Oral History Program Madonne Miner Interviewed by Kandice Harris 8 August 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Madonne Miner Interviewed by Kandice Harris 8 August 2019 Copyright © 2022 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 Beyond Suffrage Project was initiated to examine the impact women have had on northern Utah. Weber State University explored and documented women past and present who have influenced the history of the community, the development of education, and are bringing the area forward for the next generation. The project looked at how the 19th Amendment gave women a voice and representation, and was the catalyst for the way women became involved in the progress of the local area. The project examines the 50 years (1870-1920) before the amendment, the decades to follow and how women are making history today. ____________________________________ 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 Kandice Harris, 8 August 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Madonne Miner Circa 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Dr. Madonne Miner, conducted on August 8, 2018, in her office, by Kandice Harris. Madonne discusses her life and her memories, as well as the impact of the 19th Amendment. Alexis Stokes, the video technician, is also present during this interview. KH: Today is August 8, 2019, it’s 2:30, we are with Dr. Madonne Miner in her office. Kandice Harris is conducting the interview and Alexis Stokes is filming. When and where were you born? MM: I was born in 1952, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. KH: Would you talk a little bit about your early life and some historical background? MM: I’m the first child of four. My parents were from Southern Illinois and the city of St. Louis. When they got married, my father was offered a position in Milwaukee. So, Mom and Dad moved up to Milwaukee. Which kind of isolated them from their families; they both came from really large families, Mom had 12 siblings, my father also had 12 siblings and he was the youngest of all of those. They left their families behind and moved up to Milwaukee and I would say I had a typical, white, middle class, upbringing within a Catholic household. My father was a fairly traditional patriarchal parent. My mother, before she got married, had been a nurse, and actually she met my father at a VA hospital in St. Louis. Once they got married and children started to arrive, my father felt that she shouldn’t work outside of the home, for pay, anymore. She became a full-time mom which at 2 the time was great as far as I was concerned, because it meant someone was always at home. She was the kind of mom who enjoyed baking so, we had cookies waiting for us when we came back from school and so forth. It wasn’t until I got into high school that I began to question some of the roles that seemed to be taken for granted in my family. There were a couple things that prompted those questions—one was culturally, it was a time when women’s movement literature was becoming more prevalent. Betty Friedan had published her Feminine Mystique, in 1963. By the time I got to high school, I knew about that. In addition, I attended a Catholic high school and most of the textbooks were written in a way that presented the Catholic church and Catholic history in a very positive fashion. But I had always been a reader and I found that there was some contradictions between what I was reading outside of school and what I was reading in school. I became the family rebel, or the family doubter, and was willing to explore different alternatives during high school. At the time, in Milwaukee, I didn’t see that much going on with respect to the Civil Rights movement, except with respect of Native Americans. Interestingly enough, there was a group of Native Americans who took over the harbor area in Milwaukee and that too was part of the background to what I was picking up during high school. The Vietnam War was going on and I had doubts about what our motives were with respect to that war. My father was a supporter and was of a mind, “You don’t question authority.” I remember very distinctly him saying, “There are kinds of things you don’t know. The president knows and you don’t. So you need to go along…” In any case, towards the end of high school when it 3 came time to decide on a college, I essentially said, “I’ve gone through 12 years of Catholic education, I want to go someplace that’s really different and a little more radical.” We had an agreement in our family that as long as my parents could afford it, each of us children could choose the institution of higher education that we wanted to attend. We had to pay for a quarter of our tuition and living expenses. I could have gone to one of the public schools in Wisconsin and my quarter costs would have been relatively low. But I wanted to get out of Wisconsin. I didn’t go too far away, I went to a liberal arts college in Minnesota called Macalester. It’s in St. Paul. I went to Macalester in part because at the time, there was a Yale Guide to Universities and they listed Macalester as being the hot bed of drug activity in the Midwest, and also of anti-war activity. “Okay, that’s what I want to see, that’s what I want to do.” It was a very good choice for me. Not because it was a hot bed of drug activity, but because I got to meet a different range of people. Macalester prided itself on attracting a lot of international students doing study abroad. No longer was I in this relatively isolated white, middle-class community. Instead, I had the opportunity to experience a different range of thought and that was really positive. That’s the early days. KH: Were you encouraged to pursue an education? MM: I would say yes. There was never a question about us going onto college. That was a given. And all four of the children, myself and my three siblings, all of us did go. We all got bachelor’s degrees and three of us got Ph.D.’s. We had a foundation of being interested in reading and ideas. My mom read a lot to us 4 when we were kids. I didn’t mention that before; but I think that was really important. Before we went to bed, she would spend time reading books to us, and that established that pattern. The fact that my parents even had this financial plan set out for us, meant that we were going to college. KH: What started your interest in English? MM: Not only did my mom read to me, but I was a reader as a kid. I remember distinctly after lights were out and we were supposed to be asleep, I literally would have the flashlight under the covers reading because I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to finish these books. I wanted to keep on going. I was fortunate because we had a book mobile that came to the school across the street from where we lived. Every two weeks it would come on Monday afternoon and you could take out ten books. It didn’t matter whether they were kid’s books or adult books and very quickly I started reading adult books and I was fascinated by the act of reading, and seeing these different worlds. I had the opportunity at Macalester to work with some really fascinating faculty members and they continued to pique my interest in literary analysis and interpretation. One of the things that I will say is that, I did my undergraduate between 1971 and 1975 and at that point, the canon within Literary Studies still was very British. I don’t think I took a single American Literature course, when I was an undergrad. Only after I went to graduate school did I start diving in American Literature. Which now, is kind of like, “Duh. How could that have been?” But the idea was, English Literature was the coin of the realm. That’s what you studied and learned from Beowulf, and through Shakespeare, and Milton. We did read some Virginia Wolff. 5 She was included but mostly it was the white dead guys who spoke British English. KH: What were some of the challenges you faced while obtaining your degrees? MM: I worked when I was in school because I was supposed to contribute the one quarter of the cost. But in a way, that wasn’t a terrible challenge in that I enjoyed the part-time jobs. And I think, I knew that if I couldn’t meet my financial obligation, my parents were there to help me. I think about students today, many of whom don’t have that cushion. I had it much easier than they do, I was doing a very traditional route. I went immediately from high school into college, I didn’t have kids, I didn’t have a lot of the responsibilities that many of our Weber State students do. In some ways, the challenges were living up to the goals I set for myself and trying to meet my own expectations. I was and still am obsessive compulsive and I was one of those people who always wanted the perfect grade, the perfect score. Made myself nervous about taking tests and giving my best performance possible. But I see myself a bit as generally having been very fortunate. I happened to be born in a family that valued education and pushed me to do it and although my mother didn’t have an advanced degree, she had an RN, registered nursing degree. My father had gone to college on the G.I. Bill. They both had some experience with what it means to go on beyond high school. KH: What degrees and certifications do you have? MM: I got my bachelor’s degree in English, got my master’s degree in English and then went on and got my Ph.D. in English. One track mind. 6 KH: That’s not a bad thing. MM: No, but I sometimes think, “Maybe I should have explored a little more. It might have been wise to open up more windows.” Those are the degrees, I don’t think I have any certifications. KH: Where did you get your master’s and Ph.D.? MM: I got my master’s from the University of Minnesota, not far from where I did my bachelor’s degree. While I was getting my master’s at the University of Minnesota, a friend of mine finished her master’s and went to State University of New York at Buffalo for her Ph.D. She and I wrote letters, because this was the time when you wrote letters. She kept saying, “This is a really fun place. There’s lots of exciting stuff happening at the State University of New York right now.” It was a time when Rockefeller was