Oral History Program M. Diane Krantz Interviewed by Ruby Licona 4 April 2014 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah M. Diane Krantz Interviewed by Ruby Licona 4 April 2014 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii 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: Krantz, Diane., an oral history by Ruby Licona, 4 April 2014, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii M. Diane Krantz April 4, 2014 Abstract: The following is an interview with Dr. Diane Krantz conducted on April 4, 2014 by Ruby Licona. Dr. Krantz discusses her early life and her career at Weber State University from 1995 to 2011. RL: Today is April 4, 2014. I’m Ruby Licona from the Stewart Library at Weber State University. Also present is Stacie Gallagher, our video technician. We are speaking with Dr. Diane Krantz, who came to Weber State in 1995, retired just a couple of years ago and is never still for a moment. Every time I encounter her she’s got plans for one activity or another, so she’s not a shy retiring kind of person, she is living her life to the fullest. Good morning, Diane, and thank you for coming in to talk with us. DK: Good morning, Ruby, thank you for the privilege of donating my thoughts to the library. RL: Well, we are anxious to learn about you. To that effort, why don’t you start out telling us a little bit about your origins and some of the things with which you were involved prior to coming to Weber State? You did not come here straight out of—well, you came straight out of your Ph.D., but that was a few years following your bachelor’s degree. So, why don’t you talk to us a little bit about that? DK: Okay. Well, I was born in a small coal town in Pennsylvania called Carbondale. I was a very devout Catholic and always wanted to be a religious woman, so when I graduated from high school, I entered a convent that was in the town where I 1 was living. I got a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from St. Louis University, ultimately, and was credentialed to teach math. I taught elementary school math for three years and then went on to high school math and got my master’s in teaching mathematics from Fairfield University. I taught high school mathematics for 17 years. RL: That was at Fairfield University in Connecticut? DK: Yes. RL: So, how did you get from St. Louis to Connecticut? DK: Well, actually, I started in Pennsylvania. We moved to Connecticut and then after I had taken my vows, I was transferred from the convent in Connecticut to St. Louis. Actually, my first foray there in higher education was a sister’s college called Mirallac College. It was for religious women. I was there for a year, but there program was so convoluted; it would have taken me five more years after my Associate of Arts degree to get my bachelor’s. So, the Provincial and I decided I would go to St. Louis University. Then I taught for three years in the elementary school in St. Louis and was transferred back to the high school in Connecticut to teach there. Math teachers, even in the convent, are at a premium especially because a lot of sisters did not go directly on for their degrees. They got them part-time. Getting a math degree that way could take 12 or 13 years. I was going full-time, so I managed to get mine in a reasonable amount of time. I got a National Science Foundation grant, so most of my master’s degree was free for me and the convent. So, that was nice. I taught many years, as I said, in the high school and religious life somewhat changed and I began to—a lot of 2 women left religious life during those following years as the church became—as their thinking became more modern. I always thought I was in it for the long haul, but I began to realize at one point that I had become somewhat like my mother in the sense of not knowing my own mind after a while. I was following superiors and I wasn’t thinking for myself anymore. I didn’t know, actually, what I wanted. At that point, I decided that I would at least try life outside the convent. So, when I was in my early 40’s, I had permission to live outside the convent for two years and at that point I had been transferred to California and taught part-time in an elementary school while I looked into attending the University of California at Davis. I had requested to get a Ph.D., but that wasn’t common at that time among the sisters, so I was refused for that. I went on—I was enrolled in the master’s program. I spent two years and I think most people that knew me from the convent assumed that I was enough of a flake that I would never manage in the outside world. But, it turned out that I had my father’s sense of economics, so I did very well, actually. By that time, I had decided that it was time for me to try a new direction in life. So, I was enrolled in the English program at U.C. Davis and I made a formal request for dispensation from my vows and received it. I then went on to get a Ph.D. at the University of California at Davis. RL: So, you got relieved of your vows in, what, the late 80’s? DK: Yeah, it would have been about 1985 or 1986. A Ph.D. would take seven years at U.C. Davis if you didn’t have—well, I didn’t even have a bachelor’s degree in English, so that was a little bit more of a challenge. At any rate, I got a Regents Fellowship my first year there and then forgot to apply for it the second year. I 3 ended up with fellowships in teaching, but the University of California system was very generous at that time and it had a lot of money, so they actually paid me what I considered a full salary, although, my colleagues in the English Ph.D. program were not doing quite as well because they were more used to being on their own and spending money as they wished. RL: They hadn’t been in the religious life. DK: They had not been living a vow of poverty, right. After a year, while I was still debating, I said, “What would be the one thing I would be sorry for if I went back in the convent? What would I be sorry not to have done?” So, I took a trip to Europe—a bus trip to Europe. It was one of those bus trips where, “It’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium.” And it was literally like that. You got up in the morning and it was Belgium and you were going to go back on the bus and over to Holland all that day and then you’d spend a couple of days in Holland and