring the staff, I knew first of all with the academic computer that we needed to have more terminals hooked to it, so that more students could interact with it at the same time. It was four terminals in the first year (I was hiring Leo at the same time), so I don't exactly know the sequence or anything but within a year we had that four up to 12 ,which was helpful. The computer wasn't particularly good for the jobs it was asked to do or could do, but at least people could get at it. That was the best we could do as sort of a first wave and we did do that. On the administrative side, I didn't like the whole plan cause what they were doing was they had spent probably a couple of years by the time I got there developing software for the Business Office, the accounting software. Written it from scratch and their plan was to once they finished that to move on and go to the Registrar’s Office and write a registration system from scratch for the Registrar’s Office then move to the…. The experience I had in software development at that point told me that that was going to take them 20 years. You know it was just not going to get done, and perfectly adequate software was available for purchase and so right away I decided I was going to press for elimination of the contract for the consultants. Scrapping the work they had done which was going to be a hard sell because there were a couple proponents in the Business Office that believed in it. And buying a set of packaged software that would serve the entire administrative college environment. That was a struggle that took a lot of time for the first couple of years. I did convince my boss that continuing on the way you were going was not good. He put together… he had me put together a committee of people to go out and look at software and make a recommendation, and we spent a year maybe traveling around to different colleges talking to people who had package software installed already and doing those investigations. We did a thorough investigation and we terminated the agreement with the consultant, bought a new computer, put system on it, and moved forward from there. MM: Wow sounds like some bold moves. It’s what needed to be done, I guess. KH: It felt like it did. You know and they were fairly bold, I think. MM: Ok, well you had the experience now. Now we know a bit more about your projects. I'm wondering about these first years 1981, 1985, I'm wondering more about what daily life would look like ,...where was your office. �KH: I moved around a fair amount. My office was originally on the end of the little corridor I referred to earlier on the 3d floor Palamountain. Basically, if you took the center steps of Palamountain where you come in the front door facing west, I mean north, I mean you go up the big stairs turn right and go down into the first corridor that goes to the right. My office was down that corridor around a corner. I don't know who’s really now. It’s mostly English Department, I think. MM: Yeah, that’s right. KH: And as you go down that corridor you see some very funny shallow offices.... Those are the area we had our computer terminals in those early years. So, that was that. We were in that location for a few years. I'm not sure quite how many, for a few. The other area was the basement of Barrett center. I never had an office down there but once I hired Stan and we began and transition of system from the consultant to our new software, Stan’s office was down there and he was actually… (LAUGHS) he was in a totally unacceptable space. But he didn’t complain. I mean, literally, you go in the basement of Barrett Center; there was an office there. There was also a step up and a door that led to a totally unfinished basement. That was his office and you know it was unfinished concrete pipes hanging down all kinds of weird stuff. MM: Any windows? KH: But no windows; no windows. It was a total cave. The only window was out in the hall on the door and that was it. MM: It makes me wonder, do you feel like the administration respected the work that you did as a computer scientist? Were you important to them? KH: I never thought of it as a reflection of our importance; it was a reflection of growing pains and lack of space. The college campus in general was very crowded everybody was squeezed in. You know, there were numerous buildings that didn't exist at the time. So, a lot of staff was squeezed into space that was inadequate, so we kept it. We took it and we lived with it. And you know as I said what I don't remember is how many years it was but eventually things changed and we moved along. MM: So, correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like we have a picture of the early 80s. I wonder if it’s time on our timeline now to move onto to around 1986 from what I understand is that when AIMS came to campus? KH: Actually it was 1983 that AIMS came to campus.. MM: Ok..., AIMS, for those listening, Academic Information Management System. This is the computing system that you brought to campus. This is what you brought to campus to have everyone run on. �LH: To replace the UNIVAC that was running the administrative application. It didn't do direct academic support at all. It was all administration stuff, but it was it was a very all-encompassing administration system. It included an alumni development software area, a registrar’s system, a student affairs, business office, pay roll personnel. I mean it really every major administrative area to the college had a module that came with AIMS. They weren't all perfect with Skidmore’s operation. As something general never could be, so we modified it a bit to meet Skidmore’s needs in certain areas. Some areas needed more modification than others, and we added a number of modules on our own. It had a nice tool kit that came with it, so along the way I had hired a couple of additional programmers. I'm not sure I could tell you the years that happened. In administrative computing we had a couple of extra people who began modifying the system and enhancing it to meet Skidmore’s needs. MM: I’m hearing that you gave administrators, department heads they each have their own computer units? KH: Well, it was an integrated software system but there were modules- I guess that’s a better way to put it - AIMS itself was an umbrella that had a dozen modules perhaps. Each module supported a different administrative area. And they were all consistent in terms of the user interface. They all looked the same, operated the same way, shared the same set of data. One of the things that AIMS had that was kind of important back then, that a lot of systems did, was called people files. You entered data if it was an alumni request to enter somebody’s information, it went in the people file. The basic demographic information was kept in a common database and then more sensitive information was attached separately. It was a unified system which was helpful. MM: Ok, ok. We’re going to hit another landmark around here. Around July 1987 we got a new president, President David Porter. KH: Wonderful man. I love David Porter. He was great. He wasn't the sort of stand-up inspirational kind of person that Joseph Palamountain was, but he was a wonderful human person. He was just an average guy, an everyday guy. He was funny. He would sit up in front of the faculty, he punned -he was a great punner. He was important because there was some faculty unrest and the kind of thing that was not unusual in an academic environment and he helped unify the faculty. Made the faculty happier than they were perhaps. I might be overstating it, but David Porter was a wonderful person. I have great respect for him. He was a tremendous intellect and a sad loss actually I… we lost him recently and it’s a great shame. MM: That was one of our first assignments for interviewing class..to practice what a good interview was. This same project interviewing him …sounds like a great guy. Moving on let’s wrap up the 1980s. So, at the end of this decade-I mean when we started this decade-the administration seemed kind of like a mess. You're telling me that the administration and registrar work was contracted outside companies. Campus wasn't doing a lot of its work on its own campus. �KH: No, no - almost none of it. And again, the times were different you have to keep in mind that by installing AIMS we at least started to get around that problem and bring everything in house and by the mid 80s we had accomplished that. We had also Leo and his staff, we had a couple of extra people there by now too. Realized that the TI990 was never going to do the job for academic support that we needed on that end of things and most of our sister institutions were using digital VAX machines. And Leo no doubt talked to you about this, but sometime in the 80’s we managed to jettison the TI990 and replaced it with a couple of digital VAXes that were much more appropriate to academic computing. There was software available that had been developed on other colleges that you could get that did things that our faculty wanted to and students wanted to do. It was a great move going to those digital VAXes. I thought by that point, by probably the late 80’s we were well aligned with where we ought to be. We still might have been behind in sense that we had a lot of catch-up work, but we were going in the right direction. Also, somewhere along the way we moved. You asked about space. We kept the space in the basement of Barrett but, at some point, we moved our operation down to the library walkway area which was rehabbed to hold us. There was a merger with telephone services somewhere along in there too. The dates are really hazy for me. But I took over running the telephone system, which was essentially a computer. There was virtually nobody else who had that experience so we moved in the telephone switch that was down in that basement area. We moved the computer center in there and my office and most of the other offices wound up there as well. MM: Ok, ok KH: That was probably in the 80’s well it might have been 1990 I'm not sure. MM: I don’t know if you were in touch with student body. Student culture was like, what the spirit of campus was, if things were more optimistic than they were? KH: Well, I don't know. The biggest exposure we had to students was the students who worked for us, and we always managed to find a good group of students. There weren't huge numbers interested in technology at that point in time, but there were a few. There were amazing ones, students who had in their high school run a computer system for the high school, and we managed to hire them as they came along and use them as a lab assistants and so forth. So, we had that kind of experience with students, but it was a small sampling. From my perspective, I think there’s always a certain amount of turmoil on a college campus - as there should be. I think a college campus without turmoil wouldn't be a college campus. I don't think it was all that different, but my world was smaller. MM: Ok. I wish we didn't have to go through things so quickly but we do have 20 minutes left till we reach our 1-hour mark. So, I'm going to ask about the first half of the 1990s. What were you working on at this time? �KH: Well somewhere along the line personal computers started to show up and that really rocked our boat in many ways. Everybody wanted one. Everybody wanted a Mac or actually even earlier ones. Because we had established relationship with Digital for our VAX computers, Digital was going to come out with an early IBM PC clone called the Rainbow and we agreed to purchase a bunch of those. And it was a serious error. The Rainbow never sold. It was not successful. And I don't think we purchased more than a dozen or so, but that was not successful at all. So, we backed away from that. We were sort of stumbling and fumbling with what to do with this because we didn't have the budget to get everybody a new Apple 2 or whatever the early technology had been or even a Rainbow. We did what we could. We got some out there; we tried to adapt and bring in new ones. So that was kind of a turmoil for us, getting from a sort of time-shared environment with a central computer and bunch of terminals to one where people had on their desktops personal computers that were a little imitation of what we have today. MM: You were talking about faculty and staff having their own computers in their offices? KH: Right, that was just starting. Students were still probably getting most of their computing time through labs that we had set up. You went to a lab, you used a computer or a terminal that connected to one of our VAXes, and that was your academic support, but faculty were eager to get the micros: Apples, whatever. So I’d say the first presence of that kind of technology on campus was in various offices. The administrative computer stayed kind of a time-shared system too, so we weren't doing that in administrative areas. MM: Ok ok and so first the computer took up a lot of time. What else is going on any updates on AIMS? KH: Well actually have to go back to the 80s to go back to AIMS. The company we purchased AIMS from went out of business, so we committed to continuing with the software and modifying it to meet our needs, so it really satisfied 80-90% of our needs. We figured we could keep it up to date; we could modify it and go forward from there. We modified AIMS we kept it going and in fact it ran through the 80’s, 90’s until 2005, so we got wonderful service out of AIMS and uh yeah what can I say. (laughs) MM: Any other the pace doesn't have to be as aggressive. Are there any special incidents or stories that are coming to mind that you feel like you have to share to give us a good picture of what this time was like? Anything special? KH: Hm that’s a good one. um MM: You don't have to have any stories, but if so they're good to like… KH: Odd things happened. You know, we… MM: what odd things? �KH: We had a…technology was booming of course. And Xerox, I think it was, came out with a wild photographic printer that was; I'm not sure if it was Xerox but I think it was. It was supposed to be wonderful, and we managed to get a grant to get one of those. So, we got it and we opened it up, set it up, and really could not figure how to make any decent use of it. So, we boxed it up put it away and about 2 years later one of the faculty members of the art department came over and asked about it. And they were incensed that we had stuck it away and not used it. We had that kind of stuff that was going on; we were adapting to technology and learning new things just like everybody else and in some cases. What was interesting was the source of all knowledge on both computers resided in the computer center in the 80’s, and then as we got into the 90’s knowledge spread, and so there were people out there in faculty departments who in a particular narrow area knew more about computers than we did. So, it was a difficult transition psychologically for us to do that. MM: I’m curious, what did the arts faculty member want with that computer? LH: He thought we could have done something with it. And didn't really realize we had it. I think it was a question of the thing just got lost in the shuffle. He thought it could have been useful. We couldn’t make anything good out of it but that was the kind of thing that was happening, cause expertise was popping up in faculty areas and usually in a very narrow disciple. But nonetheless, it was expertise, and as computers got more and more capable by definition everybody knew a little bit less about certain areas. So, it was that kind of a conflict. Some of that was going on in that point in time as