investing a lot of money in the state system. Buffalo in particular, was developing a specialization in psychoanalytic criticism. It was new and shiny at the time and also in feminist theory. That sounded intriguing to me. So I applied and was offered scholarship support. I should say that my parents had told all of us, “You have your four years of undergrad, after that, you’re on your own.” And I knew that going into English was somewhat risky, because even then, it was the case that people with Ph.D.’s were struggling to find jobs in academic positions. I didn’t want to load myself up with debt and when Buffalo offered me this fellowship, it meant I wasn’t going to have to take out a loan. I actually didn’t even teach during the first couple of years I was there. I just collected a paycheck which was fabulous. It allowed me to finish my coursework and then start working on a dissertation. I had met a 7 couple of really strong women’s studies and feminist faculty members and I was able to pursue a dissertation that involved looking at women readers and women writers who were engaged in writing very popular novels across the 20th century. At other schools, more “traditional” schools, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do that kind of work in the late 1970’s early 1980’s. KH: What were some of the mentors and resources you had available to you in your programs? MM: I think back to—especially some of the faculty members who really went out of their way to be supportive and to be encouraging. There was a faculty member in my master’s program, Madeline Sprengnether, who taught Shakespeare and feminism. It was a graduate seminar and she would have us over to her house in the evenings. The seminar, “Hey, we’re getting to interact with this professor on equal terms.” She was encouraging when I went to State University at Buffalo, Madeline had a colleague, Claire Kahane, at Buffalo who served on my dissertation committee. Claire was very helpful, not only in terms of reading the dissertation, but also in pushing me to publish it and also helping me find an academic position toward the end of my time as a grad student. Those two in particular I point to as early, strong, mentors. I also had some really good male faculty members along the way. At the University of Minnesota, when I was getting my master’s degree, I was assigned to a faculty member as his TA and just being able to watch how he taught and get a sense of how he graded and evaluated student work, allowed me to learn a whole lot about teaching. That was important. 8 KH: What are some of your memories of the feminist movement? MM: I recall when I was at Buffalo, attending marches for reproductive rights. There was a very conservative politician in Buffalo, and I’m forgetting his name right now. He ended up on the national scene for a while. He was adamantly opposed to any kind of federal funding going to clinics and was pushing against that. To me, it seemed that it was imperative that if women were going to be able to make choices about the way they lived their lives, they had to have access to reproductive freedoms. Those were interesting rallies, interesting marches. I don’t think of myself as a huge activist, but those were days when I thought, “I have to do this. This is really important.” I was fortunate in that, again, Buffalo had a range of women studies courses and so I was able to do course work that talked about not only the feminist issues, but also about feminist pedagogy. When I received my first teaching job at the University of Wyoming, it was in women’s literature/modern drama, a weird combination. In any case, I was assigned several women’s studies courses and they were some of the best courses I’ve ever taught. I think back on those courses and how you could see people’s minds changing and you could see them rethinking a lot of things that they had brought with them from childhood. Those courses also made me think a lot about traditional models of teaching so that I had to move out of any kind of lecture expert position and instead, do a lot of work to facilitate discussion and ensure that voices could be heard. All of that really came out of the women’s movement, and informed who I was as a teacher and as a human being. KH: What resistance or battles did you face as you progressed in your career? 9 MM: That’s an interesting question. Again, I think I was exceptionally fortunate in that I happened to be in places that allowed me to flourish in most cases. Buffalo as a graduate program offered me the opportunity to write about these best sellers. I wrote about the Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann and Gone With the Wind. And most literature programs would have said, “What? You’re writing about these best sellers? That’s not what you do.” But, it was a time when some schools at least, were able to say, “Maybe it’s important to analyze popular culture. The kinds of books that lots of people are reading. Maybe it’s time to analyze T.V. shows because they are having a major impact on lots of human beings.” That was positive. Then my first position was at the University of Wyoming and I have so much gratitude to that place because I entered an institution that had established a women’s studies program with support from a female dean of the arts and humanities college. By the time I got there, the program offered several courses including Introduction to Women’s Studies which I ended up teaching for several years, and had a strong advisory committee made up of a community of people that welcomed me. I had colleagues and I had people who were willing to go to bat for the importance of teaching Women’s Studies and then later, the importance of building up a Native American Studies program as a diversity requirement. There was something very positive in the air. I know sometimes people think of Wyoming as a conservative state and it certainly elects Republicans all of the time, but it’s also one of those states that will say, “You can do what you want, as long as it doesn’t affect me.” It’s a very independent state or Libertarian state, I guess. Where I 10 felt that I could push in new avenues and be supportive. I will say that early on I was teaching first year composition and a student in my class wrote a really disturbing paper that articulated his hatred of gay students. I was shocked because I hadn’t seen that kind of overt expression of hatred toward a group of people. I had to learn how to work a little bit with this student who had come from a tiny little town. I had to learn what it was like to be in a state that had only 400,000 people and there wasn’t a major city and you had to be careful of how you approached some subjects, but you still had to approach those subjects. You’re asking about challenges and I’m not really telling you about challenges because once again, I feel like I was fortunate. I ended up with this good supportive community. People who were willing to advance women in the university. Wyoming proudly talks about the fact that in 1869, they were the first state to give women the right to vote. They don’t usually talk about the fact that the legislative body that did that, did so because the population was predominately men and they needed to get women to move to the state in order civilize those men, and make the state flourish. There was this kind of culture that said, “You want to be a department chair? We’ll help you be a department chair.” I probably should mention that one of my other mentors was the English department chair, at the University of Wyoming. A woman named Janet Constantinedes, who invited me to serve as her Assistant Chair after I had been there for a while and had received tenure. In that way I was able to develop some experience as an administrator. KH: What other mentors did you have in your career? 11 MM: A really important mentor for me came during my second academic job. That was after I had spent 15 years at the University of Wyoming. I moved to Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas; that move was motivated primarily by a relationship. I, at Wyoming met my partner, David Malone, who was an accounting faculty member. He was moving up to the University of Idaho. So we were separated by 1,033 miles, as the crow flies. We did that for three years, thinking, “Well one of us will find a position where we both can be in the same place.” That wasn’t really happening and so I had opened my mind to the possibility of moving elsewhere and trying to find a position for David wherever I might move. Happened to see an ad for the English department chair at Texas Tech in Lubbock. I knew one of their faculty members and called him and he said, “Well, this is kind of tricky place. Faculty aren’t getting along with each other but interview.” I did and on my interview I met the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, a woman named Jane Winer, and really liked her. Thought, “Oh, she could be an interesting person to work for.” She offered me the job and offered to find a position in the Accounting department for David so that the two of us could move to Lubbock together, which we did. I got to work with Dean Winer for five years as I was English department chair and then eventually I moved in as an associate dean into her office. She was a model who showed me some of the larger workings of an institution. She had eighteen departments under her as the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. And when I moved into the associate dean position, it meant I started learning about the politics of the institution in greater depth, about the financial battles in the institution, about personal battles 12 and personnel battles and she was willing to be very open and share her challenges, her struggles, her solutions. I credit her for helping me see how I might fit into an administrative role and what both the pleasures and the pains of such roles could be. KH: Did you always want to teach? MM: I always wanted to teach. I never wanted to be an administrator really. I joke about the fact that in my family’s home where I grew up, down in the basement, we had some of those old desks that had inkwells in them, and there would be the