Oral History Program Marie L. Kotter Interviewed by Ruby Licona 26 October 2007 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Marie L. Kotter Interviewed by Ruby Licona Special Projects Librarian 26 October 2007 Copyright © 2012 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: Kotter, Marie L., an oral history by Ruby Licona, 26 October 2007, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Marie L. Kotter Assistant Vice President for Academic Support July 1981 Marie L. Kotter McKay Dee Board of Trustees July 2007 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Marie L. Kotter. It was conducted October 26, 2008 and concerns her recollections and experiences with Weber State University. The interviewer is Ruby Licona. RL: This is an interview being conducted with Marie L. Kotter, former Vice President for Student Services at Weber State University. The interview is being conducted in the Stewart Library at Weber State on October the 26th, and the interviewer is Ruby Licona. To start out, Marie, tell me about your background: where you were born, where you went to school, etc., just to fill us in on who you were before you came to Weber State. MK: I was born in Boulder, Colorado in 1946, so I’m one of the first baby boomers. My father is an engineer and we lived in mining towns in Nevada and moved to Salt Lake my senior year in high school. I thought my life was over when we moved to a great big high school. It turned out to be good for me because I grew up very fast that senior year. Then I went to school at the University of Utah. I have three degrees from there; bachelor’s degree in Clinical Laboratory Science, master’s degree in Clinical Laboratory Science and a Ph. D. in Educational Psychology. I’m married and have two sons, and came to Weber State in 1972. I was, at the time, working at Holy Cross Hospital and was in a program they had just started at the University of Utah in Clinical Laboratory Science Education. So I was one of the first people in the state of Utah to get a master’s degree in that program. That was very fortuitous because they were starting a Clinical Laboratory 2 program at Weber State and they needed master’s degree faculty. I was 25, very young. I wasn’t even sure where Ogden was, and didn’t have any sense that for some people it’s difficult to get a faculty position. So, because I had the degree, they called me and I came up and interviewed and then went back to work. I was working at the hospital. They called me and asked why I hadn’t put in an application for the job? I didn’t realize that that’s how you did it! RL: They called you and interviewed you so you figured it was a piece of cake? MK: I know. [Laughter] That just shows you how naïve I was. And then I was interviewed by the provost, Helmut Hoffman, who had been a German tank commander in World War II. I was being interviewed for my salary and to see if I should be on the tenure track. I didn’t even know what a tenure track was. They were offering me a salary for nine months that was higher than my twelve month salary at the hospital. He said to me, with a German accent, “Young woman why should we pay you that much money?” I said, “You recruited me.” Anyway, he paid me the salary and put me on tenure track. And that’s how I came to Weber State in January, 1972. Twenty-five years old, never having taught at a university before, and starting a new program! Because the college was being built, my office was in the house where the campus police are currently located. That was our first house. Then we moved to a house where the alumni center is before we finally moved into Building 3 and had a building. So that’s where Weber State was at the time and where I was. It’s fun to look back and think about that. RL: You were starting up a program, it was a brand new department, what was the intellectual climate like? 3 MK: We were a college, but we were a very student centered place. We weren’t trying to be a research institution. The focus was on student learning. We were like many other community colleges that then grow into a university. Liberal arts and sciences were very strong, and the new programs coming in were, to quote liberal arts faculty, “vocational programs,” which was not right. COAST had started to grow and so had the College of Health Professions. We were hired initially on a big grant that the dean received and then we were moved over into hard money positions. I was on grant money for two years and then moved into a hard money position. RL: Who was the dean at the time? MK: His name was Reed Stringham; he was the founding dean of the college. RL: He was there for quite awhile wasn’t he? MK: Yes, he’s a dentist, a very visionary man, very strong. He hired a lot of new faculty, and so the people he hired were visionary people building new kinds of programs. Take Nursing for example. Nursing was taught in the hospital before it came to the university, and Clinical Laboratory Science was a year internship in the hospital. So he’s building college based programs that used to be taught in hospitals. You had to have very creative people to figure out how to do that because it hadn’t been done before. And so the people he hired in all fields, in Rad. Tech. or Respiratory, or any of the programs that came along, had to be thinking about how to do this differently than we’ve ever done it before. The grant also funded an educational psychologist, so we had courses in how to design curriculum and how to do competency based education. Not only were we 4 designing something that had never been done before, we were also using cutting edge pedagogy. I didn’t even know what pedagogy was at that time. The grant was making sure that we were designing programs that students learn from, and it was pretty exciting. RL: It sounds like you were designing for the future and developed some things that had an influence on the way Weber State has developed. MK: Nursing started the first associate degree R. N. program. There were only five in the United States and one of them was here. We were the first programs to be college-based and if you look at those programs now they’re the biggest program in the United States, and are the only programs in the U. S. that are currently online. When you bring people in who think this way, you design programs and then you keep doing that. Then we went to online learning in our college. RL: When I first came here, I was surprised to learn how extensive the distance learning program was even before things were online. The college had programs in Alaska and other parts of the mountain west. Were you one of the pioneers that helped to build that? MK: Yes, I was on a committee just this year in which somebody in science was saying, “How do you get your faculty to do that?” And I said the University of Utah is the mountain and Mohammad goes to the mountain. We will go where people need us. If you’re trying to get health professionals in a rural area and if they practice along the Wasatch Front where everything is, they won’t go back there. But, if you train someone who is tied to a rural area for whatever reason and train them there, they will stay there. That’s how you get the personnel you 5 need to run your medical facilities. Because we were always taking instruction sites to people who need it, it made sense then to go that next step. And to just tell you a kind of funny story, I’m going to be in a meeting Monday with Nursing and the English department because Nursing needs a master’s degree and they’re trying to get the English Department to do an English course for them to help students write. RL: A technical writing kind of class? MK: Yes, at a master’s degree level. Nursing wants it this summer and they want it online. English doesn’t want to do summer or online. I’m only saying this to give you an example of traditional liberal arts and how they think about things, and how we think about it in a different way. I’m not saying this in a negative way, I’m just saying that when you ask, “how did Weber State come to be?” Well, we were this traditional liberal arts community college and then we started to get these applied programs. So at this moment, of course, we have the most graduate programs of any of the colleges and we’re known for our Health Professions programs. RL: With the changes at Weber over the last fifteen years or so, and the number of master’s programs that we have, a technical writing class would have a built-in audience. MK: You would think so. But it gives you an example of how challenging it is. I’m trying to get a new bachelor’s degree and a new master’s degree and I’m running into a problem with science right now, much like the trouble we had when we first started on the new programs. My faculty, who came later are not used to all of 6 this, are getting very sad, asking “Are we going to be able to make it run?” Well, I expected this, because the last time I tried to do any new programs this is what we had to do. RL: What degrees are you trying to do? MK: A B.S. in Health