well. There was a faculty member who was into Next computers. They were kind of a black box. A Steve Jobs company that got kicked out of Apple, and we decided that we didn't think those were in the best interest of the college but there was a faculty member in the music department who did. There was that kind of conflict that happened periodically it was about growing pains and direction and a variety of things of that sort. MM: We’re at 1995 now, when you arrived Skidmore was in the era of doing everything by paper. Course registration you know, you get called, every department has its table, you have an index card to pick which class. You pick them all up hand it to the registrar that was your schedule admissions; everything all the records for all papers. By 1995 how much of this changed? KH: By 1995 it had all changed. I wouldn't say i think they might have still been doing the area registrations even though the software we have was capable of doing online registration. They had a variety of reasons for that. They hold onto things for a long time, but virtually everything else was moving forward with online support. Admission was done greatly in an online application. But , you know, the data entered it when it got here and from that point on was pretty much handled online. The alumni office had all their records online. So, by 1995 everything was really greatly different than it had been in 1981. Running a lot smoother and much more automated. Yeah. �MM: Alright now I'm asking about this particular time 1995 because there is a big change here I want to ask about. As Leo has informed me, his story goes that the school decided that AIMS as a system by mid 90’s the administration, as Leo tells me, our old custom system that’s not really sustainable, We need a standard system that’s more universal. They started talking and decided to phase out AIMS looking for something else. Leo tells me that you approved that and that was as the director of the computer science department. Do you have anything to day about that? KH: No, you know, it wasn't a sudden thing. AIMS, we were supporting AIMS, it was doing the job but technology was changing as technology does, so AIMS at its heart was a time-shared system where terminals provided access to a central computer. To change that so that it fully integrated desktop technology, desktop computers, would have been definitely a major rewrite, and we weren't doing that. What we were doing was supporting it if the registrar needed to be able to have a report of students that was not a standard report, we created one for them. If an office needed to be able to do a process differently this year from the way they did it last year, we would make that change. But the change would always be within the limitations of the technology. Which meant there was time-share with the terminal access. When people started saying I want to put my MAC on my desk, and I want to have it do this and integrate with the system, that was another ball game. It was a really big technology ball game. So, we could see the handwriting was on the wall…you clearly had to...we could keep AIMS doing things that people needed, but in a way that was very old fashioned. So, I agreed that it needed to be done. And we all did what Skidmore does best, form a group, went out and did a lot of time looking at alternatives. Spent quite a bit of time looking at ways to go. At that point in time, we decided to become… affiliate with Oracle on a pilot project, which again was in hindsight a mistake, but Oracle up to Larry Ellison was committed to education as a marketplace and we would on the ground floor helping the software develop. So, we did that; we jumped in and that was actually…the seeds of that may have begun in 1995 but the actual conversion from AIMS to oracle occurred in 2005. MM: And to continue that particular storyline as for computer system…turns out Oracle didn't really do the job because people…? KH: Larry Ellison’s commitment turned out to be not as strong as one would have thought. He basically said he was committed to education no matter what. He bought People Soft and said this is our solution. People Soft at the time and he looked at it thought it’s too big it’s something that’s meant for hugeness … Oracle was, too; I think that’s part of the mistake there. We need to start from scratch we need to take a look. And the system that the college wound up purchasing, Banner at that point was one we had looked at numerous times in the past. It was a system of old. It had been around a long time, but they had a big staff. They set it up to date they modernized it. There are merits to being in an environment where similar institutions are using the same piece of software. �MM: We’re not done yet. I just want to just come to the modern day. We’re still on Banner, aren’t we? KH: Banner is what we’re in. I assume we'll be on Banner for a long time. Now we’re committed to it. Banner is a product that is successful in the marketplace and therefore gets updated. So. I think the College will use Banner for a long time. It’s not a perfect product by any means, but it does seem successful, and one thing I've done since leaving Skidmore is worked on a consulting basis to convert a lot of that old AIMS data into Banner. Especially the student data. So much of the data going back to 1983, and in fact some that was converted earlier back into the 60s, is now in Banner. MM: Have you still been coming to campus? KH: I come up here. I come up to walk my dog up here a lot. I do some consulting as I said. So, I come up periodically to meet with the staff in the IT department. I do some software development, mostly data conversions stuff at this point. I support a couple of systems that I wrote in the days before I left Skidmore. So yeah, I still have technical connections here and i still love the place. I still come up here and walk around. Skidmore was very good to me and I love the place. MM: Ok, so we’re going to be around modern day, so I'm going be asking about some of the reflections you have. One thing, what made you decide to retire when you did? KH: Um one of the things that we had to do in the late 90’s, again we were still supporting AIMS even thought the idea of moving beyond AIMS was there at that point; that was still 5 years out. And as we approach the year 2000 there was tremendous pressure about computer systems failing. A lot of people thought it was going to be a disaster. Many systems only stored a 2-digit year and once you got to the year 2000… It got an amazing amount of press but there were issues there and in AIMS in particular there were some Y2K issues, as they were called att that point. So, my staff and I did a tremendous amount of work in that last year trying to get AIMS ready for Y2K, and it involved changing programs throughout the system, and while we were doing that we also had to keep up with the flow of requests for new things. Everybody always wants something new or different, and one of the things the College wanted was to develop a new purchasing support system. All this was happening at once. So, it was a tremendous amount of work through 1999 and into 2000. I felt burned out quite honestly. I decided i was ready to retire. So, I stepped down and was convinced by my boss to work an extra 5 years on a part-time basis. Which was very nice for me and I helped get some things done for the college. MM: when that time did come to retire, you left the campus a whole college than when you first found it? KH: I do believe so �MM: Alright and you deserve some credit for changing that. KH: i do (laughs, oh yes MM: I’m wondering how you changed over those times. Did your relationship change to the college? Did you remain static the whole time you were here? KH: No, I had different bosses. My unit got moved around a little bit. I inherited some areas. like I mentioned - telephone services and those things. So, my experience grew. I learned a lot of things; I learned to work for different people. When I came I worked for the Provost, who was the Academic Vice President, so i was connected to the academic side of the house, but I always had to balance this administrative computing and academic computing things. Initially I reported to the Academic Dean. Somewhere along the line I was transferred to work for the business operations, so suddenly then my boss was the Vice President for Business Affairs. I had great working relationships with both those people. So, working for an academic dean there was a lot of concern about academic computing issues. Working for the business vice president there was a lot more concern about administrative issues. So, I watched that kind of shift occur and adapted to it as I went. I actually enjoyed it; it gave me some different perspective. You know, an academic institution like any institution has to have a structure to support it to keep it going. The administrative stuff can be mundane. You have to have a human resources department; you’ve got to have an accounting department. Those things are mundane, but without them, they're the structure of the institution, without them you don't have an institution. On the other hand, the main purpose of an institution is an education so the academic side of things is very important. So, I got a nice view of that from different working arrangements with different bosses in different departments. MM: Nice so, sounds like you definitely had to learn a lot. You look back often to think about the things you would have done different knowing what you know now? KH: Well certain things. Might not even have gone with AIMS, given that their company was going out fairly quickly. I mean the product worked; we can’t complain. It worked from 1982 or 3, when we purchased it, up till 2005. That’s a tremendous lifetime for a software product, but we would have committed to something that had ongoing support so that’s a decision. I guess I would say I would do differently in hindsight; I knew what was going on. The other one was going with Oracle. We definitely shouldn't have done that; that was a mistake. So, those two big administrative things were different. In terms of academic computing i don't know that i would have done a lot differently. I mean moving from the TI990 to the digital VAX computers was a good decision, and it was important. And we did the best we could to deliver the onslaught of computer interests and I think we did that fairly well. So, my regrets were few I’d say. I think we did well. �MM:Alright, sounds like an excellent career I mean when you did step down from head of IT, did you meet the next head of IT? Did you have any advice? KH: I did i don't have the feeling he was interested in any advice, but I did meet him and we chatted occasionally. I would go talk to him at least once a week, and he was very different from me. His style was very different and his interests and so forth were very different, so i can’t say I agreed with him but that’s to be expected. Things change when you get a new leadership. MM: Advice in general as a computer scientist do you think there’s things the IT department remembers from your time? KH: Well, I think the biggest thing in an environment like Skidmore is listening to your constituents, go out and talk to them, that would be my advice to today’s IT staff. Get as much input as you can. Meet with people. Set up little groups, perhaps, of people with special interest and commonality. Meet with them. Stay in touch with thinking at the academic department level. uhh and in administrative computing I don't think that…it sort of happens by itself; it’s more of a structured environment. The academic environment can be very unstructured. Faculty departments can be little fiefdoms in a way, so they can kind of go off on their own. You really need to keep in touch and bring people together as much as possible. MM: i just realized, actually, that sounds a little bit familiar. It’s kind of the same you first found when you came to Skidmore. Think you'd help continue that and do you think it’s still around today? KH: It’s a little hard for me to judge, I guess, but i think so. I think the place is hugely different from the way it was. There’s always certain amount of dissent again, but a college environment should have that. I think the place is pretty similar. By the time you're retired you do see some changes, though. The building of the Tang, the building of Tisch and a lot of other … a lot of student body got more diverse, a lot more prestigious. It still pretty much feels the same. From my limited perspective it seems very much the same. A lot of people turnover has been really great, but very few of the people who represent the old Skidmore to me in terms of leadership aren't around anymore. So, it’s all different people, some of whom I don't know. But it still feels the same when I come up here. So, yes, i think it hasn't changed a lot. MM: We’ve reached the end of our hour. Before we go I’d like to ask is there anything in our quest to create a good portrait of your career contributions, Skidmore from your eyes, is there anything we've missed in creating this portrait? KH: I think we really covered it pretty well. I mean, I think i came to Skidmore at a time of great change in the technology industry and in Skidmore, so it was an interesting moment in time. The college needed a lot more computing. Students were expecting it, clamoring for it, and �computers were changing dramatically. So, I came here at the start of something. It’s one of those things that always meant a lot to me. I was able to get in on the true ground floor. I was the first IT, so I participated in hiring. By the time I left here in 2000 I had participated in hiring everybody who worked for IT at Skidmore, and that would be it I’d say. I think we covered it very well. MM: Ken, thank you so much for coming in today. � Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Max McDermott Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Ken Hapeman Location The location of the interview Scribner Library Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio Recording Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Michelle Cohn Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit April 26, 2017 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Ken Hapeman Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 5, 2017 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Skidmore Retiree Memory Project Language A language of the resource Eng Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. "Interview with Ken Hapeman" Skidmore Saratoga Memory Project, accessed April 26, 2017 Description An account of the resource Ken Hapeman was born in 1944 and grew up in Hudson New York. He went to Hudson High school and RPI College where he graduated with a degree in psychology. At Skidmore College Hapemen was the director of computer services, the first IT position the school ever had. He worked to provide more opportunities for students to use computers as well as updating the software the college used in order to advance its technical processes too. Hapeman worked at Skidmore from 1981 until he retired. AIMS Campus Move Computer Science David Porter Engineering Program faculty relations Information Technology Joseph Palamountain Palamountain Technological Changes https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/d743e91f9566c6e55b0cba610add53b7.jpeg 3d98fc62ec314988c78ca1a1243bc67d https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/1084882b66cbd761290b7a1661ee407e.mp3 b46009ebfd325f4e5f8f7e8d7dd1f208 https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/35b50e42c3c9f851b0c80862caa0a45c.pdf 