front part of the desk and then that would serve as the back of the desk of the person ahead of you. They were meant for grade school kids. I would make my younger siblings go down there and be students while I would be the teacher. It’s like, “I’m the oldest, so I’m the teacher.” I enjoyed playing teacher and then when I got into graduate school and had the opportunity to teach as a teaching assistant, and then eventually when I got to teach my own classes. I just loved it, I loved figuring out what I wanted to accomplish in the class and then setting up a syllabus that would lead to—we didn’t call them learning outcomes then, but setting up a syllabus that would lead the students to the learning outcomes that I really wanted them to achieve. I also enjoyed being in a teaching community and seeing how different classes of students interacted in completely different ways. At Wyoming when I was teaching a lot of Intro to Women’s Studies, I might have two sections. In the eight o’clock section, students would get along really well and the discussion would flourish and then the 9 o’clock section, they were like, “Ehh.” Wow, I’m teaching you the same stuff, we’re talking about the same 13 topics, why? But so much of a class has to do with how people who enrolled, how the students get along with each other or don’t. It’s an extremely rewarding profession, or it has been. I don’t know if it will be as time goes on. At least, up until now, teaching has been the highlight of my career. I have really enjoyed working with students. It is exceptionally rewarding. KH: What other positions than the ones that you have mentioned have you held in your career? MM: I served for a little while as director of graduate studies at Texas Tech in the English department. Did the associate dean position and by then, both David and I had spent ten years in Lubbock, which is very isolated. We used to joke, you’re six hours from anything and everything, the city is out there on the west Texas plains. It is the home of Buddy Holly but it’s also very much the home of Church of Christ and it’s pretty conservative. Even though Texas prides itself on its wide open spaces, everything is fenced in. It was hard to find open land. And I found while I was at Texas Tech, as much as I enjoyed it, I really missed the mountains. I had loved living in Laramie and the Snowy Range is really pretty. There was something tugging at me about the west, what I think of as the west, which is Wyoming, Utah, and I wanted to get back to this region. I started keeping my eyes open for positions that would be up along the Rocky Mountain Range. Found the ad for dean of arts and humanities here at Weber State; that would have been in 2007. I interviewed for the position, Mike Vaughan was provost at the time. He offered me the position and he offered to find a position for David in accounting. To give David credit, he’s been the trailing spouse two 14 times in a row. We agreed to move up to Ogden. I was really excited about moving here and moving to Weber State. I also really appreciated the clarity of Weber State’s identity. One of the things that I loved about Wyoming is it was the only four year degree grauting institution in the state. If you wanted a bachelor’s degree you went to the university. I never felt like Wyoming was trying to be anything it wasn’t. It knew what it was supposed to do. Tech was different because the two big public schools in Texas are UT Austin and Texas A & M. There was no way Texas Tech was ever going to compete with those two research I institutions. But Tech desperately wanted to be a research I. The whole time I was at Tech, I felt like the university was conflicted. It wanted to be a good teaching school, but it really wanted to be UT Austin. When I came on campus for my interview at Weber, one of the first things that struck me was this school knows what it wants to do. It’s a teaching institution and it prides itself on working with its primarily undergraduate population. Master’s programs, yes, but a relatively few number. I was up here for two and a half days for the interview and I thought, “This is it. This is where I want to be.” So when Mike called, I said, “Yeah, I’d like to come.” My next position was the Dean of Arts and Humanities. Started that in 2007, really enjoyed that position. I had five departments: Performing Arts, Visual Arts, the Communication department, English department, and Foreign Languages. They fit nicely with my own background, my own interests. I think I flourished in an environment where I got to work with people whose interest and loves were very much aligned with mine. Even though in 2008, we went through the economic downturn and it looked as 15 though there weren’t going to be raises for a while and we probably weren’t going to have new lines. It was still so gratifying to work with that faculty and work with the students and staff in the college. The dean’s office for Arts and Humanities is in the Val Browning Center and every time I walk in that building I feel good. It’s just a spacious building, it’s beautiful, “I get to work here. This is really cool.” KH: What was Weber State like when you started? MM: The real dramatic difference between then and now has to do with the buildings and the plan of the facilities on campus. It’s been remarkable to see how beautiful this campus has become. And how lucky we are to have such nice facilities in which to teach and work. When I started the Student Union was under renovation and they were adding to it. Buildings Three and Four were still being used—or One or Two, I can’t remember. They were still on campus, long Quonset-hut looking buildings, but those came down. Elizabeth Hall went up in 2009; I had been here for two years and got to open this new building that housed Communication, and English, and Languages. That is really a neat building, nice wide corridors, spaces for students. Others opened just recently of course, Social-Behavioral, Tracy Hall. I can’t believe the amount of construction that’s gone on and the way Norm Tarbox’s area—Administrative Services really has paid attention to the aesthetics of the campus. Even this morning when I was walking in, I thought, “Wow, the grass is recently cut. They’ve done nice stuff on the landscaping. This place looks really good.” I have a very old friend— well she’s not very old, but she’s a friend who’s been a friend for a very long time—who is affiliated with Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. 16 She came to visit Weber several years ago and as I was taking her around she said, “Your buildings are really kept up. They are so well maintained. If you go to Washington State, there’s trash around and we’ve cut back on our maintenance services. Things are nice here.” It’s true, it’s really true. That’s a real easy change to see, the physical change. Some of the other changes are that I see us paying a lot more overt attention to student success and I’m really pleased about that. That has been an initiative that my office has supported in tandem with Student Affairs. We’ve really made some progress in saying, “Students have to come first and that applies to not only faculty, but staff. We want students to enter Weber State, to feel that they can succeed at Weber State and then complete whatever degree or certificate that they want to complete. There’s a lot more conversation, a lot more awareness about how important students are. I’d also say we’re changing in terms of our offerings. Last spring, we had our first doctoral degree in nursing practitioner approved and that is an indication that—not that we’re going to turn into a doctoral institution, we’re not. That’s not our mission. But it is an indication that we’re keeping up with what’s going on in the required degrees for health professions. We’re keeping up with what’s needed in our region, in terms of graduates who are able to get jobs and being thoughtful about what kinds of courses and majors we can offer. KH: What were your responsibilities as the dean of arts and humanities? MM: Essentially, I was there to support and facilitate the best possible education that those five departments could offer. Also, there to help hire, evaluate, and support faculty members and to encourage faculty and staff to think strategically 17 about what our course offerings should be in the five departments. I was really pleased while I was there to partake in the hiring process of lots of new faculty. You know, people retire and then you have to decide, “Alright, are we going to hire someone in that same area? Are we going to hire someone different?” I interviewed every candidate who came on campus for an interview with the department. I’d usually express an opinion to the hiring committee about who I thought their best candidates would be. Over the years that I was dean, we became a more ethnically, racially, and in terms of sexual orientation, a more diverse faculty than we were in the past. We also updated a lot of our course offerings so as to ensure that students were getting not only a liberal arts education, but also, that they would think about practical applications of that education. Those were major responsibilities. On a more mundane, or day to day basis, my job was to put out little fires and to cultivate donors, to deal with the phone calls from irate students who for one reason or another couldn’t get into a course, or they weren’t happy with a grade, and those kinds of things. KH: What was the process for getting Elizabeth Hall built? MM: Most of that happened before I came on as dean. The previous dean was the one who actually went through the planning process with choosing a contractor, ensuring that the state approved sufficient funding for that building. When I arrived, the plans were set and it was interesting because I found myself looking at plans going, “Okay, well, I don’t know if I would have chosen to have done things this way, but this is what we are getting. You can’t change the plans when you’ve gotten so far along.” Much of what I ended up doing, in terms of 18 facilitating that building, had to do with figuring out how to move the faculty members who had been in Social and Behavioral Sciences, that