Oral History Program Madonne Miner Interviewed by Suzanne Maltby 22 March 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Madonne Miner Interviewed by Suzanne Maltby 22 March 2017 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library 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 College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ 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: Miner, Madonne, an oral history by Suzanne Maltby, 22 March 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Madonne Miner, conducted on March 22, 2017 by Suzanne Maltby. Madonne discusses her life and her experiences as a minority leader in Norther Utah. SM: This is Suzanne Maltby. I am interviewing Dr. Madonne Miner. It is March 22, 2017. I am interviewing her in her office in the Miller Administration building at Weber State University. Madonne please start by telling us about your background (you may use childhood, teen years, where you grew up, hobbies, family values, education) MM: Thanks for the question. I'm from the Midwest. I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the 1950's and 60's. And as I thought about how my early childhood plays into leadership. Two specific recollections come to mind. One is that I'm the oldest child of four and I think I use my oldest position as a kind of leadership command center. They had to obey me. I was bigger. I was stronger. At least for a while. One of the ways that I enacted that leadership that actually led, I think toward an educational career, is that I almost from a very young age enjoyed teaching my siblings. Down in the basement of our house we had a small area with a couple of very old wooden desks. The kind that had ink wells in them and actually had seats that then were connected to the next person's desk behind you. So I would be the teacher and my younger siblings had to learn from me. I don't know what I taught them. But that is one of my strong and positive memories from childhood. The other thing that I think was really important as a teenager, is that I was a reader. I was fairly introverted as a kid and also wasn't particularly athletic. 1 I laugh now, but I really am basically uncoordinated and tend to fall down, and etc. Was never chosen for teams, hoped I could be a cheerleader and no way couldn't clap to save my life, you know at least couldn't clap in a rhythmic manner. So, I just spent a lot of time in fictional worlds and I think that was really, really important in that it opened me to different ideas, different cultures. It also very much pushed me toward college life because I knew that this study, this learning that I was getting from books was going to be important for me. So I basically, there was no questions I was going to go to college, and from college on I pretty much knew I wanted to be a teacher of reading and writing, teacher of literature, so I continued on to get a master's degree and PhD and here I am. SM: I love that answer because I have worked for Weber State's Family Literacy Program for years and so that just sounds exciting to me because I was working with the little kids to help them get the same value that you appreciate so much. MM: Yeah. SM: Thank you. Next, what experiences did you have in your childhood, teen or adult years that led you to believe that you were or could be a leader? MM: I'm glad you gave me this question in advance because it gave me a little bit of time to think about the fact that as a kid and a teenager, I didn't think of myself as a leader at all. Didn't think of myself as a leader in college either. I was not someone who ran for faculty senate, excuse me, student senate president or took on leadership roles. I didn't see myself as a leader, instead I saw myself as someone who studied, someone who read, and someone who spent a fair bit of time in her own world I guess I would say. But part of the reading that I did and 2 something I think really that did effect my possibilities for the future was works that were coming out second wave feminism. That is, the American women's movement was very important to me personally. I, toward the end of high school, remember reading Betty Friedan’s book. I read Simone de Beauvoir, “The Second Sex." And all of what those authors were saying, meant something to me because the culture in which I grew up was fairly patriarchal, fairly decidedly white, middle-class. We lived in the suburbs. My father was proud of being the bread winner. My mother was supposed to stay at home and raise the four kids and then when I countered these ideas from the women's movement, I thought, "Oh there are other possibilities. There are other ways to think about men, male and female roles." I started to question and challenge some of the roles that I saw in me. I think, I really have to give credit to this worldwide and national movement that was taking place when I was in my late teens and then on into my college years. When I look back now I went to a liberal arts college in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I was taking an English major, and I didn't read a single female author as an undergrad. And it was only when I got to maybe my junior year that I went, "What's going on? Surely there were some women writers." And this may sound so passé and ancient, but quite literally that I graduated in 1975 from McAllister and that was the way the curriculum was. You