Oral History Program Candadai Seshachari Interviewed by Ruby Licona 20 February 2008 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Candadai Seshachari Interviewed by Ruby Licona Special Projects Librarian 20 February 2008 Copyright © 2008 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State University Oral History Project began conducting interviews with key Weber State University faculty, administrators, staff and students, in Fall 2007. The program focuses primarily on obtaining a historical record of the school along with important developments since the school gained university status in 1990. The interviews explore the process of achieving university status, as well as major issues including accreditation, diversity, faculty governance, changes in leadership, curricular developments, etc. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Seshachari, Candadai, an oral history by Ruby Licona, 20 February 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Candadai Seshachari 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Candadai Seshachari. It was conducted February 20, 2008 and concerns his recollections and experiences with Weber State College. The interviewer is Ruby Licona. RL: This an interview held with Candadai Seshachari, who retired from Weber State University in 2001 after several decades of service. He retired as full professor and chair of the English Department. Sesh, let’s start first with you telling us about your background and information about where you were born, where you went to school, etc. CS: I was born in India in one of the southern states, Andhna Pradesh, in Hyderabad. It’s a huge city. It’s a high tech city these days. I came to the University of Utah on a Fulbright Fellowship to do my doctorate degree in 1959. Then in early 1964 I got my degree and went back home. I came back to Weber in 1969 with family and since then we’ve been here. I did have my undergraduate and master’s degrees from India from Osmania University. All my degrees are in English language and literature. RL: What was your specialty when you did your doctoral research? CS: My specialty was in American Studies. I came here for American Literature specialization and took a whole bunch of degree coursework. As a matter of fact, I have a graduate certificate in American Studies from the University of Utah in addition to my Ph. D. So it was an immersion in American culture and background, history, philosophy, literature… RL: What was the topic of your dissertation? 2 CS: My dissertation was on Gandhi and the American Scene. N ot many people know that in the late 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, Gandhi had a great impact on the American mind, mostly the churches. I wanted to investigate the impact of this. Later on we know that Martin Luther King, Jr. followed Gandhi’s techniques in his own civil rights movement. So my dissertation was on Gandhi and the American mind. RL: On the influence Gandhi had on the American mind? CS: The churches, the popular imagination, and such. It was certainly in the larger American involvement, both to the person and the idea of his non-violence. RL: You came here in 1969 with family; Neila, your wife, and children? CS: Roopa and Priya came with me, and often have been home since then. Neila passed away in 2002, but the children are here. One daughter is in Salt lake and the second one is in San Francisco and both of them…the older one who’s an M.D. and is a highly successful pediatrician, is following a second career now teaching grade school half time. The second one is a big time attorney for Wells Fargo in their corporate offices in San Francisco. So both the kids are here, and Roopa graduated from WSU and Priya from Smith College. RL: What were your experiences that led you to Weber? What attracted you here? CS: It’s kind of a story that won’t ever happen again because of changes in laws. My family and I were going to upstate New York to one of the grad schools there. I had written a letter to a professor of mine from the University of Utah to say I was going to upstate New York, and maybe next summer we would come and see him. I think this was when Bob Mikkelson was the chair of the English Department at Weber. He told me they were looking for somebody with my kind 3 of background in American Studies and American Literature in the nineteenth century. At one of the parties, I think the Christmas party, he was inquiring if there were any candidates that they could recommend, and they all said, “Get Sesh. He’s going to New York, but he would love to come here because Utah is in his blood.” And out of the sheerest blue I got a contract from Weber State for a job I had not applied for. These were all things that could happen long ago in 1969, but now you have affirmative action and equal employment and different things. It was signed by Dello Dayton who was dean of the School of Arts, Letters, and Sciences, and it said, “If you are agreeable to this contract, sign it, keep the goldenrod copy and then send the original back.” We didn’t take long to decide to come here. I came in September. The story gets a little more interesting. I came in September to be here, for the beginning of school. I thought I was coming for just a couple of years, because both Neila and I had wonderful jobs at my university back in India, Osmania, and we thought a couple years would be good here, and then we would go home. I applied to come here and then the consulate- I knew lots of people in the American consulate because I was an American specialist for the consul general- to get me here in a hurry decided the easiest way was to get me an immigrant visa. They said, “Take an immigrant visa and stay for as long as you want, and come back.” I got the immigrant visa, but Neila and the children were not able to come, because they did not have that many immigrant slots open. I came and my office then was in the Music Department wing in the Browning Center. Across from me was VaLoy Boothe. She was the vice chair of 4 the Democratic Party, I think, and she said, “What about your wife and kids?” And I said, “They are waiting for the visa” and she said, “come into my office.” She picked up the phone and called Senator Frank (Ted) Moss, and said, “I’ve got this person and his wife and children are in India waiting for a visa. Is there a way you could help?” Then he forwarded the call to his office and they took all the details. Would you believe it that within four or five days, I had a letter from Senator Moss saying, “I’ve taken this up with the Secretary of State and he should let me know within a week.” Within another four days I got another letter from him saying, “Secretary Henry Kissinger assures me your wife and children will join you in time for Christmas.” Neila, Roopa and Priya were here on the twelfth of December 1969. Neila told me she a phone call from the consulate general saying, “Come on over. We have the visas ready for you.” They also got the same immigrant visas, and everything was fine. The kids were here and they were doing well in school and everybody was happy and well-adjusted and so we decided to stay and sink roots. That’s what happened and we became citizens in 1976. RL: Did you celebrate Christmas that year? CS: We did, and the first thing we did was, because of the kids, was to get a tree, and then we put up the tree and the first thing that happened, the first morning, the little gifts started appearing under the tree. The kids had bought some gifts and stuff, and so our first Christmas was our time of joy and celebration. RL: That’s wonderful. 