Oral History Program Stacy Palen Interviewed by Kandice Harris 15 April 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Stacy Palen Interviewed by Kandice Harris 15 April 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: Palen, Stacy, an oral history by Kandice Harris, 15 April 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Stacy Palen Circa 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Dr. Stacy Palen, conducted on April 15, 2019 in the Stewart Library’s University Archives conference room, by Kandice Harris. Stacy discusses her life, her memories at Weber State, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Marina Kenner, the video technician is also present during this interview. KH: Today is April 15, 2019. We are meeting with Dr. Stacy Palen to discuss her time at Weber. My name is Kandice Harris; also present is Marina Kenner. When and where were you born? SP: I was born in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, October 19, 1971. I lived in Pennsylvania for a while; moved to Indiana, lived there for a while; moved back to New Jersey, lived there for a while; and then went off to college and everything after that. KH: Were you encouraged to pursue an education? SP: Yes, my parents were big readers; they were very interested in education. Neither of them had graduated from college. They both started and then my mom got pregnant so they left college to get married. That was my brother, not me. They were very interested in having books in the house all of the time and having us go to college. My brother went for a little while but also didn’t finish. So I was the first one to finish. KH: Oh, so you are a first gen? 2 SP: First in my family. KH: That’s great! SP: Yes. KH: What started your interest in physics? SP: It’s so funny because you always tell these stories after the fact. You look back and you’re like, “Oh, I can connect the dots now.” But while you were living it, it didn’t live that way, right? It lived like this wandering, going all over the place thing. But if I have to trace it back, I would say, my parents sat me down with Carl Sagan’s, “Cosmos.” I must have been seven years old, or something like that. They sat me down in front of that on PBS and I was riveted, just completely riveted. Then, I forgot about it. All the way until high school when I was math-science tracked, and had two years of calculus and two years of physics by the time I graduated from high school. That rekindled my interest in science again— especially physics because I was so charmed by the idea that you could actually know stuff. You could know stuff and then you could predict stuff and then you could get the right answer all the time. I found that really charming. KH: What degrees and certificates do you have? SP: I have a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. I have a Master’s of Astronomy from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, 3 Iowa. I have a PhD in Physics with a concentration in Astrophysics from the University of Iowa. KH: What were some of the challenges you faced while you attained your degrees? SP: I had a lot of challenges. Being a first generation college student is always hard. I don’t think there is any way that anybody can make that an easy transition. Just learning to navigate this entirely kind of different value system, I think is really hard. Certainly being a woman in physics was hard. In my undergraduate education, I was at Camden campus, which is not the main campus of Rutgers. Physics was a very small program there. By the time I was done with my senior year of classes, I was sometimes the only person in them, not the only woman, but just the only person. That was a blessing and a curse at the same time because you get a lot of individualized attention, but then you also get a lot of individualized attention and there’s nowhere to hide. Everything you do is everything that’s done and that can be really hard. When I went to graduate school, I didn’t know what I was doing. That decision to go to graduate school kind of went like, “Well, what do I do with a bachelor’s degree in physics?” Which, people had been asking me all along and I thought, “I don’t know what I’d do with a bachelors in physics.” But, the University offered them, so there must be something. I went to my advisor when I was ready to graduate and I said, “What do I do with a bachelor’s degree in physics? Now I’m ready to think about what comes next. What do I actually do?” And, he said, “You can get a job or you can go to graduate school.” I said, 4 “I know what jobs are. I’ve watched my parents have jobs, I’m not that excited about jobs. Tell me about this graduate school thing.” So we sat down and talked about it and he encouraged me to apply. But I was broke. The whole time I was in college I was sending money home to my parents to help them pay rent. They had gotten divorced, and both lost their homes and declared bankruptcy and it was just unbelievable. I had financial aid packages that paid for work, school, and room and board. Then, I had a job and I was taking all of the money from my job and sending it home to help support them. I didn’t have a lot of money to apply to a lot of graduate schools—$120 was the fee to apply and at that time it was a huge amount of money to me. It was like half a week’s work and I could not afford very much of that. I said, “What I’ll do is I’ll apply to one graduate school and if I get in, I’ll go. If I don’t get in, I’ll try out this job thing.” It was terrible…Camden, New Jersey is—at the time I lived there, it was the murder capital of the United States. It was very scary. You couldn’t go for a walk by yourself. Certainly not as a white woman, you couldn’t go for a walk. I was ready to do something else. So I applied to Iowa City, Iowa. I thought, “That sounds super safe, let’s go to Iowa City, Iowa. That sounds awesome. I’m sure I could go for a walk by myself there.” I applied, and I got in. Then, off I went to Iowa City. Unfortunately, the year before I got there—so it was when I was applying, but I didn’t really hear about it at the time—a graduate student did not get a scholarship; he went in; shot up 12 professors in the physics department and killed them. In addition, the summer that I was moving there was the summer 5 that the rivers were flooding. I had arranged to stay in married student housing or graduate student housing. But by the time I got there, that was underwater; literally flooded and nobody could live there. The department was a disaster because all of these people had died. The emotional effort of going through a day was really hard because of that. However, they couldn’t help me. There was nobody looking out for any of the graduate students that year, because the whole department was just overwhelmed. We all had nowhere to live. I wound up living in my car for a while. Then I finally got that all worked out and found a place to live, an apartment with a lot