Sciences and a master’s in Health Sciences. The provost and the president wanted the degrees yesterday, but I got cancer and… RL: This is different from the Health Science Administration master’s? MK: Right, this is just Health Science. I haven’t been over yet to get the librarian to sign off on it because I’m doing the politics of it right now. We’re doing cross college degrees. Two emphases with COAST in the bachelor’s degree and then the master’s will be for a Health Professions educator. If you need a graduate degree and you’re going to teach and there isn’t one in your field, then you would take this degree. And we’re doing a clinical degree because if your field doesn’t have knowledge and job skills that require a master’s degree, then we’ll put it in the emphases of this Health Science degree. That’s how we built the college, building associate degree programs and then as the field enlarged, we built a bachelor’s degree on top of it. The bachelors’ degree is a structure in which you put emphases until they can stand on their own as a full fledged bachelor’s degree. It’s a very iconoclastic idea, and I’m running into political problems. RL: I understand that the politics in an academic venue may change not only your schedule, but your life! MK: When I’ve finished, my faculty will say, “I think we should run you for president of the United States,” because I was explaining to them all the politics involved in 7 doing this. See most people don’t know. They just know they can’t get what they want, but they don’t know why. So I was explaining to them that I’m going to do this and see if it will happen. I’m trying to teach them thirty-five years of politics because when I leave, somebody’s got to be able to do it. RL: You said Reed Stringham was dean when you were hired. Who were some of your other colleagues and how would you access their activities? MK: What’s nice for me is that some of those people are still around. Leola Davidson was head of Nursing and she called me on Sunday to ask how I was doing. She’s eighty-six years old. We built this wonderful caring community and because in health care there are more women than in other fields, it’s a very supportive area for women. So she called me. We were the ones that started the Ladies Libation group, and brought women from other colleges in because they might be more isolated and alone, whereas there were more of us. So I came in from Clinical Labs, Kathleen Lukken from Dental Hygiene; Respiratory was started by Georgine Bill’s mother, Joyce Wanta. Dr. Soderberg from Health and Dental Hygiene just retired. Jane Ward started Rad. Tech. and the other programs have come later. That’s the initial programs. RL: Females dominated the college from the beginning? MK: Yes, because in those days women could be school teachers or librarians or work in health care. RL: When I was growing up, I’d say I want to be lawyer and they’d say “you can’t do that, you have to be a teacher or a nurse.” 8 MK: Exactly, that’s what I’m saying. I wanted to be an archeologist, and my mother told me I couldn’t be an archeologist because there was no where for me to go to the bathroom. What I’m telling you is that she was a lady and that made her think in certain ways. And if I was out on those digs in Peru or somewhere, who knows what would happen. So I ended up at the U taking all these science courses and the field that was open at the time was Clinical Laboratory Science. I was actually working in the med school, in the pharmacology lab, and they offered me a position because they were just starting to take women into med school. I’m amazed that I knew enough about myself not to do it because whatever I do, I do a 120%, and I wouldn’t have been able to have a family or have a life. I truly believe that I couldn’t have both, and in those days, I would bet you couldn’t have both. And so I went into Clinical Lab Science, which has the same courses, and you’re in the hospital, so I was doing an approximation of it. And I’ve never been sorry. I mean I’m just amazed that I had enough self knowledge at that time to know not to go to med. school. RL: But did your life go in a direction you didn’t necessarily expect when you came here as that fresh faced twenty-five year old with wet ink on your degree? MK: Oh, of course. That’s right. RL: What about the campus when you came? You said you were in a house that is now campus security. MK: Right. RL: So you were off in the hinterlands really because WSU had Buildings 1, 2, 3, and 4 and what else? 9 MK: The Social Science Building was built. RL: But, you didn’t have the Miller Administration Building? MK: No, Miller was built. The Business Building was built while we were there. All these buildings were built and we were in a house and had to drive over to our classes. RL: It was quite a ways? MK: That’s right. You drove over and taught classes in Social Science or in Building 3. The dean was in Building 3, so we would go over there to teach. We used to think it was very positive that the dean was over here and we were over there. He never came over to the house to check. RL: So you didn’t have anyone breathing down your neck? MK: That’s right, we didn’t want anyone checking on us. RL: You said you were doing associate programs. How would you compare the campuses at the time? I would think that the U would have been a totally different experience. MK: What’s interesting is that at the time I went to the U, it was only 10,000 students. RL: What was Weber State when you first got here? MK: We’d have to look it up. I’m not comfortable saying a number, maybe 5,000, but I’m not sure. So the U was maybe twice as big as here; it just felt like that. RL: What about the students how did they compare? Was the attitude of the students different because they were in two year programs? MK: No. Many students were place bound and so bright students came here because they couldn’t afford to go the University of Utah. I was in deans’ council last week 10 and was telling them that when I first came to Weber State our students were here. They were going to college and were coming prepared, and I was teaching them right here. Then I was in administration for seventeen years and now they’re here. [Moves hands from high to low] Now, that doesn’t mean we can’t move them up, but what I’m saying is they’re here. And the last two years we’ve gone down. So what’s coming to us is less well prepared. Not just in content, but in understanding how to study, understanding that it’s going to be hard work. At this very moment, if you’re one of these very bright students up here, you’ll get one of those thirty spots in Dental Hygiene. A 150 people try, thirty of them make it. You have to have a 3.8 or you’ll not get one of the hundred slots in Nursing. It’s very competitive. We have these very wonderful students that are even better than we used to be because of what computers and other things have done. As you know, it is amazing what you can find out when you can check all the references on your computer, so they’re like here. What we don’t have is this big middle; there is a huge gap between here and here. Weber State is good at moving this group here but we had more in the middle before, now we don’t. RL: Makes it difficult in the classroom? MK: Makes it very difficult. RL: You have a few of the really good ones and then you start losing them because you’re having to repeat things two and three times for the others. MK: You know what I’m saying. Wouldn’t you say it’s different? RL: It is and attitudes are different. I wonder if it’s not the fault of our generation that students feel very entitled. 11 MK: And we made them that way. RL: Yes, we did. MK: They’re our kids, RL: Yes. They complain if they’ve got x number of assignments for a one credit class. When I went to school there weren’t any one credit classes. There were 3, and 4 and 5 credit classes and you took a bunch of them. MK: But, we took college prep, so we took math every year, English every year, science every year. These students have not. What I was trying to say to the deans is, this is where they are and we have to thrust some of these to the middle. RL: I don’t think it has anything to do with ability. I think it has to do with motivation. MK: Exactly. They haven’t ever had to do anything. So imagine you have to get an A from me or you can’t get in this program and I’m not kidding. RL: When you came here, in addition to your teaching and research, what other activities did you undertake? MK: Because we were building all these new things and didn’t understand the politics and didn’t understand curriculum committees, it became very clear that we needed to get involved in the campus. A group of us from the applied programs, Business, Education, and COAST banded together and voted in who we wanted on the faculty senate. RL: You got political right off the bat? MK: Of course. The problem was we could have been out voted by the liberal arts group, and so the faculty bylaws quickly changed that. There would be a 12 