then go on to the Rhine. That was very exciting. I had thought if I had a chance to go back to Europe, it would be nice to have an overview of it, so that’s why I went on that particular trip. I was still a little bit behind for my doctorate. My father died in the meantime. My mother died three weeks before I left the convent, so that was a little traumatic because, a) I wasn’t expecting it and, b) that her timing was impeccable to make me feel guilty. I failed the exams I took right after my father’s death, so they gave me another chance. So, I did get through my exams and my defense of my dissertation. Then I realized I couldn’t finish the dissertation on time and they would cut off my teaching pay, but there was an opportunity to go 4 to Germany on an exchange and that would be fully funded—by the Germans, actually. Because I was, shall we say, older, and also had several master’s degrees they paid me through the nose in Germany. So, I was very well off in Germany. RL: Did you go to Germany to teach? DK: I went to Germany on an exchange of doctoral students to teach at the University of Mainz. So I lived in Mainz and traveled again through parts of Europe. I enjoyed my time there and taught six classes the first semester and seven the next, but German classes are much different than American classes as I learned. Students basically don’t hand in anything until the end or they take three Claysure tests if they’re not on that type of a schedule. It was probably less work with the six classes there than with my high school teaching, so it worked out very well for touring. After I came back from Germany, about a month before I had to hand in my dissertation, I had some work on graphics to do because I hadn’t had a Mac computer there. I got my three signatures and the Ph.D. and then had a post doc at U.C. Davis for a year and applied for jobs. I got four responses. I was much more careful the second time I applied than the first time I applied. The first time, in Germany, I sent out a hundred applications and I wasn’t specific at all. The second time when I was back in the United States, I said, “I’m going to research these universities.” I think I applied to four and I got responses from two. One was Weber State and the other was the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. The only thing that really attracted me there was that they had one of the large 5 radio telescopes at Arecibo, I think it is. At any rate, it wasn’t too far from Arecibo. But, I don’t speak Spanish. I was worried that the cultural differences, not for me, but the differences between the rich and the poor there would be a source of constant pain to me. The other thing, of course, was that by this time with both parents dead, my siblings were living across the country. One was in Connecticut, one in Iowa and one in Portland, Oregon. So, I would never get any visits if I stayed in Puerto Rico because it would have been quite a long trip for them. I decided that I would be happier all around accepting the job at Weber. When I came to Weber, I was really impressed with the English people who met me. Tom Burton was my predecessor in the English Department and he met me at the airport, shepherded me into Ogden and was very sweet, very kind, and very helpful. Then, I went through the interview process and was very impressed with the committee, with their friendliness, their warmth and their welcoming—also by the efficiency of the process, because I had been waiting for months to hear from Puerto Rico whether I was being offered the job or not. At this point, I was sort of disappointed that they had taken so long, but also it just seemed like a better fit to come to Weber State. So, I mean, it was largely the charm of the English Department people that I met that drew me here. RL: Can you remember who was on your search committee? DK: Well, there was Tom Burton. Levi Peterson was Chair at the time. Sally Shigley was on the search committee. John Schwiebert may have been on the search committee and Michael Wutz might have been, but I’m not sure. These later became close friends. That’s as much as I remember. I remember Sally because 6 I was going to teach one of her classes—her Renaissance class—as part of my interview process. She had sent me information and I had prepared to teach something about George Herbert, a 17th Century poet. So, I remembered her of course and I met her on the committee. After that it becomes a little bit of a blur in the nervous tension one feels when one’s life is basically hanging in the balance. RL: Yeah, you get a lot of really big butterflies, don’t you? DK: Right. Actually, the teaching went well because part of it was that I—having taught so much in the years previously and when students were not always being very cooperative. I had also taught at U.C. Davis as well as at Mainz, so I had a lot of teaching experience behind me. So, I had kind of a dynamic in the classroom that I wanted to set up, and Sally had prepared her students very well to be kind to me, I think. So, the class went just very well, and that made it a much more positive experience than if I’d kind of lost it in the classroom, so I enjoyed that. RL: So, your first impressions, of course, were formed by the search committee and by the department. When you got here, having taught in—I’m not certain the size of U.C. Davis, but I know U.C. Berkeley was tremendous. Did you notice a difference in the students when you finally got here? DK: I think I noticed a larger range in the students. I had bright students. I had students who were very capable and well-prepared at Weber State, but I also seemed to have a number of students who were struggling from the time that they got into my classroom. So, that was a difference because the students at 7 U.C. Davis tended to be more homogeneous. They weren’t all happy to be there. They weren’t all happy with their majors, etc.