5 CS: President Miller was university president then. So that gives you the background of how I got here. RL: What was the intellectual climate of your department? CS: The English department has always been a very solid department and very into faculty involvement and leadership things on campus. When I came, I found there were only three other Ph. D.’s in the English Department: Levi Peterson, Tom Burton and Floyd Woodfield. Everyone else like Mikkelson, Gordon Allred, Merlin Cheney and the others got their Ph. D.’s after I came. RL: Was Weber a four year institution then? CS: It was a four year institution. I think about five or six years earlier it had become a four year institution. That’s part of it, it’s partly that the transition had occurred from a two year school to a four year school. Neila reminded me, that in 1969 when we came, where we now have the memorial grove on the south east side of the Browning building there used to be a little hitch for horses and that one of the instructors in English, Cluster Nilsson, used to ride in, occasionally, on horseback. It said “no horse beyond this hitching post,” that’s what it was in 169. The campus was much smaller and we had spectacular real estate at the foot of the hill. Where what is now the Administration Building and a little bit of the pond, was the LDS Institute. RL: I suppose the hitching post by what is now the Browning Center would have been the edge of the campus then? CS: It is much larger in real estate. What do you call the round building and the sciences building? 6 RL: The Science Lab? CS: Yes, Science Lab, those were all there. The Business Building, of course, the Social Science Building and the Administration Building were not in. RL: But it was still the small Buildings 1, 2, 3, and 4? CS: They were part of the campus. It was a lively campus. I think the student population was about 8,000 and now there’s what 18,000, or something? So we’ve grown. It was a cohesive school. One thing that President William Miller did when he came to the campus was park in different parts of the campus and walk a different way. I asked him, “How come you park in different places?” He said to me, “Sesh, that gives me a chance to walk to my office from a different part of the campus.” And then he would greet students and walk together with them. He would know the students by name, and then he would say, “How is your grandma? How is your grandpa’s leg doing?” He knew students, their histories and their backgrounds. Remarkable! RL: Very hands on? CS: Very hands on. He and his wife Mary had a influence on campus life. RL: Would you describe the atmosphere in your department as one of primarily teaching rather than concentrating on research? CS: It was primarily teaching. I suppose even now it’s primarily teaching, and research is being done because that’s part of the mission statement for the university. And even though the faculty are doing a lot of research, there is no such thing as primarily teaching, where you just teach and don’t write. RL: No, especially not for English. 7 CS: Not for English. When I became the chair, we made a policy that we were not going to hire any non-Ph.D.’s any more, and that’s how we hired a bunch of Ph. D.’s. Practically everybody that you see now was hired during my time as the chair of the department. RL: When did you become chair? CS: I became the chair in 1984. Earlier than that from 1974 to 1982 I was what was called the Director of General Education. It was a special position, much like a dean, but they did not call it the dean, they called it the director. When I left, the position was abolished. I was the only Director of General Education in the university’s history. It was during my time as Director of General Education that I created the Bachelor of Integrated Studies as a degree. We had a B. S. degree and a B. A. degree of course. The Bachelor’s of Integrated Studies was a different concept of pooling students’ specialties… RL: To give them an opportunity to touch on different fields and incorporate what they were studying? CS: Yes, it was part of the national university scene because everybody is in a major and minor situation, that’s the traditional degree, but some people had a general degree. People thought that, at the universities, students should be able to go through and not specialize in anything. And I decided what made our degree unique from other degrees is that when you get a four year degree you need to have some kind of specialization, without that there’s nothing to your knowledge. So the B.I.S. was basically a three minors concept. Three minors meaning, that you had three specialties, but at the quality of a minor. It was not a standard 8 minor, but it was individualized for that student. So the department would sign special contracts for a student that did a specialty in English, the English Department chair signed off, and then he or she had to do more, in Nursing for instance. Lots of nurses used the degree, because at that time there was no degree in Nursing on campus, and the nurses needed a degree. So the B. I. S. degree was utilized by some departments, in technology and also in health professions. RL: So that gave them an opportunity to get the education and a degree? CS: Yes. It also addressed questions of where the student’s strengths were and, when they were inclined, to specialize in that kind of thing. RL: I would think it gave them an opportunity to explore different things without a total commitment. CS: Where I think it gained immediate acceptance of quality was, if you were to take a history major or English major, immediately you thought of a minor in political science or philosophy or something. But things were changing so rapidly that if you had an English major, you could take a business minor and you could take a technical sales minor. So you could put things together to address issues of the demand in the market place. Normally you take a minor that’s similar in basis to your major, so that your strengths are alike. An English major with a philosophy minor, or a history minor it gives you some strengths, but now your English major could take an accounting minor and could take a sales minor so that you had specialization. RL: And be prepared for different careers? 9 CS: So it was a good thing. I see that the program is still thriving. Library Science is one of those areas that benefitted an area, because we did not give a degree in Library Science, per se, but then people could get a minor in it. It worked well, especially for the students. So that came from the time when I was Director of General Education. RL: What would you say about the campus in general in terms of the intellectual climate and some of the colleagues you encountered from other areas? CS: You know, it’s always been a solid campus. It was always student centered. I would say, about the time of Vietnam, the opposition to the Vietnam War was sweeping other campuses, but basically nothing happened on our campus. I remember we had the convocation series. Convocations then, I think, were much better attended than they were a little later. There was a high student attendance. Lots of nationally and internationally very prominent skeapers came and students attended. So the campus was a solid, tight campus and I think then, like now, although I can’t say too much about now because I’ve been retired six years. In the afternoons the campus was basically deserted. Our students always had jobs to keep, things to take care of. I don’t know the figures, but I think on an average about 50% of these students were married then as now. So after about one o’clock there were not too many students around. And then, when you’re talking about how I started the B. I. S., you might call me, as well, the father the of the Saturday morning classes. There were no Saturday classes until the early ’80. Then I was pushing for Saturday classes, and a lot of people were saying “Sesh, you don’t know about Utah. You don’t know about our community, you 10 don’t know about our students. No students are going