Oral History Program Dr. June Phillips Interviewed by Kandice Harris 13 June 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah June Phillips Interviewed by Kandice Harris 13 June 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: Phillips, June, an oral history by Kandice Harris, 13 June 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. June Phillips Circa 1993 June Phillips Circa 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Dr. June Phillips, conducted on June 13, 2019 via telephone, by Kandice Harris. June discusses her life, her memories at Weber State University, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Marina Kenner, the audio technician is also present during this interview. KH: Today is June 13, 2019. It is 10 a.m. I am on the phone with Dr. June Phillips. Present is Kandice Harris, the interviewer, and Marina Kenner, the recorder. When and where were you born? JP: I was born in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. I’ll give you the year, only because last week I was at a high school alumni luncheon. And what we were all laughing about was that it’s the one place where you can’t lie about your age when you are sitting around with all of your people. I was born in Pittsburgh in 1938. So I’m old. KH: Oh no you are not. Would you talk a little bit about your early life and some historical background? JP: I guess the first thing, probably in my life that made a change was that when I was four or five and World War II was going on, my father enlisted in the Merchant Marines. So he was gone for several years and that certainly changed our family life. I was an only child at the moment. But his being gone meant that my mother went to work. Now I know that there’s been a lot of recent talk about Rosie the Riveter. She did not do that, she worked in an office. But it also meant that we moved in with my grandparents—my paternal grandparents, 2 during that time, as she went to work. I remember my father coming home, maybe once or twice a year for a couple of years. So I basically grew up with my grandparents and my mother in those early years. While I don’t remember details of that time, I certainly remember that it did change the fabric of our family and my mother was a working mother at that point. Her working outside the home was a change in society at that time. When my dad returned from the war and I soon had a brother and a sister, but we remained living with my grandparents. I also had that older generation to talk with and grow up with. KH: Did you grow up in Pittsburgh? Did you graduate high school there? JP: When I was small we lived in Pittsburgh. And then in, I guess it was in 8th grade, we moved to a Pittsburgh suburb. I graduated from, Brentwood High School in the South Hills of the city. KH: Were you encouraged to pursue an education? JP: Yeah, I was, especially by my grandfather. I think my mother had expected for me to do that too. She died suddenly when I was a sophomore in high school. My dad was not against me going onto higher education, but he seemed to just not have any expectation for it. He worked at a bank and thought he could find me a nice job there. But, it was really in my last two years of high school—I was in a very small high school. We had a graduating class of about 120. My teachers and principal there, all just assumed that my grades were such that I would go on. And in my senior year, I was recommended by the school for a full tuition scholarship for four years to the University of Pittsburgh. At that time, 3 Pittsburgh was not as nationally known as it is now. They had a program where they offered a full tuition scholarship to one senior in every school in the Pittsburgh area. So I did receive that and, I remember one day my grandfather coming to me—because my dad hadn’t said much. And he said, “You know, if your dad doesn’t want to support you going on to college, I certainly will.” And so I always remember that because I think that he wanted to do that for my father, but then the war came and my dad went into the service and then he went back to work at Mellon Bank. He ended up getting degrees through his job. So I was always particularly thankful for my grandfather for saying that. KH: What started your interest in foreign languages? JP: It started after I got to Pitt. I’m sure you read all of the time about how many times freshman change their majors. And I was among them, even then. I started at Pitt, thinking I wanted to by a physical therapist, but I had good language experiences in high school and I really like them. So I continued taking them at Pitt, beyond any requirement. In my junior year, I applied for a study abroad scholarship at Pitt. Once I got that, to go and study overseas for a semester, I decided to do it. And basically what happens is in physical therapy, if you leave that very restrictive set of requirements, then it’s going to cost you an extra year in the program. I did not want to do an extra year, so I went off and did my time abroad. When I came back—and in those days we had the Dean of Women and the Dean of Men. They were not necessarily academic deans, but they were almost like student affairs deans, but with a slight academic theme. I remember going into this dean, her name was Helen Poole Rush. She was 4 someone we all admired and we were just a little bit afraid for, but she was a very gentle nice person. I can remember going in and saying, “Dean Rush, how can I change my major? What can I major that I can get out of here in four years?” And she looked at me as if I were the dumbest person on earth. She