representative from each of the colleges so that it wasn’t necessary for us to group vote. When we group voted, we also pre-determined who from their area got in. I was also the first woman on the executive committee. Now think about how young I was. And on the executive committee. RL: How long had you been on campus when that happened? MK: I’m trying to remember. I don’t know, maybe three years or so. RL: So you were still not even thirty. MK: Yes, we’re talking young! Bruce Handley was on the executive committee, Dick Sadler was the chair, and Milt Mecham was the registrar. We were at some sort of retreat and Milt Mecham says to me, “I think Marie should take the minutes.” And Bruce remembers this to this day and always tells this story over and over again. I said to him, “You understand that I’m the only woman in the room, and if you have me, the only woman in the room, taking the minutes then you will not have my voice available for the discussion.” Milt took the minutes. [Laughter] So Bruce says he’s been terrified of me ever since. RL: Well, I think that was a very diplomatic way of saying... MK: I would say that one of the good things about me is that I have, what I would call a soft caring style that has steel underneath... RL: Steel magnolia? MK: Yeah! So, it’s always clear that there’s steel underneath. I didn’t realize, until other people tell your stories back to you, what you may or may not have done in those days. So Bruce is still telling that story. The thing that was difficult in those times was when Joe Bishop was president and this was the faculty group that 13 had a vote of no confidence in the president and deposed him. I was involved in doing that. One of the things it did was change the... RL: The power structure? MK: Yes. And it has remained changed to this day. If you’re on another campus you will find that the faculty government structure is not as strong as it is here. It is very strong here and the faculty that deposed one president feel like they could do it to another and not even think twice. Because of that, it affects relationships. RL: But you’re talking about Handley, Dick Sadler, and yourself, people who have been here for a long time, a different age group. Are you seeing that same type of spirit in the new faculty? MK: Yes. What’s interesting is new faculty in our eras were pioneering new faculty. I came here with a master’s degree and it wasn’t even done. They needed me in January because I had to teach a spring class and I was still working on my thesis. They hired me without my thesis being done. RL: Was that considered a terminal degree at the time? MK: Yes, it was a terminal degree for my field and so back to that difference in generation and being a pioneer. Because we had viper politics to get our degrees through the faculty senate, I didn’t ever want to sit across from Bruce Handley and not be called Dr. Kotter, so I went ahead and got my Ph.D. while I was working full time. And then, in our college because we got comfortable, people didn’t get their Ph.D.’s. Now we have master’s degree programs coming in and twenty-five nurses are going to have to get their Ph. D.’s, and so they’re a big cohort in a Ph.D. online program. 14 RL: I heard about that last week. MK: Did you? RL: I was in Salt Lake and ran into one of the nurses with whom I’d served on the Academic Standards and Students Affairs committee. She was a saying, “Oh, there’s this push now for us to get a doctorate,” and she said “We had to find an Ed.D. program online.” MK: We’re in a major shift at Weber State. I’ve been here long enough to see the shift in master’s degrees, like now. In the traditional liberal arts you always had to have a doctorate, but we had a rank called an instructor specialist, which is for people without the terminal degree, and allowed them to tenured. For example, in Communications they wanted to keep the person who was advisor to the Signpost, and so they created this category called instructor specialist that you can get tenured in, but you don’t have a terminal degree. There were still things like that happening then, and now today you see twenty-five of the nursing faculty saying they’re going to get their doctorates. It will be interesting to see if COAST ever shifts. But our college is shifting yet again into another iteration. RL: One of the best little cartoon strips I’ve ever seen was something I found in the newspaper ten or twelve years ago. It’s a little egg with a little beak popping through and breaking up the shell, and then all of a sudden this little chick in the next screen is saying “Oh wow! Paradigm shift!” I still use that to show the students a visual definition of a paradigm shift. It’s a wonderful example! Are you having better success in the politics of getting new programs approved than you would have had you not had your administrative experience? 15 MK: It helps you understand the process and that you must talk to people. I am trying to collaborate with people and have them want me to get this degree. So, that’s the process I’m using. Some of the people I’m approaching are still in the old mode. That’s why I told you the story about the English Department because I wanted you to sense that, for the most part, science and the liberal arts have not changed in their paradigm. Their paradigm is the same and it’s been the same for many years. RL: You were the first woman on the executive committee early in your tenure here. When did you formally move into administration? MK: I was on the executive committee that interviewed candidates for the new provost position under Brady. That was when Bob Smith was hired. I had just gotten tenure and a promotion, so that would have been seven years. At that time tenure and promotion was a university wide process, so there was a university committee and you had to get by the traditional liberal arts people to get promoted. Now we have college documents, but we didn’t then. I’d gotten my program off the ground and mentally was ready for something new. In my career, I’d moved to a new job every five years, and was wondering if I had a five year attention span. Research indicates that most people change positions every five years so when Bob Smith advertised for an assistant provost, I thought maybe I should apply and see if I liked it. (At that time it wasn’t called an ‘assistant provost.’ Bob’s title wasn’t ‘provost.’ He was Vice President for Academic Affairs and the position he advertised for was Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs.) 16 My husband has always been very supportive. We had long discussions about whether or not I should apply because it would take me off a nine month contract. It takes you in a new world. I didn’t realize that it, in fact, was such a new world. You are in the administration. You are not Marie anymore; you’re that woman that’s vice-president. At that time though, I was just Assistant Vice President. I was selected and was over the library and instruction and development. Craige Hall was running the library when I took over that position and I had the instructional technology area that was overseen by JohAnn Kurfis. As my Ph.D. was in Ed. Psy., I was over curriculum, accreditation, and advising and counseling services. I set up the first program review process for programs because if you’re an accredited program you must be reviewed regularly and if you’re not, you lose your accreditation status. All the programs I worked with were in Health Professions accredited and were reviewed. Other programs were not, nobody ever looked at them, so we set up a program review process. I was also in charge of space for the whole campus. When trying to get people to take whatever space I was proposing, I would offer them the house where I used to live. When I offered them the house everybody would do whatever I said because they didn’t want to live in that house. They didn’t want to live in the house where I used to live. I just thought it was funny. But that’s what I was doing at the beginning and I did that for five years. Then President Brady decided he wanted students to have a bigger voice in his administration and the way he figured to do that was to create a Vice President of Student Services position. We called it Student Services because 17 we don’t have affairs in Utah. It was a Vice President of Student Services which, at that time, reported to the academic vice president. It meant pulling those kinds of things in and making a unit that included registration, records, financial aid, counseling, the health center, student government, the union building, and residence halls. I was chosen and essentially had three deans over each of those areas. Two of the people that reported to me had also applied for the position, so it was a challenging first year. I was not a traditional student affairs person. I had a Ph. D. in Ed. Psy. and had done training counseling and supervising counseling but I didn’t have a master’s in student affairs and hadn’t gone up the student affairs track, so that