just didn't see women writers. I went on and got my master's degree at the University of Minnesota and continued to kinda ask, "Why aren't we reading women, why aren't we reading works by minority authors?" But it was only when I got to state university near Buffalo, that 3 I was with a group of PhD students who really gathered together and said "Things have gotta change." And that group of female graduate students and female faculty members at Buffalo were very supportive of all of us doing research in the area of gender studies and women studies. The first articles that I wrote as a grad student and then as a faculty member did have to do with questions about women as readers, women as writers and how social construction affects the processes of reading and writing. I think that work and that community is what allowed me to start thinking of myself as not necessarily a leader of people, but as at least an intellectual leader; that I was starting to have ideas that I could pull people into and ask them to consider and ask them to consider changing parts of their lives. So it really wasn't until I had spent five or six years as a faculty member and my first job was at the University of Wyoming so I was there. I received tenor and at that point I started realizing maybe it was time to take a step that was slightly off my original path of remaining as a faculty member and see what it would be like to be an academic leader and so I applied for the assistant chair position of the English Department at the University of Wyoming. I had always been very organized and one of the things that I found is if you are pretty organized, you get back with people when you say you are going to get back to them, you do what you say you are going to do. That's a large part of being a leader. Believe it or not. It is just sort of ensuring that you fulfill those responsibilities and then you hope that you also have time to be imaginative and creative and come up with solutions to problems. But I knew I could do the first 4 part and as I moved into further leadership roles, I realized the second part was sort of exciting and allowed me to gain pride and satisfaction in helping improve situations that I hadn't even known I had wanted to do. So that's the leadership story. SM: I love that explanation. That's why we're doing this project. You have just given me bits of gold. MM: Well good. SM: I love that you experienced different ways of thinking and you grew and challenged your thinking and changed because of that. I love it. Thank you. next, what are your core values? How have they influenced your leadership experiences or abilities? MM: I think some of those core values come first from my family; I think I received an education in the importance of treating people equally, of recognizing how important justice is and attempting to be truthful and honest and so forth. But some of the other values arose out of my work in women studies and in the women's movement. And that it's really important to pay attention to power dynamics. Especially as those power dynamics affect who can speak and who can't. And so as a leader I try to be very aware of those people who haven't had a voice. What is it that they could tell us that would change the way we see a particular situation or challenge? One of my goals as a leader has been to try always to stop myself from making decisions until I truly survey the landscape and see if there are individuals who haven't been able to express their opinion or their perspective 5 and if I can solicit those opinions and perspectives I can make a much betterinformed decision than otherwise. So that's one of the goals that kind of came later in my life or values. The other value that I think comes out of my discipline area is that in literary studies, especially during the years when I was in graduate school. We really emphasized the importance of skepticism and critical thinking and of asking questions. So I try always not to make assumptions but instead to say, if I'm making an assumption, let's question where that's coming from and figure out why I'm making the assumption and if that assumption really is something that I should hold onto or should I ask questions about what it's doing. I frequently when I teach first year compositions I ask students to read a text and I'll say, "What work is that text doing on you?" It is working on you somehow. And I try to do the same as I read for my profession as I read for decisions about leadership. What is the work that this particular article or essay is doing on me and if I can employ that critical thinking as a leader, I think that again I can be better at pulling out what some of the ideology is in a particular decision or pathway. SM: That was great. Thank you. MM: See this is great. She just confirms what I said. SM: Name a person who has had a tremendous impact on you as a leader (maybe someone who has been a mentor to you). Why and how did this person impact your life generally, and your leadership abilities specifically. MM: I'm grateful again that you gave me these questions in advance because it gave me a little time to think more fully about the different mentors, the different people 6 that have influenced me on this leadership path. Usually the first people that come to mind are two female leaders who helped me see that I too could be a leader because they showed their confidence