7bbf333574eea983b37554a49861dde9 PDF Text Text Narrator: Eileen Sperry Interviewer: Sophia Delohery Location of Interview: Saratoga Springs, NY Date of Interview: April 7, 2023 Sophia [00:00:01] Today's date is April 7th, 2023. My name is Sophia Delohery. Eileen [00:00:11] I'm Eileen Sperry. Sophia [00:00:12] And here we go. So, Eileen, can you tell me a little bit about where you grew up? Eileen [00:00:18] I grew up in upstate New York. I'm an upstate New York native. I grew up in a small kind of rural farming town called Harpursville, which is about halfway between Oneonta and Binghamton. Sophia [00:00:29] Oh, cool. Sophia [00:00:30] That's awesome. And can you tell me a little bit about where you, just your school experience, like, beginning school and then secondary school. Eileen [00:00:41] Mm-hm. Started school in a sort of more suburban school district. Then my family had moved out to Harpursville, and so I went to this, the local high school all the way through the local public school. It's a really small school district, and so it was really intimate. My graduating class was sixty-three people, many of whom I'm still friends with, right. So it was a very small, kind of tight knit community growing up. And I went there all the way through high school. I went to NYU for my undergrad. I was, I had had enough of living in a small kind of rural town, and I, like, desperately wanted to get out and live in the city and sort of be in a big school environment. So I moved to New York and I went to NYU. Sophia [00:01:29] Yeah, that's definitely a big transition. Eileen [00:01:31] Yeah. Sophia [00:01:33] That's nice that you had like a good community, though. Uh, but did you find that going to NYU, like, changed that for you? Like, was it easy to find community there as well? Eileen [00:01:44] It was. I gravitated towards other people who I think had similar experiences like my, my kind of close group of friends ended up becoming, you know, people who had been in a similar place of like they had grown up in smaller schools or they had grown up working class. They had grown up in, in poorer communities who like all like me, really loved being in the city and really loved being at the school, but who also felt moments of estrangement, like not part of the kind of rich kid crowd or the private school crowd, like feeling both belonging and a kind of sense of being an outsider. Sophia [00:02:24] Yeah, that makes sense. I think that's, that's an experience that a lot of people go through making that transition, and it's nice that you guys, like, gravitated towards each other then to find that community. Eileen [00:02:35] Yeah. �Eileen [00:02:36] Yeah. I think that that was that was one of the things that really sustained me. Sophia [00:02:39] Yeah, that makes sense. And so what were you studying at school? Eileen [00:02:45] I was studying, I initially thought that I was going to be a major in a program that NYU had at the time called Language and Mind, which was a combination of linguistics and psychology and neuro linguistics. And then I remember that I was not great at math, and it was a lot of math. And I had taken an English class my freshman year as well, and I fell in love with the English major. And so I declared early on and I stayed an English major for the rest of my time there I minored in linguistics. I had a real love for the linguistics program, just not so much the psych in the stats and the hard science. Yeah. Sophia [00:03:21] Yeah, that's very valid. So did you go to school at any place post-NYU? Eileen [00:03:29] Mm-hm, I went from NYU, I did my master's degree in English at Binghamton University, and then I did my Ph.D. at Stony Brook University out on Long Island. Sophia [00:03:39] Oh, nice. So a lot of staying in, like, at least the New York state. Eileen [00:03:44] Yeah. You know, my, my now husband, my boyfriend at the time, he and I started dating in high school, and we both went to separate colleges, but we sort of stayed in the same geographical area as a way of staying connected to one another. I still had really close connections to my community and to my family, and I sort of never was possessed with the desire to, like, run away to California or move across the country. I wanted to stay relatively close. I also had a recurring summer job at a summer camp back near where I grew up, and so I would go back there for the summers, so it was nice to be able to stay relatively close. Sophia [00:04:19] Yeah. Sophia [00:04:20] So it sounds like you are someone who's, like, really rooted in community then, like, it seems like you've, like, sought that out in the different places you've gone. Eileen [00:04:30] Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot recently, actually. That I think, especially from those early moments in high school that we, you know, it was not I never had a schooling experience growing up where you were always sort of encountering new communities. You know, I had heard from friends who had gone to bigger schools that, you know, you could sort of abandon one friend group and find another one or you were transitioning schools. And for us, it was the same. It was the same people the whole way through. And so I became really attached to these ideas of, like, forming deep bonds and deep community. And then that has extended, I think, to a lot of other places in my life that I've, like, privileged forming these big communities and sort of these deep relationships. Sophia [00:05:10] Yeah, that's interesting as you kind of move into the topic of labor organizing, I think community comes up a lot when people talk about that kind of stuff. Eileen [00:05:18] Yeah. �Sophia [00:05:20] But kind of in that same vein, was there anything in your, like, schooling or growing up experience that kind of portended, like, an interest in labor organizing for you? Eileen [00:05:30] My, my freshman year at NYU, we arrived. I had been there maybe four or five weeks, and the graduate students began a union campaign. They had filed for unionization and they were working towards, I believe at the time they were working towards their first bargaining agreement. And so they went on strike. And so many of my classes, because it was a big university, many of my classes were taught by graduate students or I was in a big lecture and the recitation session was taught by a graduate student and they all went on strike. And many of my professors were incredibly supportive of their graduate students and so refused to cross picket lines. And so as a freshman, you know, I had one class that moved to like the Marxist community school organizing space like halfway across Manhattan. So like every week I had to, like, grab my backpack and trek twenty blocks away to go to class. But it was this really early exposure to like labor in academia, right? Like seeing and hearing the graduate students say really clearly, I love my job, I love the work that I do, I love my students, but I have to be able to, to live here. I have to build to support myself and have a life, and that's equally important. And seeing the solidarity from other professors who were saying like, yes, our graduate students are important. They're one of the things that make this university work. It doesn't work without them. We have to be in support of them. And so seeing how much that was an early reminder or an early moment for me, where it became really clear the kinds of work that were necessary for a university to function and the way that, like, different elements, had to come together to support the fight for fair working conditions. Sophia [00:07:15] Yeah, wow, what a cool, like, experience to have, right going into college too. Eileen [00:07:19] Yeah. Sophia [00:07:19] That sounds awesome. Eileen [00:07:23] My dad pulled the most dad move ever and he was like, I'm just you have to go to -- I'm going to email the college president. And I was like, Dad, you cannot email the college. And he did. And he, like, had several emails with the college president about like labor rights. Sophia [00:07:36] Oh wow, that's awesome. Eileen [00:07:37] It was really sweet. Sophia [00:07:38] So are your parents kind of interested in this as well? Eileen [00:07:42] Yeah, to a lesser extent. My mom was a public school teacher as well growing up. My mom was a public school English teacher and so she was always a teacher's union member. She was never really involved on the organizing end. But I always remember being kind of conscious of that as just like an element of her job or that she was tapped into this bigger community. Sophia [00:08:00] Yeah, that makes sense. The teachers union, I think like starts a lot of stuff for a lot of people, like growing up around that. �Eileen [00:08:06] Yeah. Sophia [00:08:08] So kind of shifting this to, to the Skidmore experience, can you tell us a little bit about the non tenure track faculty union just and your involvement with it so far? Eileen [00:08:22] Sure. I began working here part time last year. I had been at the College of Saint Rose before that and Saint Rose during, during the period of COVID, although it sort of had its roots much furtherbefore that. They had a mass faculty layoff. They laid off thirty-three tenure track faculty, and then they let go of eight contingent faculty members. And I was one of the contingent faculty members. I had been there for four or five years on this rotating one year contract, and I always knew that it was not a secure contract, but I had become part of the department. I had, you know, built relationships, built community there. And my department fought really hard to save my position and just just couldn't. Right. Like the tide had turned. And so I arrived at Skidmore in this part time position because I had been job hunting. I had found some other work. I was sort of cobbling things together. But I had just come off this experience of, of a layoff, of seeing what happened at a college that, like, was unionized and still had a really tough set of working conditions for many of its faculty, was in terrible financial straits. And so I was at this point in my professional life where I was thinking about, like, what's the kind of security that I want? What are the sorts of things that I want to work for? What's the kind of working environment that I want to choose for myself going forward? And I had friends already in the English department through just, like, local research groups and other connections. And as I arrived, I started talking with some of the other contingent faculty members about some of the things that were going on and was able to find out that there was this kind of growing union movement. And I was enthusiastically, like, sign me up, give me work to do, like, I want to help out however I can. It helped that, you know, the organizing process was happening in conjunction with SEIU, which is the union that I had been part of at Saint Rose. And so I knew Sean Collins, the lead organizer. I knew him through other, other interactions, and I liked working with him. And so I was just sort of like enthusiastic to, to dive in and contribute. Sophia [00:10:39] Yeah, that makes sense. So like your, your previous job experience kind of propelled you into this current union experience and motivated you. Eileen [00:10:52] Mm-hm. Sophia [00:10:52] Yeah. Can you speak a little bit more to like, how how it feels to be on that, like, kind of tenuous contract and be working and how it affects, like, job experience and performance. Eileen [00:11:03] Yeah. From a really concrete standpoint, the academic job market requires a lot of work to sort of be on the market, you sort of have to prepare a set of materials every year. This can be upwards of, you know, fifty pages altogether of cover letters and syllabi and teaching statements and course evaluations and diversity statements and all these sorts of things. And so maintaining a current dossier of materials takes a lot of work. It takes a couple of weeks every summer. Then the application process. Applications would go up every fall. You'd spend time combing the listings, submitting things, interviewing, doing campus visits, making all these decisions. And all of that time was time that I wasn't spending on teaching or wasn't spending on students, right? I would find myself sort of saying no to things that I really wanted to be doing because I needed to sort of always have one foot out the door. It also affected the way that I was making decisions about the kinds of things that I would teach. Right? I was sort of �not in a position to be as experimental as maybe I would want to be, or that I was thinking about, like, how to build a CV that, like, would make me attractive to other jobs rather than, like, allow me to excel at the job that I had. And so that, just the time spent on being kind of one foot out the door, having to always sort of search for other jobs and the cognitive load of like always sort of thinking elsewhere and not thinking here. Both of those have affected in previous positions my ability to just like kind of be at home in a place and really dedicate myself to the students that are in front of me. Sophia [00:12:46] Yeah. And kind of circling back to the community aspect, like, it, it just kind of alienates a whole group of people working here who are supposed to be a part of the community and helping, like, build it and everything to yeah, to have them feel so unsettled the whole time while they're working here. Eileen [00:13:05] And I think that that distinction is often, you know, it's not visible to students because these job distinctions are sometimes they're not really clear and students don't know if I'm here permanently or on a temporary contract. And so, you know. This past year, I've had students who have asked me to serve as their advisor, and I can't, you know, I can't in good conscience say yes because I might not be here next year. I can't sort of support them all the way through to degree completion. I don't know if I will be a stable presence for them. And so it prevents me from building those kind of long term mentoring relationships as well. Sophia [00:13:41] Yeah, that makes so much sense. And that's interesting to, to move into, I just want to ask you what you think like the student perception of the union has been or your experience, like, with what questions students have been asking you. Do you feel like they're kind of aware of what's going on? Eileen [00:14:02] I think they're becoming aware. I think that it's something that has, you know, the last few years have been this really incredible time for labor organizing. I think that students are seeing the ways that unionization can affect jobs at every different level. Right. The faculty are attempting to unionize or have unionized. But also the local Starbucks is unionizing or, you know, the Trader Joe's is unionizing, thinking about how this is a tool for workers kind of across the spectrum. I think that has also helped students understand that maybe the popular perception of, like, what a professor is and what that lifestyle or job security looks like that that's not actually the reality for most of their professors. My, I predominantly teach freshman writing and these are often themed courses. And one of the themes that I use that I taught this past year was on the philosophies and economies of higher education. So, like, how does college work? How do our decisions about what college means to us, how are they shaped by our desire for money, for wealth, for happiness, for knowledge? And one of the things that came up in that class was this conversation about, you know, what do you think professors are