—I had several encounters with students who were telling me how they had been forced to major in science rather than in English, which was their love. The parents, I think, put a lot more pressure on the students at U.C. Davis also, which you could say, “It’s the cost,” except, it wasn’t the cost. At that point, the price of U.C. Davis was very low, but— RL: Well, I think there’s probably a difference in all of the U.C. campuses. They have very high admissions standards as far as GPA’s and background and SAT scores and so forth. Here at Weber, with open enrollment— DK: Right. It wasn’t quite open at the time. Some of my English colleagues were very miffed at that because I think Bob Smith had put some limitations on admissions, which didn’t seem high to me, but there were a few things in place. That changed as I stayed here, but it’s also possible that some of the students as U.C. Davis would not have been as motivated as students at Weber State in the sense that their parents may have been paying for their education. Whereas here—and that was I think the biggest shock—to find so many of the students were working full-time. That was my biggest surprise at Weber State. RL: The nontraditional aspect of it. So many of them come back from a mission and get married and are supporting at least a spouse if not children. That makes a big difference. DK: Yes, it did. One had to be conscious of that in terms of how much time students were able to put into their studies. I always kept my standards fairly high, but 8 then that had been my problem since I was teaching first grade. I was always like one year beyond what the students were capable of until I got to the master’s program here, and at that point we all came together as to where I expected them to be and where they were. That was a very happy experience. I was very impressed here with a lot of the women students who were very very bright and very well read and just seemed capable of handling a ton of things at the same time. That was impressive. At U.C. Davis, it would probably be just the student and her books. RL: Well, and also, I think the difference in having the commuter campus as opposed to students living on campus or right close by, does make a difference too. Now, you’d been teaching in earlier years, probably in Catholic schools, and having been in a religious background, what was your reaction to coming to Utah to a totally different religious environment or approach to religion? What were your impressions? DK: Well, of course, the first thing I did was draw kind of a parallel between my own times in Catholic school as a very devout young person with the students here. The one annoying part of it was that the students, oftentimes, are much narrower in their approach. Not more narrow than conservative Catholics, certainly, at all, but much more narrow in their thinking than, for instance, the students at U.C. Davis. I was teaching a class in persuasion and I drew up a list of topics that I wanted the students to argue and the students invariably chose positions diametrically opposite to what I would argue. Of course, if they argued well they got an ‘A’ on the papers, but it began to dawn on me that this was, politically, the 9 state was very much the opposite of what I had left in California, in the north of California. Because as someone once pointed out to me, Southern California is so conservative that they’ve had mostly Republican governors, so, but that wasn’t true the year I was in in Davis. So, it was the political rather than the religious element that I found challenging when I taught my students. RL: And yet that’s surprising because Ogden is fairly different from the rest of the state. DK: Well, some people have called Weber “little BYU,” so there was, at least historically, a group of very conservative men who were leading the university. Now, that’s actually changed as I’ve been here. It’s been wonderful to see women assume leading roles at the university, so at one point I had a—and this was exciting for me—a woman president, a woman Dean, and a woman Department Chair. It spoke well for Weber’s openness to women and to their advancement. I think that colored life to a certain extent on the campus. One incident that occurred in English was that a student was complaining—I guess to a teacher, it wasn’t to me. The teacher told him he should talk to the Chair because that would be his right, so he went to the Chair and I guess he was very disgruntled to find out that there was a woman Chair. She said, “Well, you can go on up, but the Provost, the Dean, and the President are all women also.” It sort of gave him a little more perspective on what women’s roles were, at least at this university. Not necessarily what he thought women’s roles would be. This was a person from one of the Middle Eastern 10 countries, so, of course, the culture that he was from would have suggested that women didn’t belong in such roles. He got his eyes opened very quickly. RL: But I think one of the things that we’ve been very lucky about is that women who have served in these capacities are so capable and have been so successful in carrying out their assignments and their missions. DK: Absolutely. RL: That’s become more and more common in Arts and Humanities and other areas at the University too. Of course, President Milner, who just stepped down not that long ago, had that love and respect of everyone in the legislature and all of the people in higher education and so forth. I think she has set a really high standard that other women will be striving to reach. DK: And men. I mean, basically, because her political acuity was so great she constantly kept the legislators on our side despite the economic problems of the times, and Weber has continued to grow from this enormously. So, of course, it says a lot for Weber. RL: She gained a lot of respect for the institution. Weber had always been a little brother kind of place. I think it’s risen in people’s viewpoints. DK: Well, in fact, I’ve been very impressed at times reading just a little bit in the past five years about some nationally known figures from Weber and people certainly making their mark in our culture and in the American culture as a whole. Of course, I have to say that when I told my mentors at U.C. Davis that I was coming to Weber State, their first reaction was, “Oh, the winners of the Big Sky 11 conference.” I said, “Well, I had never heard of Weber State, but the men at U.C. Davis certainly were very respectful.” RL: That was right after the time that I think they had beat out both North Carolina and Michigan in the NCAA. First round they knocked them flat on their backsides. DK: Great. Yes. RL: I mean, with me, people would say, “Weber State? You came here from Weber State? Never heard