made it difficult. RL: You were an Assistant Vice President for five years? MK: Yes, and in retrospect I believe I was the right person at the time. Those other two didn’t have Ph. D.'s, and as we were going to build a new arena and try to hold our own, somebody who had a Ph. D. and could speak to faculty and to student affairs was, in fact, the right person for the job. RL: What was needed? MK: For the job at that time. Because we were going to build the division. Interestingly I was not just the first woman vice president here, but the first woman vice president at a Utah four year institution. Lucille Stoddard was the academic vice president at Utah Valley, but at that time it was a community college. So at a four year institution I was the first woman vice president. As I’m sure you know, when you’re in a room and you’re the only woman, there are dynamics, particularly in a place like Utah in which, for the most part, women 18 aren’t encouraged to be vice presidents. So it’s like, “What are you doing here?” and then, “How do we deal with you?” And since we had built wonderful programs, we built the Student Services building. In retrospect, politically I was “that woman in Student Services with all that power.” The faculty thought that their world was changing and it must be because of “that woman in Student Services who has all the power and all the money.” So if we get rid of Student Services, our life will be like it used to be. They didn’t realize the money that came for Student Services was paid with student fees and can’t be used for faculty salaries. Student fees go for student things. It’s like a tax on students and doesn’t go for faculty salaries. I don’t think that most faculty understood that. The building got built right in the center of campus hooked on to the union building, and we moved all the student services in to one place. I had the Regents on campus before the building was built and put them in wheelchairs to show them what a disabled veteran has to go through to get registered, admitted, and... RL: Advised? MK: All of those things. I made them be in wheelchairs- several of them that I knew pretty well- and Mr. Tablot said, “Marie, if we promise to fund your building, will you let us stop?” I said, “That’s it, you fund the building and I’ll stop,” but I want you to have a sense... RL: Veterans Affairs was in the basement in the library, hard to get to, ramps over by the bell tower. Then more ramps up to the second floor to the library, and then hopefully the elevator was working so you could get to the basement. Once 19 there, you had to go through a maze to get back to the offices. Yes it would have been horrible. MK: It was. RL: And so you got the building funded. MK: I got my building funded. We did a lot of very exciting things like that. We have a very creative student fee process in which the students have a very strong voice in where the money goes and, again, that was a first. At lots of places the administration makes those decisions and the students don’t. RL: And at lots of places the students pay the fees but have no governance. MK: That’s right, no governance on where the fees go. We have a very strong student-centered, faculty-centered institution. And I’ve been involved in helping that culture along, which is nice. Then we did strategic planning. RL: Tried to do strategic planning. MK: Bob Smith said he felt supporting that process was one of the major mistakes he made because it tore the campus apart. I believe it damaged the faculty of the institution, and I don’t think it’s been the same since. In colleges, departments were fighting departments, including in my college. People who were supporting Bob were wanting to get rid of that woman in Student Services and so it was a rough, rough two years. By this time, I’d been a Vice President for twelve years and an Assistant Vice President for five years. We’re talking seventeen years on the third floor! That’s an enormously long time. The mean tenure for presidents is five years, so to be seventeen years on the third floor- no one had ever been seventeen years 20 on the third floor- and so it was time. In retrospect, I was exhausted from the stress of those last two years. I actually think that stress is what took my body down to start my cancer. Because I looked so stressed, I’m sure people thought I had cancer and that’s why I was stepping down. Then I went on sabbatical and came back and was tenured full time in the College of Health Professions, and that’s where I am now. RL: Before we move off administration, I’d like to ask you about the Women’s Libation League. Gloria Wurst mentioned that the Women’s Libation League was very important to her and Helen James because they were the only women in the College of Science and it helped to have the moral support of a women’s group. You said that when you went into administration you became one of them. Did being an administrator cut you off from the female support you’d had in your college previously? MK: Right. I felt like I was the same person, but when you’re viewed as an administrator, they don’t see you as the same person. Also, Yaz Simonian took my faculty line and I felt strongly that because new people were working on the program, I shouldn’t meddle in it. As you know, I was department chair of that program and then department chair over several other programs like Rad. Tech. and Respiratory Therapy. So in other words, Nursing was here and I was over everything else. Which I think helped, but once I was down there (in the Miller Administration Building) you’re in a different environment and you’re treated differently. It’s not possible to try and pretend that you’re one of the faculty because they don’t see you like that. So you need to develop your life away from 21 there. RL: Could you do that with what would have been your level of colleagues because they were all male? MK: No. I had to do it nationally. I was national president that certified clinical lab people and then I was the Regional Vice President for NASPA, which is the association for student personal. I moved into this group because I was very active in professional organizations. When I was in Clinical Lab, I was national president, and when I moved into Student Services then I became very active and was over the Rocky Mountain states on their national boards. So that became my new group. RL: But locally, how did you survive? MK: If you haven’t been in administration most people don’t understand they pay you more, but what they get for that is that they buy your life. So I’m scheduled by my secretary from seven in the morning till ten at night six days a week. That is my life. You have to go to every ball game. You have to go to thousands of banquets. I get a kick out of some of my friends who won’t let their secretaries schedule them and won’t have their schedules in GroupWise. I’m like, are you kidding me? When I came back to being chair I had so many skills that being a chair was pretty easy… [Break in recording] My kids can sing all the Weber State songs, all the, “Weber State, Weber State, great great great,” so they went to ball games. They went to all kinds of things. 22 RL: Did they come to Weber State or did they go elsewhere? MK: They ended up coming to Weber State, but then they went elsewhere in the great “gotta get away from where the parents are” spirit. So at the moment they’re both in Florida. I got support because student affairs is another field where there are lots of women. Now, men were the senior student affairs officers, but there are women in counseling and women in other positions. So, it’s an area where there were women. Think about Helen James and Gloria Wurst in science, where there just aren’t women. I was in two environments where there were women. But you see, when I’m at the Regents or in the board room and I’m the only woman, I’ll admit that was just the way it was. I was the first woman on the McKay Dee Board of Trustees. The first Board was all Stake Presidents and Elizabeth Stewart, and she didn’t come because she was too elderly by then. I ended up being the Weber State representative on the Board and I was the first woman on that Board, so there were lots of men and lots of places where I was the only woman in the room. RL: The trend setter. MK: Yes. Whatever term you might want to use. I met the mom of one of the student officers who is a Mormon. She was saying her daughter was talking in a different way and she didn’t know how she learned that, and then she said, “now that I’ve met you, she’s talking like you.” RL: Well, good. MK: Yes, but when there’s only one of you it gives whatever that person says way too much weight. You only know one way to do it because there’s only one person. 