said, “My dear, you have just acquired 28 credits in French. What do you think you can major in and get out?” And I said, “Okay, I’ll major in French.” But it ended up being a good decision to me because I was much more in the humanities side of the house and I enjoyed that. KH: Were you part of any student government or organizations in your undergrad? JP: Yes, I was. You know, in those days, Pitt was primarily a commuter campus so the Greek system was quite active because it gave you a house, a place to go to. My senior year, I was president of my sorority there, which was Tri Delta. I was in a number of student organizations, and one that I might mention later. At the he University of Pittsburgh, people around Utah might not know, the main campus has a 32-story building with gothic architecture called the Cathedral of Learning. It came from the vision of Chancellor John G. Bowman, who equated higher education and higher learning with that look of a castle or a cathedral that reached upwards. Also in the university, there is a series of Nationality Rooms. At that time, I think there were twenty some, and they have added a number since then. But Pittsburgh, maybe this is the history a little bit, Pittsburgh was always a city of so many different ethnic groups that came through to work in the mills, to work in the mines, and different waves from different countries came at different 5 times. And when they did, many of them retained their ethnic connections through social clubs. For example, even today, Pittsburgh has the largest number of ethnic relations of any place in the United States: the Irish, and the Italians, the biggest Croatian-American community, and so many others. So when Chancellor Bowman wanted to create the university, he decided that all of the first floor classrooms, would be given to any ethnic group that would take on the responsibility for designing it, putting their own artwork in, the only limitations were that it had to be serviceable as a classroom. Which in those days meant it needed to have chairs and desks and a blackboard in it. So ethnic groups took up that challenge, and by the time that I was there, there was a French room, and an English room, and an Irish room. There was a Yugoslav room, I mean everything was there. But many of these groups, did when their rooms were built, continued to raise funds and they created scholarships. And that’s the scholarship that I received to study in France. For us as students, there was an organization, this organization were called CWENS and don’t ask me what that means anymore. But we learned about and took people on tours of the nationality rooms and the Heinz Chapel, which was a chapel on campus that was created in the likeness of the Sainte-Chappelle in Paris. It became a really important campus organization and one that linked into the community. I was very active with the nationality rooms and I think that was a source of my lifelong interest in other peoples, places, cultures. I also participated in Panhellenic life and I was in Mortar Board my senior year, and some other things. It’s too long ago to think of other things. 6 KH: What degrees and certifications do you have? JP: Well my BA from Pitt was a major in French, with minors in Spanish and English and I was certified to teach in all three of those areas. Then my Ph.D. from Ohio State University was in Foreign Languages Education with areas in Linguistics and French. KH: What were some of the challenges you faced while obtaining your degrees? JP: As I read that question, I was thinking back and I really don’t think I had so many –I was lucky At Pitt we had supportive faculty, we had opportunities in scholarships and for studying abroad. Pittsburgh at that time, had a lot of support from the old money families in Pittsburgh. The Carnegies and the Mellon’s and the Heinz’s. You go back and look at the corporate big wigs in the early part of the 20th century a lot of those industries were here. For example, Vera Heinz, the ketchup family patroness, underwrote a trip for those of us who hosted the nationality rooms and Heinz chapel, to New York City. My first time in New York City was on a trip that I paid nothing for. And Vera Heinz even came with us on that trip. So things were pretty smooth as I look back on those days. Also in graduate school—and this is less common today—but public schools at that time, most of them in this part of Pennsylvania offered sabbaticals after ten years. Just like we do for faculty at the university. So I had a sabbatical from public school teaching when I decided to go on to graduate school at Ohio State. , That meant that, unlike other graduate students, I did not have to find teaching jobs or other kinds of support for income while there. Ohio State was on a quarter system, so that mean I could establish residency and complete all of my 7 coursework in those four quarters. Then I returned to teaching, and worked over three summers to do the research and writing for my dissertation. So when I think back on it, I think I had a fairly easy time. And I certainly didn’t have any student loans. That’s probably unheard of now. KH: What were your career options once you had your degree? JP: I completed my undergraduate work in the 1960’s. Women did one of three things: they were nurses, they were glorified secretaries, or they were teachers. I did go into teaching at that point. Also, just prior to my finishing my undergraduate degree, Foreign Language hadn’t been a growth area in schools. But Sputnik had launched in ’57 and institutes for teachers were created