in me. I mentioned that when I was at the University of Wyoming, I applied to be the assistant department chair. At the time, the department chair was a woman named Janet C. who embraced the fact that I was interested in moving into the assistant chairs role. She invited me to attend a conference for leaders of English departments. She sort of gave me good advice all the way through. I knew I could trust her. She was very honest and open with me. So she was somebody that was very important, especially early on in my academic leadership. The second person, again another woman, was Dean Jane Winer, who was the dean of the college of arts and sciences at Texas Tech University when I moved as chair of Texas Tech English Department. Jane was someone who chose me to be the chair, but as soon as I moved in as chair she met with me regularly and gave me a sense of what the challenges were going to be, what the history was of different particular disputes or different situations and I always knew I could trust her. I knew that she was honest with me and that she really did have my back, you know it's an expression, but she was a tremendous mentor and when I talked with her about the fact that I might be applying elsewhere and possibly moving, again, tremendously supportive. She understood that the move to Weber State into a dean's position would open up all kinds of new opportunities to me. And so of course I'll write you a letter. I really appreciate the 7 generosity of those two women leaders who took time to teach me as I was moving along this pathway. But the other person I thought of as I considered your question, and I haven't spoken about this in previous interviews or previous Q&A sessions, but I mentioned earlier that I grew up in essentially a middle-class family and that my father was the bread winner. I didn't mention that prior to my parents' marriage, my mother had been a nurse. She had an RN degree, worked as a nurse. Soon as they got married Dad said, "Oh you're gonna be wife and mother." So she stopped working. He was very reluctant to have her go back to work even as the four children reached an age where it might be possible for her to do so. By the time my youngest sibling was 12 or 13, Mom said, "I wanna get back to nursing." And she did. I don't think I've really ever given her credit for taking that step and then moving not only from a nurse's role, but into a position of leadership in the nursing institution where she was working. So she took those steps in a quiet, non-confrontational way, but she recognized that for her life to feel fulfilled, she was not only going to be a wife and mother, but she was going to do something that professionally was fulfilling to her. And I think again surreptitiously or sort of in an underground way, seeing her do that was a factor in my later move to say, "I can take on a leadership role. There's reason for me to do that. And it's going to be of interest and it'll help me grow and a human being. So I'm gonna to keep on pushing." So, there you go. 8 SM: Great. That's a great example and it was probably could have caused a lot of waves if she had done that, but she did it anyway. And I respect that a lot. Great example. But, I also love that you used the theme of trust with your leaders. That's something in the book that I've been studying. They talk about how leaders are have trust because they're consistent. You know what to expect from them. And I think you saw that. MM: It really is. SM: Ok next is, what do you see as the biggest challenges of being a woman leader in a Northern Utah? What do you do to overcome these challenges? MM: I was talking with a colleague on Saturday night and he mentioned that something like 80% of our Utah legislative body is white and male. We're in the year 2017 and 80% of the legislators of our state are white and male. That just blows be away and to give you credit he was very disturbed and talking about writing a letter to the editor to say, "We need to get with here gang." Utah is a different place. That is culturally, there is a history that suggests that white males are the ones who will be making decisions and so what does it mean to be a woman who aspires to positions where you do make decisions? Here I'll go back to Ann Millner. I didn't mention her before, but I probably could have because one of the reasons that I was interested in moving to Weber State was that Weber State had a president Ann Millner who had been in that role for several years before I applied for my position. And I thought, "Here's an institution in what appeared to be a conservative state, but that institution is run by a female president. There weren't that many female presidents back 10 years 9 ago when I started at Weber. So once again, part of what Ann did for me was tell me, "It's possible to be respected and work effectively as a woman leader in this culture of non-Utah." When Ann announced that she was going to be stepping down she told us all at a faculty senate meeting, I remember going up to her afterwards literally with tears in my eyes because I felt so saddened that she was moving on. And she had other things to do. She had put 10 years in as the president and it was time and she's now doing other good things, but she was important as a model for me in this instance. In terms of what I try to do to make sure that I can be an effective leader while I can