23 When in fact all kinds of women have all kinds of styles that are just as good as my style. But I’m the only woman of power that she’s ever seen so she was acting like me. So on the one hand at least there was one woman, but... RL: That makes you a role model? MK: That’s it. It does make me a role model. But what I’m saying is that it’s better to have more women so you can see multiple ways to do it. And because I’m a gentile... RL: That made a difference, too. Although that is changing in Ogden and at Weber. MK: As you know, Ogden is the most diverse place in Utah. RL: Yes. MK: And so I’ve always been out there with diversity issues. You know, the Jewish people get such a kick out of being a gentile in Utah, never having been a gentile before. And, it worked to my advantage. I could recruit people like you when they would say, “How does a woman live in Utah?” And I would say, “There are a hundred people like me on every corner of New York City, there’s only one of me in Ogden, Utah. So I got opportunities that I wouldn’t have gotten in a different place. And if you come and work with me, you will also get opportunities that you would not get in a different place.” RL: I think that’s true at Weber State, not necessarily just in Student Services, but on Faculty Senate Committees and in a larger setting. MK: You wouldn’t have been there. RL: I might not have had the opportunity because men would have been chosen for it. 24 MK: Exactly. And I would say the same is true for our students. If you go to a research-oriented institution you’re not going to have Marie Kotter and all these professors teaching freshman courses. And you are not going to have the opportunity to do undergraduate research or undergraduate literature, all the things that you have the opportunity to do at Weber. At a research institution, graduate students have that opportunity, undergraduates don’t. They have amazing opportunities at Weber. RL: The smaller classes, the smaller teacher-student ratio, and the studentcenteredness hasn’t changed. It’s good we’ve been able to keep that. MK: If you’re wise, you recruit someone who is student centered and wants to teach because they won’t be happy at Weber State if they don’t. That’s a huge issue in keeping student centered. If you haven’t been anywhere else, you wouldn’t have any concept of how powerful that is, or that it’s not everywhere. RL: How would you assess your interaction with Weber students both prior and during the time you were Vice President for Student Services? MK: Because we are very student centered that affects everything. I told you that we were designing this new pioneering kind of program and when we got accredited, the accreditor said to me, “You let students call you by your first name, I don’t think that that’s appropriate.” That’s an example of Weber’s student centered spirit. Students get to be involved in undergraduate literature, in research and in student government. They have much more power than you would imagine. They have the opportunity to make group recommendations on million dollar budgets and on where the money goes. That experience is something they may not have 25 in their careers for ten years. I would be a reference for student officers who had that experience and would write in my reference letter what they had done, what that meant, and what kind of skills they had. I knew the students and it wasn’t like they had to stand up and salute and say ma’am or sir. I was in the room with them and we were making decisions together. Doug Watson, who now works for me, said that when he was a student he was afraid of me. That I was one of those liberal people who was spending his student fee money. He would want to do dadada and then I would have the data or a bunch of reasons why we shouldn’t do what he wanted to do. Advising is one of the things that reports to me in the Dumke College. When I needed a new Head of Admissions Advising, I went down to talk to him in his office. He was so impressed that I came and talked to him that he came to work for me, and then he told me that story. RL: Because he found that in this new arena, having someone like you who has the answers is a strength? MK: Yes, exactly. RL: So I guess it depends on which hat your audience is wearing. MK: It is comical. A fun story. I get people telling me stories of what they think I was like. RL: I’ve never had that feeling, because our first experience working together was when you came to me needing some help. So I never felt put off or threatened. MK: Remember, you’re not a man. RL: That’s true. MK: I don’t mean that necessarily in a derogatory way. I have two sons and a 26 husband I’ve been married to for forty years. What I’m saying is that men were not used to having a strong confident woman in a position of power. They didn’t know what do to with me. By the time they finally figured it out, it was way too late. RL: Were you involved with student government when you were at the University of Utah? MK: Yes, I was. When I was at the U, I was in a sorority called Pi Beta Phi. I was their scholarship chairman. I was also very active in the Union Building programming and I was selected to serve on their honorary organizations for women. I was in all of those when I was at the university. I would say that from my father I got my analytical brain, and from my mother I got this energy level, which allows me to do multiple things that make other people tired. When I’ve been on the cancer train, they’re saying over in Radiology, “We’d hate to see you when you’ve got all your energy back.” [Laughter] So I am well aware that I have been blessed, or cursed, however you want to think about it, with extra energy, and have always been doing multiple things. RL: You mentioned earlier being involved and interested in issues of diversity. When I came here you had the… MK: Diversity residency program going. And it’s gone away. As you know, we don’t have it any more. RL: No, but you had all of the different departments, the services for women and the services for nontraditional students. I’m sure you were an integral part of that organizational plan. Are you satisfied with the way those programs have 27 developed? MK: One of the things that happened when I left Student Services was they hired somebody who essentially took it apart. They pulled registration, records, and all those things back under the provost. And that left a more traditional student affairs, and a new Vice President for Student Affairs was brought in to do whatever the president said. RL: He was not a strong female. MK: Yes. And he did do that, so what happened was that many of the staff whom I had hired left. Lee Peters and Mike Ellis and other very strong people left and went other places. We said that we’d built Camelot and then the barbarians came to the wall. I would say that in hiring Jan Winniford, they’re trying now perhaps to build a little bit of Camelot back. RL: We have a female president that’s directing some of that. MK: Yes, exactly. A female president that has been at Weber State for a long time. One of the issues we’ve talked about is how different Weber is from other places. So you bring a president in, and one of the presidents that came in had been at Harvard and BYU; both very selective, very traditional institutions. And when he came here, where we have this bimodal population, traditional/nontraditional, and not highly selective, decisions were made, like to build a new residence hall, when this isn’t a residential campus. I was one of the people in administration who said you can give them your best advice and then they can take it or not. We studied it and found we didn’t have the population to support revenues on residence halls, so we recommended against it. Well, the president wanted to 28 build residence halls so he got a new vice president and built residence halls that didn’t fill. That’s an example of how things like that happen. Ann is the first president that has been at Weber State long enough to know what is good for Weber State. And so she’s not trying to make Weber State the Harvard of the west because that isn’t what Weber State is. She’s focusing on first generation students. Half of our students are first generation students. If we can get the first generation student graduated, we change them, whoever they have relationships with, and their families forever. One of the banquets you go to is the Business Scholarship Dinner. The way it was set up was the scholarship winners were there with their family, and there is somebody from administration and from business at each table. I’m at this table and the scholarship winner is a woman accountant. She’s married and has brought her husband’s mother as part of her family. And the mother-in-law says to me, “I get to go with,” I don’t remember who it is, “shopping tomorrow, we’re going to buy a suit because she needs to interview for an accounting position. She’s never worn a suit to work before.” Now think about it, once you get one person in the family who wears a suit to work and got an accounting scholarship and graduated, the family will be forever different. That’s what Weber State does. And we do it better than anybody, because it’s so student centered. It’s a good place. RL: I knew a young man in Chicago who had graduated from BYU with a