to come on Saturday.” So we had a meeting in Emil Hanson’s office. I sat with him, Emil then was the registrar, I talked to him, and he said, “let’s meet together.” There were two or three other chairs there and I said to the assembled, “I don’t know about you, but I am going to offer English classes. The idea is we’ll announce it to the kids in the building and then pull some faculty in to teach the classes.” And the classes were not hard to offer students just came the very first time. People hadn’t realized that on Saturdays it was easier for a kid to be babysat. So people who took classes in the evening also started to take classes on Saturdays. It was very successful. We were the first university in the state to offer classes on Saturday morning. I still remember when the University of Utah offered Saturday morning classes a dozen years later and then the Signpost ran a little article to say, “University of Utah is the first one to carry.” Not the Signpost, some other newspaper. Emil Hanson wrote a letter to say no, it was Weber State University under Sesh. I still remember that. I might have a copy of that letter some place. So he set the record straight on that. One other thing let me just say here the parking lot west of the present Social Science Building was completely in the dark in those day, there were no lights at all. It was during President Brady’s time that one of our students, who happened to be my work study student, was raped on campus. So I took that to President Brady and he acted immediately. Between listening and his making a decision, it took him this much time [snaps fingers]. And he said, “Let us help.” So, he put all the flood lights on top of the building in order to light up the parking 11 lots. Those are some of the things that (when you ask questions) come crowding in my mind, little things, but important things. RL: They’re part of the history. CS: Part of the history, absolutely. RL: How did your experiences here differ from what you had known at Osmania and at the University of Utah? Were the atmospheres totally different? CS: WSU was a four year school. Osmania was a graduate school and I had several students who had completed their doctorate degrees under me. But here it was what you call an undergraduate school, where they took part of their work in general education and then part of the work in a major and some in a minor and some electives. All of the perennial fights on campus were about electives. As majors became more and more demanding the electives basically disappeared, and you needed to have something like. 180 quarter hours, toward graduation. The demands of majors went up and the demand of minors went up, and so more general education courses were offered. Students started taking more courses, spending more time on campus in order to get a degree. RL: Did you notice a difference in the quality or dedication of the students from when you got here to when you retired? CS: I would say that the quality stayed about the same because our students are good students. They follow the instructor and complete the assignments and the courses. Our students would look you in the eye and then when you ask them the question, “Did you read for this class?” And “No.” “Did you come prepared with the assignment?” They would look you in the eye and say yes or no. There 12 was no need to lie or dissemble and the students were hard working. The problem, of course, is that a high number of our students are married and have jobs, sometimes two jobs, three jobs, whatever it takes to get the whole life going. So they’re as likely to cut corners as students elsewhere. But one of the things that I noticed throughout my thirty-two years here is our rate of absenteeism is on the high side, I should imagine, although I do not know the national figures. It may be hard for the course, when you miss three, four, five students in a class of twenty-five. Then you have problems. I think the departments and then the institution started addressing this issue of absenteeism and suddenly what happened was that in the requirements for the course there would be attendance. You needed to be attending at least 80% or something. I personally never had an attendance policy because you could not force a student to be in a class and grade the student with attendance being part of the grade. The class should be interesting enough, fascinating enough and be one of quality, so that students feel compelled to come. I’ve had problems with attendance policies, but as chair of the department, I would see my faculty giving out all these handouts on day one, and attendance requirements would be one of them. It was one way of making sure that the bodies were present. All that attendance did was provide seat time. Students came and sat in a chair. There were other ways of addressing this and I think some people did, putting in place team work, the way you designed your assignments, and the way you required what was due in different ways. When we switched from quarters to semesters absenteeism became a little more prominent because suddenly you go from ten 13 weeks to sixteen weeks and it is a long drag. Then we came up with the idea of spring break to give them time to come up for air, student they were gasping so much. The university like every other institution decided to do a few things to help students. RL: You talked earlier about coming here with your family. You arrived on campus in a situation where you were not a member of the primary religion, and were an immigrant from another country. Were there other immigrant faculty on campus when you arrived? CS: I think Dr. T. R. Reddy was the other one from India, but we lacked minorities. I don’t think we had Hispanic or black professors. WSU was basically a glorified community college, totally white. But Neila had no problems breaking into the community, and that reflected our personality. Even now we are very involved in the community. We were all in support of doing things in the community, and we quickly made friends. RL: What about your children in school? Did they encounter any kind of discrimination? CS: I think Neila encountered it. The children of course they found their own niche of friends and most of them I think were non-LDS, Catholics, etc. but also LDS. Children have a way of making friends. I think you mentioned this connection, but Neila, who was also a full time faculty, confronted quite a bit of discrimination on campus. RL: Because of being foreign, or being… CS: Gender. Yes, gender. 14 RL: Gender, that’s what I was going to ask. She was expected to sit in a corner and be quite? CS: Yes. I know that at one of the faculty meetings, those were days when faculty would begin a meeting with a prayer! That went by the wayside. So one of the chairs at the end of the meeting looked at Neila and said to her, “For the next meeting, Neila, would you bake a few cookies and bring them to the department meeting?” And Neila looked at him and said that she’s very busy. She had a full load of classes and she did not think she would be able to make cookies. And then she looked at me while she said “How about you making cookies, Levi?” I think it was Althea, his wife, who made cookies. There was no question of Neila making the cookies. That went over board When we first came there was a faculty wives’ association. The faculty were all male and the faculty wives were supposed to support their husbands. Neila belonged to that faculty wives’ association for a year, year and a half, but I think she succeeded in torpedoing the association because it was not her idea of things. And so in ‘72-‘73 I think, the faculty wives’ association died because a lot of things. One of the major things that Ireila and I think impacted was the question of health insurance. If a couple was working, as in my and Neila’s case, the