under NDEA—National Defense Education Act. They provided summer programs for Foreign Language teachers that were completely underwritten, you did one year in the states, and then you did the second summer in the country. As I think back now, I actually did my first NDEA institute at Princeton University. The teachers in that summer program were the first females to live on campus because Princeton was opening its doors to women in the following fall. That was interesting because some of the dorm rooms were not quite set up yet for women to live there. That the NDEA post-graduate option was important, and then after I returned from my sabbatical and completed my doctorate, I moved on to a nearby university. By the way, you look back at these things, you realize how old you are and how much things have changed. When I returned to teaching, I technically owed the institution a year of work before I could leave. I 8 had always regularly had teachers from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, IUP. It is in Western PA, part of the state system. That next year, I had a student teacher, and the IUP supervisor came by and told me that he was about to retire. He kind of asked if I would be interested in that position, the supervisor for teachers and the methods course. He knew I was ABD and in those days, the 1970’s, I think IUP was where Weber State was shortly before I came. That is faculty tended to be local. A lot of positions were only advertised locally or perhaps regionally. Or as in this case, word of mouth. So when I said, “Well, I might be interested,” the department chair called and asked me to come up and meet him on campus. I did that, I had never been there even though it was just 75 miles away (maybe not ‘just’). I decided to go look, and my step-daughter drove up with me. And I was interviewed, I met some faculty and the department chair called me in a few days and offered me the position. However, it was several thousand dollars less than I was making in the public schools, plus I had a 150-mile round trip too. But IUP faculty was unionized, and so the only way to raise pay, was to raise someone’s rank. Consequently, I was hired at stage five of an assistant professorship, two years before I even completed my degree. In two years, I was an associate and in another few I was a full professor. Now, those days are long gone, going through that. But when I look back, I realize how easy that was to do in many ways. At the same time, I had publications, research and a national editorship so 9 accomplishments certainly counted as well. KH: Were there a lot of women faculty members where you were teaching for starting out? JP: No. But in the languages department, there were women. I can’t think back now, but I know we were almost half. And that might have been true… it was true in some of the other areas as well, but they were areas that were more associated with education, teacher preparation. I don’t think the business school had many. I know the economics school did not. So where my narrow faculty had plenty of women but that was not campus wide. KH: What mentors or resources did you have available to you in your program and career? JP: Well, actually in the beginning—as I said, at Pitt, we were a small group. I had a lot of people there that were encouraging. But probably the first person that really help shape the course I took was the assistant principal in the junior high where I taught. He was the person who, when I neared time for a sabbatical, said, “Take it when you are eligible and do graduate work.” And if he had not pushed that, I’m not sure that I would have gone forward. When I went to investigate that sabbatical, my initial effort was to just apply for a master’s degree program. Now I had 36-some master’s credits, but I had never put them together. I was one of the people that used my summers to go somewhere to study, but I didn’t enter a program. Fortunately, Pennsylvania at that time had what they called a master’s equivalent so, if 30 degrees was a master’s credit, and you could present 36 acceptable graduate level credits; they took those and gave you an equivalent. Now it wasn’t a degree, it was for purposes of salary 10 scale. So I had done a summer in Princeton, I had done a summer in Wisconsin, I had done a summer in McGill, Canada, I had credits from France and from Pitt. And so I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and enroll in a graduate program. I applied to about four programs with different emphases. Then, Dr. Ed Allen, who was in charge of the program from Ohio State called me very early on a Sunday morning and first asked if we could converse a bit in French. That was fine; the only problem was that on Saturday, we had taken something like 8 busses of 8th graders to a Maple Sugar Festival, and 8th graders were no better then, than they are now. I was one of the chaperones and when we got those kids back and picked-up by their parents at 10 o’clock at night, we all went to a local bar and just drank until it closed. It was early in the day, it was the number of beers I had, and there I am on a Sunday morning talking to this graduate school director from OSU, in French. Anyway, after a bit, he asked me why I applied for the master’s program. And I said, “Because I didn’t have one.” And he said, “Well, you know, the doctorate is defined in terms of x-number of credits past the master’s, or x-number of credits beyond the bachelor’s,” and what I learned then was that this happens a lot in the sciences. That’s exactly my step-son, who is a laser physicist, did. He