was where English had been and where, I think foreign languages had been, but communication was in one of those Quonset huts. We had to plan how they were going to make the transition to Elizabeth Hall and that transition occurred in December of 2008 in between the Fall semester and the beginning of Spring semester. Of course, as we moved toward the end of semester in 2008, the builders were still putting finishing touches on that building and you get nervous and think, “Are we going to make it? We have to offer courses in there in January. What’s going to happen?” But, we did. It all worked out fine. KH: What was it like being a dean over people in so many different buildings? MM: That’s a good question because there are three buildings that are the responsibility of arts and humanities and probably when you were asking what some of my job responsibilities were, one of the things I should have added is dealing with floods when they happened in the performing arts building—Val Browning. You’re supposed to have a donor dinner that evening and someone calls and says, “Uh, there’s water running down the hallway, where you are going to have your donors engage in their nice little soiree.” So, whoops. Having three buildings was fun because each one had its own distinct personality. Because I wanted to ensure that I had a connection with the humanities area, even though my main office was over in Val Browning for a while, I had a faculty office in Elizabeth Hall and held office hours there. I made an attempt to teach at least one course each year, so that I retained my street cred as a faculty member; but 19 also, retained that connection with students. It’s really important that administrators don’t get too far away from students, because if you do, you forget what student life is like. I had one office in Elizabeth for a couple of years. As time went on, it became clear that they needed that office for someone who was going to be there more hours than I was. Eventually, I had only the Val Browning office. But, I do think because this campus is not so spread out, it was relatively easy to occasionally make my way over to E-Hall for an English department meeting, or for a lecture that was being held in E-Hall 229, the bigger lecture hall. And of course, it was very easy to walk from the Val Browning to Kimball Visual Arts. I have always loved walking through Kimball because always there is artwork displayed on the walls and you get to go, “Oh, I like this, or I like that.” Although it’s somewhat of a challenge to be that spread out, it was a good challenge because the areas do have distinct personalities. I liked getting a feel for what those personalities were. It also was a lot of fun being based in Val Browning because almost every week I’d have either some vocal performance majors walking by singing outside of my office, or there would be actors rehearsing lines in the hallway. I felt I was part of that environment and it was fun. KH: What are the distinct personalities of the different buildings? MM: I would say—no surprise, the performing artists are a little more eccentric even though many of them have to work together. For example, if they’re in an orchestra, or if they’re in a quartet, or if they’re putting on a play, they have to work together because the costumer and the set designer and the director have 20 to make it all work communally. But, they tend to be very individualistic. Here’s an example. Not too long after I became dean, I was fortunate enough to be able to hire a person to do marketing and public relations, Christie Denniston. She is fabulous at her job. When she came on board and she said, “Okay, we’re going to set up a calendar of events. Faculty members you must submit your events to me by x-date.” The faculty members who always submitted events late, were the performing artists. “How can you come in late? You have to show up on stage at 8 o’clock, don’t you get it? There’s deadlines!” But, that was just part of their culture. It’s hard to regiment them. Visual artists… they were very easy to work with. Maybe they had their things set and they knew what was expected of them. I never had problems with visual arts. The humanities areas, again, a little more prickly, sometimes set in their ways, but they were my colleagues and I appreciate them. KH: What programs did you help create and run as the dean? MM: Probably the program that I was most proud of, I started working on during my first year here. I was approached by Cynthia Buckingham, who at that time, was the executive director of the Utah Humanities Council. UHC, it now just became Utah Humanities, but at the time it was UHC—she was working to set up programs in which UHC would partner with local institutions of higher education to offer what was called the Venture Program. Venture was meant for individuals whose life conditions hadn’t allowed them to pursue a college education, either because they financially didn’t have the means, or life had gotten in the way in some ways; but, who were interested in exploring what higher education might 21 offer. Venture was grounded and modeled on something called the Clemente Course, which had started in New York City. A guy named Earl Shorris actually had been talking with prisoners in the New York prison system and it struck him that many of these prisoners really had very, very little connection to a sense of themselves as citizens of an American city, or of an American culture. They hadn’t been given the opportunity to learn either about western civilization, or more specifically about American civilization and history. They were at a distance, they didn’t see themselves as really part and parcel of a specific community. He decided that he would offer humanities work to these prisoners. Again, he called it the Clemente Course, because I think that was the name of the prison that he first worked in. The way he set up his program was that prisoners would get a course in American History, Philosophy, Art History, and I think literature was the fourth. The idea was to say, “This is your history and this is your culture.” These are the philosophers who’ve shaped the way we in the west, often think. Humanities Council here in Utah said, “We think that’s what we should do in partnership with SUU and partnership with Weber State.” I started helping to put that together. It was complicated because we didn’t want to charge tuition to any of these students. We did want to offer them some university credit so that they’d really buy in, but the red tape associated with not charging tuition but offering credit was very complex, very thorny and knotty. With the help of the provost office (It was Betty Kusnierz, here in the provost office) we were able to set up the Venture Program and for, I think the first year or two, we met in the Marshall White Center and not only would we offer these students 22 course work in the evening, but we also provided bus fair or taxi fair and child care. It meant we could provide the opportunity to people who ordinarily might not be able to have that opportunity, and really interesting students signed up. We had 17 or 18 the first couple of years; it was just heartwarming to hear the stories of these individuals. Several of them have moved on and come to Weber State to pursue a full degree. I’m grateful to the faculty who taught in that program. It went on until this last year, and now Arts and Humanities is realizing there’s been a downturn in the number of enrollees, and the current dean is trying to figure out if it’s going to be financially viable or not. Because we are doing more with Dream Weber and providing more financial support to students who maybe need developmental work, maybe we don’t need Venture anymore. But it was a program that I really felt extremely happy about and positive about. KH: What was the demographic? MM: Ages from say 17 up to 70. Several individuals whose native language was not English. Some of them had come from European countries, just a real mix of varying individual people. KH: What made you decide to apply for the provost position? MM: That’s a good question. I was really happy as dean. But, I had been in the dean’s position for eight years and really enjoyed working with Mike Vaughan as the provost. When he said he was stepping down, I thought, “Oh no! I trust Mike, he’s very thoughtful.” I was worried about who we might get as a provost and in any case, he came to my office and suggested that I put my name in the hat. 23 That was really motivating to me, the fact that he had confidence that I could do the job. I also have to say that Betty Kusnierz stopped by and she said, “I will help you.” If I hadn’t had Betty’s help and the promise of her help, there’s no way I would have applied. I was interested in seeing a broader picture, a wider picture and taking on that next challenge. Becoming the provost meant that I had to learn a whole lot more about engineering, applied science, and technology, about what goes on in the health professions area. Those were really not in my background particularly. I’ve enjoyed doing that as a matter of fact. What’s less enjoyable is that all of the problems that can’t get solved at lower levels, end up coming here. I have many more conversations with legal counsel than I ever had before. I’ll put it that way. KH: What are your responsibilities as the provost? MM: In general, the provost, whose other title is Vice-President for Academic Affairs, is meant to provide oversight for everything academic at the institution. While Norm Tarbox provides oversight on everything financial and everything having to do with facilities Academic Affairs tries to think about everything that is in our curriculum. I spend a lot of time working on new programs, new degrees, if we have a new center, new institute. All of that comes through my office and goes to the Board of Trustees and the Board of Regents for their consideration and approval. Also, what comes through this office under that academic realm is responsibility for maintaining our accreditation with our regional accreditor, Northwest. That’s really important because if you’re not accredited, your students cannot receive Pell Grants and other