male was the head of the family. Neila and I always had lunch together and we were talking and she asked me, “Sesh, why don’t I be the head of the family because I manage the account?” And then we called Stan Greenhalgh. He said it was the Utah law and then Neila and I said to him, “Would you send us a copy of where it is in Utah law.” And Stan called a couple of days later and said it’s not 15 the Utah law, it’s the practice on campus and that there was no such law. Neila said to him, “we are coming over immediately and I’m going to sign up as the head and Sesh is going to be a dependent.” We did that. Except that within a month or two as Neila and I were talking, she said, “You know ours are two full time jobs. Why should one be a dependent of the other?” RL: Why can’t we both be treated as independent employees. CS: Both be independent. Because that’s significant for insurance, because under EMIA you got 80% and then the other 20% came out of your pocket. But if you there were two, you got the 80% and the 20% that one day was not covered by you, it was covered by your spouse, so it totaled a 100%. During lunch I typed and as Neila stood by my side and dictated a letter challenging this thing. There was some history to it, because one of the vice presidents about four or five years earlier had told Neila, “Why do you want insurance? Sesh has insurance you don’t need insurance; you are a dependent?” and that kind of set her off. RL: I can just imagine. CS: Neila took care of a lot of this kind discrimination with lots of businesses as well. She would say “the first time ever you come across an act of discrimination should be the last time you see the face of that discrimination! You should clear it up!” So we wrote a letter to President Brady and we ran into him a couple of weeks after that by the clock tower. He said, “Sesh, the argument you raised, you are right and we are going to grant independent insurance standing to the spouses. Had I not thought it was right, I would not have approved it.” I said to President Brady, “had I not thought it was right I would not have asked for it.” And 16 then, for the first time, we found there were sixty couples on campus who benefited directly from it because lots of faculty wives worked in the administration or in the registrar’s office. RL: Support staff? CS: Support staff and a lot of them were in the P.E. Department. I would say Neila was directly responsible for that. RL: Did she begin working as soon as she arrived? CS: No, she did not have a Ph.D. She had a master’s and she was an instructor back in India at Osmania. She finished her degree within two years at the University of Utah, going down three days a week, and she got her degree with distinction. Then she worked for a year or so teaching English at the Skills Center North [now Ogden- Weber ATC] where Brent Wallace was the president. There was a national search by Weber for a person in 20th century American Literature, and she applied and was selected for it. She joined the faculty full time, I think, in 1973. RL: How did you handle the situation administratively when you became chair of the department? CS: That was not a problem because there were several people across the system where the husband or wife was chair. For instance, at Utah State University the chair of chemistry was the wife and the husband was a full professor. What we did when she came aboard was that Sherwin Howard, who was the dean, Neila, and I signed an agreement that I would never be involved in her reviews at all. I never was involved. 17 RL: It was a memorandum of understanding? CS: It was a contractual thing. Neila reported for all things except for scheduling directly to the dean. Naturally there was a potential conflict of interest that had to be avoided. RL: So in addition to breaking ground with the B. I. S. program and the Saturday morning classes, what other kinds of activities did you two take part in? CS: We did a lot of stuff on campus and, of course, off campus. We were very busy on the community scene. RL: Did you two become politically involved after your citizenship? CS: Yes. We were politically involved, but not in terms of a party, the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. We were always involved in lots of community issues. One of the things, as an example, was that Neila spent a good deal of time with the county library, Neila was always the spokesperson for the county library. The director was Mary Petterson followed by Lynnda Wangsgard. They would ask Neila to make presentations to the county board and to the county people. RL: Was she on the library board? CS: She was not on the library board. One of the things that happened to Neila was that during President Carter’s time there was a White House conference on information systems, just before the computer took off. There were six people elected from Utah to represent the state. All the six were elected by the legislature and Neila was one of those who went to the White House conference. Neila came back home excited, and I said “Who was the keynote speaker?” She 18 said, “You don’t know. It was the governor from Arkansas and I shook hands with him. I have met the next president of the United States.” It was Bill Clinton! She was so impressed with him as an extraordinary person. Neila and I were both on everybody’s list for speaking to organizations, the community, and luncheon groups. And when we first came most people did not know much about where India was, and we became some kind of ambassadors for doing intercultural things. We did a lot of stuff around culture. RL: So you did community things. What did you develop in terms of a social life? CS: We were very busy. We were part of lots of things and belonged to the Newcomers Club, the Rotary Club, and a number of other clubs and so that was at the social end. We began to go to anything anybody asked us to up and down the Wasatch Front. We were in high demand as Sunday speakers in churches, Unitarian, even LDS, and Episcopalian. We had a whole network of things we belonged to, pot luck groups, or dinner groups. RL: You mentioned Dr. Reddy being here and Raj and Priti Kumar came later? CS: They came later. RL: Quite a bit later or… CS: A little later, but not a quite a bit. They came in the mid 70’s, I think. RL: Did you start to form an Indian community? CS: There are about ten couples, basically from India. There are a lot more, but these are the older couples. We started a potluck group, people we often meet at different people’s places once a month. It’s been fifteen to eighteen or twenty years and it’s still here. One of the things about Indian men is that they don’t go 19 into the kitchen. It’s one of those things, maybe it’s universal, but they don’t ever do so. In order to take care of that, we began on the Sunday after Mother’s Day, to have a Mother’s Day party where just the men cooked without the help of women. And those traditions for over twenty years are still growing strong and lots of men have become expert cooks because of that. RL: So real men can cook? FC: Real men can cook! RL: From the YCC? FC: Yes, from the YCC. Roberta Dustin who was the secretary in charge of this, I was then the interim dean of the College of Arts and Humanities. She came to me with Gaye Littleton, who was the director of YCC. They worked closely together. I’d started several programs there, such as showing foreign movies free, and then we started offering how to write resumes, and then John Schwiebert went and taught these courses. We did a lot of things for the community. Because of that, Roberta Dustin came to me and said “is there any other thing we could do?” I’d just finished reading Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, that was very popular. I said, “Real men can cook. Why don’t we do that?” She found that