making? What kind of class position do you think professors are holding? And I think a lot of students assume, because this was the case, you know, twenty years ago, forty years ago, that all of their professors are, like, making six figures and, like, own their own homes and are these, like very comfortable middle class lifestyles when that's not necessarily the case anymore. Sophia [00:15:34] Yeah, that must be that must have been a crazy conversation to have because yeah, I'm sure a honestly me before kind of getting more involved in this world and learning more about it, I also think I safely assume that, like, oh, my professors are definitely just making, like, stable money, stable jobs. They all kind of are on the same, like, professor is the one position you can be in kind of thing. And yeah, learning more �about this faculty union has been really interesting. And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more to, like, what stage the, the union is at now. Eileen [00:16:14] We're currently in the negotiating process for our first collective bargaining agreement, which is, it's a really exciting place to be because it's just, like, a place of possibility. But so the election happened this past fall. The majority of non tenure track faculty voted in favor of unionizing. And so now I'm on the negotiating committee, along with several other faculty across departments, across different job roles. And we're in the process of putting together our bargaining proposals. So, you know, what do we want our contract to look like? What are the sorts of things that we want as terms of our employment and bringing those to the college to then negotiate with college representation about, like, okay, what can we make happen? What can we both agree to? What can we put in stone in the language of the bargaining agreement? Sophia [00:17:03] Yeah, wow, that's very cool. Eileen [00:17:05] Yeah, I, we, I, in fact, just before this, I spent an hour on a Zoom working meeting to look at some language about benefits and, like, who has access to health care, which of our faculty have had access to health care. What would it look like to try and widen that scope a little bit more to include maybe part time faculty or other faculty in that? Sophia [00:17:25] Yeah. And just for the record, on the, on the recording, if you could talk a bit about like what the main goals are of the union. Eileen [00:17:38] Through the organizing conversations and through all of the other conversations we've had with the full bargaining unit,that's all the faculty who are members of our new union, a couple of things have come up consistently.So one of them is, is compensation, especially for part time faculty. Part time faculty make a pretty low rate of pay and aren't eligible for a lot of really core benefits. And so increasing their compensation. For full time faculty, it's increasing job security. That's been one of the, one of the primary goals is that we have a system right now that has lots of people who are on these rotating one year or two year contracts who are in that position that I was describing earlier. They're never sort of really secure. The college has kinds of contracts that offer that sort of security for non tenure track faculty. But they haven't been extended to a lot of the faculty who are currently here. So we're fighting to create that kind of stability so that professors can be here and can be fully present for their students. And then finally, it's protecting the benefits that people have already that they really love. The college right now has a great system of benefits for full time faculty members, and a lot of faculty rely on them. And so we want to make sure that those are enshrined in the bargaining language, to make sure that they can never go away or they can't go away without the college negotiating. That's one of the things I think I have brought with me from previous job experience is that, like, knowing that even if you feel, like, you've got a great relationship with the administration, even if things feel like they're going great, feeling like things won't change isn't protection to say that they can't change. And so putting things in the bargaining language means they can't change. And so it's been a priority to get things that people really love about their jobs just memorialized and safe. Sophia [00:19:21] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And kind of going, following that vein of, how do you feel like the administration response has been to the union in terms of like supportive, non supportive? �Eileen [00:19:37] I think it has been, it's been neutral to supportive so far. I've been, I've been pleasantly surprised by how how things have been going. I will say at previous institutions, I have seen things rise to a level of, like, real aggression and real anger. And so far, that hasn't been the case. I think that also Skidmore has recognized that this is something that is core to its value system. At Skidmore one of the things that I've been so impressed with arriving here and that seems to really define the community, is a real dedication to, like, social justice and an awareness of, like, inequality of power in the world and on campus. And frankly, I think if the college wants to continue saying that it supports those values, it has to sort of be open to improving working conditions here on this campus. Sophia [00:20:32] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. In that same kind of question, how has the support been from the tenured faculty or what has been kind of their involvement being like adjacent to this whole thing? Eileen [00:20:50] I've had nothing but supportive conversations with tenure track faculty. It's been really great. I think that they recognize that the work of the whole faculty body is necessary, that we are doing the same kinds of work, that we are supporting students in the same way, and that that labor is equal to the kinds of labor that they are putting into the classroom. They know how hard it is to, to make the ship run. And so they they see that. I also think that right now the academic job market is, is really, really poor. Right. That there are hundreds of Ph.D. holders or hundreds of eligible and suitable candidates for every position that gets listed. And a lot of them were also on the job market for many years, or a lot of them have also had a history of being a graduate student instructor or being an adjunct instructor or being a contingent instructor. And so I think increasingly other professors are recognizing that, like, the difference between these levels of faculties is disappearing, like that we are we are all bringing the same credentials to the table and that we could very easily be in one another's place. And so I think that that has increased this, the sense of solidarity. Sophia [00:22:03] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like things could, things could change. It's yeah, kind of luck of the draw in that way. What would you say the biggest challenges to the union are at this time? Eileen [00:22:20] I think one of the big challenges is, is building the kind of community and solidarity across departments and disciplines. You know, we had, it was a really great experience. I was working on some bargaining demands with a faculty member in in the Chemistry department. And we became immediately obvious that, like, neither of us understood how the other person's job worked, right? Like, that we were, our contracts looked different. The way we accounted for our work looked different. And then you fold in somebody from music who's an instructor who, like, accounts for their labor and their work and their relationship with students in totally other ways. And so finding the space to really understand the kinds of work that we all do, like, how our jobs look kind of different on the surface, and then using those differences to actually find the core values of, like, what are the things that we share? What are the ways like what are the ways that we can build common goals out of those differences? That's something that requires a lot of trust. It requires a lot of relationship building. It requires a lot of time. So I think that that's been a big challenge. But I also think that that will ultimately be one of the big strengths. Sophia [00:23:31] Yeah. Like a cool part of it that just takes so much work. Eileen [00:23:35] Yeah. �Sophia [00:23:36] So, yeah. Do you think, I mean, hopefully the union just will build strength over time through, like, the course of creating those bonds and community. Eileen [00:23:44] Yeah. And I also think that this, the process of the first bargaining agreement is such a difficult one, but can be such a rewarding one. One of the other things that has been notable is that this is, it's sort of on generational lines, but not entirely, but that for younger professors, it's much more likely that they would have gone to graduate school and been in a graduate student union. Those have been increasing over the last ten, twenty years. And so we have one part of the population who has a long history of being unionized and knows what that kind of contract feels like, what it means to be part of a union, what that experience would look like. And then you may have another portion of the faculty who have never been a unionized worker before, like they've never been in a faculty union that has never crossed their mind. And so the process of sort of education in all of this is another, it's another struggle, but it's also going to be another kind of deeply rewarding thing that these people, you know, who've never been a union member, who've never been under a collective bargaining agreement, I think have a lot of fear of the unknown. But I'm excited to, like, that sort of motivates me even more of, like, you know, we have to secure a really strong bargaining agreement to sort of show people what we can do when we all work together for something like this. Sophia [00:25:05] Yeah, I think that's one of the classic, uh, like attributes of the union process is, like, it is such a difficult process, but, like, ultimately such a rewarding process. Eileen [00:25:15] Yeah. Sophia [00:25:15] I think that's what, like, a lot of people feel about it. And kind of in that same vein, what support would you say that the union needs the most from, from like the student body, from the Skidmore community at large? Eileen [00:25:35] Oh, that’s a great question. I mean, I think the support of recognizing, recognizing the work that's going into it, like knowing that your faculty are working towards this and recognizing the labor that people are putting in, that has been a huge, that's always a huge morale boost for me when we've done like outreach events or we've been out on campus and students come by and they're like, this is great. Like, you know, we're so happy to see this. Like, well, like, let us know how we can support you, even if that's like putting a sticker on your water bottle, wearing a pin around campus. Like, it's a good way to know that the community is behind you. That makes a huge difference. And I think learning more about the conditions of, of employment, the conditions of, like, the place that you are living, right, that being at college is this weird place, you know, you're sort of, you're a customer, but also a community member and also a student here, all these things. But taking the opportunity to sort of learn the details of like how the community that you're in, how it's working and the kinds of work that make it possible. Sophia [00:26:35] Yeah. I mean, and considering that you kind of initially were drawn to this kind of work in college, like, would you say this is an important time for, like, people to start learning about it now? Eileen [00:26:47] Absolutely. One of the tenure track faculty who'd supported us when we sort of declared the, when we filed our cards, when we had declared that the, that the vote was going to be scheduled, we held a little rally and she got up and said something that �has, like, stuck with me of, like, one of the things that you all are doing that is such a value here is that you're showing students what it means to, like, live into a set of values, to, like, to, to recognize something in the world that you can try and make better and, like, try and do that. And I've thought about that a lot over the past year of, like, that, that that's a responsibility that we have as organizers, but also as educators to, like, show students what it means to, to sort of commit to a value and to try to bring that into reality. Sophia [00:27:34] Yeah, that's so interesting to be, like, considering your role as a union member, but also an educator at the same time. Like, education based unions are so, like, special in that way. That's incredible. Is there anything else you wanted to, like, add or explain that you feel like we missed? Eileen [00:27:53] No, I think that that covers it. Sophia [00:27:55] Awesome. Sophia [00:27:56] Well, thank you so much for coming in today. This has been a great interview. Eileen [00:27:59] You're so welcome. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saratoga Labor History Digital Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource August 11, 2023 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Eric Morser Language A language of the resource English Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Eric Morser Subject The topic of the resource Labor History Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jesse O'Connell Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Oral History Date Created Date of creation of the resource. August 11, 2023 Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Sophie Delohery '25 Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Eileen Sperry Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio Recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 27:59 Record Contributor Individual who prepared the item and/or edited it. Eric Morser Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit August 29, 2023 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Eileen Sperry Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 7, 2023 Description An account of the resource Eileen Sperry holds a PhD in English from Stony Brook University. She teaches composition and early modern English literature, and her research specializes in poetry and disability studies. She’s been a member of the CWA 1104 Graduate Student Employees Union—Stony Brook chapter, United University Professions—Albany and Empire State chapters, and SEIU Faculty Forward—Saint Rose and Skidmore chapters. Language A language of the resource English Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Eric Morser Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Saratoga Labor History Digital Archive https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/1385cad585f8c181f726de64d2303fb1.jpg 9a634b74fd20f1319774267f2ef741ce https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/2574e5d65743f1eb45b5ef784b9cc07c.mp3 27783708d2cfe3268a42a6521156944e https://ssmp.skidmore.edu/files/original/722b095771a49c864ef56616c9961079.pdf 358442d5d406a30425fbc753a0e6399d PDF Text Text Narrator: Natalya Lakhtakia Interviewers: Cal Rogers, Zain Sundaram, and Hope Wahrman Location of Interview: Saratoga Springs Date of Interview: April 7th, 2024 Hope Wahrman [00:00:00] So, today is Sunday, April 7th. Um, It's around 10 a.m. This is American Labor History, Oral History Project. I'm Hope Wahrman, I'm a sophomore. Other group members... Cal Rogers [00:00:16] I'm Cal Rogers, I'm a junior. Zain Sundaram [00:00:19] I am