federal funding. In addition to the 24 academic programming and the accreditation piece, we’re also responsible for enrollment, admissions, scholarships, all of those student services. Sometimes in other institutions, those services fall under student affairs, but here, we’ve said, “Hey, if you’re recruiting students, they’re coming into academic programs, so we want to take on the responsibility for those particular functions.” Also under my office are some of the high impact programs. Brenda Kowalewski is in charge of the Center for Community Education and Learning. She’s also in charge of Ogden Can, which is our Ogden Network of anchor institutions that are trying to improve education, housing, and health in the 100 block area in downtown central Ogden. She also is working to ensure that we have high impact practices that every student will experience over the course of his or her education. The office in addition, has a lot to do with review and evaluation of faculty members. Once a faculty member is hired and is moving through the tenure process, or even just annual review process (if the person is not on the tenure track), all of that will come up through this office. And I’ll make a final decision on that person’s application. We also handle things like sabbaticals and special leave requests. If a faculty member is hoping to take on a different kind of duty—just earlier today, we had a faculty member in history who’s been invited to be an editor of an international journal. So he’s going to be editor, what does that mean in terms of his course load? Can we make a reassignment? Those are kind of the big issues. I mention though that I do spend time with legal counsel and that’s because if a faculty member is accused of violating any of our policies and procedures, or if a faculty member is accusing a student of having violated 25 those policies and procedures, generally that issue will come up to my office. I do a lot of that work. KH: Would you talk a little bit about creating the positions for Brenda Kowalewski and Eric Amsel? MM: When I came into this office, Mike Vaughan had as his associate provost, Bruce Bowen (who is over admissions, enrollment, student success, advising, and so forth); Ryan Thomas (who was primarily in charge of the accreditation piece, also some of the legal pieces); And Bruce Davis (who was in charge of the division of continuing education and the Davis campus). Ryan Thomas stayed in his position for almost a full semester after I came on as provost. But he had reached a point where he said, “You know, I think I’m going to retire.” So that meant I needed to search for a person to take on Ryan’s work. I did so, and ended up with two candidates who were exceptionally well qualified: Eric Amsel and Brenda Marstella Kowalewski. I was really torn because they’re very different, they have very different skills, talents, different personalities, and I wanted both of them. I was fortunate because right about that same time, a position that had been under the provost office, and we had been paying for the position, and this was a position that Alex Lawrence was in, having to do with economic development opened up. Alex wanted to move into a faculty position. When he moved to Professional Sales, I was able to take the salary that had been associated with Alex and say, “I have salary for two people.” I made an offer to Eric and Brenda and divided up the responsibilities. It’s worked out really well. I think there was some backlash from certain corners on the campus 26 saying, “Oh, Madonne has just become provost and now she’s adding more administrators.” I can understand that because the faculty would much prefer to have additional faculty lines. I wasn’t really adding anybody; I was moving Alex out and Ryan moved out and we appropriated the salary dollars for Brenda and Eric. What happened to the economic development piece, was that for a while, it just floated. Bruce Davis did some of it and now, under Brad as president, we have Guy Letendre. Guy reports to Brad and the president’s office. That was a better place for economic development to reside. KH: What is the process for creating new programs and colleges? MM: It begins with the faculty. That is, if a department says, “We would like to move ahead…” I’ll give you two examples. One is right now, the department of Social Work, presented me with a strategic plan. Every department has to provide a strategic plan report at the middle of May, each year. In the strategic plan from Social Work, they proposed that this coming year, they want to begin the paperwork so as to be approved to offer a Master’s in Social Work. The paperwork itself is extensive. The Regents have a program proposal form that our Social Work faculty will have to fill out. They’ll have to go through their department and get majority support for doing the Master’s in Social Work. Then they go through their college curriculum committee. The college curriculum committee has to support it. Then it goes to Faculty Senate Curriculum, then to Faculty Senate as a whole. Then to President’s Council, then to the Personnel and Academic Policy of the board of trustees. Assuming that the Personnel in Academic Policy committee approves it, they recommend it to the full Board of 27 Trustees and then, assuming that the program is within our dedicated mission (and this one would be because it’s a master’s program and we would be offering it here at Weber State), it can go to the office of the Commissioner of Higher Education for the state of Utah and it will be reviewed by all of the chief academic officers at the other institutions. As long as they don’t say, “Hey, there’s no reason for Weber State to offer a Master’s in Social Work because we’re offering one at the University of Utah and we’re offering one at USU and we’re not even full. We have open spaces.” Those other CAO’s could block or try to block the formation of a new program. Usually they don’t and at that point, if they say, “Okay.” Then it’s, “Wow, okay.” It’s a very long process. Do you see this diagram up here, that’s part of it, and this is part of the diagram of what happens. The program that I think about when I was the dean of Arts and Humanities was when the Communication department said they wanted to do a Master’s in Professional Communication. As dean, I got to go through that process with them. They had to write up a proposal, I think it was almost 100 pages long about how they had the resources to do this, what the curriculum was going to look like, what requirements they would be imposing on students, what the learning outcomes were going to be, how much it was going to cost and how much they were going to bring in from master’s level tuition. It’s quite an elaborate process to get a new degree through and ready to go. KH: So if you’re optimistic, how long does that normally take? MM: A year, and actually the other thing I should have added is after the office of the commissioner signs off, I then give it to Eric Amsel and he has to take it to 28 Northwest and tell them, “We will have this program on the books starting next fall.” And they said, “Okay.” At least they’ve said okay thus far. KH: When did you start from, start as provost? MM: Started as provost in 2015. KH: What does a typical semester look like for you? MM: Prior to fall semester there’s a whole lot of organizing of meetings and retreats. I like to hold a retreat for all deans and department chairs before the semester actually is up and running. We will be having our retreat on the Monday of everyone comes back for breakfast day. At that retreat, I try to deal with or introduce conversation about some of the major changes that are going on. Some of the major issues that are confronting us. Right now, our office is planning for that retreat. We have already had a meeting with each of the three new deans who are coming into office. One of those is full appointment as a regular dean and that’s Kristin Hadley in education. But, we also have two interim deans who are new: Matt Mouritsen in the Goddard School of Business and Economics and Julie Rich in Social and Behavioral Sciences. We try to get them off on the right foot. My whole staff of associates provosts, Betty Kusnierz and I meet with them and talk about, “Here are things that the dean needs to know about budget. Here are things you need to know about faculty assignments, working with your departments, and so on.” We’ve done that. We’re very soon going to have a meeting with eight new department chairs because they’ll be stepping into their offices and they need to know what they’re 29 responsible for, what the PPM’s say, as those PPM’s affect their jobs. We’ll do another session of training with them. The other thing that happens right before Fall, of course, is the new faculty retreat and that’s always a pleasure. It’s so much fun because it’s up at Zermatt and we get to welcome all of these very excited, happy, new faculty. They’ve got a job teaching in an area that they’ve been studying for years! That tends to be an upbeat time. I usually participate in that by giving a welcome speech. The other welcoming talks that happen during the summer involve the mandatory (with a small “m”) student orientation that we now have for incoming first year students; I usually get to meet with those students’ parents, or family, or friends who have accompanied them to the orientation. At least three times during the summer, I give a little welcome talk to them and talk about what I see happening for their students in the next years. There’s a fair bit of that kind of gathering and planning of events. What also happens right before the beginning of the semester is I’m paying a lot of attention to the Report Gallery, which tells me exactly how many students are enrolled in courses and if we’ve got a lot of students on waitlists and if I notice that there’s a waitlist with ten students, I’m going to be calling the dean of that college and asking, “Can we open another section? I want to be sure that those students can get in.” Or sometimes the dean, him or herself, or department chair, has been paying attention and they’ll call my office and say, “Can I have some money to hire another