master’s in accounting and had gone to work for Arthur Anderson. After several years he decided to go dental school in Utah. On his way back from Chicago, he stopped at several dental schools, and all but one of those schools’ faculty members told 29 him to take the science courses he needed to take before he went to dental school at Weber State. Of course, he had the BYU attitude of why would I want to do that. They told him it’s a really good school, it won’t cost you as much, and you will learn more than students at the other institutions. MK: Right, right. RL: He did come here to do his makeup coursework and then went on to dental school. He’s now practicing dentistry in southern Illinois. MK: Again, most people don’t know this. We’re like this hidden jewel, and I would say that’s true across the campus. It’s true because students and student learning are important. When you’re organized around that, you’d be surprised at how good the learning is. RL: I don’t hear faculty complaining about Weber State. They might want more money, or to have more grants, but for the most part, I haven’t heard complaints about wanting to go somewhere better. And we have had several cases of people going and then coming back. Were you instrumental in setting up the program with Japan Airlines? MK: Yes. That program was a way to put people in the residence halls. Because of the kinds of students Weber attracts, students who don’t go away to school, and who don’t live in residence halls, our residence halls were not bringing in enough revenue to be self-supporting. Residence halls, along with the Union Building, campus printing, and many other things, are called, “auxiliaries,” which means they must bring in enough revenue to pay for their services. Tuition money can’t be used to fund “auxiliaries.” The program with Japan Airlines increased diversity 30 as well as increased revenue for the residence halls. So, in that Camelot time, we were building and designing many new and positive things for the campus. RL: Was that the first large cohort of international students to be brought in? MK: That’s right. RL: Some of the students we have are children that came here as immigrants from South East Asia. We also have more Middle Eastern students, and I know you were instrumental in starting the exchange program we have with Lithuania. MK: Yes I was. One of the ways we could increase diversity was to bring international students to campus. If you can’t work with different people, you’re not going to be able to function in today’s world. So we were doing a disservice to our students by not having enough diversity here. RL: Absolutely. One of the first things I got involved with was the high school diversity program. I remember students telling me I was trying to get them away from a billiards demo and back into our conference. Somebody said, “But lady we don’t belong here.” “Yes you belong here.” “No we don’t belong here.” And it was like, “Yes, you do. You were invited. You belong here.” One of the kids said something under his breath and I called him a ‘snotty nose’ in Spanish, and he said, “You speak Spanish?” and I said, “Yes I do, and a lot of people up here do.” “Oh, oh.” It made a difference in their attitude. MK: Of course, because you have to have faculty and staff that look like you, or you don’t think you belong. And think about the families they’re coming from- first generation families just like many of our students. English isn’t their first language, they’re an immigrant, all those things. So how do we get them to feel 31 like this is a place where they belong? When you go to college you often go where your best friend goes. If there isn’t one other Hispanic person from your school up here, it’s pretty scary for you. RL: I see a different make-up in the classes now. MK: We’re still not where we should be. But we’re better than we used to be. RL: And we see more non-traditional men, too. Weber has always had non-traditional women who were coming back to school because they had to learn to support themselves, but I’m seeing more men here who have a problem finding a babysitter. The make-up is changing. What do you foresee in the near future in terms of diversity? MK: As you know, there’s a large Spanish population in the surrounding area and we haven’t yet begun to bring as many of them here as should come, but we’re making progress. I have a Hispanic student working for me who was at Ogden High and did an internship in my office, which is how she got hired. In Health Professions we’re still very white and need more healthcare people that match the population. RL: What are we doing now in terms of minority recruitment? When I first came to WSU (eighteen years ago), and asked why there weren’t more brown faces here, I called the recruiting office. When I asked a recruiter, “What are we doing to recruit minority students to Weber State?” Her response was, “We don’t have time for regular recruiting much less for minority recruiting.” Strangely enough this young woman was African American! If that’s the attitude in the recruiting office, how are we going to change? 32 MK: You do know that for the size of the institution, Weber State is under-funded and under-staffed. I think that most faculty have no concept that with BANNER it takes four times as much time. If you’re packaging financial aid in the old STARR system, you could do it on one screen. BANNER takes four screens to do one financial package. We didn’t get any new staff, so what she’s saying has nothing to do with diversity. It has to do with she can’t even do her job. RL: But I’m talking about eighteen years ago. Yes, we’re under-staffed and underfunded, but has the attitude changed? MK: I can only tell you that when I was vice president the attitude towards diversity was very progressive. Now remember that office reported to me, then they moved it to Academic Affairs. I believe that services for students such as recruiting, registration, and financial aid should report to a vice president whose job it is to make sure that you give good student services. The problem is when you report to the provost, the provost is in charge of the academic campus. One of the problems that libraries have is that libraries come after the colleges, so in the hierarchy the colleges are here, then the library, then student services, so when they pulled much of student services out from under the Student Services Vice President and put it in Academic Affairs the dynamic changed. RL: I’m interested in knowing about the different presidents under which you served. MK: I would say that is the vice presidents run the institution. The president is out in the legislature and in the community. RL: Glad handing and raising money? MK: Yes. When a new president comes in, you taught that person how to be 33 president of this institution. One of the reasons Jerry Storey left and Allen Simkins came in was because he felt that he couldn’t teach one more president how academic funding really worked. He had taught enough presidents how it worked and he wanted to stop doing that. President Thompson valued diversity, but the people that made what he valued work was Bob Smith in Academics and me in Student Services. When we left and different people came, that value shifted. RL: Did it at least create the position that Forest Crawford now holds? MK: Exactly. RL: That helped. MK: Of course it did. It was a value for him, and because Forest was in the room, he didn’t disagree when Bob and I did things because it was a value for each of us. He wasn’t the kind of manager that said make diversity your number one priority because it was a value for me and Bob, and for the president. There was a culture of doing that. RL: Was that more so than with Brady or Nadauld? MK: Yes, more so. RL: Both you and Bob served under the two of them before Thompson came. MK: Thompson didn’t like acrimony and so the vice presidents would meet outside somewhere and fight over the budget or whatever it was we were fighting over, and then come to President’s Council and all agree on what we were doing. RL: And yet his background was business and management. MK: I know. Don’t you think that’s very funny? I’m looking at team based learning and 34 I would say my most perfect team experience was when Allen was Acting President and still Business Vice President, and Jeff Livingston was Acting Provost and I was in Student Services, and so the three of us were running the campus. It was the year they were making decisions about the Olympics and what we would have at Weber State, and so the three of us would meet with no personal agendas. It was all about, “what is the best for Weber State and how can we make that work?” We did that for a year and it was splendid. At the president‘s staff level that was the best team I was ever involved with. RL: I’ve always been a believer in the team organization, but you’ve got to have everyone on the same page. MK: They can have different strengths, but they all have to be comfortable. RL: They have to be open to