Zain Sundaram, I'm also a junior. Hope Wahrman [00:00:23] And our interviewee... Natalya Lakhtakia [00:00:26] I'm Natalya Lakhtakia. I am a speech language pathologist, who lives here in Saratoga Springs! Hope Wahrman [00:00:32] Awesome. Okay so, um I think a good... or the perfect place to sort of begin this interview um is asking or starting from the beginning. Asking about your childhood, where are you from? Sort of, what was that like a little bit. Natalya Lakhtakia [00:00:49] Sure. So I am from State College, Pennsylvania. It's where Penn State is, its what it's known for. Um, I am the daughter of two immigrants. So, my Dad moved to the United States from India. My Mom moved to the United States from Argentina, both to go to graduate school in Salt Lake City at the University of Utah, which is where they met. And about a year after, well not even a year after they met, my dad got offered a job at Penn State University as a postdoc and they moved to State College. And I was born a few years later. So I grew up with two parents working at the university. And unlike Skidmore, Penn State is very very large. When the students are there, it's doubling the population of our community. So, the community is large. You know, the city itself is larger than Saratoga, and then the population of students is very big. So the community is very university centered. And so because of that, I think I got a really, I got an excellent education. I had a lot of opportunities. I had, um a lot of chances to do things with the university that you know, really enriched my life. And then my parents, who are both academics and both from countries where the focus on education I think is a lot better than the United States. I mean more complex, but there's a bigger focus on education than there is in the United States. I had them also supplementing you know, my upbringing. So in third grade my parents said, "Hey, this isn't meeting our child's needs. She is bored at school." And the school is starting to blame me for being bored. And so they moved me to a private school, which is complex as a person who as an adult only supports public education. You know, that's a complex decision. And then when my private school didn't have the resources to do certain things, my parents would fill in. So in sixth grade, you know the sixth graders in public school got to dissect, um animal hearts. And so my mom bought animal hearts for my private school. And so they were really focused on that. They gave me a lot of chances to do things. I got to go to space camp, I got to go to journalism camp, I got to do all sorts of really amazing things. Um, and then I went to Penn State for my undergraduate degree with every intention of becoming an engineer. And after, uh the first year I thought "that's not the right path for me." And, I decided to major in psychology. As a junior in psychology I took psycholinguistics, and I was really, really, really excited about it. And I talked to my professor and I said, "How do I do this as a job?" And she said, "Well why don't you go to the Communication Sciences department and like see what you �could do?" And so she connected me with Doctor Katherine Drager who said "Hey, come work in my lab, do undergraduate research," and I did. So I did my research on, so autistic children who are three and four years old who are using a communication device. I did my research on how the other children were able to understand them, communicate with them, play with them, etc. And so within you know, a few months I said I'm gonna apply to grad school and I'm gonna go to grad school to become a speech language pathologist. I didn't want to go into research, I wanted to do work. And so I wanted to do therapy. And so when I did that and I applied, I thought that I was going to work at a veteran's hospital. I said, "I'm going to work at a VA. It's a guaranteed job for life. There will always be people who need you." Um, and I thought I was going to help people with swallowing and with their voice disorders. So those are two really common things that you're seeing at a veteran's hospital. Because, like war is really really hard on your body. And so those are two things that will come from that: trouble eating and trouble speaking. And then I, as a graduate student at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City which is where my parents went too, I had to do two externships. And I did one in a public school, and I did one in a skilled nursing facility. And I said, "That is not for me." I'm gonna work in a public school. I had an idea of what swallowing disorders were like, but it's actually really really terrible when someone tells you you can't eat. And so I put up with a lot of um, I don't want to say it was abuse because it wasn't like... I understand it, I guess. Um, but people were really really upset to not be able to eat. And I said this is not, I don't want to be the person who's telling them they can't eat. Um, I want to be the person who's playing with kids and helping them communicate. Um, and so I applied with the school district where I had done my internship and they hired me. I did two years there before I said "I actually want to move back to the East Coast." So I moved back here, and I had started dating a guy that I actually went to preschool and also elementary school and also high school and also college. So he was living in Massachusetts, so I moved there. And I ended up getting a job doing early intervention in Rhode Island. So just like for the context of this interview: being a union employee in Utah to being nonunion in Rhode Island. And then a couple of years later, he got a job offer here in New York. So we moved here and I didn't work for almost two years because I got pregnant very, very, very soon after we moved here and I had a really sick pregnancy. And then I had a baby, and I didn't really know how to go back to work. Um, the other thing that was complicated was moving to New York. It is really, really, really hard to get licensed here. It is a lot of work. So in Rhode Island I was able to like get my photograph taken at AAA, and fill out a sheet of paper and go to like the local like state police department and and get fingerprinted. And I handed it all in and I had a license. Here it was an enormous process including, like additional classes. I had to like, call my high school to get specific dates of things like it was a really involved process. But when my son was about eight months old, I got a call from a recruiter saying "Hey, the Santa Fe Public Schools are looking for someone to do teletherapy. Would you want to do that?" And I said "Yeah, that's great." And I will say at that time I didn't really understand a lot of things about employment. And so I started as a contractor with them. So I was not a direct employee of the schools, I had a contract with a company that had a contract with the schools. I was essentially self-employed. But, and it being paid pretty badly I would say, but it was worth it to me because then I could start work at 10 AM because of the time difference. And so I did that for seven school years. And then just this past August, I got a call from the head of special education where he was crying and said "The district has made the decision to end all teletherapy. I have fought, I had even fought for it to just be you who stays, like we don't want to lose you. But we don't have an option, you're out. We're ending all teletherapy." And so um, that was horrible. I will say like, I was really really upset. I didn't get to say goodbye to my students. Like, when you work in a school you're really bonded with kids. But it's also the nature of being a contractor. Like, they can just end your contract. And if you aren't even within the dates of a contract, which I �technically wasn't because they called me a week before school started, they don't even owe you anything. Like, I didn't get paid out a month. I didn't get anything. It was just your contract's... not starting. And so, I took a little bit of time to figure out what I wanted to do. I'm really actively involved in politics here, and I thought "Like I'm good at this. I could do this as my job and I could, you know, continue to have kind of an easier job until my son starts middle school." Um, and I found really quickly that it wasn't the right fit for me. I'm a person who really needs structure, and needs to have a solid work day to stay happy. And so I in December, applied to some local school districts and I got hired at Fort Edward Schools. It's about 30 minutes from Saratoga Springs. It's a very, very, very small community. Um of about 3000 people, there are fewer than 400 students in the pre-K through 12 school. And I'm one of their two speech therapists. And I'm back to being in a union and I'm a member of NYSUT (New York State United Teachers) and then a member of my local, which is the Fort Edward Teachers Association. And I'm really, really excited about that. So that's my history! Cal Rogers [00:09:51] Yeah, awesome thank you. Natalya Lakhtakia [00:09:51] Sorry. Hope Wahrman [00:09:53] (Laughs) No no, that was perfect. Um, yeah. There's so much now that I want to like, ask you about from from that alone so that's great. Hope Wahrman [00:10:03] Also I wanted to just say our professor, Professor Morser sent us like your Linkedin. And so I'd seen that you went to Penn State, and I'm from Philadelphia. There's like a map of Philly in my dorm. And like literally, I'm more like...because I'm closer to Philly than like "state" like a lot of people end up going to like Drexel or Temple. But like at least like 20% of my graduating class goes to Penn State. So. Natalya Lakhtakia [00:10:31] Yes! I'm sure. Hope Wahrman [00:10:31] Love Pennsylvania, love that. Yeah. Natalya Lakhtakia [00:10:35] I know, me too. Hope Wahrman [00:10:37] So yeah, just wanted to. Natalya Lakhtakia [00:10:39] Awesome, no I love that. Hope Wahrman [00:10:40] To make you feel more comfortable, with this. But okay, so sort of talking about, um keeping on track with like your earlier experiences and how that shaped your involvement today. Um, what was your first job? And that can be... You can talk about like your first I guess like quote unquote, like "professional job." Maybe like right out of grad school, but also maybe like your first job as a young adult as well. Natalya Lakhtakia [00:11:09] Sure, yeah. So as a young adult I, well, if you set aside things like babysitting my freshman year of college I actually was a nanny for a cardiologist in town. And I made so much money just from nannying during football games that I didn't do anything else. Like that paid my, that paid for all the things I wanted it to pay for. But, I want to say I was a sophomore in college when I got a job with what was then called MBNA. I don't know what MBNA is now, but it's essentially a bank that gives out credit cards. And I was sitting in like a big room really close to actually my parents house, and I �was making phone calls basically trying to get people to accept a credit card. And, also sometimes calling people who already had credit cards with us and upgrading them. And like thinking about it in this context, so there was another... I think she was a junior who worked with me, her name was Ellen. I don't know Ellen anymore. Like, we only worked together for five months? Maybe. But Ellen and I did not smoke, like I don't smoke cigarettes. And Ellen did not smoke cigarettes. But if you worked at MBNA, you got a 15 minute cigarette break every two hours. And Ellen and I were like, "But how come people who smoke get to leave this like weird like warehouse of desks that we're in and go outside for 15 minutes?! And we don't get to, just because we don't smoke?" And, I probably at that time would not have been the person to push it. I was the person to complain about it. Just to like, Ellen. Who was at the desk next to me! But Ellen was like, "They can't stop us." We went outside one day and our you know, manager was like "You guys aren't going outside to smoke, you can't smoke." And Ellen was like "Okay, I'll start smoking cigarettes if that will let you, if that will make you let me go outside." And our manager, like that was enough for our manager to be like,"Huh, yeah okay. Go outside." And so it was a really interesting thing where like after a month, all of a sudden we had our 15 minute breaks the same as smokers did. Um, but I didn't stay there for very long. It wasn't, um it was like the kind of job that I could do when the semester wasn't going on. When the semester was going on, they didn't have any real trouble with like pushing and pushing and pushing to take over more of my time. And I just was privileged enough to be able to say "Like sorry, I actually don't need you." Um, and so I stopped working there. I started working at Panera. Um, and then I left Panera for a local place a very Pennsylvania place called the Carnegie House, where I was a server. And so, I did that. And I worked at the Carnegie House up until I graduated and moved to Salt Lake City. Hope Wahrman [00:13:58] Cool. Yeah, that definitely answers that question. And then I also just had one other question, kind of based on what you had said earlier. And it's just, so you grew up in a house that really like supported education and self-sufficiency. And like it sounds like every opportunity your parents had to make your education better, they took. And that's really awesome. And they themselves were educators. And so it's it's funny that you you had no idea that that's kind of what you were really interested in like that you went to college for engineering, um and all of that. And so I guess my question maybe is like, do you take anything from your childhood and the way your parents raised you and educate into your work today? Natalya Lakhtakia [00:14:46] So I will say, like I doubt this is what you meant by "selfsufficiency." But I would actually say that both my parents are from very very communityminded societies compared to the United States, which is a very individualist society. And so I think that the biggest thing that I have taken from them and like that upbringing is my dad constantly saying like at least once a week, "No man is an island." Like you're not doing anything by yourself, you're doing everything in the context of the people around you. You are not like, if you do well in life you're not "self-made" like you're community made and all of that. And so to me, that kind of a mindset is what leads you to understand... unions. Because like, I cannot go to a school and do speech therapy by myself. It doesn't exist like that. Like I'm only seeing kids for 30 to 90 minutes a week, right? Like they're spending time with other people who are shaping them. We're not doing it away from their parents, even if their parents never set foot in the school. Which is the case sometimes, that parents are completely they feel disconnected from the schools and they are disconnected from the schools. But we're not doing anything by ourselves. And so I think that um...First of all, it wasn't until I was much older that I recognized that my dad views himself first and foremost as a teacher. Um, because I would recognize him as a researcher. And same thing with my mom. So my mom wasn't an instructor until I was in �high school, my mom was doing research. And so, that's kind of how I viewed academia just from like that perspective. And then my dad started to win teaching awards, and I was like "oh huh...he is a teacher." But my dad's also a professor of engineering. So I would say like my like, I was going to be an engineer like my dad. And so that's kind of how I