person?” And the answer always is yes. If we have a pressing need, we will provide instructional wage to hire somebody so that we can staff that course. So looking at the numbers, paying attention to enrollment and then, 30 setting off with Faculty Senate issues. In addition to some of the retreats, I’ve mentioned, the Faculty Senate executive committee always has a half day meeting where we review the different charges or responsibilities that are assigned to each of the Faculty Senate subcommittees. I enjoy that day because much of what Faculty Senate is doing really is in tandem with the academic endeavor that we’re trying to facilitate in the provost office. I’ll attend that with them, engage in conversation with them about things that I think they might want to put on the charges lists, or things that they could take off and so forth. Then, the semester begins and everything is a little crazy for a while because we have lost students and we have people who thought they were taking courses at Ogden but really their course is down at Davis, and a lot of phone calls, and we try to make sure that everybody finds his or her way. Also, at the beginning of the semester the tenure and promotion season begins. The department chairs have to work with the faculty who are coming up for review and ensuring that those faculty get their review materials together and that there’s a review committee set up and that the department is prepared. I try to give them the deadlines and say, “This is happening.” The other thing that happens right off is our Board of Trustees retreat. That is a daylong session where new trustees learn what their responsibilities are and those of us who are on President’s Council (that is all of the VP’s) talk about our areas so that the trustees get a sense of what it is we do and very soon, early in September we have our first trustees meeting. I facilitate the Personnel and Academic Policy committee of the Board of Trustees and that’s where we are again, looking at all of these 31 proposals. We have our meeting for an hour before the actual Board of Trustees meeting; then the Board of Trustees meet and then if there is something that I’m contributing to the agenda I feel I’m responsible and thank goodness for Aubrey. Oh, she is so helpful and she keeps me on track, like, “Here are the agenda items, that we need to consider.” In addition, we’ve got Deans’ Council meetings every two weeks. The deans can ask us to talk about certain topics, and I put topics on the agenda that I see coming up. For example, we just learned two weeks ago that the bookstore has changed the way they organize textbooks. Instead of being in order by discipline and then by course number, all of the books are going to be alphabetized by the author’s last name. You might be taking English and you’ve got somebody… you’ve got a book that is written by Anderson and a book that is written by Yeltson and you’re going to go to the A’s and then you’re going to go to the Y’s. When I first heard that I said, “Wait, I can’t believe this. There’s been no discussion, no publicity.” I wrote to Tim Eck, the bookstore manager and said, “Um, maybe someone was pulling my leg, but I heard that the bookstore is reorganized.” He wrote back and said, “Yeah, we have, we bought this electronic program. We’re not going to have paper on any of our shelves anymore, with those little notes. It’s all going to be electronic.” I said, “Okay, Tim but faculty don’t know about this and students don’t know about this. You should be telling people.” He said he was going to send out email messages last week, but every student I’ve met, with the exception of one (our work-study student who eventually figured out how to find her course schedule with the books listed alphabetically so she can take that alphabetized list and go 32 to the bookstore) every other student I’ve talked to has been confused. It’s that kind of that stuff that comes up at Dean’s Council, or it’s going to come up the week before school starts when folks go in the bookstore and have to find their books alphabetically. Anyway, that was a tangent. But, every single day, there’s something like that. When I leave here at night, I try to have my inbox down to 50 messages and when I come in in the next morning it’s 200. “Oh yeah, okay, here we go.” I think about how when I first started as a faculty member, we didn’t have email and now how much time I spend just responding to the emails that come in with all of these questions and concerns. That will take up a lot of my semester. The arc of the semester is interesting because we have our official enrollment count on the 12th day. For the first 12 days of school, we are really attentive to who’s dropping, who’s adding, are we getting the numbers of students we really can serve in those classes or not. After the 12th day, we’re a little less attuned to that as a consideration and more attuned to larger questions that are going to affect what happens in spring semester and so forth. KH: You’ve mentioned some of them, but what other committees or organizations are you a member of? Either on campus or career focused. MM: On campus I serve on a range of committees, but probably the ones that I would highlight are first, the bi-weekly gathering of president’s staff. That’s a very small group because it includes only the VP’s and President Brad Mortensen. It’s an interesting, fun committee because we can be very frank and open and talk about our concerns, and it’s a very collegial group. We get along well. I loved having Chuck as president. He too facilitated a marvelous staff meeting, and 33 Brad does the same. Then there’s President’s Council which is a larger group because it includes those VP’s but also includes a staff liaison, chair of faculty senate, the chief diversity officer, there’s probably four or five other people there as well. President’s Council is an official approving body, and so they’re the ones that if there’s going to be a change in PPM would have to say, “Yes” or “No” and so forth. I have my own group of associate provosts with whom I meet, usually it’s once every three weeks, and we talk about what’s going on in our different areas, what ideas, what initiatives we’re pursuing. I love that group. One of the highlights of this job is having such a great team, I couldn’t ask for a better group of people within to work. And when Malissa, my former admin, left I was really concerned, but then I got Aubrey and it’s like, “Wow! Thank you!” So I just really love the folks that I get to work with. Then, I did mention executive committee of Faculty Senate. I also go to all of the Faculty Senate meetings, but I’m not allowed to vote because I’m an administrator and that’s fine. Otherwise, for two and half years, I chaired the academic master planning task force, which was dedicated to coming up with a way of thinking about our academic future in strategic and tactical fashion. It was out of that Academic Master Planning Task Force that we came to the decision to have the departments write these strategic plans that were due in May. That process and the plans, I feel really proud of because they have allowed us to allocate resources much more intelligently. Every single one of those plan writers evaluates what his or her needs are. And essentially makes an argument. And there are some departments that say, “We’re doing fine as we are. We don’t need a new faculty line, or maybe we 34 need half of a staff person.” But they make their arguments based on Weber’s future, on our mission, on academic excellence, on providing value, and the plans right now are very much informed by data with our institutional effectiveness office and institutional research. We’ve been able to allow departments to see, “Well, what areas are they growing in? Are they primarily serving majors? Or are they primarily working with general education? How long does it take for their majors to graduate? Why is there this trend, this way or that way.” In any case, they write the plans and then the deans as a group evaluate how we should allocate whatever resources we have. It’s a shared responsibility between the deans and me. I think the deans are really good with the process. It’s been effective. They are sharing funds with other deans and they recognize that sometimes their college has to wait and another college takes priority. That’s been pretty cool to see. That Task Force no longer is operational because we came up with this planning process. Dean’s Council, of course, I get to work with them and when I was a dean, I really enjoyed the fact that the deans get together outside of dean’s council. They have informal lunches where they gather, and I used to be part of that and that was always fun. But then when I became provost, it was like, “Okay, I know. You all are going to go off and your own thing and I don’t get to listen. But that’s okay.” I was on the board and served as board chair of Utah Humanities Council. I was on the board for six years and served as chair for I think two. That was my external commitment. KH: What topics have you written about? 