the process, and not be territorial, or… MK: Intimidated. The big issue is that you bring people into the team with their different strengths who are comfortable so they can work in a team environment. RL: And Jeff wasn’t trying to build any powerbase, because he was temporary. MK: That’s right, and neither was Allen, and neither was I. So what we were focused on was what was best for Weber State. As a result of that it was truly splendid; we were very close. And at that level it was even more amazing. But that means that every member of the team has to be competent in their own area. They have to have their own strengths and they have to be willing then to listen while we figure it out. If you are insecure you can’t handle it. You can’t be in that room because if you’re insecure you have behaviors driven by your insecurities. Your bucket is never full. 35 RL: The glass is always half empty? MK: Yes, you are always trying to fill it up, and many times you’re trying to do that at the expense of other people. Teams only work if all team members are competent and assured within their own realm. RL: As far as provosts, you worked with Bob Smith and Dave Eisler? MK: Yes. I would say Dave was insecure and not able to hold his own in a room with Allen and me. His background was music and he made us all come in and sit in the center of the room like he was leading the orchestra. He had this very strong authoritarian management style, which just doesn’t work. It certainly doesn’t work with me. That style didn’t work and he didn’t work well here. RL: What about working with Kathleen Lukken when she was Associate Provost? MK: Kathleen was very confident. RL: What about the deans, from your perspective as VP for Student Services? MK: Because of the kind of culture we have at Weber State, Sherwin Howard, who was dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, told me that being a dean at Weber State was like being a president of a little university. RL: And then he went on to Warm Springs? MK: Yes, and that’s when he really knew that it was like that. It was after he was president at Warm Springs that he said that. But the problem is that… RL: You have many microcosms rather than a whole? MK: Exactly, and nobody is working across colleges. So back to my political problems with my degrees. When I’m trying to work across colleges it’s not done. Academics in general are too tied to their department and only see how their 36 department works. RL: And how it's going to be affected by this new thing? MK: And they don’t see how Weber State works and how what you do works with somebody else. It’s very difficult here, and I would say it’s the same everywhere. One of the nice things about our college is that we have all of the Health Professions in one college. At the University of Utah there is a College of Nursing, a College of Pharmacy, a College of Health Professions and a med school and they’re all fighting… RL: For space? MK: And money and prestige. The doctors are always going to have all of it and you’re always going to be second, and so you’re fighting for second and really don’t do anything together. In the hospital if people don’t work as a team people could die. You’ve got to work as a team. Sherwin Howard was wonderfully creative. As dean of Arts and Humanities, he did all kinds of wonderful things. When you have a creative dean, they can make their college shine. He was very stimulating. Warren Hill has been the same with COAST. He’s brought COAST a long way. The new Arts and Humanities dean looks very intriguing. It will be interesting to see what she can do. RL: Her research is in Women’s Studies. MK: She’s a mountain woman. She lives on the mountain, so I talk to her because I’m a mountain woman too and this is a good place for mountain women. I think she’ll like it. It will be interesting to see what she does. The College of Business 37 is very strong. They got AACSB accreditation, built that building, and then got an MBA. And so again you can see the impact of strong deans building that college. RL: And the current dean is very dynamic. MK: Yes he is. That’s what I’m saying, there’s been a history of strong dynamic deans in that college. If you’re a liberal arts faculty, you see that Business is very strong, Education is very strong, Health Professions is very strong. RL: Social Sciences? MK: You know what I’m saying, right? So because of that, it makes those politics worse and Social Sciences is in an enrollment downturn right now. My department is up seventeen percent. I have a thousand students at the high school level taking concurrent classes. That’s another example of how we reach out and are very creative. I’m up seventeen percent and have enough student credit hours that I don’t worry about it, but departments with declining enrollment do, and don’t want to cross list with me. RL: They don’t want that half, or they think you want some of theirs rather than you’ll bring something to the table. MK: Exactly. So it would be mutually beneficial. RL: Science has a new dean within the last few years. MK: Yes, Dale Ostlie. RL: Ron Galli was in that position for a long time, wasn’t he? MK: Yes. RL: Education has probably had the most change in deans while I’ve been at Weber. MK: They have a good strong one now, and they’re comfortable with who they are. If 38 you look at the new master’s degrees, the first one was in Education, the second one in Business and Accounting, and now Nursing and Health Administration. There’s also one in HPHP and one in English, and Criminal Justice. The only area that’s not an applied degree is in English. So you see where the growth is, it’s in all those applied areas. RL: But all of the areas need each other. MK: Of course. RL: Because we’re going to turn out educated students. MK: Exactly. RL: They’ve got to learn, to cross their T’s and dot their I’s and put a period at the end of a sentence. MK: Of course they do. RL: And so you need that technical writing course and if its cross listed, it’s good for English, too. MK: Of course, you understand. But you are not sitting in that department. RL: It sounds like the problems you encounter are more at a departmental level rather than a college level. MK: I’m trying to get two new degrees, so that’s why I’m involved in that right now. And that’s because Weber State is moving to a new place soon. RL: Speaking of new places, when you came here, they were already on this campus so you weren’t familiar with how things were before they came here. MK: No. Have you interviewed anybody that was here before they built this campus? RL: No. 39 MK: Is there anybody alive now who came from the old campus? RL: I don’t know. MK: My W number is 109. What that means is that there are only 108 people on campus that came before I did. RL: Going to a four year school, your programs went from associate programs to four year degree programs? MK: The Clinical Lab program was always a four year degree. RL: I thought you had said you were doing associate programs. MK: The college was. Nursing, Respiratory, and Rad. Tech. were associate’s degree programs. I have an associate’s degree and a bachelor’s degree. In the past in my field, just like in Nursing, associate degrees were given at community colleges and didn’t articulate into a bachelor’s degree. So we are articulating an associate’s degree into a bachelor’s degree. The bachelor’s degree program was a hospital based program. It’s very technical and we were just moving forward. Nadauld was president when we began the change to become a University. RL: Yes. One of my memories is a comment about you having to change suits at the last minute because you had been planning on wearing a red suit to the legislature and realized you had to change to a purple suit. MK: I have three degrees from the U and I wasn’t thinking about the politics of the color of my suit. You have that funny story about me. There’s all kinds of Marie stories out there. It’s very interesting to hear those Marie stories from people. RL: We’ve talked about the people that were over you administratively. Now within Students Services you worked with Toni Weight for many years. 