was viewing what he was doing. Um but again my parents are very focused on like, "everything is in the context of community." And that's really difficult I will say. Like I don't know if you have parents who are from other cultures, but like it is really difficult to be an American student and especially at that time, and to have parents with that mindset when we are in such like a rugged individualist society. And when my friends who were like American with American parents, were living lives that felt very very different from mine. And I also did have a lot of Indian friends who had Indian parents, but most of them had two Indian parents then I didn't. And so that was also another thing where it was like I couldn't really... It was hard to find out my place between these two worlds. And then I don't even know that there was anybody in State College from Argentina at the time. So I don't know if that answers your question, but that's I would say that's the biggest thing that I took from them. And something I think about a lot and something that I actually tell people a lot like when I'm talking about, um the labor movement or when I'm talking about socialism. Just these are things that like you don't have to be like outright saying like "Hey, like I personally think that socialism is a better way to do things than capitalism." You can talk about things in that context of like nobody is self-made, everyone is community made. And, I think that that's a way to kind of contextualize the world in a way that helps people see the things that American education is kind of hiding from us. Hope Wahrman [00:18:19] Yeah, that's awesome (laughs). Thank you. Natalya Lakhtakia [00:18:23] Sure. Zain Sundaram [00:18:23] How did you end up working in the Saratoga area? Natalya Lakhtakia [00:18:30] So, um we were living... My husband was working at um... I think it was...I don't remember it went through a bunch of different names. I think it was "Schneider Electric" at the time, in Massachusetts. And... But it had been like different iterations. But they had taken a project that my husband was like, "something's going to go wrong here. Like, we're not going to be able to finish this project, and I'm going to lose my job." And, I was working in early intervention. Rhode Island early intervention is very different from New York early intervention. Here you're a contractor, and you're working with the counties. In Rhode Island, you're a direct employee of a company that's managing all of that. And so, I was working for a company where I would say I was definitely being exploited. I was being held to a different standard than my fellow speech therapists for a couple reasons. I mean the first is that I'm bilingual, and the second is that I didn't live physically on that island where our company was located. And so, I was doing a lot more work than everybody else and I was really tired. And my husband said, "What if we start looking for jobs in other areas?" And so he took a job in Clifton Park. And his boss told him like, "You definitely want to live in Saratoga. It's such a great place to live, you'll love it, etc. etc." We looked at a couple places to rent in Saratoga and could not afford them. And it's obviously only gotten worse. So we took... we found an apartment in Ballston Lake, which is like Exit 11. And we lived there for two years. And then actually... So I'm here in my house in Saratoga, the house across the street...the dad I will say...so the dad grew up with me and my husband in State College, he actually lived in the same neighborhood as my husband. And then his wife went to Penn State, which is where they met. So when we moved here, we like reconnected with them. And so she called me one day and said, "The house across the street is going to go on the market tomorrow. You need to buy it. This is �an affordable neighborhood in Saratoga, and it would be so great." I already had a baby. She was pregnant. And she was like, "It would be so good. None of us have family here. We could be each other's family and support. It's like you have to move there." And so, that's what I did. Like I came here...my mom was visiting, we came, we toured the house. I said, "This house is disgusting." And my mom said, "Nope, this is a good house and you can paint it, like it'll be good." And we bought the house and we moved in. And I will say again like going back to this community idea, like my parents live six hours away. My extended family doesn't live in this country. Their families live more than six hours away. I mean, I think everybody lives in Ohio basically, or DC. And, they don't have other family that's here. But we get to be each other's families like our children are, and I understand that they're not like siblings to each other, but they are. They have this really intense family relationship where like for February break, like I took their daughter with us and we went to go stay with my parents. Like we're doing these things together all the time. And so we got to build our own little community. And I will say, having that kind of community in Saratoga Springs is what keeps me here. Because I don't enjoy living in Saratoga Springs at least 80% of the time. It is a really really tough place to live. And I understand why my husband's wealthy white boss was like, "Hey you should live in Saratoga Springs." But for me it is, it is rough to live here. And so what keeps me here is my neighborhood, and having that kind of a community. Hope Wahrman [00:22:05] Um...really quickly, would you mind kind of talking a little bit about like some of the difficulties in terms of living in Saratoga Springs? Natalya Lakhtakia [00:22:37] So Saratoga is... It is a unique community in many ways. So one of the ways that it is, is that unlike most municipalities in the United States it is getting whiter. And so that is unlike the majority of the United States. So it's getting whiter, the schools themselves are not getting whiter. The schools are actually getting less white pretty, steadily. But there's such an influx here of older white people who do not have children, and so there's that. Our county is one of 3% of counties in the United States that votes in line with the winner of the presidential election. And so like, and I think that that's been happening since George W Bush. But I might be wrong on that. But it's many many years of like, "this county voted George W Bush and they voted for Obama and they voted for Obama, and they voted for Trump, and they voted for Biden." And it is very likely that however this county votes in the next election will also be the winner of the next presidential election. And so what that has led to, is to our county being a kind of testing ground. And with us being kind of the focal point of the county, a lot of that testing happens here. And this makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist, but like we can track like this is something I'm really interested in. And so, you can track that this is happening and you can see. Like if you remember a few years ago, there was a big focus on critical race theory. Not actual critical race theory but like what you know, conservatives were calling "critical race theory" and how that was going to take over the schools. That entire cycle played through in Saratoga Springs before it became a national news story. We had already had an entire school board election here that was focused on critical race theory and it played out in a way that was really interesting. I mean, that was three years ago. And so the people that were elected through that election are now up for reelection here. And so being a testing ground means that there is kind of a constant attack on the left, and that's really tough. I would say that I do not view myself as liberal, because I view liberalism as being very conservative. I am, you know, I'm a leftist. I view myself as being very far to the left. And then because I'm not white and because I am a public figure here, I get to be the target of things. I get to have different things -- I don't know if they're tested on me or if people are just saying them. But there's kind of this like, regular attack on me as a person. And that's really really tough. So it's not only tough to recognize that I'm �raising my son, who I don't think you can see him, but and by all appearances is white. Um, like gets to live in the world as a white child. And like as a tall, fairly well-off, very cute white child which comes with a lot of privileges. So not only am I raising my kid in this very homogenous society or homogenous community but also like... so there's like this, like structural thing that's really tough for me and there's also the personal attacks that are really tough for me. And then there's the other specific level of um, we are one of the we are one of two communities in the entire state of New York that has our particular form of government. Which is called the "commission form of government." The commission form of government is literally illegal in some states. Like it is such a horrible form of government, it was created immediately after... I think after Juneteenth, I think I think it was like 1867ish. It was created to ensure that formerly enslaved people couldn't have the same like ability to be in charge of their municipalities, as like wealthy white landowners. And we still have it here in Saratoga Springs. Since I moved here, there have been a lot of attempts to change that and they both failed. One of them failed by only ten votes, though. Like I mean, there are some pretty close things that are happening. But so because of this form of government, we just have kind of "rule by a specific mindset of person," Which has been led to like very very blatant civil rights violations, specifically against Black people. But also poor people, brown people, etc. And I think that that is something that our community doesn't even really recognize. You know, I would consider myself to be a police abolitionist. Like, I don't think that societies need policing the way that it exists right now in the United States at all. But I think that specifically in Saratoga Springs, the form of policing that we end up having here as a result of the commission form of government, and as a result of the whiteness, and as a result of the wealth here has led to us just being in a really dangerous situation. And again, I feel like a lot of the people around me don't recognize that. And that's because of...and this is the last thing I'll say about Saratoga Springs. I think that Saratoga Springs, being raised here from people who were also raised here, leads to a lack of curiosity. And so there are a lot of people who are like "Why would I leave Saratoga Springs when this is the best place to live? It's so good." Like it's... And it is a good place to live, right? Like there's a lot of stuff to do. It's really beautiful. You're close to things. In general, like your kids' needs are met. Like, there's a lot of good stuff here. And so, I think that there's just these people who aren't leaving this community. Who also have this particular type of like nativism where they're like, "If you're not from Saratoga, then you're not a true Saratogian." Which I'm like, "Okay well, I don't really want to be. I don't care about that." But I think that this has led to people having a very skewed perspective of their community. And therefore, not standing up against the really concerning parts of our community. And again I will say like, I'm making generalizations here. And there are a lot of amazing people here who are standing up to that and who are doing work, and who are trying to make it better. And I'm trying to do that too. But, it it is a very particular type of community that kind of has all these different things going on. And they do add up to being a hard place for me to live like, conceptually. Like I'm like, "Oh my God, I can't believe I live in Saratoga Springs, New York." And also just in terms of like my actual existence here like, "Natalya Lakhtakia living in Saratoga Springs" is having a really really hard time because I am a focus. And, we have considered moving. Like we have talked about it. Not this past December but the December before, somebody posted under a fake name on Facebook. Like, they posted this thing about how like, I'm vermin and "we need to bring out the big guns against Natalya and blah, blah, blah." And that, I will say like having had so many things be said about me over the last five years...that particular like dehumanization like using literal Nazi language against me was enough that I was like "we need to move, like we need to go somewhere else." And my husband was like, "Great, let's figure it out." But at the end of the day like many Americans, we are in some ways stuck here because my husband's job is really really good. And like so we could move to Niskayuna if we wanted to. Or we could move to Clifton Park if we wanted to. But we're �really just staying within the area because my husband's job is so good. And a lot of millennials don't get to have the kind of job that he has, and it's not worth it to give it up. Because he gets raises every year, he's really protected, he gets time off, he gets PTO and medical time off. He gets all these things that like millennials are getting less and less of, and Gen Z is potentially not even getting at all. And it's really really hard to give that up and if we're just going to move within the area, then we are giving up the benefits of our neighborhood community. And I would rather that my son had that neighborhood community and just like, look at social media a little bit less. Hope Wahrman [00:31:04] Thank you. And also like I mean, of course it's difficult living in Saratoga Springs. But yeah, this community really needs people like you. And the work that you do makes Saratoga better. So, thank you... Natalya Lakhtakia [00:31:17] Thank you. Hope Wahrman [00:31:18] ...For staying in spite of all those things. Natalya Lakhtakia [00:31:20] I will also say like, the students in this community are super rad. And, there are things happening in this community that I sometimes I'm like, "Oh my God, like there's really, really good stuff here." So like this is just one thing, I really love musical theater. But our high school just put on Head Over Heels. And, Head Over Heels is a really in your face musical that is like very very blatantly spelling it out for anybody who might not get it: pro-trans. And to have like our high school students put that on, and to see essentially no pushback. No pushback that I saw as a school board member and as a member of the community. And as the friend of parents of a lot of kids in the musical, there was like one parent that was like. And all the other parents were like "Nope, the kids are doing it." And that was the end of that. And I was like okay, that makes me feel good because for us to be so far on the right side of that in terms of protecting trans students and uplifting their stories... Like that to me, I'm like "okay, they're good things in Saratoga too." So I can talk about the bad things all day long but there are a lot of good things here too and I will say that. Cal Rogers [00:32:33] I want to transition a little bit. I want to hear about what your work looks like and your interactions with kids and like...just tell me about it. Natalya Lakhtakia [00:32:44] Yeah. So I'm a speech language pathologist and again, I started this job um... Tuesday will be three months of me working in this particular school district. So I am still learning a lot about it. But I work in a pre-K through 12 school building. And then my particular caseload