was a good idea and that’s how Real Men got started. RL: You were a trend setter in all aspects of your life. CS: Well just a little. Then we began with RAMP ZAP is the Salt Lake version, RAMP is ours; recreation, arts, music and parks. Neila came up with the idea that we do a one-tenth-of-a-cent tax, that is one penny per dollar, or one dime for ten dollars. We developed this idea and decided that we would do it and take it to the 20 voters. Then she passed away and I took it over and the voters approved it. Three million plus dollars flowed into Weber County to support arts, recreation, parks, and museums. I’m the chair of the distribution council, the chair of the board that makes recommendations for all of this. I’ve got strong companies working on it. So lots of things… RL: There’s no sitting back and just resting during retirement? CS: I don’t think so. That’s in the old idea where you got a gold wrist watch and then two tickets to go to Hawaii or some place. Those days are gone. A high percentage of older people are working, holding a second job after retirement or doing other things. I was also involved a great deal in conversion from quarters to semesters, because the English Department was large. I worked very closely with people in registration and the English Department was the first one to get the centralized computer system to begin computer registration. We developed how it worked. We did a lot of stuff. When I was the chair of the Faculty Senate we did a lot of things for faculty and the curriculum. RL: When were you chair of the Faculty Senate? CS: I was chair of the Faculty Senate the last three or four years before I retired, that’s ’97 to ’01. We did a lot of things, including institutionalizing ways of recognizing faculty governance. RL: Did your position as chair of the department and your administrative responsibilities take you away from interacting with the students? 21 CS: No, I always taught a class or two. I always loved to. Somehow or the other, it may be a gift or a better way of managing time, I was chair of the department and chair of the faculty senate at the same time. I was able to do that and meet with the president and the provost, David Eisler when I was there, on a routine weekly basis. It’s something that you have a talent for. You plug things in and then do those things. RL: Then you live by that calendar? CS: Live by that calendar, and do those things. You think, this time could have been taken up by other things, sure, you always find time. You always prioritize and you do those things. RL: As an international faculty member were you able to become involved with international students? CS: Not really, but we were able to advise the students. We were able to do other things. One of the things I did was get a grant from the Saudi Arabian government to run an ESL program. That was the precursor for our English as a Second Language program. Prior to that we got a special grant from the Saudi Arabian government to teach their WSU English and then get them into technology classes. We got a grant and we began what was called STEPPS, I’ve forgotten what the acronym stood for. On the piggy back of that, we got another grant to train Japanese Airlines flight attendants in English through continuing education. That was another program we got and out of these two sprung our English as a Second Language program in the English Department. If you spend a full professional life in a profession like teaching, I was here for thirty-two years, 22 and if you’re fairly active and in a leadership position then you begin to make an impact. I have not touched on other things, for instance, President Joseph Bishop. Those were heady times. He was basically forced to step down. I think I was one of seven people who signed a famous document asking for him resignation. RL: Tell me about that. CS: When you talk to Tom Burton, ask him, I know that you are going to be talking to Tom Burton, he could tell you. He was one of the signatories, he, I, Levi, I think Dick Sadler, and about two or three others and president Bishop’s tenure saw a general break down of morale. President Bishop came in the mid 1970’s after President William Miller. And even though he had his roots here, when he came from Florida he did not have to much experience. He had been head of some two year community school and he brought with him a live wire by the name of Dwight Burrill who thought he and President Bishop could change the university. They had strong ideas of how universities are run and how especially Weber State was run. You know, we have our own personality. We’ve got a background. We’ve got our own history. They started to put their weight into too many things and Bishop did not want to listen to the Faculty Senate. He marginalized the Faculty Senate, and wanted to redo General Education totally. That’s how I got to be the Director of the General Education program, because I had been a chair of the General Education committee that designed the gen. ed. program. There was a search committee established of which Richard Roberts, who is now retired, was the 23 chair. I was interviewed and chosen as the director. There was lots of friction between President Bishop and the faculty and on one Saturday morning there was a huge meeting in the ballroom of faculty. People got up and spoke and I think there was a small committee of two or three people, one of whom was Tom Burton, that met with the Institutional Council, the Board of Trustees was then called Institutional Council. Dale Browning, an attorney in town, was president of the Institutional Council, so they met one morning and gave him the letter demanding that the president step down. They drew up a charter. RL: A “no confidence” kind of thing? CS: There was no confidence. I think the faculty took a no confidence vote that almost passed at the meeting. But we thought it was probably good not to pass it, instead to go the other way and demand a resignation without making it too public. Bishop had lost the total confidence of the faculty. It was also a question of cronies. He started operating through cronies. Two things that happened during President Bishop’s time was the old Arts, Lectures and Sciences, the big school of which Dello Dayton was the dean, was broken up in three colleges: the Humanities, which later on became the College of Arts and Humanities, which was done to show that arts was also part of the college because there were the visual arts and other arts, the College of Social Sciences, and the College of Science. So it became three different colleges and there were three different deans. The first dean of Social Sciences was Larry Evans, and the dean of the College of Humanities was Robert Mikkelson, and the third was Garth Welch, the chemistry chair who became the Dean of Sciences. The other thing was that in 24 this time the Dee Events Center was built. So even as we were fighting and things were chaotic and things were in turmoil… RL: Things were still happening? CS: In the classroom you met your students. RL: Was there an idea of divide and conquer by breaking up the colleges? CS: That was partly behind it, because they thought Dello Dayton as the dean of the old College of Art, Lectures, and Sciences was too powerful. Therefore they wanted to break his control and they came up with this idea. It did happen, but the faculty was so much for Dello that he was made the Dean of Curriculum. Later on, when Bishop left, Dello became the Vice President of Academic Affairs, which office later changed during the time of Bob Smith to provost. Quite a bit was done during Bob Smith’s term when he became the provost. If I were to look back I would say those were extraordinary times, heady times, times when lots of wonderful things happened that define Weber State. It was the time that we became