of it.” Then, all of sudden, they got the reports and it was, “Ruby, is that your Weber State?” It made quite an impression. As you say, it was not necessarily women, but the men that—well at least they didn’t say, “Why?” or “Where in the world is that?” It gave a little bit of information to hang things on. It sounds like you were happy with the choice of coming here. DK: I was very happy. One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Weber is its people, I think of my department—and my department is very, very large and very diverse and tends to be like herding cats to a certain extent. People could have sticking points about things that you thought, “Well, this will be just a little conversation,” and all of a sudden there’s a big uproar. Yet, I always felt a kind of warmth, a kind of encouragement from my colleagues all through my career. I never felt, as I think often happens at large research schools, like I was competing in order to get tenure, in order to get promotion and in order to get various and sundry privileges that went with my job. The students also are very warm and very accepting of a lot of different things. Not necessarily different ideas, depending on which students you’re talking about. It’s quite possible that, of course, the composition classes are where I would hit this type of negative 12 response and that’s because I would have students from across the campus, and I think some other departments may be a little bit more rigid in their thinking than the arts and humanities and even—well, not even, but the social sciences also would be in how they think about issues and how they think about people. I always felt like this—I always felt very comfortable around and accepted by both the faculty and the students. RL: You mentioned Tom Burton and Levi Peterson who were highly respected and very accomplished in their areas. Did they or any others—I realize you came here as an older person, but did anyone work in the capacity of a mentor for you? DK: I was thinking about that question because we didn’t have a formal mentorship at the time in English or, as far as I know, across campus. But, Sally, Judy Elsley, and Priti Kumar included me in their lunch sessions together and I think that was a kind of mentoring. That was in my first maybe five years where we met all the time. We met on a regular basis, and they were very helpful about different things. Levi, of course, kept an eye on people. He would give you hints about things. Then, when I became Women’s Studies Coordinator, which was in, I believe, my third year, that’s its own little story, but Gloria Wurst had been coordinator the year before, and she very much took me under her wing in terms of how to go about taking care of the program. RL: The program was fairly new when you got here. DK: Well, yes. 13 RL: In 1990 or 1991, and I think Gloria was probably the second director. She was very invested in it and remains so even now. DK: Yes. Literally invested. RL: The three women that you mentioned that included you in their lunches, they were highly involved with the women’s program in the early days. So, again, that’s an example of the strong women that have been coming to Weber in the last 20 or 25 years. So, you became involved with the Women’s Studies Program through them or just through seeing things about it on campus? DK: I’m not sure how I got word of the annual meeting—the Women’s Studies annual meeting. I think it must have been my second year of being at Weber State that I either learned of it from something that was sent out or it’s possible that Sally or Judy mentioned it to me. Anyway, I went to the meeting and we were concluding the business and they said, “Well, we need a coordinator for next year. Diane, what about you?” “Okay, let me think what skills I have.” I had been Department Chair, of course, at both high schools that I had taught at, so I had some administrative experience under my belt—certainly not the amount that I could have used, but again, Women’s Studies Coordinator is for three years and it’s basically the secretary that runs the program. Really the point of that is that people promised to be supportive and mentoring in that position. The only drawback was I didn’t have tenure yet, but I guess they decided they would take a chance. I think they thought that maybe having been a nun, I had some sense of how women should organize things and run them and be good to other women. So, I did in fact take on the job and Gloria 14 gave a lot of help. We had Norma, who was secretary, who had been secretary for Gloria but she wanted to retire at Christmas time, so we went on search for another secretary and we found Linda Shoemake. She was spectacular. She came from—she had been in an office for, I think the public schools for a long time and she came and she was fully invested in the program and extremely good at communicating with the other secretaries. Of course, Women’s Studies is an interdepartmental program. RL: It’s all volunteer. DK: Right. It’s all volunteer and inter-departmental, so you have to be able to communicate with secretaries across campus in order to know what’s going on and how you should be operating. Linda actually mastered the budget, which no one before or since, I think, has done. We actually did quite well with that, except that at one point I actually went hat in hand to five deans to beg for some money for Women’s Studies. So, that was a really interesting experience for me to meet the deans in other colleges. So, Linda just really helped and I had set up—Gloria had actually done all the paperwork to get us through semester conversion, but I drew up sheets for the students coming in so that we could make their converting of the courses they had already taken from the quarter to semester credits easier. So, that was my accomplishment in that timeframe. Also, the University went into program evaluation and I set something of that up for Women’s Studies—a sheet of criteria for whether the program was a success or not. Kathleen Lukken was the temporary Provost. I think at the time she was also in 15 charge of that evaluation program where we were looking across the University at different— RL: Accreditation and five year reviews. DK: Right. She had a website and I plugged all sorts of data in there. RL: Now, at about the time you came was