is grades one through six. And the other speech therapist is doing pre-K, kindergarten, and then like seven through 12. And so my day generally looks like most of the time pulling kids into my room, either individually or in small groups, to do speech and language therapy with them. So it's two different things: either working on their sounds, or working on the actual content of what they're saying or what they're understanding. And then we have a really awesome, strong union and so I have a lot of stuff built into my day that I didn't really realize I guess, what an awesome day I had, I could have, until I started working here. So there are 30 kids on my caseload, that is extremely low. In Santa Fe where I was a contractor, at one point I had 47 kids on my caseload and I was like, "Oh my God, they're going to make me go to another school because this is too low." So I usually had around 60 kids on my caseload. So here we're at about half of that. I do see these kids more often than I saw kids before because I work on a six day cycle. So like when I go back to work on Tuesday, I think it'll be day three. And so I have like my day three schedule that I follow. But the following Tuesday will not be day �three, right? It'll be like day one or whatever, I don't know what it is. So I follow that and sometimes I'm going into classrooms, sometimes I'm pulling kids for testing. And then also under our contract, I can sub for people that are absent for a period. So I can sub for a teaching assistant, or a teaching aide, or I can sub for a teacher. And I get paid different rates for that. And so sometimes I'm doing that as well. And then I have a lot of prep time. But I am so used to not having prep time that I think that I've developed the skills that I don't really need to prepare during that time, like I'll do some prep. A lot of my prep is transitioning things that I previously had that were electronic to now being like printed out and laminated so that we can reuse them over and over again. But usually I'm using that prep time to do billing or to type reports. Then also right now we're in what they call CSE seasons. So CSE is Committee for Special Education. And so I'll have meetings with parents to go over our plans for next year. And then also as we get to like, you know, the different marking period, and I'm typing up progress notes to let parents know how their kids are doing. But the majority of my time is doing therapy, it's doing testing, it's doing billing. There's a lot of billing to do in New York compared to Santa Fe. And the system that we use is actually really inferior to the system we were using in Santa Fe. And I think that's because New York kind of has, maybe because of the BOCES, I don't know. But everybody's using the same system, so it doesn't have to get better because there's no competition. So it's a really time consuming system to do all of my billing. My work day is from 7:55 to 3:00 pm, except for on Fridays when I'm out at 2:45. And because I have a little kid and because of my husband's work day, I get to work at like 7:54. I mean, I'm not getting there before my contract time at all. In general, I'm not staying after my contract time either. And part of that is because the other speech therapist, her husband is such like a strong union guy that he's like "if you can't get your work done during your contract hours, then they need to change how they're giving you work. It's not up to you to figure it out outside of your contract hours. It's up to the district to give you an appropriate work level." And if we stay after he will like jokingly, but also like it's only kind of a joke be like "you guys are being union busters, like you're scabbing." And it's such a good perspective to have from this like really strong union guy of like, "Yeah, why am I staying after? If I didn't get my work done, I got to do it tomorrow." But like my contract hours are from 7:55 to 3. I'm not, I don't need to stay later. And I actually recently went through this, where I contacted the Special Ed director and I said "Hey, I have three IEPs due, those are the individualized education plans that we're writing for students who are in special education. And I have to do all of my progress notes. I don't have time to do this and see my students. What do I do?" And she said, "Oh, actually you get three days that you can request like as time off, but it's only time off from therapy. You're still here doing your paperwork." And she was like, "Why don't you put in for you know, two half days so you can do that?" And that's what I did. And they got my stuff done. So, there's a lot of stuff in place to make sure that I can do stuff. In terms of actually being with kids, we do a lot of "play therapy." So communication in general, as I'm just like making a speech right here. But in general, it's a turn taking exercise, right? Like you take a turn you say something, I take a turn and I say something. And so because of that, it allows us to play a lot of turn taking games while we do our work. And I do have a surprising number of students who need support with turntaking. I actually was not expecting how many of my kids would be in like third and fourth grade and not know how to take communication turns. They know how to take turns on a game, but they don't know how to translate that into their communication. So there are a lot of times where I'm walking down the hallway and three children are talking to me all at the same time. And I'm like, "oh my gosh like this is what we really need to focus on." So a lot of times we're sitting there, we're playing a game, and we're working on whatever their skill is. Sometimes we're reading, I'm reading or they're reading. And then we're you know, working on vocabulary through that. We're working on using context clues to build their inferencing skills. Or we're just working on sounds. There are a lot of kids who are making �speech-sound errors, and I just do therapeutic work with them to help them be able to develop those sounds. Because it's important that they be able to be understood. Cal Rogers [00:39:29] Awesome, thank you. So what are, following up with that, what are some advantages or disadvantages of your job? Natalya Lakhtakia [00:39:40] Um, the work hours are really good. The only thing I would change is if I could start work at like, 8:15. That would just give me a little bit more time with my kid in the morning before I like, send him over to my neighbor's house. And I would be happy to stay until 3:20 for that. But I would say when you work in education, especially right now, you're really bonding experience with your coworkers. I mean, you're responsible for children and there are a lot of families that are really really struggling. Fort Edwards is a really depressed community. I'm still learning about it, but it's my understanding that they used to have a really successful factory there. And when the factory shut down, that really just impacted the community. So I have a lot of students that don't just need to come to school to get an education and to learn how to be like humans in the world and learn how to interact with each other, but they also need like love and support because their parents are really really struggling. They you know... I think a lot of times they think my son gets to like, enjoy breaks. I have kids on my caseload and I'm sure this is the case everywhere, but kids on my caseload that break is like a daunting time for them, and they're really relieved to come back to the structure of a school day. So I didn't really understand it when I interviewed. And they were like, you will get so much love working here. But it is definitely true. And I would call that both a benefit to my job which is that like, my kids are really really sweet and loving and we have such a nice time together and I just, I mean I love children in general. And also just a really sad part of my job, which is to know that like they need love from me because their parents are in such a bad position that they literally cannot meet the needs of their children the way that I can meet the needs of my child. And so that's both good and bad. I really like my coworkers. I like my school building. I like that I get to move around a lot. I spent a lot of time just sitting literally here at this desk, for seven years doing work at this computer. And so it's really nice to get to move around. You get to see, kids are so creative. You get to see what they're creating. You get to create things with them. Like my big thing is if I go into a classroom and they're doing an art project, me too. Like I want to do it as well. And to you know, to do that you get to what my kids think. Kids are really radical. I always love to say that "kids are the truest comrades." Because they are very very cool. And they're living in this very specific way when they're attending public school that just really builds their community ties. And then like as adults, we just don't get to have that in the same way. Especially without having like community centers, the way that I think that we should have them. And so I get to hear like a lot of really radical stuff from kids, and I love that. I get to read books with them, like it's just it's really nice to work in a school. And I had think forgotten that, working from home. Because working from home was fulfilling for me, and it was easy for me. And I still got to see my kids, and it was really fun. But working in a school, you just are in this very specific type of community that I think I wish could be expanded out more. I think that there are education reforms that are needed, for sure. It's not that I think public education is perfect, it's not. But I do think it is much better than just our general communities and existing in that is really amazing, I love that. And then also I will say, New York pays me really well. And I'm not saying that teachers don't deserve to get paid more like, we do. Like I think that my job is a lot more valuable than someone who plays basketball, for example. But I'm not a sports person in general but like I think like what I do, like I love Taylor Swift. But I think that her writing beautiful music maybe doesn't mean that she needs to be a billionaire when teachers should definitely get paid more for the work that we do. But that said like I also get paid significantly better than I got paid �before, in Utah and in New Mexico. Rhode Island was different because I worked you know, 40 hours a week year round. But I get like, the pay is really good. Cal Rogers [00:44:04] So going on to the Utah topic, my dad worked for a trucking company called "Driver Tech" out of Salt Lake City. So uh... Natalya Lakhtakia [00:44:11] That's cool. Cal Rogers [00:44:11] The University of Utah was my first choice for school, but I didn't get in. Natalya Lakhtakia [00:44:19] Well, that's their loss I'm sorry. Cal Rogers [00:44:21] It's okay. So you kind of answered all of my questions, so I'm gonna... Natalya Lakhtakia [00:44:26] Oh, okay! Cal Rogers [00:44:26] I'm gonna put it on the rest of the group, thank you. Zain Sundaram [00:44:35] What would you say is, some of the current local union issues? Natalya Lakhtakia [00:44:41] I mean Skidmore, honestly. It's really exciting that the nontenure track professors are, I guess instructors, are very close to getting you know their collective bargaining agreement done... Is what I was recently reading. I know the RAs were working on unionizing. Although I will admit that I lost track of where that was and what was happening. I also know you know, we had an attempt at unionizing the ALB1 Amazon warehouse. Which is in, I still don't know how to say it. If its Schodack or Shodack I forget. I think it's Schodack, about an hour away from here. But, you know people here work there. We did a really awesome job with unionizing Starbucks. Although, I'm now boycotting Starbucks. So for a while I was like, "I'm gonna go to the union ones." And now I'm like, "I don't need to go to Starbucks at all." So there's that kind of stuff happening. I know that there were some attempts at unionizing Spot Coffee, which was really exciting. But I think that what I appreciate about the area is that there is a lot of just solidarity between the unions. And I don't know how this compares to other places because I was not involved in this stuff before I moved to New York. And I moved to New York in like December 2014. So it hasn't even been you know, a decade yet. But here at least there's a lot of solidarity in the entire region, and the capital region is huge. But there's a lot of work that's being done to take care of each other. There's a lot of collaboration to like, support each other. There's some big union only projects coming up. So when there's a construction project there can be something called the PLA, a Project Labor Agreement. Which means that all of the labor will be union. And also all of the materials will be from union places like unionized...I don't know what the word is...industry? And so there's going to be a few of those. I think that the airport is one of them. And then there's some other bigger projects going on in terms of like the infrastructure in the area so like that's happening. But I think also, there's a lot of discussion going on. And there's a lot of solidarity when there are unions that don't have contracts. So, this is one thing that I can't talk a ton about because I'm on the school board. But the Saratoga Springs Teachers Association did not have a contract for two years. And, well that's misleading. They didn't have a contract for a year and a half. But negotiations are usually about six months. So for about two years they were working on a contract before they got one. And that included a contract that was voted down at the end of last school year. And it was really amazing to �me to watch the solidarity that was happening there and the work that they did. I mean, at one point we had a school board meeting with like 250 teachers at it, all in their union tshirts to show up with signs to basically be like "make this happen." And I thought that that was really amazing. I didn't really expect it I guess, even though I know that we have a strong union. The other thing that I think is really amazing is that. Um, well okay. So actually I will say the same thing happened at SUNY Empire where they didn't have a contract, so they did picketing. And people from different unions are coming. And so what I think is really amazing about unionizing is that you don't have to know the other people, and you don't have to work with the other people to show up and support them. Right? We're all in the working class, we're all together in this. Like the solidarity is so strong. And so I think that that's really amazing to see. I know that like the head of our teachers union was writing letters to Skidmore in support of the unionizing that was happening there. And the head of our CSEA, which is like the staff members of the district, did the same thing. And so they're showing up at pickets together. I think that's really incredible to see. And I will say like even when I feel really, really, really down about the current state of things in our country and world and like what I perceive to be the future. Or like what I'm worried will be the future, seeing like this kind of renewed sense of like labor and like that the working classes hold the tools to the future and the ruling classes clearly don't. I think that that's what really gives me hope. So, yeah. There's also some concerning labor stuff happening in the area, which I think is really interesting. And it gets back to kind of my view of