of cockroaches and stuff. Things started to improve after that. That was really not a traditional introduction to graduate school. A question I should have asked and if my family had more experience I would have asked it, was “what was the climate like there for women students.” I was the first woman to get her PhD in physics from the University of Iowa. It was not because they had not accepted women; it was because no women had ever made it through the program. I have vivid recollections of my first year there; this is horrible, I’m living out of my car, right? This is all really overwhelming. I have moved out and I’m on my own. My parents are like, “Where’s the money?” I’m thinking, “Oh my god, I have nowhere to live. I can’t send you any money.” I was having trouble with the homework the first couple of weeks, because you do; it’s a thing that happens to people, they have trouble with homework. I went in to see a professor, who shall remain unnamed, for help in his office. He just shoved back in his chair, looked at me and said, “I don’t even know why you’re 6 here. Women aren’t built to study physics.” I said, “What does that mean? I really don’t know what that means.” He was like, “I don’t have time to help you. You’re either going to have to figure it out or go do something else, which really is what I recommend.” I left, and got really angry. That anger was my saving grace. The fact that I could get angry about that instead of taking it personally, that was not easy. Then they did a weird thing. Because of the shooting that happened, they began looking closely at their entire program and saying, “How can we make this less stressful for students.” They revised the exam curriculum, which was fine. I get what they are doing, because in graduate school you take these different sets of exams where you have to remember the whole subject all at once. They revised that curriculum but then they didn’t grandfather anybody in. I wound up taking both sets. KH: That sounds exhausting, I’m sorry. SP: Every year I was there, I was taking either qualifying examination or comprehensive examination or something like that. I was there for five years and I took five sets of those. After I took the fourth set, I had just left one of my professors’ offices and he said, “I’m so proud of you, you got the high score on this exam.” I’m like, “Well yeah because I had all of this practice.” I was walking down the hall and that same professor who had given me such a hard time early on, I overheard him talking to another student in the hall and he said, “Aren’t you glad that you got through the program before they made it easier for women and minorities; just so that women and minorities could get through.” There are times when you just have to bite your tongue and keep putting one foot in front of the 7 other. Those are some of the challenges—I did not do it the easy way. I did not ask the right questions. But, there have been a number of women who have graduated since then. I think they became very much aware of what some of the problems were. It’s a better place now than what it was before I got there. KH: That’s good. SP: Yeah. KH: What are some of the resources and mentors that you had available to you? Was it just you? SP: Right? Just me? All by myself? There were a couple of things that really helped me a lot. One of them was, before I even went there; I was talking to one of the professors about what my specialty would be. I said that I was interested in Astrophysics. He said, “Oh my gosh, of course you are! There are so many women heroes in Astronomy and Astrophysics.” That I had not heard; I didn’t know that. So, off I went to find out who these amazing women were. Studying them and hearing their stories, even though I never actually met them, was deeply influential. I was like, “Well, if Annie Jo Cannon can do it; if Cecilia Payne can do it, then I can do it too. I’m going to get this done.” That was a big chunk. My particular dissertation advisor and I did not really mesh. I wish that I had known that you could change your dissertation advisor. The person you are assigned to when you walk in the door is not necessarily the person you have to stay with. But I didn’t know that, so I just made it work. 8 Then I had other professors who were deeply interested in helping me through because they were, I think, a little bit ashamed that none of the other women had gotten through. They would on occasion actually intercede with me, for me, with my dissertation advisor. That was really helpful too. There was a part of me that didn’t know enough to know that it could be any other way. I didn’t really have other people there with me who could really help me with this. But, because I didn’t know enough to expect it to be any other way, I just kept putting one foot in front of the other and just kept going. Some of the fellow graduate students were helpful. They would get angry when I would get angry and that was nice. But, some of them were not. They were like, “You’re just making too much of it. You just really need to toughen up or get out.” I think—it was just a hard time. It’s funny because when I talk about it with women students now, I often say, “When you go to interview at graduate schools, you need to ask these questions. You need to ask, ‘How many women are there in the department? Are those women graduating or are they falling behind?’” Because it’s still going on. Then, sometimes I’ll hear people down the hall, “Well not all graduate programs…” I’m like, “Fine, so they have to ask the questions so they can find the right graduate program.” But it has made me very much aware that I did not have that mentoring when I was going through the programs and the process. So I try to be a mentor to students and keep in touch with them long after they are gone. I get a lot of emails like that. KH: When you finished all of your degrees, what were some of your career options? 