was in a graduate program where they go straight from bachelors to doctorate. So Ed told me, “Looking at your credentials, I would be willing to take you into the doctorate program.” So I went back to my junior high school principal and said, “What do you think of that?” He said, “Go do it.” And so that became another important stage; I went to OSU at that time and was able 11 to go for my doctorate. Had I not done that, I probably would never had made that step, and then I would have never made the shift to higher education. So, that Sunday morning conversation was important. Then when I was OSU, a lot in the field of foreign language education was changing at that time. They had just hired a new professor. His first year there was the same as ours and so he sat in on all of our classes. I knew towards the end of the program that I wanted to do a dissertation in a different direction than was the norm. I knew that Dr. Gilbert Jarvis was the person that could work with me on that the research I wanted to do. He was brand new in the field but at that very moment, he hadn’t had yet the qualification to direct dissertations. So he worked with me and the other professors, so that someone technically was my advisor until he became qualified the next year. My dissertation advisor is someone that I still communicate with by email, once or twice a week. He really became a life-long colleague and a friend. That was probably my most important mentor and resource at that time. A year after returning from my sabbatical, I went and taught at IUP (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) for 12 years. In 1984, I had been elected to chair the Northeast Conference on the teaching of Foreign Languages, a large regional conference held in New York City every year. IUP, like Weber State, had pretty heavy teaching loads, compared to research universities. So I went to the dean and said, “Could I get a course reduction for chairing this conference next year?” Not sure what kind of an answer I’d get, he agreed on one condition. He agreed to reduce my teaching completely, if I would serve as acting associate 12 dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. They had had a search that year, and it had not produced a candidate. So he said, “If you’ll do that job, then you don’t have to teach.” So I did that and in the next year, again, he asked if I would be willing to serve in that position. I moved from faculty to administration at that point. Probably the last mentor I can identify was Bob Smith at Weber State. He was the provost who hired me in 1993. Bob hired two women and an African American in three deanships that year. I think that was the first point that any of those identities had been hired on Weber State campus. Bob had a commitment to diversify the faculty and college administrators. He became an important advisor to me as I entered a new town, a new campus. He shared its history, his vision for growth, and self-confidence in all of the set of new deans at that time. KH: What resistance or battles did you face as you progressed in your career? JP: I think perhaps resistance. I guess I was fortunate as I look back—battles might be too strong. Not that there weren’t obstacles. But they were not ones that came out of any deliberate circumstance. I mean, probably for me, the first obstacle that I had at IUP was I spent 150 miles making a round trip from home to campus. What made that doable in the early years was that part of my responsibility was to supervise student teachers. And back in the 70’s there were large numbers of those. Most of them did their student teaching in the greater Pittsburgh area. So I usually only had to go to campus two or three days a week just to teach one or two courses, and that helped. Once I went into administration though, I did need to be on campus every day. But at that point, 13 our children were grown and off to college, so I just sort of broke down and bought a townhouse up there. In that way, I could stay over several nights a week. Then I guess it was in 1986 my husband retired. He was 15 years older than I was. At that point, he said, “Anywhere you want to go is okay with me.” So I either moved to Indiana, PA, or try something else. That’s when I changed careers. So the resistances were sort of self-made in that sense. KH: What positions have you held in your career? JP: I taught junior high French. I was faculty at IUP and then in administration. I went from there to Tennessee and was executive director of the Tennessee Foreign Language Institute, a newly funded center under the Commission for Higher Education. Then from there, I did two years as a DVP, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. It was from there that I applied to Weber State and became Dean of Arts and Humanities in August of 1993. KH: Did you help start the Tennessee Foreign Language Institute? JP: Yes. It had just been established by state government. Tennessee was trying to improve language teaching in the schools and higher education as well. Tennessee had just attracted companies such as Nissan, the Japanese Auto Factory and very few people in Tennessee had been studying or learning foreign languages or cultures. The state set this up to see if education and the global economy could promote and encourage different paths in schools and business. KH: What was it like starting that institute? 