when they were pushing Teaching and Learning Forum and strategic planning in different areas of the University and so forth. Were you involved in any of those activities or did you pretty much keep your nose to the grindstone with English and Women’s Studies? DK: Only in terms of just setting up that evaluation criteria for Women’s Studies. Of course, I participated at the Teaching and Learning Forum, but I also was trying to get—by this time Sesh was Chair and he was pushing me to get my book published so that I would be able to get Associate Professor or tenure out of that. RL: They were still doing both at that time. DK: Right, we would do this both at the same time. So, he directed me to a press where we’d probably be able to get the book published and I got an RS&PG grant—again, with the help of Sally—to change my dissertation into a book. So, that was very helpful, but— RL: What was the nature of the book? DK: It was on a medieval mystic called Julian of Norwich and—The Politics of Enclosure was what I wanted to call it, so that’s what I eventually called the book itself. It was on the nature of her texts and how they focused on Jesus as mother. So, she was a medieval mystic and her visions—which she only had once, and 16 she turned out to live, we think, quite a long time—but she was a very grounded person, so she wasn’t the type of mystic that’s some place off in the clouds. She only had the visions once and she wrote a book from that and then after meditating for maybe 20 years on that, she wrote a longer book. So, I looked at the structure of the book in terms of enclosure and how this reflected her emphasis on Jesus as being a mother. Of course, the cognitive dissonance with that type of gender disparity that might exist for moderns was not prevalent in the medieval mind where gender was as gender did—that is to say, your actions determined your gender. Of course, your actions were highly circumscribed so they could determine you gender, but she listed qualities of Jesus that are mothering qualities. She also lived a life of enclosure, and she talks about being in Jesus, almost as in a womb, and there are different images in the Middle Ages that look at Jesus as a mother with a womb. But, that, again, would be the subject of another discussion. RL: You mentioned Bob Smith earlier as Vice President for Academic Affairs, and I think toward the end of his time here they made the change and that position was called Provost. Were you able, in your capacity as Coordinator of Women’s Studies and on other committees as well, did you have much experience working with him? DK: I didn’t actually. I knew his wife, Adele, much better because she was the one who was closest to Women’s Studies. They gave us their cabin to use, for instance, for our annual meetings, so we did that for a couple of years. I knew and admired Bob, but I never actually worked alongside him. Probably the Dean I 17 would have worked most with would be Richard Sadler because he was the Dean for Women’s Studies. June Phillips, I worked on various general education committees within the college, and we worked with her on those and also another thing on evaluation with her. There were large movements in terms of the student evaluation and program evaluation. The program evaluation was the most dynamic development change that I was witnessing as I taught here—after semester conversion which was its own little nightmare, but we managed to get through that. I worked with Levi Peterson on that when he was Chair to do semester conversion and then with Dean Phillips on those types of committees, the types of committees that looked at program review and general education development. So, those were the Deans I best knew. RL: Was Sherwood gone by the time you got here? DK: Yeah, he was no longer around. He had been replaced as Dean of Arts and Humanities by June. RL: You were here under two different presidents, Paul Thompson and Ann Milner. DK: Right. Two different Provosts—well, there was Bob Smith, there was Kathleen Lukken and Mike Vaughn while I was here. Who was the Richard that was head of diversity—well it wasn’t called diversity— RL: Richard Ulaberry. DK: I did work with him because I was on the diversity committee again because, well, partly because I wanted to be there to represent Women’s Studies and he wanted me to be there. He was very very supportive of Women’s Studies, so I 18 tried to make sure that I worked well on that committee with him and we worked on the Diversity Conference, I don’t know if the first one was one of the ones I worked on, but we worked to make the Diversity Conference a good one and handled all sorts of different issues. I, of course, was there, but first mostly to encourage looking at women’s issues. RL: Then there was Mike Vaughn. Did you have occasions working with him? DK: No. I didn’t work with people in their capacity as Provost at all, nor the Presidents in their capacity as presidents. As I said, Richard Ulaberry, who was Vice President for Diversity I guess at the time— RL: Assistant to the Vice President for Diversity. DK: Okay. He was the one I would have worked with and then Dean Sadler and Dean Phillips, so none of the other higher administrators. I was mostly intent of getting through my tenure and promotion process and running Women’s Studies and teaching classes of which I’ve taught quite a few different ones. This is another appeal, I might say, of Weber State, to me—despite a Ph. D. in Medieval Literature, I am basically a generalist at heart. I love to dabble in a lot of different things, and Weber was a wonderful resource for being able to teach all sorts of different classes, and my Department Chairs encouraged and enabled that. It was easier, of course, when we were on quarters because there were simply more electives. Even when we had semester conversion and we were working in semesters I had opportunities to teach science fiction, fantasy, Perspectives in Women’s Literature, some women’s studies courses, the Women’s Studies Critical Theory course for both women’s studies and for English, and The Bible 19 as Literature. This was another happy dovetailing of my interest with what Weber State enabled. RL: So, the Weber State that you came to and the Weber State from which you retired, were different? It developed over the years and what are your