9 SP: When I graduated, my husband and I had met at Iowa and gotten married; he was an undergraduate. He had gone off to Antarctica for a year, and then he sailed around the Indian Ocean for a year. Then he did this and then he did that. So he was older and coming back to school, because he flunked out the first time. He was just finishing up his Bachelor’s degree in physics at the same time that I was getting my PhD. So we carpet-bombed; we applied everywhere. I was applying for jobs, post-docs, and stuff and he was applying for graduate school. Then we had this limited subset of places where we actually overlapped and we got so lucky, lucky because we overlapped at the University of Washington, which was glorious. Absolutely a wonderful place to be; really great people, super welcoming, and just lots of opportunities to kind of have creative freedom and do whatever we wanted to do. SP: It was really wonderful. So he got into the graduate program there. I was a lecturer, post-doc, so half of my time was teaching astronomy classes, and half of my time was doing research in astrophysics. I did that for four years and then went looking for a more permanent job. At University of Washington, I wound up renegotiating my contract every term and they are on the quarter system. That was four times a year that I was like, “Let’s sit down, do I have a job in the next ten weeks?” But they were wonderful about it and really tried very hard to make sure that I always had a full-time load of one kind or another. It was great, but tiring. Then John was getting ready to graduate, starting to look around for what to do, and I was thinking maybe we could not do this every-ten-weeks thing 10 anymore—that would be super. So I applied for a lot of faculty jobs and got several offers, actually. Weber State was the one where I felt the best about the department. Which is kind of strange, in a way, because it was all men at that time. I was not pulling my punches anymore. I just asked them straight out in the interview, “Why do you not have any women in your department? What’s wrong with your department that you have no women in it?” They said, “Well we’ve tried to hire women, and they just don’t come.” I said, “Uh huh, and why is that?” And the person that I was talking to said, “I think it may have to do with the local culture.” He was very diplomatic, he said, “It has a reputation for being not that supportive of professional women who are scientists and it just has a reputation.” I said, “Uh huh, but what about your department?” He was like, “We totally would love to have some more diversity in our department. We would love to have the different ways of thinking that come with different people of different kinds.” I said, “Okay, that’s sounding pretty good.” I talked to him about what maybe my husband would do when he was done and had done a post-doc. Then I looked around, and honestly, this is not diplomatic in anyway, but I was looking for a department with a lot of old people in it. I was looking for a department with a lot of old people because somebody was going to retire and then maybe my husband could get a job, because finding two jobs in physics at the same place is hard. It’s one reason why there are so few women in physics. I thought, “Well, there are actually quite a lot of old people here in this department.” So let’s try this out 11 and see how it works. This was the job that I had accepted out of the offers that I had; then we came here in 2002. KH: Who were some of the people in your department at the time you started? SP: Adam Johnston and Colin Inglefield were there. Brad Carroll and Dan Schroeder and Farhang Amiri, Walther Spjeldvik is still there. Jay Phippin was there; he’s the one that retired and then John got his position. Good people, all of them. KH: How has the physics program changed over time? SP: Oh my gosh, I think that one thing that has happened is that we’ve hired a lot more women. We now have four women in the department out of ten full-time people. Which is shocking; it is shocking for a physics department to have that many women in it. I think a lot of that is just this kind of openness that especially the younger faculty in the department have. We’ve tried a lot of things to make it more accessible to different kinds of people. One thing that we are really working on, at the moment, is trying to figure out how to make it more open and more flexible for students who are coming from different backgrounds like Hispanic students from the Ogden area, that kind of thing. We are not finding a terribly huge amount of success just yet, but I think we are starting to figure out what the stumbling blocks are, why those students are not really enrolling in our programs and how to get them. Because we just need more heads. It’s an all brains on deck kind of moment and we need to get everybody on board. I think the department, at the moment, is aging a lot. We haven’t been allowed to hire anybody new for a while and we’ve had a couple of retirements. 12 So now, I would guess the median age of the department is probably 50. Which is getting old. So that’s a thing that we worry about, as a challenge that needs to be met, is to figure out how we refresh department. It’s really painful to the morale of a department when it gets old like that. KH: What was Weber State like when you started? SP: Oh my gosh. How long have you been here? KH: I’ve been here 7 ½ years. SP: I think the biggest, most noticeable change is the campus itself. The physical plant here is just leaps and bounds ahead of what it was when I came. When I came, it was definitely kind of community college, maybe run-down. The Union Building, I remember, used to have this scary overpass where the two buildings were connected and it was dark underneath there and I would not go there. That was kind of terrifying. Then all of the buildings were old and decrepit and especially Science Lab was in terrible shape. A lot of work has been done that way on campus. But there are other things; especially the openness of campus to new ideas, I think is absolutely noticeable. A complete 180-degree turnaround from when I came. I noticed that there’s a lot more student conversation of all kinds around all kinds of social issues that wasn’t happening when I first got here. I think it’s good; I think it’s really good that people are just talking about stuff. I think that there have been a lot of faculty level committees and stuff that have been doing a lot of really important work. The environmental initiatives 13 committee has been doing a lot of really good work. The Diversity Office is new since I’ve been here and that’s doing a lot of good work. Weber State grew, it grew up, you know. It’s stopped being the picked-on little, ugly stepsister university in Utah and now it is a powerhouse and I think that’s great. KH: What does a typical semester look like for you? SP: Chaos! I get asked to do a lot of public talks, a lot of speaking in astronomical societies around the Wasatch front, and to women’s groups along the Wasatch front and most of that happens during the school year. I also get invited out to talk to schools a lot, although I don’t do that very much anymore. I don’t think it’s the best use of my time. I run the planetarium here and have done for seventeen years. That ebbs and flows as I get super-interested students or different grant money and stuff. At times, we’ve had a million dollar grants and run 24,000 people a year through there and other times it’s a little bit slower and maybe I’ll only get a couple hundred thousand and then see 12,000 people in the planetarium a year. So that takes up a big chunk of my time. Classes are just— it’s my favorite part. The teaching is my favorite part. I love it; I love seeing students get super excited about even crazy esoteric things. Like this year, it’s been all about the big black hole and gravitational waves and stuff and it’s so exciting. It’s so fun to see the students get excited about that. I also write textbooks. I have four textbooks out and three of them in multiple editions for hundreds of universities across the states. It’s amazing. Who knew that was going to happen? So then, I’m always in revision on one of those. It’s a perpetual cycle now. That keeps me from getting in trouble. 