liberalism. Which is that, liberalism is nice as a concept but in practice kind of falls apart. And so in Troy, we saw Capital Roots try to unionize. And they were like, "we're going to unionize." I had a couple friends who work there, and they were like "we're so excited to announce that we're going to do this work." And right away, the executive director and the board were like "Nope we'll just we'll recognize your union. You guys are unionized now. That's great. Like, you don't have to do all of the work. We'll just recognize it." And so everyone was like "Cool, this is great!" And then Capital Roots is basically going to be destroyed because of this. Because while they recognized the union, they then started to actively target different people and fire people. And there was like a lot of retaliation. So they like, recognize the union in concept because they knew that not doing that wouldn't be good. But then they have like many active National Labor Review Board violations that like they're found in the wrong. Capital Roots is falling apart. This is a group, I don't really know enough about what they do but they do like community gardening. And then they provide food to people in the area. So they're doing work that we can all agree is good. But they went on this kind of retaliation spree. My husband and I got to go and like be there to help picket with like Scabby the Rat and whatnot, which was really cool. My husband took off work to do that. But it's a reminder of like, unions aren't a nice idea. Unions are an ongoing, powerful practice. And so I think that sometimes in a place like New York where we are very liberal, we are very blue. Even in you know, like "Red Saratoga County." But like, it's not really right? Like Saratoga is very purple, that we can kind of recognize these good things, but then not actually support the practice. And so Capital Roots is now falling apart. And I think that that's really interesting. I also just like... This is weird to say because I assume that you're all in Gen Z. But I just like Gen Z gives me, like endless hope. Because I'm like. Gen Z with generally Gen X parents know so much and can see what these practices should look like. And I'm really excited for that, because I do think that we're going to see just kind of like a renewal of labor work. Hope Wahrman [00:51:57] Um, Yeah. And I kind of like to that vein of talking about like Gen Z and like their kind of hope for the future... Like what are what are some ways I mean, on Skidmore's campus is like one thing, but what are some ways that you think Skidmore students can sort of get involved in these unions? �Natalya Lakhtakia [00:52:21] So I think that the best way for any Skidmore student to get involved unfortunately costs money. But going to the labor breakfast. So the most recent one was just two days ago, and unfortunately I couldn't be there. But the first Friday of every month with a couple exceptions, I think May and September and July can kind of be iffy for them. But in general, the first Friday of the month there is a labor breakfast that happens at the Desmond Hotel. It's that hotel that's right off of Exit 4, so it's really close to the airport. And, it's a Union hotel. And so there's this labor breakfast where labor leaders and labor like union members and then also like electeds will all get together and talk about what's going on in the area. Because I think that what's going on in the area changes really rapidly from month to month. And so, you can learn about what's going on there. That's actually where I met Eric (Morser). Because I was going there with Minita, who is one of the city council members. And she was like "I'm going to bring my friend Eric from work." And I was like "cool!" And so he came to see it, and so he came to a really interesting one. Where we you know, we really just were talking about Palestine. And it was really interesting to see some of the leaders of the group try to shut down that conversation. And also really interesting to see one of the like, big labor leaders who the executive director... um and what is he? Yeah, he's the executive director of PEF, which is the Public Employees Federation. Get so angry about it, with him being in support of Israel. That he like threatened a woman who is Israeli, and like told her that her baby would be beheaded. Like it was really intense. So Eric got a very intense view of the labor breakfast. But that said, like it is a really awesome way to learn what's going on it is generally a really positive experience and the only reason why I can't go right now is because I have a job that's in-person and doesn't start at 10AM. But it's kind of your chance to learn what's going on in the area. And I think that that's really amazing. What I do know is going on right now close to here, is that the county workers are saying that they don't have a fair contract. And so there's some of the people who work for Saratoga County, I think they're CSEA, and so I know that they're doing pickets around the area. So I think that there's a way for students to get involved and to learn about that. I think it's really interesting that we're a very politically divided society. But when we're talking about the labor movement, that kind of doesn't matter as much, I guess. And I think that is because again, like the solidarity of the working class is so strong when you're unionized that views of like electoral politics just matter less. And I say that as somebody who like I would generally identify electoral politics as like my sports. Like I love to follow it, I love to be involved, I love to do my work, I love to know what's going on worldwide. But it's just you can set that aside when you're doing labor work. And so I think that that's really incredible to see. Because it doesn't really matter who's president. If you can't, like pay your bills and if you can't eat. Like, what matters is that you do the work to be able to do that with your one job. I also saw today that in Europe, something like 37% of people can identify that their job serves no purpose. Like they're not doing anything that's like, important to the continuing efforts of society. So I also know that, Bernie Sanders just introduced like a four-day work week bill into Congress. And I think that that's something that students should actively be involved in supporting. Because, like everybody could go do a four-day work week and our society would continue and people would have better lives and be happier and have more time for like, the joys of life. Without really very much changing. Hope Wahrman [00:56:28] Yeah. And I have one more, like our last question. But I also... It was interesting because during the pandemic, my high school had like a four day workweek. Like, the Friday of the week was "office hours." So like, you could go if you needed help, but like if you didn't have anything you needed help with and you were ahead on all your work like there was no class that day. And I think obviously there were some discrepancies with just working online, but in general like we were able to finish like �everything we had to for each unit. And like, learn the best that we could under those conditions. So, I definitely think a 4 day work week is a super cool thing that we could see in the future. That would work. Natalya Lakhtakia [00:57:11] And it's I mean, it's popular, right? Hope Wahrman [00:57:14] Yeah. Natalya Lakhtakia [00:57:14] Like my dad talks about it. And my dad is in his late 60s and is a professor. Like he's not working like in industry, right? Like he's he has like "a make your own hours" type of a job. And even he has like "yeah, people should have a four day workweek." Hope Wahrman [00:57:29] Yeah. And so thank you so much for meeting with us and talking to us. I could talk to you about this kind of thing for hours! Natalya Lakhtakia [00:57:38] Yes, me too. I love labor. Hope Wahrman [00:57:40] So I guess the final question is... Maybe it's a cheesy one I don't know. But I guess what is your advice to younger labor union organizers. Younger people just entering the workforce in general? Um, trying to kind of navigate their rights and their workplaces. Natalya Lakhtakia [00:58:04] Um...well. I don't think that I'm old, but I didn't know anything about this when I started working. So like when I started working, when I started working after grad school. When I started working in my school, they said "Check this box if you want to pay your union dues." And I turned to the person next to me and said, "Why wouldn't I pay my union dues?" And she was like, "There's no reason to not pay your union dues, like the pay off is much more like just pay them." And I said "Okay," and I checked that box. And that was like my total understanding of unions, was that my coworker said to check the box. And so because it is an option to not pay your dues which really sucks, to not pay into your society I guess into your community. But, so I would say like learning about this understanding that like basically all the good things that we have in terms of like the structures of society or because of the labor movement. And then also I will tell you, I get a lot of recruiting calls. And so, I do think that you have to balance like being able to live with having ideals. Like I strongly feel that. Like I have a lot of ideals, and I have a lot of beliefs for how things should be, and I also know how things are. And so I think that there needs to be a balance there where you can work for better, but also like you have to be able to eat. And you have to be able to pay your bills and you have to also like, not be just laying in bed in the dark because you don't have a job, right? Like so like there's all these things going on. But what I do now is even though I'm not looking for a job, I think I'm probably in it at Fort Edward for the long haul. I really like it, and I am happy there. After three months but, still. Even though I'm not looking for a job, every single time that a recruiter calls me, every single time I get an email or a text or a message on LinkedIn I respond and I say "Is this a union job? Because I will only take a union job." And, it's really interesting because some of the recruiters are not unionized either, they're doing their jobs. And so it's one of those things where it opens up a conversation. And I've started to kind of push for that. And what I'll tell people is "I will not take a job if it's not union." And I encourage other people to do the same, because I'm certainly not the only one getting these calls. And so I think that if you have the ability to do that, just getting out that kind of a message matters. I also think even if you get a job that's not union like my last one, and you have the ability to support union work in your area. Like being aware of what's going �on and showing up to support is worth it every single time. And so... um well with one exception, which is that I will say. Police say that they have unions, but they don't. Because unions are for workers and police are not workers. And so what they have are whatever they are called, um the...what are they called? Police Benevolence Associations. And they can have solidarity with other workers when they want to have that like public relations view. Of like, "Look, we stand with the teachers" or whatever. But I will never, ever stand with them because that kind like police come from Pinkertons like they're union breakers. They're not union supporters. But all of that aside, I think that any time you're showing up for actual workers like you're making the world better. I'm a firm believer, as even as somebody who doesn't who loves electoral work, that if you are organizing your own community you are doing something that is vastly more important than any sort of electoral work is. And there are times where I like...I will say, I do think that being on the school board can at times put me at odds with my view of the working class. And I also still think it's worthwhile to do it, because I think that having my viewpoint on the board is important, and I'm not the only one with my viewpoint. But I think that if you are doing the work to try to get a union job, getting your job and then doing the work to unionize it while knowing your rights. I think if you are connecting with other unions to support them. And then I just think in general,like even just setting union work aside, doing the work to support the working class. Which is like, all of us. And not doing the work to support the ruling class, gives you... It builds class consciousness. And understanding class, and how this division of the classes and dividing us into different groups only supports the ruling class, helps you navigate the world. And helps you have, I guess strong principles to follow. And so even if you're not in a union job, and even if you feel like you're being mistreated at work, it will help you move forward to something better. And I think that having solidarity with your fellow workers is the only way we're going to move forward as a society. Stay in New York! Because New York is like, I think the second most unionized state. Hope Wahrman [01:03:04] Wow. That's very impressive. And it's the second most? Natalya Lakhtakia [01:03:08] I think so. I think I saw Hawaii is higher? Something like that, I don't remember right now. But New York is like around 20%? This is...I actually might be remembering this wrong. We're definitely second, though. So you may want to look this up. But, if you stay in New York you have a higher chance of being in a union if you work in public education or any sort of public office. Like if you're working for the governor's office, or the state, or the federal government like you have a higher chance of being in a union.... If you're a postal worker. And then you can work for better for you and your fellow workers. But also you can unionize where you're at, my husband has looked into it for his job. Hope Wahrman [01:03:43] Yeah. Well yes, thank you so much again. Natalya Lakhtakia [01:03:46] Yeah! Zain Sundaram [01:03:46] Yeah, thank you. Hope Wahrman [01:03:46] I like really appreciate you coming in and taking the time to meet with us. Um, yeah. This was a wonderful interview. � Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Cal Rogers, Zain Sundaram, Hope Wahrman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Natalya Lakhtakia Location The location of the interview Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio Recording Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:03:54 Record Creation Date Day/Month/Year of record creation/edit September 8th, 2025 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Natalya Lakhtakia Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 7th, 2024 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Saratoga Labor History Digital Archive Description An account of the resource Natalya Lakhtakia is a speech-language pathologist in the Fort Edward School District and a proud NYSUT member. The daughter of immigrants and from a family of educators, she has been on the Saratoga Springs Board of Education since 2019 and has served as board vice-president, and on the finance, audit, policy, superintendent evaluation, DEI, and counseling committees. She is currently serving as board president. She lives in Saratoga Springs with her husband and son. She is active with Capital District DSA, NYS Break the Bonds, and does work with Skidmore’s Education Department to support future educators. Language A language of the resource English Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Eric Morser Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History