14 JP: It was interesting. It was a model that had never been set up elsewhere. Looking back, it should have had some different parameters. I think it should have been headquartered more directly out of a university instead of state government. Since then, Stanford has copied that model and has been very successful with it. I had faculty privileges and library privileges at Vanderbilt. But those were the days where e-mail was new! The state did not have e-mail, Vanderbilt did. So I was able to get on e-mail through Vanderbilt. The start-up was a new concept. I think it was a worthy concept, I don’t think that they put some of the underpinnings in it. Then as often that happens in politics, it changes administration and the state government made some differences. This was started when Lamar Alexander was governor. And this was his vision; he moved on to become president of the University of Tennessee before becoming a US Senator. He had a global vision for education and the state. The next governor that came in did not have that same vision. He had an 8th grade education and was a billionaire. I think he had Anheuser-Busch franchises for all Arkansas and Tennessee and Kentucky. He as self-made and wealthy; in office his priority was not higher education. I think that he wanted TFLI to function more like a bridge with just very narrow career aspirations whereas Alexandar had thought of it in more in an academic sense. I was less happy with it after three years, and that’s why I took the visiting professorship at the Air Force Academy. What that visiting professorship did was buy you out. So you keep your salary and your retirement and everything from your institution and they pay them back. So it was a no-loss t move. At that end of that 15 professorship, I could have gone back and see what I might do with the institute, and maybe that’s your next question, of what drew me to Weber State. I thought, “If I stay out of the academy for too long, I won’t be able to get back in.” What Tennessee had given me was experience working with state government, and I had been there three years, the Air Force for two. If I stayed much longer, I thought it would be hard to get back into the academy. So at the end of the Air Force Academy stint, my husband and I both loved the west after two years in Colorado. We simply said, “I will apply for some jobs in academia in the west. If I get it, we move. If I don’t, we go back to Tennessee.” So it worked out very nicely for me to find Weber State, a place I had never heard of, but people here didn’t know IUP either. My husband had once coached basketball and he knew Weber State basketball. KH: What was Weber State like when you started? JP: As I said, it was much like IUP had been 20 years earlier. When I came to IUP, it had recently become a university from a state college and before that a state teachers’ college. Weber State had recently become a university. Weber State was moving forward and growing, and I give Bob Smith and Paul Thompson, who was president at that time, both a lot of praise for their foresight. They wanted to start to move from local hires to national ones. They wanted to diversify faculty, they wanted to modernize programs, they knew that they were a commuter campus basically, but they wanted to make sure that they strengthened academics for the student body and brought more people from elsewhere and outside. So in that sense it really was much like IUP had been. I 16 felt comfortable because I entered IUP as a faculty member the same way faculty members were entering Weber State when I was a dean. In other words, as a faculty member came here from other places and they didn’t know the school, we really had to recruit actively. We had to sell Weber State to them, and not just sit back. Many faculty knew the university and lived here, they had grown up here, they had gotten degrees and now came back to this campus they knew so well to teach. But we needed to diversify beyond that. So that’s sort of what I saw there. When I came here, Marilyn Harrington in Allied health professions, and I were the first women deans. David—boy I just went blank on his last name, was African American and was hired as Dean of Education. So that helped too because they had three positions at that time with three newcomers, and I think that on dean’s council and on local initiatives that immediately started to diversify the conversation. KH: Do you feel like Weber welcomed you that everybody accepted the outsiders that were? JP: Well I’m never going to say 100%. But basically yes. I found that the chairs and faculty in Arts and Humanities were welcoming. I felt that people tried—I remember Paul Thompson, who was president, you know, he invited all of the deans to his home in one of those early months. Again, maybe it was just the new deans and their families, just to talk things over and how were we feeling and everything. So yes, that was comforting. Now, that doesn’t say that there aren’t a few people that of course, resented that or tried to wonder who you were and who you were coming in and whatever. I think part of that had to do with 17 something I learned years before—you don’t come in with all of your own ideas and say, “This is what we’re going to do and change.” I tried to take my time in learning what the issues were. And one of the things was that if there was resistance in some departments, it’s not like it was 100%. There were already a group of faculty in each department that wanted to make some changes. So I think, for the most part, they saw having a new dean as a helpful way of that happening. KH: What programs did you help create and run? JP: I don’t think “I” just ran or created programs. I think that’s part of our humanities and arts disciplines; these are