14 During the school year, I’m very focused on all of that kind of stuff, I get asked to do a lot of talks on campus and elsewhere. That keeps me busy. I also have a little farm right outside of town here, over near the highway. I break and train horses there and have milk goats, and chickens, and fruit trees, and all of the things you would put on a little farm. We grow a lot of our own food out there and stuff like that. That’s what keeps me busy in the summer. It’s interesting because I also teach riding. This is a thing that fascinates me because I get to teach riding to students. Which means I’m teaching them one at a time and it’s a very intensely focused environment, which is genuinely dangerous, right? Genuinely you could lose your spleen; break your leg, or something. Then I come here to university where I’m working on like one to sixteen, one to twenty-five, right? So it’s ratios like that in an environment that is not actually dangerous. The worst thing that’s going to happen to you is that you’re going to get it wrong and have to do it again. But it fascinates me that the students have the same reaction. A lot of my students in my astronomy class, they hit the math questions and they get this legit physical fear response where they are sweating; their palms are sweaty and they can’t swallow and their pupils are dilated. They’re literally looking like my student on the horse that is bucking. I spend a lot of time thinking about this and playing with this thing that’s going on there because somehow or another the astronomy students wind up traumatized in their K-12. So by the time I see them, they have this very traumatic response which I am trying to figure out how to address. I can address it when it’s one on one because I can talk to the student about fear and I can talk to them about how 15 do you manage fear. You know, it never goes away, you just learn to manage; you learn to carry it better. But then, you can’t really do that in front of their peers in a big class. You can’t really do that, so what do you do. That’s an avenue that I’m interested in; I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I think part of the reason I have this farm is because it helps me figure out how to do this other work better because I’m always dealing with that particular response. KH: What’s involved with running the planetarium? SP: A lot of accounting, which I despise; oh, I hate it so much. I get my students, right. And they hate math, but I hate accounting. Every time I go to do it, I think, “It’ doesn’t have to be this way.” Black holes have to be hard; they have to be. Nature made them hard. Accounting doesn’t have to be hard; somebody made this hard on purpose. I just resent it. So there’s a lot of that. I have to apply for grants. I have to get money. I have to pay students to do things. There’s a lot of time management that goes into it. There’s a lot of putting out little fires. Like, something happened in some student’s life; now they can’t be there to teach the fourth graders. Somebody has to show up and teach the fourth graders, or they are going to run crazy all over Lind Lecture Hall; then everybody is going to be mad. There’s a lot of that kind of just management things, which faculty are never taught to manage. It’s just not a thing. We never take management classes; we never take accounting classes; we never take any of that. They’re just like, “Hey, here, get this done.” So that’s been a big chunk of it. 16 My favorite part of the planetarium is working with students who are working on self-directed sorts of research projects where they are making new planetarium shows. We have been really successful at that! I mean crazy, ridiculously successful at it. We make planetarium shows and then sell them to other planetariums, and it is part of how we fund the whole project. Now we are in 27 states, different planetariums, more than 27 planetariums because there are sometimes more than one planetarium in some states; and then 16 foreign countries and in seven foreign languages. My favorite is that there is a show where I did the voice over for it. So I’m the narrator of the show and that show is showing at the Women’s College of Abu Dhabi. I love thinking about all of these women in traditional Muslim dress in Abu Dhabi at the Women’s College and my voice booming out of the ceiling, telling them about astrophysics. I think that’s cool. So that’s been really a lot of fun. The best part of that is just hucking projects at students and being like, “Run with that. Let’s see where you go.” Then seeing where they go is just often not where I expected them to go and that’s what makes it fun. KH: What types of topics are covered in the show? SP: A lot of traditional astronomy topics. We might have a show that’s a tour of the universe and almost everyone has seen a planetarium show like that. But we also did one called First and Farthest, which has been really popular; which is all about the space program and rockets. We’ll dig that one out of the vault and show it a lot this summer because it’s the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing in July. That was one that we did. 17 We did one called, “The Nature of Science” that was really popular; which is all about pretty much how science works and why do scientists do what they do. That was a student’s BIS project for their final capstone. He did a marvelous job of it. We’re working on one right now about gravitational waves, that’s the hot new thing. It was just discovered a couple of years ago. Then, I have a student who is very interested in doing one about Mars and needs a little steering, and I’m trying to figure out which way I want to steer them. I’ll steer them and I’ll be like, “How about you go that way?” Because her idea is that, she wants to do one about terraforming Mars, turning it into an earth-like planet. She’s going to get weighed down in the weeds and not be able to finish. She needs to rein it in and make it a little smaller project. KH: What committees or organizations, either on campus or otherwise, are you a part of? SP: There’s a thing that happens to women when there aren’t a lot of them in a field. That is that they are asked to be The Woman on all of the things. So I’ve been involved in committees for the American Astronomical Society, the American Physical Society, the American Physical Society Four Corners section; a lot of that kind of stuff. I was on the Clark Planetarium Board for a while. I’ve served in on-campus committees: Environmental Initiatives Committee was my favorite so far of all of the ones that I’ve been on on-campus. I get asked to be on a lot of hiring committees and stuff like that. My favorite off-campus committee that I’ve been on is the American Physical Society Four Corners Section, because I’m in 18 the Executive Committee for that. So we have the four states, it’s a regional division of a national organization as 50,000 members. You didn’t even know that there were 50,000 physicists did you? KH: No. SP: I’m on the executive committee for the regional group. That means I get to a leadership conference every year and leadership conference happens in Washington D.C.