impressions with the directions in which Weber has changed? DK: I’ve had to come to grips with having attended Jesuit universities and having been formed in a philosophy of education that came out of a Catholic background, I had a much more classical view of how a university should operate than I encountered even when I first came to Weber State and certainly throughout the decade and a half that I was here afterward. I think it’s a necessary direction. I don’t think it’s—I mean, it would be very nice to say, “Well, this is what the University should look like.” But I don’t even know that’s true even what is best for our country. Weber State has joined the computer revolution and the technological revolution in general. I taught all sorts of online courses and enjoyed putting courses on the internet even before it was popular. So, I had lots of material that my students were accessing through computers even before it became almost mandated that we do that. I don’t like the business model of education, but I don’t know if there’s a way around it economically today. So, I think Weber has done what it needed to do to survive and to flourish in this particular culture—culture meaning the whole of the economic reality of the United States and its educational needs. It still needs a populous that is educated in order to keep a vibrant democracy going and even the philosophy of the Jesuits has changed with respect to that. They 20 see the need for a more democratic approach to education. So, universities may have offered scholarships to some poor but talented students in the past, but I think it’s become increasingly necessary to draw in middle class and working class students because that’s the only way they’re going to survive economically and even politically today. People have to be savvy about those things. RL: Certainly, the level of wisdom that went into the idea of preparing Weber students for the economy and society here in Utah. I know it has paid off. There was an article recently about Weber having the highest return of investment for the schools in Utah. A greater percentage of our students are working. We do a lot more with a lot less money. Of course, when you first came, this was strictly, well, pretty much an undergraduate school. I think at that time we would have had three master’s programs. DK: I don’t even know if there was that many. RL: When I came there was accounting, education, and— DK: Nursing? Did nursing have one? RL: No, it was something in the social sciences area. It’s grown to where we have quite a few master’s program and I know when I first arrived people were saying, “There will never be doctorates at Weber.” Now I’m hearing conversations in that direction. Yet, I think we’re successful because we can still keep that approach to education where our faculty actually teach. They’re doing research, they’re publishing, they’re doing all kinds of travel and gaining a lot of respect for the institution, but they still teach and they really love it. 21 DK: In fact, this is what impressed me about my replacement from Yale. She comes from a very high-powered university, obviously. She was tired of maybe the type of students who felt the world owed them a living at Yale. RL: Who was your replacement? DK: It was Samantha, and her name was changed because she was married, but I don’t remember her last name right now. She turned out to be a spectacular teacher. She was so impressive in the classroom when she came for her interview that it put her at the top of the list for who we would hire. Before I left U.C. Davis, again, the economic situation changed. I heard other doctoral students at conferences like the Modern Language Association Conference, which is a big hiring place, mumbling that why would they want to go to a teaching university. I thought, “Well, maybe if you wanted a job you’d go to a teaching university because those are where the jobs are these days.” So, the job market has changed. That’s been a major change, but I do have to say that as I got older, it just flabbergasts me that people are so capable. These younger, incoming professors are so capable to be able to basically do everything. I’m not sure if it’s the best use of their energy because it certainly must be draining on a certain number of them, but I think Weber is flourishing at this point with the type of people we’ve hired and the type of loyalty that both previous faculty and alumni have toward the school. I think it’s on the right track for what has to be done. 22 RL: Now, you spoke about the students and how they were when you first came here and certainly the faculty and the staff have changed over the years. What are your impressions of the students? Did the face of the students also change? DK: I think, as far as the majors in English, I didn’t find a big difference. I was finding in the composition students a sort of less preparedness in terms of attitude as I went on. Of course, I couldn’t tell if it was because I was getting old and therefore, less patient about the type of things that they didn’t want to do, like assignments. I did find that, it seemed at one point to me, and this was just a momentary dawning of an idea that the number of students—I was still getting good quality work out of most of my students and I was getting outstanding work out of some, but it seemed that there were a growing number of students who simply didn’t bother with the final project. I heard other teachers complaining about the same thing. The students would be in class all semester and just not bother with the project that they needed to do in order to pass the class. That was one thing that I found to be unsettling. I don’t know if it’s partly because some of these students are younger in terms of they may have taken college courses while they were still in high school. RL: Advanced placement courses. DK: Yeah, advanced placement or the early college courses while they were in high school and they just weren’t mature enough once they got to the university to buckle down and do the work. Or they had reached the point where they had exhausted themselves from high school and they weren’t ready to take on college responsibilities, but that was a little bit of a challenge. On the other hand, 23 I was teaching master’s students. I actually got to teach—and again, Merlin Cheney, who