disciplines that are collaborations that usually have an amount of cross-disciplinary work. So I did not see my role as mandating a program, but I think rather as supporting initiatives underway and helping them grow. I worked very, very closely with chairs, and with people who were program directors. I think one of the areas though, that maybe we did really look at more closely was fundraising, both for scholarships and for buildings. Early in my tenure the development office made a move to assign development officers to each college, rather than doing it at the university level and that became important. We really increased the numbers of scholarships over those years and that was something that we did more out of the dean’s office. And then pulling in chairs and disciplines for ones that were localized. A program that we had funded shortly after that, and I think that is still quite active is The Dean and Carol Hurst Artist in Residence Program which we expanded to Artist/Scholar in residence. We met and conversed regularly with Dean and Carol. They really 18 wanted an opportunity for students to have more than one shot deals with personalities and in the field. In other words, with many campus outreach programs, they would bring in a speaker, and there would be a Q & A after. Or sometimes there would be a performance and there would be a master class before it. So the Hurst’s set up this program so that we could bring in a visiting scholar for a week or more to work very closely with a selective group of students. Artists/scholars were recommended by faculty, we had an application process, and then Carol and Dean’s grants underwrote transportation, housing, related expenses. One aspect of the program was that we also asked visitors to do an event for communities and meet with faculty. I do remember that very first year, the first persons we brought in were in theater, Anthony Zerbe, that’s not a name you would know anymore, and Roscoe Brown. They were two actors who were just wonderful and so they worked so compellingly in the theater department. We had Claire Bloom, an actress, we had the Paul Taylor dance troop. It’s been interesting for me recently; we had a journalist for the Department of Communication, Orville Schell, who had done a lot of work in China. I had forgotten about him and yet now I see him on television almost weekly on the PBS news hour or program like that. He’s Director of a Center at the Asia Society and with all of the interest in China, his expertise is called upon frequently; he’s often one of the talking heads on T.V. When I arrived all of the programs were undergraduate programs. But probably after a few years, we had a group of faculty in English who really felt that there was a need for a graduate program in English for students in the area. 19 That took quite a few years to develop. But we did get the first graduate program in our college approved in English. Now again, I don’t want to take credit for that. That was a faculty issue, my effort was the critique, to comment, to evaluate, and find support for it. As it went forward to the curriculum committee and then to the state, it was successful. The communication department started to develop a master’s in communication. From what I understand, that now is active on the campus. So those were some signs of progress. Some other programs on campus that had been established were moving forward, and I think what we tried to do was just to make them more visible, try and find more support, and make their impact stronger. Part of that was, by bringing in more national and international people. One thing that I always still enjoy getting in the mail, is an issue of Weber Studies, hat Michael Wutz l, now edits. He’s really pushed that journal forward. When I read the last issue, there were interviews with three or four nationally renowned authors that had taken place. I know the Undergraduate Literature Conference continues to bring in really major literary persons. So these initiatives work both ways, they bring people to campus, but their participation also enhances Weber State’s visibility among the universities at large in something other than athletics. But as I said, those were programs that were already here, faculty driven. I think what a dean’s office does is support that. A couple of places where I think maybe we played a heavier role was in working together to jazz up the commencement exercises in our college. In other words, we used the fact that 20 we have performing and visual arts, and languages, and English and communication, to try and make the college commencement ceremony more engaging. That’s where you hand out the diplomas, not in the larger arena setting. Just using the creativity of faculty and students, we actually had people from other colleges and administrative groups saying, “Can I come to your ceremony?” So that was always something fun. We still had many, many first generation college graduates. Large families came, they wanted to view their graduates, so we really tried to perk it up so that it was a fun event in itself. One initiative, went back to my discipline. A dean always has to be careful of not favoring your own discipline over the others. But back in, it would have been about 2000, Weber State was starting to do a little bit more with online education than many larger institutions were doing. Canvas, Blackboard, none of those things were out there yet. But Weber had a home-grown WSU online program. People could use software to create online learning. Tony Spanos, in Foreign Languages, was interested in trying