a University. RL: You’ve mentioned Presidents Miller, Bishop and Brady. After that came Nadauld and Thompson. CS: Nadauld was there for a shorter time. There was also a little bit of unhappiness he caused and finally he left to take a job with Pacific Corp or for some private company and that didn’t do well. That went kaput, not kaput, but it fell on bad days and he left and then he taught at BYU. I’ve lost touch with what happened. Then, of course, President Thompson was a very able president, a very understanding president. He was very amenable to faculty rights and privileges 25 and during all these times. This was the time when the Policies and Procedures Manual, the famous PPM, came out. During those earlier times the Faculty Senate was called the Academic Council and then we changed from Academic Council to Faculty Senate. And this might be of interest to you- there was a library committee and we ran into some trouble in the Library. I was the chair of the committee. The Faculty Senate said, “We are going to appoint you as the head of the Library Committee to sort out problems.” There was Mr. James Tolman who was the librarian and his right hand man, assistant, was Craige Hall. It was during that time, after Tolman’s retirement, that Craige Hall became the librarian. We handled several issues: how and who did the ordering of books and the sciences said “Form books are not as important as journals. Journals are more important, therefore we need to have journals,” and “how do you spend the money, we need to have an input in budget,” and “where do you find money?” The argument went thus: “literary classic is a literary classic, it stays literary classic no matter what; Shakespeare doesn’t age, but in chemistry and physics you write a book and it takes six years to print and then by the time you’ve done, everything has changed.” Journals were therefore more important. So we solved these things, and authorized more journals and more runs of journals were made available. We did a lot of stuff and we got a lot more microfiche, a lot more things. You know, people talk of libraries as print media. Then we started going into supporting the classroomdocumentaries and other films were emerging. Technology was very different and then so we bought lots more VCR players and then the question came… 26 RL: More media? CS: More media and then it had to be permanent in each classroom and so we funded screens for every classroom. Previously there hadn’t been screens and you used the wall. And then you had to lug in the equipment from some place else. When I first came we did not have Xerox machines. We had those resographs or Thermofax, you know you put a stencil in the machine… RL: A mimeograph? CS: Mimeograph, yes. And you had to crank it and everything got inky and you made copies that were messy. RL: And it smelled? CS: And it smelled. When the faculty wanted typewriters you went to inventory and got a discarded one. That’s what we do now, too, with computers. We get somebody else’s discarded computer. But things are… RL: They’re progressing. CS: Oh my gosh, they are! RL: You mentioned that President Thompson was… CS: He was a good man. RL: A good man. I know that there was more emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism under him. CS: There was. RL: What are your recollections of that? CS: President Thompson created an administrative assistant reporting to him directly, and I think it was Forrest Crawford. 27 RL: Assistant to the President for Diversity? CS: Yes. He did and then he went on a sabbatical. He is back I think. RL: And Richard Ulibarri was in there for a little bit? CS: I think Ulibarri was the first one. RL: Actually, it was Forrest and then when he went back to his department to work on tenure Ulibarri was in there for a while and then Forrest came back. Then when he went on sabbatical one other person was there for a year, I believe. CS: Yes. There were several emphases and they brought in several specialists for lectures and for Black History month. RL: Was there departmental support for the different areas? CS: Neila was very involved in the creation of Women’s Studies program. She fought the battle when nobody really cared about it. It takes some interest at the level of the institution for things to happen. RL: I think it was an ad hoc committee that raised the interest. CS: The other thing that happened was that Women’s Studies has never caught on at Weber State because it was marginalized, it was not a department. So you raid faculty here and there. It’s not working properly, I think- that’s part of it. RL: The unwelcomed step child. CS: Yes. The other thing we did was volunteer, Neila and I both. We did any number of studies looking at women’s salaries. One famous one was under Bob Smith. I was directly involved. I was chair of the Salary Committee before I became Faculty Senate Chair. RL: There was a big push for equity under Bob Smith. 28 CS: Equity, we did that. I remember even now. I don’t want to mention names. On day one when I was appointed dean of Arts and Humanities, I knew the women faculty were being discriminated against. I went in and then I took action to take care of all of those things, one after the other, after the other. RL: Was that when Sherwin Howard went off to be president at Deep Springs? CS: I succeeded him before June Phillips came. I had a flair for operating budgets, and for figures and numbers. One of the issues when I was the chair of the Senate Committee was that salary money should stay within salaries. Otherwise, when people retire, they retire at the high end and when their replacement is hired at the low end, what do you do with this saved money? You kind of rip off and then you take not only that money, off each dollar there was thirty-seven percent then in benefits. You take that money, you take the benefits and all. And I do remember one case the year before I retired, with President Thompson. That’s the reason I say he was a good man. We began negotiations during the summer months and he said, he couldn’t do better that two, two and a half percent for faculty. I said “no, you should do six percent.” And then he said “there’s no money.” I said “what about all of this other money?” I knew at my fingertips where all the money went and where all the money was. We made sure there was no leakage of this money to something else. Then he went up to three, three and a half, four percent, five percent. And one day I went into my office and the previous day I had told the president, it was a brash and a dumb thing to do, but I think I said to the president at a meeting, “You know my phone number, you could call me when you are ready to give 6%.” Then the next day, Kim said “the 29 president has been calling you.” You know Kim Webb was the department secretary. So I went to the President’s Office and he said “I think we’ll give you six percent.” I was very sensitive not only to the doing of things, but also to the gestures and symbols. When Provost David Eisler wanted to meet with me on a weekly basis, I said, “very fine” and he said he was going to block out eleven to twelve on whatever day it was. I said that suited me. And he said “Would you come over?” and I said “No. This is the Faculty Senate office, you need to come over.” It was very important. Otherwise. it would seem I had sold out the interest of the faculty. One good thing about David Eisler is that he did not mind. He methodically and routinely kept all his appointments. He came and we sat together and we talked about lots of things; things that were in the pipeline, things that were coming, things that were of a sensitive nature, and things that happened on campus. We talked about all those things, but it worked extremely well. But I said “you have to come.” These are very important. RL: What was your involvement with Strategic