—this is a long involved story. KH: It’s okay, we like those. SP: The Leadership Conference is hooked on to Congressional Visit Day. For the last three years, I’ve been going to visit our congressional delegation in Washington to talk to them about issues that are important to physicists, and that has been so freaking educational. I cannot even tell you how much I have learned by going to see Congress. It’s just been fascinating to see—usually I get to go around with people from another section or another state. The first year I did it, I went around with a bunch of people from New Mexico, and we went to see their congressional delegation and the Utah congressional delegation. I can tell you some fascinating things; the democratic offices, for whatever reason, have an actual scientist for their science advisor. So, their science staffer is a scientist; the Utah delegation has a businessperson, a real estate person, or a kid just out of college in communications or political science. It’s a very different experience to go to these offices where you get to actually talk to a scientist about science issues and why they matter; then these other offices where you’re 19 talking to somebody who has no education in science. Figuring out how to—spin is not quite the right word—how to code swap maybe or code switch, between talking to a nuclear physicist about why energy issues are important and talking to some kid fresh out of their communications degree about why energy issues are important has been super educational. And then watching the evolution around the topic of climate change has been fantastic and just so amazing to watch. The first year I went, I was in Mike Lee’s office and his staffer said…was it Mike Lee’s office? No, it was Rob Bishop’s office and his staffer said, “Look, everybody knows climate change is a thing. Everybody knows that it’s happening; everybody knows that it’s people doing it but no Republican is ever going to say so, so stop talking to us about it.” And I was like, “Well, but it’s super important. It’s really important.” And at that time, I had this report from the pentagon talking about how important climate change was going to be to military bases. I was walking around and talking these congressional people about these military bases and the effect that climate change was going to have and how expensive that was going to be and people were going to die. Anyway, and he was like, “Yeah, just don’t talk about it. We’re just not going to talk about it.” But then this last year when I went, I had this Department of Defense report which labeled Hill Air Force Base as being vulnerable on four of the five issues that they looked at. It is actually the most vulnerable military base in the United States to climate change. So walked into Rob Bishop’s office and I’m like, “Can we talk about this now? I was here three years ago and you wouldn’t talk to me. Can 20 we talk about it now?” They were much more willing to actually talk to me about it, which I was fascinated by. So that was really interesting and then this one thing happened that was super fascinating. I was in Ben Ray Lujan’s office in the New Mexico delegation the first year I was there. He was telling me about this bill that he had that was all about workforce preparedness and training. I said, “You know what? I think Rob Bishop would be super interested in that because Hill Air Force Base is going to need to hire thousands and thousands of people who are trained in technical things like welding and computer science. He would be really interested in this bill that you have. Have you talked to him about it?” And he said, “No, he’s a Republican.” I said, “Well, I’m going to go see him later, would you like me to talk to him?” He was like, “Yes, that would be amazing.” So, I carried the bill into the other building and handed it to Rob Bishop, and then they got together and started pushing it. I was like, “Why did it take me to do that? I don’t understand. I’m a random physicist person; why was that necessary?” That’s been really fascinating. It’s one of my favorite committees to be on because I feel like I’m doing something really useful; actually going and talking to people and saying, “Look, this matters.” Sorry. KH: No, you’re good. We love stories like that. What topics have written about? SP: My textbooks are all astronomy textbooks, so I’ve written about that. I have not that much other writing outside of textbooks. I have a couple of blogs that I keep. One of them is about environmental issues; like how to manage that at home, how to change your house to be more environmentally friendly, to fight climate change, to improve the water supply, like all of the things. Mostly, that’s all about 21 little experiments I do at my house. I’m like, “I tried this experiment, and I cut my water usage by ten percent. Let me tell you all about it.” So that’s more writing that I do for myself just to kind of keep track of what I’ve been up to. I’ve written a couple of papers in science journals about, in particular, astronomical objects that I study—planetary nebulae, which are stars like the Sun that are dying. Also, a few about teaching and why specific issues in astronomy are hard to learn. The most well received paper I ever wrote was when I was working on a set of planetarium shows. We did a survey of all fifty states in the United States; all of the grades K-12, what astronomy are they teaching, at what level. That apparently had never been done before and so it needed to be done. That’s probably the one that’s gotten the most traction; people all across the country were super excited to see that come out and it’s been mimicked now in other sciences, which is cool. It probably needs to be done again; that was a decade ago that we did that. KH: What recognition have you received for your accomplishments? SP: Well, two years ago, I was Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor, which is awesome—the highest award that we have for faculty here, so that was really exciting. I’ve been Master Teacher for Crystal Crest, that’s a student nominated award; that’s really amazing to get. I’ve been nominated for that a bunch of times, and I’ve only got it once. Then, there’s all these kinds of recognition that come along with the things that you do, right? So having my books adopted in to more than a hundred universities across the United States is pretty cool. I take 22 that as recognition. Then, I