to do some programs in Spanish. At the same time, I was serving as president of the American Council of Foreign Languages, our national professional group. What we were seeing there was that fewer and fewer students were graduating from teacher education programs in colleges. They had so many other fields to go into, but then later on they would decide to come back into teaching. So one of the courses that they always had to have was a methods in teaching languages course. States started to set up what they called, “Alternative Paths,” or similar names. What would happen is, these prospective teachers would get temporary jobs for three years 21 and during that time they had to take a methods course, but rarely was there a methods course offered close enough to where they could take it. Even at Weber that occurred, because we offered our methods course, one semester a year. We did it on campus during the day, so a teacher in the school could not take it. And what I was seeing from my national work was that this was happening countrywide. So while I was serving on the Executive Council with ACTFL, and I saw this going on at my own university and elsewhere, w we wrote a federal grant under Title Seven, Research and International Studies program. I wrote it through ACTFL because I knew its status as the national professional group could get the grant, versus Weber State. Then we wrote a subcontract in it to Weber State. Some of the contract funds went to Continuing Education where the online program was being developed, some into the department. Over three years, we created that online course and Tony taught it as well as some other people; I taught it once in a while. I will say this, since I’m retired, I’ve taught that course every Spring and Fall for ten years. A colleague from BYU teaches it in the summer. We’ve put close to 1,000 teachers through that course. In the intervening years, it went through different iterations and of course, now it’s on CANVAS. But what that course has also done is funnel all of those credits into the Foreign Languages Department SCH’s. So that program was something that was kind of serendipitous because, I was able to combine my external interests with an area where I felt our campus was doing really good work, even though it may not have been as well-known nationally at the time. 22 KH: Are there any programs or initiatives that were started during your tenure that you are particularly proud of? JP: In addition to those previously mentioned, nothing is coming to mind. By the way, the one thing that I skipped over, and maybe that’s where so much of my time was spent too when I was at Weber State, we did renovate or build three buildings in the college. We remodeled the Browning Center, we built the Kimball Arts Center, and did all of the planning and fundraising for Elizabeth Hall—although the ground was not broken until, I think, the year that I left. Those were major issues on the campus that we did work with. As far as I know, they are up and running well. KH: Yes, yes they are. What was the process for remodeling the Browning Center? JP: I almost want to say that was most difficult because it was a retro-fix. When I first came to campus, one of the things that I noticed was that in so much of the university publicity, a photo of the front of the Browning Center was a feature. And even in town, you would get a brochure at a hotel about Ogden, the Browning Center was on it. And at that time, you probably have them in the archives, it was all these arches. Well, none of those arches met current earthquake standards. As the remodel started, the community wanted those arches. They wanted that front there. It could not stay. It could not meet any current standards for where it was. So for the architects, it was a real problem to be solved—to design the front of the building so it has some arch “like” features without having arches. The second big problem was that it also needed to be retrofitted for accessibility standards. None of the auditoria was suitable for 23 someone in a wheelchair. To be able to do anything beyond putting people in the last row of the balcony was a challenge. So all of those standards cost a lot of money and they are a major change in design. And then, the third thing that was a problem was existing programs and offices and classrooms in that building. So for almost two to two and half years, everybody had to move out for some period. That included the Dean’s office I don’t even know this, I presume the dean’s office is still in the Browning Center, but I’m not 100% sure of that. The Dean’s office, faculty offices, classrooms, practice offices, auditoria, everything was disrupted. Performing arts instruction isn’t a matter of saying, “Well just use a different classroom” as we might have done in English or journalism. It really meant, you had to have a whole different space. So design was the work of architects, engineers, all of those folks, plus faculty and curricular changes, that just made it horrendous. So when it finally came to construction, every once in a while I would meet somebody in the community and they would say, “Oh, I miss the arches at the Browning Center.” You just sort of say, “Well, it had to be done.” So it was really, really, really challenging to renovate, much harder than building from scratch. The nice piece of it when it came together was that Val Browning was still living at that time. He wanted a really spectacular performance, to premiere the new center. He was able to fund it so that we were able to get the Moscow Ballet to come in