Planning in the early 90’s, or is that a memory you’d sooner forget? CS: No, no. I was on Strategic Planning. Bob Smith was vice president then. We began looking at strategic planning, and the mission statement and all of these things. There were meetings of colleges and others and then… RL: Unhappiness? CS: Those things work well in businesses, they don’t work well here. But they wanted to take a business model and wanted to force it on academics. President 30 Thompson was a dean of the Marriott School of Management at BYU so you have those business models and they don’t work here. One of the things that President Thompson specifically told me was the older you get the level of productivity goes down. I’m sure it does, but it does significantly in business models. But that doesn’t happen in higher education, because in your experiences in teaching. You’re wiser, you can handle things. Classroom teaching isn’t just teaching, lots of counseling occurs, a lot of advisement occurs, you are much better off. And he did not grasp that. As a matter of fact he had written a book in collaboration with somebody else. He gave me a copy of it to read; it basically says that the older you get you’re not a good productive employee. It’s a business model. RL: Most of what you’ve talked about is very positive. Have there been negatives along the way? CS: I think my experience has been positive enough. I’ve never let anybody faze me on anything. I have background, I am a small guy. I think the negative things I would say is that it took the college and departments too long to think outside the box, and to look to the outside. I think it comes more from the culture. There was a time where our hiring was impacted by this and that was a negative thing. There are still departments which hire basically from within the state. So that’s a negative thing, but having said that, there are some exceptional people. Not just because they come from the state, no, but they are exceptional people. When you have a preponderance of people from within a few miles of the university it raises some serious questions. 31 RL: Because it can lead to a certain level of narrow mindedness? CS: Well it may, but in my mind, it definitely raises questions of quality. Especially when you hire people who are graduates of Weber State University for their first degree, you are raising some important questions about cross fertilization of ideas and a certain kind of cloning is occurring. I think that was a problem, we fought that in the English Department. Then we hired Judy Elsley, John Schwiebert, Sally Shigley, Kathy Herndon and Gary Dohrer every one of them was my hire. They came highly recommended and are highly competent people. Every one of them had Ph.D.’s. RL: Certainly very multicultural backgrounds. CS: Multicultural backgrounds and more women. That was one of the things I was very sensitive too in the hiring within the department. A lot more women needed to be hired. We did that. You see in any institution it’s always a struggle between what you have and where you want to go and setting up in that direction. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. It depends on the politics within the department and the context of the college. By and large it was a positive experience. I never thought that I should check the job market. I had lots of offers. But another thing, there was a strong discrimination against women faculty. The institution has made a very positive effort to remedy that, but it is sadly something we need to be on top of all the time. RL: An ongoing issue? CS: It’s an ongoing issue, I think. It’s a cultural thing and then you read that nationally women still make only seventy cents on the dollar. The other part of what 32 happens is, this is something sad that happens here, you come from a state of we hired from top schools but the women have poor role models. The most successful role models for them are men and the women get in there and act, quote unquote, like men. And then it doesn’t work. Part of the reason is that you should act out of conviction rather than the smart thing to do at the moment. It doesn’t work, you need to be able to recognize that. And then you know that what happens at the level of the university, happens at the level of the school and it happens at the level of the department. It happens as far as women are concerned at all three levels and then of course the level of society. As I said when the chair told Neila “why don’t you make cookies?” and she turned around and said “Levi, why don’t you do that?” These are the kinds of things that make you automatically think of those norms, but these are all professional people highly regarded and highly trained. And then what did Kisha Waters say? Women need to work twice as hard… RL: As men to be thought half as good? CS: Yeah, that is very true. I think we have come quite some distance. RL: So, besides an institutional leaning there was also a cultural leaning toward keeping women down. I think there has been progress made. CS: There’s progress made. There are lots of good things happening. I’ve no problem with anything ever. I love being this open, not afraid of anything. If there was a thing to do I lent my shoulder. I pitched in. If there was something to say I stood up and said it. You know that was not ever a thing in the back of my mind. RL: It was just a way of being? 33 CS: A way of being, yes. I had some of my best friends that came out of campus. Tom Burton and Levi Peterson were very close friends then, and we are still close friends. There was a time when Levi, Tom and I basically were the pillars of the university, because much of the leadership on campus came from the English Department. I think it happens some in other institutions as well. RL: The three police of the university? Is that what you said? CS: No, no. Three leaders, three pillars. RL: Oh, pillars! I’m sorry, I thought you said police. CS: No, no, no. RL: But there was a little of that too, because you were overseeing… CS: We made sure faculty rights and prerogatives were recognized and respected that’s the reason the PPM came into effect. It does take leadership. RL: Is there anyone you have not mentioned that comes to mind, or anything that we have not touched on that you would like to cover? CS: I don’t know. One of the other things that I’ve always enjoyed was I had friends across campus. Dick Sadler is a close friend and good man. Ron Galli in the sciences is very close. In the administration up and down and Richard Hill and the presidents are at an easy access and have easy relationship with everybody. That partially reflects the personality of Weber State University. RL: The co-mingling? CS: When I used to interview candidates I would have interviewees meet with the provost or the president they’d say “you mean I get to see the provost, I get to see the president?” Of course, we are that kind of a campus. We have a very 34 close excellent open relationship in the administration. And I don’t think that it is typical in every university in the country, and it gets worse as you go back east. But it may be part of the American spirit or the American West, or it may be peculiarly the personality of Weber State. It’s an excellent place to be that way. I feel very positive. My experiences have been positive. RL: I feel from what you have said that you have no regrets, but what would you say was your proudest moment at Weber State? What are you most proud of? CS: My proudest moments are always in the classroom. Because I was a teacher, there are two students who have named their children after me. They’re all grown and married and have children of their own. I keep in touch. RL: Did they name them Candadai? CS: No, Sesh. They named two. By the same token there were two students who named their children after