overcome some of the challenges is once again, I try not to bring my own assumptions to the table. I try to say, "Hey we're all about student success at this institution. We're all of us in our own different ways attempting to give students the right resources so that they can realize the dreams that Weber State encourages them to have." If I can keep my eye on the fact that our goal is the same, then I can work with almost anybody. I do find that I try to be specifically careful about some of the language I use, about how forcefully I push. Ironically Wyoming was, even though we are right next door, Wyoming was a wilder place. You could get away with behaviors that were a little more idiosyncratic or you could push more. Here I feel like there's a lot of coalition that has to take place. A lot of working with people who may not fully share all of your values or all of your ideas but if you can come to an agreement on some specific shared points again higher education is important. Higher education should be available to everyone who has that dream to pursue a degree. If we agree on 10 that we can work together. So I don't know how much of a strategy that actually is, but that's what I try and use. SM: I think that's sounds great. If we find common ground with people that perhaps don't see everything the same way that we do. I love that. So, I feel like I could go on and ask you a whole bunch of questions on that topic, so maybe another time. What advice would you give emerging young women/minority leaders in order to be successful? MM: I think it's really important to get a range of different experiences and so for example the class that you're taking where all the students are going out and interviewing different people. That to me seems like it will be a tremendous opportunity to see how different individuals have thought about leadership and moved into leadership roles. One of the things that I've absolutely enjoyed and have grown with is that every leadership role that I have taken on has offered me the chance to meet a whole new range of different people and learn from them. When I moved into the provost office, I mean, it was with fear and trepidation believe me. I felt as though this was really totally new training and the first year in was quite a challenge, but that first year also allowed me to meet all of these different people that I hadn't really known closely before and they shared with me some of their experiences and their strategies, their ways of working. Of course that's so cool. I can do that too. So I think the larger you can, let me back track. If you can make your experience base as large as possible, if you can perhaps intern, ff you can ask somebody, "can I be your shadow and just follow for a couple days?" That's a strategy for moving into leadership positions. 11 In terms of being successful as a leader, I think it's really important to recognize that you gotta do work. And that might sound really mundane, but that's the bottom line. It's a tremendous amount of work and it's tiring. I don't have children and I often am amazed by how woman leaders with children can be just as productive. I don't know when they sleep. I really don't because there's so much work to be done. But they do, it's possible. It's just you have to realize there's going to be a lot of weekends, a lot of nights. I knew when I was working at Texas Tech first as English Chair then as an Associate Dean, my dean, she didn't get much sleep and she was in the office all day, doing meetings. I knew that she'd go home and do email all night and there's Saturday events and Sunday events. SM: What other insights can you share about being a woman/minority leader in Northern Utah? MM: I enjoy this question because I so much enjoy being a woman leader. As I mentioned before I hadn’t anticipated during child years, but for me being a leader means that you get resources, both financial and informational that will help you make what you hope are good, positive changes for a community and that can be incredibly satisfying. Most days I come to work happy and I leave work happy. There are issues and problems that arise, there are challenges, but I’m surrounded by so many really smart people who each one is smart in his or her own different way and I get to benefit from the intelligences that they bring to bear on the challenges that occur in this office. It’s always exciting. 12 There is never a dull day when you are in a position where you’re trying to move an institution forward for the benefit of the students, faculty, and staff who work and attend a work in that institution. So I would say go for it. You know, if you’ve got the inclination, talk with other people and try to get them to honestly tell you what your strengths and what your challenges might be as a leader. Do see if you can shadow a leader or serve as an intern and then make a decision and if you’ve decided, this really is right for me, see if it can you can make it happen. That would be my advice. SM: That was perfect I love it and I especially said you like to come to work, I do too, but good to know that with all of your responsibilities you still do. MM: I wasn’t sure the first year, but really by second year around it was like, “Oh I’m getting the hang of this now.” SM: Well thank you so much for taking the time. I know your schedule is so busy, but you squeezed me in. So thank you. 13