shepherded the master’s program for English into its existence, was very willing to have me in that program and I found it very gratifying. I found students there who were very exceptional in terms of the quality of work they produced and their preparedness across the board for the courses that they were taking. That was a good deal of fun for me, intellectually. I also enjoyed my upper division courses quite a bit. RL: Were there students with whom you’ve kept in touch? DK: Actually, I do have a Facebook friend who was one of my students and then other people will say to me, “Oh, Dr. Krantz, I was one of your students.” I’ll see them in the grocery store or someplace else and we’ll greet like that. I don’t tend to be very personal in the classroom, so I didn’t tend to keep a lot of students friendly, but I had, for instance, not too long before I retired, probably about five years before I retired, a student came back with—two students came back actually—they were both alumni and they had both taken a class from me and they had married and I had been at their wedding, I think. But, the sad part of that return was he was in a wheelchair. He was actually a quadriplegic because the summer after he graduated, they went to Idaho to do swimming and he dived off a cliff onto a pile of rocks. There had been storms—he had done it before in that particular spot on the river, but there had been bad storms that winter, so there was a pile of rocks where they didn’t expect them. So, what was a blessing for him is he had already been hired by—it might have been BYU Idaho, I’m not sure, but he was working for the LDS church and so he had insurance that 24 summer even though he had just graduated from college. It looked like his young wife was going to be called upon to do quite a bit of work, but I was honored that they returned to talk to me, to see me as part of their return to Ogden. Then, Melissa Halverson, who was one of my students, and I used to share stories because at the time I had a pet rat and she kept pet rats, so we had something in common there, so she’s one of my Facebook friends at this point. Several other students just, you know, dropped into my office when I was still on campus, but I don’t correspond with anyone from here. I actually do correspond with a couple of my high school students, but that was a little bit exceptional also. I tended not to—I never believed in a classroom where you were kind of close friends with students, although people would often say, “Well, you really like so and so because she’s so bright.” I’d say, “Well, I also like other people that are not really doing that well in my class,” so it’s not fair to just say because this person is so bright is why I give her attention. I say “her” because at that time I was teaching all girls. I had a few friends among the high school students and a few friends among the students here. I attended several weddings. One of the reasons I got my second car—after which “totaling,” I got my third car, which I totaled and then quit driving—at any rate, one of the reasons I got my second car was because I missed the wedding of one of the students I was friends with and I was very disappointed at that. She was just married in a place I couldn’t get to by bus. So, a number of the students—a number of the men students also have come back 25 and talked to me when I was still in my office. I felt very gratified to see them and excited. RL: Do you feel like any students stand out in your mind as successes? Sometimes you take someone on and help them just a little bit and it makes a big difference. DK: I can no longer recall names. I have a terrible time with names to begin with and then I don’t recall them very well afterward. I just remember some of my—the men students were very sharp, I’m not trying to downplay those at all, but just some of the women students who had such spectacular insights. I was trying to get one—I wrote a glowing letter for one student to try to get her into the University of Utah, but her ACT scores weren’t good, so I actually called the head of the English department to see why they hadn’t accepted her and basically, what I was accused of doing was lying for the student. The student was brilliant. She had insights into literature that I rarely encountered even in the master’s level and I very much thought she belonged in a graduate program and at the time we didn’t have a graduate program. He basically said he wouldn’t trust any of the professors at Weber State to write letters of recommendation for their students. He said one of the letters he got for her seemed like a template. I said, “You know, I found her outstanding.” I guess this is one of the signs that, in fact, my students and I did have a good relationship. I did have, over the years, a good number of requests for recommendations. There was only once when I told the student that I though perhaps she should try another professor because she hadn’t done that well in my class. She hadn’t done that well in anybody’s class, which was why she was asking me for a recommendation, but I felt I couldn’t 26 write her a good recommendation. Other students, both male and female, I could write glowing recommendations for and did. They were just very insightful. RL: Your standpoint was your different involvements of teaching that you would consider your biggest successes? Or is there something that you see as a— DK: Culminating experience? RL: Your greatest accomplishment. DK: I think having the Women’s Studies program survive me is an accomplishment. I’ve enjoyed the teaching and I think my students have been—at least they were successful in terms of getting into higher education if they wanted to go there and that makes me very happy. For high school teaching too, over two and a half decades, I also realize that oftentimes—well, I got a letter from a students whom I had taught in high school some 15 years after I had taught the student saying how happy he was that he had me because he had encountered a situation where my advice in the classroom had gone a long way to helping him out in that situation. RL: That’s always a good feeling. We’ll never get rich, but it’s the little gems that make it worthwhile. DK: I mean, basically, with teaching you cast your bread on the waters. It’s planting ideas and I often thought—and I tried to do