35 MM: I mentioned that my interest had been in popular culture. As I said, for my dissertation, I wrote about women’s best sellers. But in addition to that work, I have written a bit about 19th century American rags to riches stories. I’ve written about 20th century T.V. heroine Murphy Brown. KH: I loved that show. MM: Well I ended up writing about the show where she was giving birth and the way in which the show represented child birth. Which was, “Aggh!” In any case, I have written a couple of different essays, articles, on women’s theater and also teaching theater because as I said, when I was first hired at Wyoming, I taught not only women’s studies and women’s literature, but also drama and that was fun. It was a good challenge. I have written a couple of pieces on pedagogy and what it means to try and push boundaries and be a radical teacher. I have not really written about administration, and I think that when I retire, one of the things I’ll do is think about writing articles or essays on what it means to have been a leader in higher education. KH: When do you plan to retire? MM: Coming up at the end of December. KH: Oh my gosh. MM: Yeah. Yep, I had thought that I would stay until the end of June and that I would teach during spring semester and that way I could say that I’m book ending my career—started as a teacher and ended as a teacher. But what I realized over this summer is that if I wanted to do an effective job teaching, I was going to 36 need to have some preparation time. And there just hasn’t been time this summer. And there won’t be time in fall for me to get ready to really do the kind of job I want to do. So I told myself, “It’s okay. I’ll retire at the end of December.” KH: What steps do you feel you need to take to retire? What things do you want to get done before you’re done? MM: One of the things that I have been doing over the last couple of months is compiling a list of the monthly duties of the provost because I figured whoever comes into this office could benefit from this chart that says, “Okay, when it gets to be May, here is what you need to do and here’s what happens in June, and July and so forth.” I hope to have that pretty well complete. I also want to be sure that our internal shared drive that includes a lot of the standard paper work associated with the activities of the position is ready for a new person. It’ll facilitate him or her coming through. There are a couple legal cases that I hope will be finished before a new person comes into office because it really wouldn’t be fair to leave a new person with these dangling situations. If we can get those taken care of, that would be great. I haven’t really said much about the student success steering committee. One of the things that Brett Perozzi and I have done as VP of Student Affairs and VP of Academic Affairs has been to work with the student success steering committee. We intend to have a retreat in early November, during which we are going to look back at the beginnings of our student success efforts and try to provide a kind of chart showing where we were and where we’ve come. I hope to have that accomplished before the end of semester. One of the reasons we are doing that is the first external speaker we 37 brought to campus to help us think about student success was a woman, Lynn Mahoney, who at the time was the provost at California Long Beach. I had met one of her colleagues at a professional meeting, and the colleague had talked about what Long Beach did to increase the recruiting of primarily Hispanic, Latino, Lantinx students from their catchment area and ensuring that those students stayed enrolled and were completing. And they made some really great progress. They had data that showed these intervention steps that they had taken were producing positive results. I asked her to come and talk about what Cal Long Beach did. She talked, that must have been 2017 in the fall semester, and she will be coming to revisit us at the end of spring semester 2020. We want to be able to say, “Here’s what we have done” before she gets here and have her come in on that. Those are some of the things I hope to finish off. KH: What recognition have you received for your accomplishments? MM: You know some of the greatest recognition that I have achieved has come from students thanking me for doing things. The other day, in the Board of Trustees meeting—our student trustee is Bret Alexander, who is the new student president— I had the good fortune to meet Bret many years ago when he was working as a waiter at The Oaks restaurant in Ogden Canyon. My partner David and I had been going to the Oaks every Saturday morning because I love their whole wheat pancakes, and for quite a long time Brett was our server; we talked and became friends. Last year before the Oaks closed down Brett was talking with me about the struggle he was having to meet ends meet as a senior, and I was able to contact Jed Spencer in the scholarship office and say, “You know, I 38 think that there’s a special scholarship for seniors who are close to completion. Could you look and see if Brett might qualify for that?” Jed did, and Brett did, and so he received some extra money. The other day at the Board of Trustees meeting, Brett said, “I just want to thank Madonne for having done that.” I felt so happy because I knew how much it meant to him, and he was able to finish. It’s that kind of accolade that means the most to me. Or when a student comes at the end of a class, or in a student evaluation comment says, “This class changed my life.” That matters tremendously. Those are the most important kinds of accolades that have kept me going. KH: How have you become a mentor to others in your field? MM: It’s been hit and miss. I think that I can look back and say, “There have been several, primarily women, who have been on a trajectory where they are looking to become leaders.” There was a friend and colleague at Texas Tech who was on the Spanish faculty, and she decided she wanted to try for department chair job, not at Tech but rather in Canada. She called me and we talked a lot about how she might pursue that position, how she could write the strongest application, what she could do in preparation for the interview. When she got the job she continued to call me and ask for advice about situations that arose in the department chair position. That’s kind of how my mentoring opportunities have happened: either I’ll see someone who I can identify as wanting to move in a certain direction where I might be able to help, or that person will see me and will contact me and say, “I’m considering this, what do you think?” And we’ll talk. Those relationships have been exceptionally rewarding and, in almost all cases, 39 the individuals with whom I’ve worked have moved into progressively more responsible positions in higher education. KH: What advice would you give to students and women starting in your field? Either administration or English? MM: I saw this question and thought about it a lot. Higher education is changing so radically. I don’t have a clue as to what higher education is going to look like in the next ten years. It’s really really hard for me to predict. Part of that is that other entities are moving into the education field. Entities that aren’t necessarily interested in offering degrees, but are interested in offering vocational training or skill-up training. I think that there’s a sense among some people that the higher education degree is too expensive, that what we need instead are just these mini credentials that will allow people to do a particular vocation and then when that dries up, they go get another mini credential. I’m leery, clearly, about that kind of thinking because it seems to me that in order for us to be contributing community members and knowledgeable citizens that we need to have a general education that’s not completely focused on vocation. That general education should make us aware of what our political responsibilities are. Or what our ethical responsibilities are. How we can be critical readers and writers. I know that happens at a university, and I know it happens as students move through a degree program. I don’t think it necessarily happens when you’re getting a mini credential. But, I also know that the general public is very concerned about students who graduate or don’t graduate and have got terrible loan debt. At Weber, we are providing a remarkable education for a very low price when you 40 compare us to other institutions across the United States. But there’s that ongoing conversation about what happens. And so I guess I would caution individuals who are thinking about moving into higher education as faculty or as leaders that they need to be nimble, they need to be prepared for paradigm shifts, they will want to be as informed as they possibly can be about the kind of climate for higher education, wherever it is they might want to teach or serve as leaders. Right now, the legislative body in Utah has employed the National Commission on Higher Education Management—NCHEMS—to do a study of the organization of higher ed in the state of Utah. NCHEMS is supposed to provide a report, it’s due either by October 30th or November 1st, to the legislature with observations and recommendations. Those recommendations might be that technical colleges and universities be combined or that tech colleges, community college, and universities somehow fall under a different system than we currently operate under. There’s all kinds of speculation right now about what that commission will recommend. So even here in Utah, we may be looking at a change structure. I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with what’s happened in Alaska over the last couple of weeks, but the governor proposed a budget that is going to cut university funding. I believe it’s by $41 million. KH: Oh wow. MM: The universities and the university trustees are scrambling to figure out how they support three state institutions with this major financial cut this September basically. And one of the things they’ve said is, “Well, we can’t offer all programs at all three of the institutions. Maybe University of Alaska will be the entity that 41 offers general education and another one of the Alaskan institutions will be what offers engineering.” They are trying to figure it out, but it’s going to be remarkable in terms of a change in what potential students in Alaska might be able to take, and how they might be able to take it. So I guess, to try and summarize, I would say, higher education has been exciting, it’s a great place to work, it has been a great place to work because you get to work with people who have ideas, and are creative, and who love working with students…mostly. And you get to work with students who come seeking new understandings, new knowledge, new wisdom, but you also have to recognize that a lot is up for grabs right now. And I don’t know what it will look like in the near future. KH: What are some of your favorite memories at Weber State University? MM: You know, some of my most favorite memories are teaching, being there in that classroom and having my students get the seats all in a circle and posing questions and having them pose questions of me. As I said earlier, I really enjoyed the teaching that I did. But