think, getting asked to do a lot of cool things; like two weeks ago, interviewing Bill Nye in front of five thousand people. That was pretty cool recognition and they asked me to do that. Funny story about that; do you want to hear the funny story? KH: Yes, yes I do. SP: So, I’m sitting in the dean’s office. We have a new dean and she wanted to meet with everybody for fifteen minutes. I was waiting for my meeting with her, and the associate dean comes in and she says, “Oh Stacy, I’m so glad I ran into you because I wanted to ask if you would moderate the discussion at Bill Nye.” I said, “Well, when is it?” and I look at my calendar and talked to her and I’m like, “Well yeah, I can do it. It’s 11:30 on a Wednesday. I don’t see why not.” So in my head what I am thinking is, “He’s going to give a talk, and then I’m going to have the microphone and I’m going to hand it to people and that’s what moderated discussion means to me.” It’s going to be a couple hundred people maybe. Then they moved it to the Dee Events Center because it sold out in 17 minutes. They moved it over there and then there were 5,000 people that were going to be there. I’m still thinking, “Okay, he’s going to give a talk and then I have to somehow figure out how I’m going to point at people and get the microphone to people.” Then we met two weeks beforehand to talk about how they were going to set up the stage and stuff. I’m listening and I said, “Wait, he’s not giving a talk.” And the organizer said, “No.” “So it’s just going to be me and Bill Nye in two chairs with a plant in front of five thousand people for an hour and a half.” They said, “Yeah.” I thought, “I better get prepared.” 23 SP: I read all of his books in two weeks and he was very impressed that I had read all of his books. Which I was actually kind of surprised that he was so impressed that I read all of his books. But I would think that that would be a thing that you would do if he was coming. Then I pulled the questions together and made more generalized questions that he could actually answer out of the questions that came in on Facebook and stuff. But it was so funny. I was just, “Really? I don’t think I’m thinking what you’re thinking I’m thinking. Some where we’ve missed the communication.” And it’s not that I would have necessarily said, “No”, if I had known what I was getting into. It was just this staggering moment of realizing what I was getting into, because I had never been in front of a group that big before. It was a different kind of thing. Fortunately, it was all about him. So all I had to do was throw him a question and then wait and then I’d throw him another question. So, yeah, that kind of recognition, like getting asked to do things. On the one hand, at some point during your semester you’re thinking, “Really? Really? Am I really this important?” But at the same time, you accept doing those things because it’s an honor to do them. KH: Who are the College of Science Dean and Associate Dean? SP: The College of Science Dean is Andrea Easter-Pilcher and the Associate Dean is Barbara Trask. KH: And how do you feel Weber’s direction is going having both females in the college presidency? 24 SP: Oh, it’s obviously a thing that we should do. You know this from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, right. When they asked her how many women should be on the Supreme Court and she said, “Nine.” Because there were nine men and nobody ever complained about that. I don’t see a problem. I really like this dean very much. She’s done a really good job. I think sometimes when you take over a bunch of academics it starts an argument of academics. I’m not sure what you would call a group of them. But when you take over an argument of academics, it’s a really good idea to just watch a little bit and see how things go. She’s done a really nice job of that and then she’s started taking ideas in trying to push them forward. This is very, kind of, grassroots centered leadership style, which I really like. I do not respond to authority. With some of my experiences, I’m not going to respond well to authority. If you try to come down on me, that’s not going to work out very well. I really appreciate this more lateral leadership style. KH: How have you become a mentor to others in your field? SP: Working at it all the time, I keep track of lots of former students and lots of former colleagues. I see them all of the time at meetings and we exchange emails all of the time. It is not unusual for me in any given semester to get two or three emails from students I had more than ten years ago asking advice or just telling me what they are up to. I’ve tried to always keep those lines of communication open. I started a group called “Women in Physics,” which we ran for a little while and then I got overwhelmed with other stuff. But since we’ve hired some more women in the department, we’ve restarted that. The guys in the department are 25 so funny—not the faculty guys, but the student guys are like, “Why do you get to do the thing? Why don’t we have a Men in Physics group?” Sometimes I have to sit them down and tell them my story and I’m like, “So this is why we have Women in Physics.” Still today, women full professors of physics: 7%. KH: Most of them are here, right? SP: Apparently, yes! It’s a real problem in the field and so that’s a thing that I’m working at. And not just in defense of the women but also trying to teach the men to be better people and be more appreciative that different experiences bring different things to the table. If you truly want creative ideas and if you really want to solve the big problems, you need to get every single person at the table. No matter where they come from, no matter what their background is, no matter what—you need all of the brains. As part of just my general mission in life is not just promoting women, but also promoting men to be better men. That, I think, is not always well received but necessary. But I have a background that’s just like, “Yeah, well okay. I know that’s very upsetting, continue.” A lot of women students, almost every woman student that’s come through the physics department, has come through since I’ve been there. I keep in touch with them. I also keep in touch with a lot of chemistry students and a lot of students from botany. A lot of students from around the college get to know me while I’m there… well when they are here, I should say. We worked together and I keep in touch with them. KH: What is “Women in Physics?” 