40 MK: Right. Toni, Lee Peters, and Emil Hansen. So my three deans were Emil, Toni and Lee. I recruited Lee and hired him. RL: Toni was already in place? MK: Yes, and so was Emil. And then we built these wonderful programs, and the building and all kinds of positive things. RL: Were you able to create a team atmosphere with them? MK: Yes I was. But that first year was very challenging because Rick Sline was the dean before Lee, so it was Rick and Toni and Emil. All three had applied for the V.P. position and weren’t chosen, so the first year was very difficult. After that, because of my management style, we turned into a team and then I recruited Lee and the team just went from there. When I was the vice president we had a regional workshop on the Weber State campus for mid-level managers of student affairs. People came to our campus and said, “This is a wonderful campus and student affairs is so vibrant.” We were doing exciting things and then came strategic planning, and the barbarians at the gate. RL: I was on the planning committee that first summer and remember walking into a room and thinking I’ve always known that the perfect committee is five plus or minus two, so what am I doing in a room with thirty people? How is anything going to get done? MK: Personal agendas got done. People went after programs in other colleges or departments; it was very very destructive and nothing good came of it. RL: I was there that summer and then went away for two years. When I came back, it was like what happened to strategic planning? And it was, “You don’t want to 41 know, you don’t want to hear.” When Northwest said we had to do something about planning, Ann didn’t call it strategic planning because the implications of that word were so negative that nobody would want to be involved. So we have something called the Planning Council. And we’re looking at 2030! MK: Yes. RL: The change to university status. What were the implications of that as far as you were concerned? MK: It was really kind of fun! Nadauld went out and jumped up on that Weber State sign out in front because he was so excited that we’d got that change. It was a new shift; and that’s when we started graduate programs. That’s when the master’s of Ed. and the MBA happened. They couldn’t have happened until we became a university. RL: The MBA didn’t come for several years. I was told yes, we have master’s programs, but we will never be a doctorate granting university. MK: And do you know what, Ruby? I don’t think we want to be. RL: No, we don’t want to be, but that had come down from the legislature and the Board of Regents and we could not duplicate programs that already existed in the state. That created a need for innovation and new ways of doing things. MK: It means that the master’s degrees we have aren’t anywhere else. There isn’t a Criminal Justice one anywhere else and the Health Administration degree will be the only one in the state. So our graduate programs are unique to WSU. Education was sold as a Teacher’s Ed. program and the same with English. English is for English teachers, it is not an English degree. So again it’s an 42 applied program. RL: And the MBA program was approved because it was an executive program. MK: Right, an applied program. RL: So in that respect being a university helped, but there are still limitations. MK: Oh yes. I don’t see them going away. And I don’t know if they should because the other thing we do well is build career ladders. Now think about our students, our first generation students. If we can get them through their freshman and sophomore years and they get an associate’s degree, they have a degree. Then they can come back and get a bachelor’s degree with that associate’s degree, and in some fields, you can get a master’s degree. Thus, we have built a career ladder for students that’s based on our kind of student. RL: When I chaired the Academic Standards and Student Affairs Committee, we came up with a tiered admissions policy. I know that’s been done away with, but I think it helped to open doors. MK: Exactly. It did. [Break in the recording] RL: Do you think getting rid of the open admissions policy has closed some of the doors that had previously been opened? MK: I do. RL: What about the other changes that have been made? Semester conversion, for example. MK: Semester conversion made everybody look at their curriculum, which was good, but it was done in the summer without enough faculty input. There’s no reason to 43 think that semesters were going to increase summer enrollment because our students are working students. They’re first generation students. We don’t currently offer enough remedial and general education courses in the summer. There are a whole bunch of dynamics going on here. RL: We don’t do a lot of courses in the afternoons either because the students leave campus and go to work. MK: That’s right. So you can say, "Why don’t we offer classes in the afternoon?" well, it’s because our students work. So back to trying to make Weber State something it’s not. This is coming from a person that is not from Weber State and thinking this will make a difference when they don’t know Weber State students. RL: Where did this originate? The trimester? MK: From Bruce Bowen, the Associate Provost for Enrollment Services. RL: Are we trying to be Harvard again? MK: BYU. RL: We moved back the beginning of classes because we wanted our students to graduate at about the same time as BYU students, because they were running away with all the good jobs. MK: And our students are very job oriented. They now have a committee to look at trimesters with a representative from each college. RL: How are the discussions going? MK: I don’t know. They’ve just started. That committee was approved by the Faculty Senate just last week. RL: You’re no longer up on the third floor, but if you were would you be interested in 44 bringing back the open admissions program or the tiered admissions program? What else would you be interested in changing? MK: As I told you, I think admissions and advising and financial aid and those other things that are student services should go back under Student Affairs. They were pulled out because we were taking apart that woman’s empire, and we weren’t focusing on what is good for the division or for the students. RL: My impression of Jan Winniford, the Vice President for Student Affairs, is that she’s soft spoken, but very strong. MK: I was one of her references. She comes from Texas A & M and is a very competent woman. RL: A very patriarchal institution; they’ve still got their military core and mentality, but I would think if she could survive there, she could survive here. MK: Exactly. All I’m saying is that the moment we were mandated to do semester conversion, we were also mandated to go to BANNER. The Board of Regents made us do both of those things and both of those things have affected that area. RL: I would think morale would be affected. MK: I have people that used to work for me still come up to me and say, “I sure wish I was still with you.” Again, the current V. P. is a competent woman, so it will be interesting to see how all this falls out. But I’m still at Weber State after thirty-five years. If you’d asked me thirty-five years ago if I’d still be here, I would have said, “I can’t believe that,” but I’ve had multiple roles here and have been stimulated in different positions. RL: Where would you like to see Weber go? Do we need to go back some or do you 45 see things where we can go forward? MK: You can never go back. We’re in a new paradigm now. How are we going to work with these master’s students in these applied programs? Even the English degree is a teaching degree, so it is an applied degree. So we’ve got to learn how Weber State does that. They’ve set up a graduate council and we’re going to have to learn how to do that. We’ve got to get enrollment and recruitment functioning in a better way. And part of it needs to come from getting Weber States’ story out. When I first applied for the V.P. position, I always made a joke that Ogden, isn’t that somewhere up by Pocatello? And the Ogden jokes are, “It’s thirty-six miles if we drive it and 300 if they drive it.” And so people truly don’t know unless they want to be in one of our programs. Dental Hygiene is the Harvard of Dental Hygiene in the west. If you know that, then you will want to get in that program. You and I know that if you want to be a writer and want to present your work at a national literature conference, or you want to be a researcher, or you want to go to dental school, you should come here. People don’t know that, and we need to get that piece out there. I just don’t think our story is out there. RL: No, its not. MK: One of the things the faculty wanted to do with strategic planning was to do away with football. Whether you like it or not, athletics tells our tale. I’m really glad we have a great track team. RL: And, our women’s soccer team, which started up as an intramural thing. MK: The money they’re using for athletics is not money that can go to faculty salaries. 46 And people’s perspectives of a good institution is that it has good teams. You can say all you want that you don’t like that, well fine, but that doesn’t change things. RL: When I first moved to Madison people would say, “Where are you from?” and I would say, “Weber State,” and they’d say, “Weber State where’s that?” Later that year when both the men and the women went to NCAA tournaments, people would stop me on campus and say, “Ruby is that your Weber State?” [Laughter] MK: Exactly. So you learned it first hand from the other side. RL: Absolutely. MK: But the story that many of our programs are in the NCAA’s needs to get out. RL: Yes it does. I’m so glad you were willing to share your story with me. If you think of anything else you would like to have on the record I hope you’ll get back in touch with me. MK: I will.