Neila. One of the things as I said, on this campus the lesbians and gays were disregarded. I was the unofficial adviser to lesbians and Neila was the unofficial adviser to gays. They outed themselves to either her or me. I always supported them and because we did not then have any of these associations on campus, we worked very closely with gay and lesbian students. Neila and I never compared notes. There were different things happening in the classroom, happening in your office and that stayed with us. We never traded stories. Lots of gay students would go to Neila and work with her for advice and then lots of lesbian students would come to me. And there was, I remember, that one of our own lesbian students who became the executive director of the Gay35 Lesbian Alliance of America in San Francisco. She came out of Weber. So being in the classroom always gave me a high, as it did Neila. RL: So fulfilling your original role became the most fulfilling part of the job then? CS: You didn’t worry about other things. If you are a good scholar, good writer, good teacher in the classroom and take care of the basic things for which you were hired, then everything else falls in place. You should not worry about the other things. You should bring professionalism and integrity to what you are doing…Quarter after quarter or semester after semester the things I looked forward to were always in the classroom. And I still keep in touch with an extraordinary number of my students. They email, they send mail, they do things and before I retired I cleaned file after file full of letters of recommendation for students. You take an interest. A great touching thing that happened several years before I retired was a letter I received from a student of mine from England. He wrote that he was coming back to finish his degree. He wrote that he had received a “B” in one of my classes and did not deserve that grade because he had cheated. I wrote him a letter to say I was so happy that he wrote because I left a lot of this stuff to the students. I empowered them to recognize that they make their own decisions and then they are on the loose. He wrote a letter, which essentially said, “is there some way you make it up?” I said “sure” and I wrote him “you see two or three cricket matches in England,” because you don’t see cricket or hear about cricket here, “and then come back and talk to me about those cricket matches,” and he did. 36 Another memorable thing was this student who became an attorney in Salt Lake. After his first year, he was going on a mission and before he went, he came to my office and gave me the most precious possession of his life. It was his personal copy of the Book of Mormon. I was deeply touched and deeply moved. Another thing Neila and I did, we invited every single senior class of ours to our home. They came once a quarter or semester and stayed until 1, 1:30, 2 o’clock A.M. We wanted to know them outside of the classroom. One of them, I still remember, at 2 o’clock proposed to his girlfriend on his knee in our house. Several years later, one afternoon he came and sat in Neila’s office and they spoke for about two or three hours catching up and the next day he committed suicide. He put one end of the exhaust pipe on the exhaust and the other inside the car and rolled up the windows. And when we went to his viewing, the mother said, “Dr. Sesh, we were going through his work and found page after page of your notes from your Shakespeare class and some other course; we don’t know where it came from. Would you help us?” “Sure,” I said, “I’ll help you.” When you look back, you got these honors, you got all these citations, you got to do these things, you got plaques to hang on the wall and certificates, but when you look back the most memorable moments are the precious ones with the students. Students’ children being named after you trumps any day having these plaques hang from the wall. They’re easy to come by, too easy to get and easy to give, but none to beat these moments of love and affection. I still remember this student who came to my office and said she was invited by her professor in a social work class to come and talk about her 37 lifestyle. She was lesbian. I said to her, “we need to go out and have lunch, because I need to talk to you.” She said “why don’t we go to that restaurant in the United Building,” some little restaurant that’s not there any more. So we went there and sat for a couple of hours and I told her to not do it in a classroom. I said outing is a different process. You need to do it somewhere other than the classroom, because there were thirty-five students each with parents and grandparents. Multiply the figures over which you have no control You need to be able to do it the way you want it, not in a classroom. And I said “there’s a heavy price to pay for this,” but she thought of it as a living a lie not to out herself and what a better thing it could be. I wish that the professor had thought through all of this. She went and did that. She said “I’m going to do it.” I said “I wish you the best of luck.” Her life collapsed within minutes after that. Several tragic things followed, her life just collapsed in a matter of minutes. Her parents came to know of everything within minutes, even before she had the chance to tell them. I walked through all of this with her. There are things that people can learn, but you pay a high price also. But I could go on for hours and hours. I remember my students by names, what paper they wrote, but anyway. RL: No, no, that’s fine. CS: I could go on forever. I remember these were some of the best things for Neila and me, our relationship with our students. That’s what brought us to this profession, that’s what kept us there day after day. RL: We could certainly get together again if there are other memories that you would like to have on record. You know what keeps coming through my mind, even 38 though I thought he was a big wind bag, is Polonius speaking to Laertes, “to thine own self be true.” Talking to with you, it embodies what I feel you and Neila did. CS: Polonius’s advise to his son. RL: I questioned his motivation, but still what he said in that speech, it sounds like something you and Neila lived by. CS: We did that. Some of our highs were when she read a student essay or classroom work that was extraordinary. She would insist I read it too, be it midnight or 1 in the morning, whenever teachers find time to read student assignments. We were very proud of students’ writings, and she would consistently make recommendations asking her students send this to this journal, send that there, send it to the undergraduate conference. She sent a lot of students to the Undergraduate Literature Conference. Even the undergraduate conference was born came out of one of these chance conversations. It was Mike Vause, another colleague, Neil and he talked about it. I think Mike visited Neila’s office and then Mike, when he thought of it, he thought of the regional conference as a regional affair. Neila said “Mike you know it’s not going to take you any extra effort to make it national.” Here you go. These are all memories that come back that made the slog worth it. But going back, the thing is the best teachers are the ones who like what they are doing and who love the students. And then you can always look forward to another day with the students in the classroom, nothing can beat that. 39 RL: You can get all the administrative positions and the accolades, but it’s the student who comes back and says you made a difference that makes it worthwhile, isn’t it? CS: Absolutely, absolutely. I’ve received my share of awards, more than my share of awards, but, as you said, it was the students. RL: We can’t end on a finer note than that. Thank you so much for your time. CS: Thank you, thank you very, very much.