this with my Comp students—that I would make composition not only a course where I would teach them how to write for all of their courses in the future, but that I would also try to give them a little homely advice or advice from my own experiences as a student that I hoped 27 would one day stand them in good stead. So, I told them that sometimes it’s just hanging in there that gets you a degree. It’s not being the most brilliant one in the class or even necessarily the most productive one in the class, but keep persevering and it takes you a long way toward being educated. So, I think, you know, hopefully some of the students in their darker moments in college remembered that advice and kept on. RL: It sounds as though you’ve been rather happy with most of your accomplishments here at Weber. Any regrets about anything? DK: You’ll see that at this point, I was looking to see what I had written as a regret—if I looked at anything with a regret. If I could go back, I guess what I would do is try to meet more colleagues from more of the colleges at Weber. I think I had a wonderful opportunity in terms of being on the Diversity Committee and being chair of Women’s Studies to get a little bit across campus, but I think I could have got more out of some of those situations and I would have liked to have known more of my colleagues across campus that way. I did belong to—I was on the board of the employee association, the Faculty Staff association. I was on the board of that for several years and that was also a nice opportunity to meet people across campus. RL: And not just faculty members. DK: Right. Well, I’ve often—I have a very good rapport with the secretaries in English and the office manager in English, so I’m very pleased with that and I also got to take my dog to campus the last year I taught. I would leave him in my office. The first semester—the spring semester I took him first was because I was teaching a 28 night class and it’s kind of eerie around here at night especially at nine at night. So, I said, “Well, I’m taking Benji and if somebody objects, then that will be the end of it,” so I took him over and he stayed in my office while I taught and then I went back upstairs and I’d say, “Okay, we’re going to take a walk home,” and he was just as happy as a little lark and we walked home. By this time, of course, I had given up driving. The next semester was fall semester, I said, “Well, we got away with it in the spring, let’s see what happens now.” So, actually, the dean told me there were no restrictions on campus about bringing an animal. Of course, you’re not supposed to bring them into the classroom, so I did not do that, but I had him in my office and the secretaries made a big fuss over him and I just thought he kind of enlivened the floor when he was out of my office on a leash. I think that would be the one thing I would try to meet more people and maybe socialize with more people because my socializing was mostly with the English department. RL: Which is not necessarily a bad thing. That’s not much of a regret to have. It’s good to be able to speak about your years here in such a positive tone. DK: It’s good to be—I mean, I think even with my leaving, again, there was this support, this kind of quiet support. It wasn’t people making a big fuss over it, but quiet support in a number of ways, so I was thinking that I should retire, not necessarily that I wanted to or needed to, but I should retire by the time I was in my later sixties, so I had gone to inquire at personnel and they said, “Well, wait until the end of the year before you put in a formal declaration.” Well, that was before the voluntary separation plan was public and then a couple of months 29 later they made it public. I thought, “You know, those people, without saying anything directly, made sure that I would be eligible for that.” RL: Directing you in the way to go. DK: So, again, it was just very quiet, but very helpful because, of course, I only worked for pay for the 17 years I was at Weber—I was teaching actively at Weber the 18 years I was here and then for graduate student fellowships for six or seven years while I was at U.C. Davis, but it wasn’t much to build social security on, or even a pension, but you know, I’m doing well. I have no regrets that Weber State has done me a great deal of good and it’s a fine place. It’s got wonderful people in it and wonderful students and faculty and staff and I’m just glad I was here and got to know everyone. RL: Sounds like you built a good life here and have fond memories. DK: I do indeed. RL: What more can you ask for than that? DK: Exactly. RL: Diane, is there anything else you would like you tell us about or any information you would like to share? DK: I’m just glad that I also had the opportunity to give a last lecture because I had originally thought that it was supposed to be one’s last lecture. Then, it turns out, no, you’re supposed to be delivering it as if it were a last lecture. But, for me, it was a last lecture and it was my one opportunity to take my two areas of expertise and kind of reflect on them as a whole instead of in pieces. 30 RL: I was there and you managed to come in there and shine. DK: Thank you, Ruby. RL: You sounded as though you were happy with both of the pieces of your life and were able to combine them in a very intriguing manner. I really like that approach. DK: I think it’s special to Weber State that I was able to do that. I don’t know if there are other universities where that would have been possible. I think at other universities, things are very compartmentalized. It’s part of the ambiance of Weber State that it allows for that. RL: And you brought together a rather eclectic audience just because of the nature of the lecture. DK: I did. I was hoping the scientists wouldn’t get up and shoot me, but everybody seemed pleased, so I was happy. RL: Well, I want to thank you for spending time with us today. We try to get people’s perspectives on different aspects of Weber State and this will really help us do that. DK: Thank you, Ruby. I enjoyed doing this. This was much more fun than I envisioned. RL: People get a little nervous about it, but just sit back, relax, and enjoy it. It’s better than going to the dentist. DK: That’s true. Almost anything is. 31 RL: Thank you so much, Diane. DK: Thank you, Ruby. 32