26 SP: Women in physics is the faculty—who are now four, and all of the women students. It’s not that we exclude the men, they are welcome to come to activities if they want to, they don’t have to. So far, none of them have asked to. Every semester we do a couple of different events. Sometimes we will get together and just have dinner so they can talk about things that are happening. Sometimes that’s our first indication that there’s, say, a particular math professor that’s not treating the women and the men fairly in class, or there’s been an interaction with a particular male student. Somebody needs to step in there and say, “Hey, let’s sit down and think about how this is going and how do we want this to go.” Sometimes that’s where we hear about that stuff first. There’s a lot of questions always from the students, the women students about, “How should I handle this? This happened. What do I do about it? How serious is this thing that happened to me?” I think having the informal social setting really helps bring out a lot of that kind of stuff. SP: And then there’s a lot of issues that women, professional women have that professional men don’t have because…it’s well studied that the men are not picking up the slack. The women are doing second and sometimes even third shift. Helping them figure out how to navigate that has been a big chunk of that. Just bringing them together so that now they know who each other are and that yes, this person who I’ve seen in a couple of classes is also a physics major and also going through the same things that I’m going through. Pushing them together as a cohort has been really valuable to me. 27 KH: Do the other sciences have something similar? Do you adopt some of them in that group? SP: When I started “Women in Physics” to begin with, it was the only one. Since then, there have been a couple of other things going on. We have adopted into our group some chemists, especially. There’s a close connection between chemistry, math, and physics, in intellectual pursuit. So we’ve adopted a couple of those people over. Very recently, this new group started up called, “Scientistas.” That’s just a general ‘women in science’ group. I don’t know. I would be perfectly happy to see Women in Physics get kind of slurped up into that. If that’s functional for the kinds of problems we’re trying to solve, I would be perfectly happy to see that happen. But I don’t know. We will just have to see how that plays out. KH: What advice would you give to students or women starting in your field? SP: Put one foot in front of the other and then put the other foot in front of the first foot. One thing that I don’t think gets talked about enough is that when you go look at a university, whether it’s for undergraduate or graduate work, you’re interviewing them every bit as much as they are interviewing you. You really need to pay attention to the culture of the department that you are stepping into. I really wish someone had talked to me about that. So I talk to students about that and I just say, “Hey, just ask.” And the people to ask are the other graduate students, especially when you are going on to graduate school. Then, I think there’s a real push right now for everyone to think of their college degree as a job getting apparatus. That the whole point of going to college is so that you can get 28 a job and then you can do a job and so on. I think that’s exactly backwards to the way that you really need to think about it. For me, getting a degree at a university made me a better person. It actually made me a person. I’m always try to get students to tell me what they’re passionate about and then go do the thing that you’re passionate about. Maybe you’ll wind up getting a job totally out of field. But then, you’ll still have astronomy to fill up your soul on the weekends. A job is something that you do eight hours, maybe twelve, maybe whatever—but that’s something that you do during the week. Then you have all of this other time. How are you going to fill that other time and what kind of person are you going to be? How are you going to be your best person; the best self that you can be? I’m always advising students, “Read everything; everything, read all of the things.” It doesn’t matter if you think you are interested in it or not, just read it anyway. Go have experiences, go have adventures, travel out of the country; go actually interact with the world. I just don’t think that a job is worth—it’s just not that important. Out of all of the things that you could be really devoting your entire heart and soul to, that’s not that important. Maybe if you are lucky, you get a job that you love. I have a job I love, but I have a job that I love because I chased something that I loved, not because I chased a job. It feels important to me to really advise students in that way right now because so much of the larger societal conversation is all about college degrees as job training and education as job training. But, it 29 offends me to my core that they talk about it that way because that’s not what it is. We are not making workers; we’re making people. KH: What are some of your favorite memories at Weber State? SP: Gosh, so many. I have not gotten to say it and I have to say that I love my department. Even before Kristin and Kiley came, there was Michelle and I. If you haven’t talked to Michelle, you should. But men in this department are extraordinary individuals. They are some of my favorite people on the planet. Every day I get to come work with them; we go to lunch every Wednesday, have coffee every morning, and play scrabble once a month. When one of us gets a big award, we all go to see that happen. When one of us gets tenure, we have a huge party and invite everybody and like seventy people come to celebrate the physics department. We do a lot of things together like the physics open house, which is a big outreach event that we do. Every day is one of my favorite days to come to Weber State and every one of them is one of my favorite memories of being here just because the people are so spectacular to work with; they are just really great people to work with. I think one of my favorite memories is a little bit upsetting. So at the physics open house we have the bed of nails. We put somebody on the bed of nails, then we put more nails on top of them, then we put a cinder block, and then we smash the cinder block, right? Good physics going on. Adam Johnston was doing it. We had the president of the university, Chuck White, on the bed of 30 nails. Adam was nervous and he didn’t hit the brick hard enough to smash it. And that is incredibly painful when that happens. So there was just this, “Oh” from Chuck and Adam was like, “AH! Oh my god!” In front of like a hundred people in the auditorium and Chuck said, “Hit it again, harder.” Adam picked up the sledgehammer and you could see him just like, “Okay! I’m really going to do it this time!” And he smashed it and it absorbed the energy as it should and it was all fine and everything. But then he got him up off of the bed of nails and he was like, “Are you okay?” So yeah, that was good. KH: Oh my gosh, that is an amazing story. SP: Oh it was. These things happen. KH: When you do the bed of nails, is it normally a volunteer from the crowd? Is it somebody from the faculty? SP: Adam and Colin, they have this really great relationship with each other. Colin plays a great straight man and Adam is funnier. So Colin will lay on the bed of nails and Adam will smash the block. Sometimes we have put somebody in the audience and called them up as the, “Oh we were asking people from the audience.” But we’ve never done it just with strangers. We always did it with somebody that knew what was coming and stuff. SP: If you would like to be on the bed of nails, you can send me an email and I can see if I can work that out for you. But for the most part, I think it’s always been somebody that we knew. KH: What do you normally do at the Physics Open House? 