I also enjoyed being a student. When I was dean of arts and humanities, there were several semesters that I was able to take Spanish classes. I loved those classes, it was so much fun. The other students always looked at me quizzically, like, “Who is she? And what is she doing?” But, I would try not to tell that I was the dean. I’d say, “I just want to learn Spanish.” And such good teachers. I absolutely had the time of my life learning Spanish verbs and taking the tests and getting credit and I almost have a Spanish major. But it’s been, well since I’ve moved into the provost office, I haven’t been able to do any of that. So when I retire, I will be taking more 42 Spanish, going back to review what I’ve already forgotten, but then I hope progressing. So those were really fun memories. Other fun memories, working with my fellow deans. They are just a good group, they really are. And we supported each other, and consoled each other, and helped solve each other’s problems or challenges. That was a really good time. In this office, good memories of working with my associate provosts, that is, the provost council. Working on the academic master planning task force because people had such interesting ideas, and it was very creative and exciting. I loved seeing what we could do there. Student success steering committee, same thing. That group, wow, they have been open to all kinds of new ideas and you know, when you are asking people to change, you do have to move somewhat slowly. For example, when we brought on the Canvas system, faculty were wondering, “What’s happening? Why do we have Canvas?” And then when we proposed we were going to bring on Starfish, oh I remember going to a Faculty Senate meeting and people asked, “Starfish? What is this new stuff we have to do?” But I tried to explain, when Canvas came on board you were supported, and when Starfish comes on board, you’ll be supported. Don’t worry, we’ll make it work. And so I’ve loved seeing those. I have loved seeing the positive outcomes of many of the things we’ve done. Yeah. So good memories there. KH: Would you talk a little bit about the different presidential administrations you’ve worked under? MM: Sure, when I came to interview for the dean’s position, Ann Millner was president. I admired her so much. She was one of the positive factors that 43 influenced me to come to Weber State. I thought, “Wow, they have a female president. That’s pretty cool.” Because I had never worked at an institution with a female president. When she came to Faculty Senate and told us all that she was retiring, she had spent 10 years as president. I cried. “Oh no! I really like this place because Mike is such a good provost and Ann is such a good president, and now Ann is saying she’s going to go.” So, and again, I think what I liked about Ann was that her commitment to this place was down to the soles of her feet. Everything was Weber and making it better, and there was no doubt about her integrity and what she wanted for Weber State. When I was at Texas Tech, Tech was a stepping stone school. That is, administrators would come to Tech and be at Tech for three years to be able to say they’d done a certain job and then they’d go off to a higher position elsewhere. At least then, I didn’t feel as if the provost and president were committed to being at the institution and making it better over time. If you have people who are coming in for three years, you are constantly going up and down. You’re starting and stopping. The fact that Ann was president for 10 years in this incredibly grueling 24 hours, 7 day a week, 352 days of the year, position is so admirable. And it meant that the ship was on a steady course. Mike did the provost office for 10 years, again that stability was really important and I credit both of them for all of the many things that they made happen at Weber. When Ann left and Chuck came on, his style was different. He had some different priorities. Ann had come up in part through development, whereas Chuck was a faculty member at the University of Utah. He had administrative experience but I think that he saw himself as very closely 44 aligned to faculty and students. It was very easy to identify with him because of his ongoing interest in the teaching endeavor and in seeing students succeed. He was easy to work with. I was very very sad when it came time for him to leave because I feel that he was pushed out for political reasons. He lost the favor of some of our legislatures who were powerful enough in essentially saying, “You’re going to have to find a different job.” I think he was not treated well and the legislator who pushed against him no longer even lives in Utah, has moved elsewhere. That legislator and others made us lose somebody who really had the best interests of Weber at heart. Some of the things that I especially admired, Chuck took a very public stance in support of the gay pride march. He and his wife Victoria were on Weber State’s float. We made sure we had that float in the gay pride march in Salt Lake City. He took a strong position on support for DACA students, the dreamers. And was willing to say as much, this university has a history of welcoming individuals who want to improve themselves and who want to have a higher education. So why would we not want DACA students to be a part of this? Those statements, plus his commitment to the academic mission, were ones that I believe in, and so I always felt very much in alignment with his goals and the way he was moving. He too made remarkable strides in trying to keep education affordable. That was one of his goals and I share it: “Yeah that makes complete sense.” When he did leave we had Norm for a while as our interim president. I guess what’s interesting there is ordinarily the provost would move in as interim president. David Buhler, who was the commissioner of higher education at the time, met 45 with all of the VP’s here in this room and he asked if I wanted to move in and said, “Not on your life. I don’t want to take on the position as an interim.” I didn’t feel that it would fit my personality whatsoever. I knew that I’d be spending even more nights awake in the middle of the night going, “What am I going to do?” So I was very glad, actually, when Norm Tarbox stepped up and said that he would serve as interim during the time of the search. I think he did a really good job of getting us through that search period, and I was really pleased when Brad was offered the position. I worked with Brad for a long time as he was the VP for advancement, and think that he’s got all of the right inclinations. Again, he really cares about students and he is wedded to this place just as Ann was. He’ll continue to work for the good of the institution, and put the good of the institution above anything for himself. I have no doubt that the search for the provost will be successful, we’ll get some new person in with good energy and that person will work with Brad and continue on. KH: How does education empower women? MM: Education is the key. Right? When you look at countries that are underdeveloped, it’s often because women have been denied education, because they don’t have access to birth control and hence can’t control their reproductive lives in ways that matter. They end up having children at younger ages, which is not healthy for them and not healthy for children. Education of women means that the next generation is going to be educated better and will be healthier. We’ll be able to be more productive and contribute to our communities. When we look at what goes on here in the United States I think it’s absolutely 46 imperative that we ensure that women have easy and supported access. Not just to high school, because that’s not enough. It’s got to be to higher education because that’s where you’re getting the skills that will allow you to participate in a 21st century global economy and to live your fullest life. That’s what is key to a longer life, a healthier life, and a life where you’re a better contributor to your community. KH: What are your thoughts on how women’s rights have changed over time? MM: I can think about my own lifetime and say, again, women’s rights are key: whether we are talking about Roe V. Wade in 1972, whether we’re talking about female candidates running for higher office, whether we are talking about changes in the percentage of women who do go onto higher education, whether we are talking about schools that admit women or not. All of that happened in my lifetime—this change. I also think there’s a much more volatile engaged conversation about representation of women in the media. What is damaging, what is positive. Those representations are important because they influence younger women about what their opportunities might be. Or what restrictions might be imposed on them. I want those restrictions to fall away and the opportunities to increase. I think we’re increasingly moving in a positive direction. There is more openness, but there is also, of course, push back. And you see it in the most recent presidential election with Hilary Clinton and our current president, what happened there? I think a lot of it had to do with voters, some of them saying, “I’m not going to vote for a female president.” They just couldn’t get around it and make it happen. So attitudes continue to… well, we 47 continue to need education to make people more open minded and change attitudes about what women are capable of doing. KH: How do you think women receiving the right to vote, shaped or influenced history, your community, and you personally? MM: I think it was a really essential step. That had to happen because without the right to vote, you’re always going to be a second class citizen. That’s it. Unless you have the ability to influence who the leaders are, you’ll always be in the back seat, and that’s not where you want to be. I see the right to vote as being extremely important, and from that right to vote, many other opportunities have become available. KH: Okay, great. Is there anything else that you’d like to add? MM: No, I think you’ve covered a lot. And I hope I wasn’t too repetitive. KH: Not at all. Thank you for your time. MM: Thank you, thank you both.