31 SP: So I usually spend the whole time in the dark. I run the planetarium and run the observatory at the open house. I’m going back and forth between where the planetarium is and then where the telescopes are. KH: Where are the telescopes? SP: The telescopes are on the roof of Tracy Hall. KH: All of the time? SP: Uh huh. KH: I did not know that. SP: Yes, we have a public observatory and a research observatory on Tracy Hall. The public observatory has nine telescopes and we can set them up for solar observing during the day or we can set them up at night for people to use. We use them for classwork and we also use them for public events. You can reserve it for $100 an hour because it takes us more than an hour to set them up. People do reserve it sometimes, but usually they want to reserve the planetarium because the weather doesn’t matter; if it gets rainy, it doesn’t matter. I run both of those things at the open house. Sometimes I give a talk too, but mostly I’m in charge of those two things. KH: If someone wanted to reserve the planetarium, what’s the process? SP: So they send an email to planetarium@weber.edu and then we find a time, a mutually available time. Because there are classes being taught in there and I have an all student staff, then it’s a little bit of scheduling nightmare. Then we 32 reserve it at a time when a student can be there to run it and that’s all. It is $60 for a regular member of the public, $10 for an on-campus entity. Occasionally, we can do something else. It’s hard to think. A lot of people want to do birthday parties in there, but it’s hard because there is no food or drink allowed in the planetarium. But sometimes we can manage to make that work out. Like I say, sometimes we’ve had 24,000 people come through there in a year. We can only seat 60 in there. So if you think about 24,000 people, 60 at a time, it is chaos when we are that busy. KH: Okay so just a couple of more questions. SP: Sure! I’m having fun. KH: How do you think women receiving the right to vote shaped or influenced history, your community, and you personally? SP: You know what’s funny is that you don’t realize how recent it all is until you’re older. Like now, I’m not at 50 but I can see it from here. So 100 years ago, all of the sudden doesn’t seem that long ago. To realize that women only got the vote 100 years ago blows my mind; it completely blows my mind. It is literally unimaginable to me that anybody would not want my opinion. I mean, obviously. I just cannot even imagine how we ever thought that was okay. Lately, there’s been this kind of frothing happening in the larger culture, which I think has a lot of misogynist overtones and stuff. So we just have to see it, “Oh this again.” But I think it’s easy to take it for granted and it’s wrong to take it for granted. I think those women fought so hard for that, then have every single step of the way ever 33 since. I remember being a kid and my mom had all of these credit cards, like store credit cards; like JC Penny cards and Sears card and stuff like that. I didn’t really think about it and then later I had a Visa card and I was like, “Mom that’s so weird, why did you have all of those department store cards?” and she said, “Because I couldn’t get a regular card. I wasn’t allowed. It was not allowed for women to have credit cards when you were young.” Complete shock, recognizing as much as I had a challenge, she had all of these other challenges that I was totally not aware of. I didn’t even notice that they were a thing that she was struggling with. She wasn’t allowed to have a bank account. She wasn’t allowed to have her own money. She wasn’t allowed to make her own decisions. She couldn’t buy a house. So I think women getting the right to vote, that was sort of the first step towards a fight for equality that we are still fighting and will be fighting for a while. I was just listening to a piece on NPR about how fast the larger societal attitudes have changed towards LGBTQ people, gay and lesbian issues, marriage equality, and all of those kinds of things. Just in a very short period of time, like twenty years, they went from 16% approval of gay marriage to 68% approval of gay marriage. I sat there in my car when I got home with the radio. The program was over and I was like, “Why did that happen so fast?” Because what I want to know is how do we make it happen fast for everybody else who is not adequately represented in not being treated equally. How do we do that? How do we make that happen for everybody so that we get this shift over? I do not know the answer to that question but doggone it those sociologists better go 34 figure it out and then tell me what I’m supposed to do to make it happen. So, I think women getting the right to vote was absolutely instrumental. A point of pride about that is that we have the oldest constitution in the world at this point. All of the constitutions that were older have now been supplanted by more recent ones and those more recent ones have by and large been more inclusive. They’ve been more inclusive because we’ve been doing the hard work since we wrote that constitution, which was imperfect and flawed to perfect it and make it less flawed; getting women the right to vote was a big part of that. KH: Is there anything else you’d like to share with us? SP: Well, how much time do we have? KH: As much time as you need. SP: There is one other thing that I would love to see get written down in an archives somewhere. That is, when I first got here, there was this kind of disparaging attitude about Weber State around. Some people called it Harrison High even back in the day. KH: Yeah, I’ve heard that. SP: There was this kind of like, “Oh it’s just Weber.” Which really made me angry, actually, when the marketing people did the, “Just Weber” thing. I was like, “Really? We’ve been spending decades fighting that. What are you doing?” But, over the time that I’ve been here, I’ve seen it grow and evolve and mature. I have always seen it as an extraordinary place. It is not a second rate institution, it’s a second chance institution. The work that we do here, where we are 35 keeping the door open for people who may not otherwise get the opportunity to walk through it, is absolutely essential and pure goodness that we do that work here. It makes me really proud to be part of it. KH: Great, well thank you for your time. SP: Thank you.