and perform. That was quite exciting, and I forget where they were coming in from. They were 24 in the states at that time, but they came into Ogden on a little plane at the local airport. Just a little private plane. Now of course, that was before TSA, and customs, and visas, and some of those kinds of things that we have to go through now. The other thing that is funny, along with some of the faculty, we had to go to the airport to welcome their director and the dancers They got off the plane and all of these dancers in such good shape, the minute they got off their plane, they pulled out their cigarettes to smoke. I remember that blew my mind. All of those dancers were quite heavy smokers. But they put on a wonderful performance and we were so grateful to be able to invite so many to attend the performance in the new building.. The Visual Arts Center and Elizabeth Hall were different, because the Kimball Visual Arts Center was a new building from scratch on a new piece of ground, a piece of ground that had been a parking lot. So it meant that during the whole process, the art faculty was still in their old building. Everything was going on as it always would have. On anything like that, it’s exciting, certainly it was exciting for me to be able to work so closely with the architects and the planners, to work with faculty. They always had their wants, and their needs, and then their, “Boy if we could…” kinds of things. That was exciting to build, but it did not cause disruption to campus or curriculum in any way. And probably Elizabeth Hall fell somewhere in between, the actual construction occurred after I left. While I was there, we knew where it would be located. We knew the old building would be torn down that at that time housed Foreign Languages and Communication. But we were able to plan the building 25 with faculty still in place and then when they actually went to build and tear down, that would mean, moving people. But as I said, it is easier to move academic subjects that are in ordinary classrooms, much easier to do that than the special spaces for the performing arts. And then I think they tore that building down the year I left and started building the new one. I have not seen Elizabeth Hall because I have not been back to campus, but from what I understand it’s working quite well. So you know, those disciplines: English, Foreign Languages, and Communication had been housed in some of the oldest buildings on campus. As they were upgrading to more computer use, the electric outlets—some of those buildings had no internal air conditioning and were using window spots. They really needed new spaces so it was great that we were able to make those moves and to get the combination of state and private funding to make that happen. And those were all kind of fun things to do, but they were major. I think someone did tell me as I was retiring that I had the most buildings on campus renovated or under new construction. KH: Where did everybody go when the Browning Center was remodeled? JP: Oh, everywhere. The Dean’s Office went to the Miller Administration Building. Something funny that took me by surprise, we had faculty that didn’t want to come and meet us there. It was like they thought that going into the building where the provost and the president were, I don’t know if they thought they were spying on them, or what they were overhearing them, or bugging them. It just blew my mind. I thought, “What’s wrong? We are just… it’s us out here.” But we were housed there. Oh my goodness, faculty went wherever. Some of them 26 were off campus into like building spaces, like old warehouses. The other thing that was occurring at that time, now that I think back, was the Egyptian Theater had recently been rebuilt. Is that still a performing place? Is that still in downtown Ogden and working as a? KH: Yes it is, at the beginning of the year, once a month, they will do a free concert now. So it’s still pretty well used. JP: Okay, well we used the Egyptian. It had been newly restored. Do you know what I mean? And it was really restored to be used more as a movie theater. The Browning Stage people and support staff went down there. We did some shows there. We did some performing arts events at Ogden High School, we used their auditorium. The band went and practiced in the football stadium, I mean they went up to the athletic field. They were just everywhere. I’m trying to think of the costume shop. I know I didn’t have any idea of how much stuff there was in there. Oh, I think Catherine Zublin put that in the basement of Miller that just had some storage space. We just went anywhere that we could find. I’m sure that there are some performing arts faculty that are still there that can still tell you exactly where they were. KH: Yeah, that’s true. How did the College of Arts and Humanities change during your tenure? JP: Oh boy, well I think number one, it is much more diverse. In recollection, I think when I came, there were only two women full professors. Now I could be off by one or two. And I think they were both in English. Oh I’m sorry, three now that 27 I’m thinking about it, there was in Foreign Languages. I don’t think there were any in communication or performing or visual arts, and that was a large faculty. So probably three women that I could think of as full professors. Now, the good part was that there was a slightly larger number at the associate level who became promoted over the next maybe three to five years. Then as we hired in new assistant professors, I think we were much closer to a 50/50 balance. Now I can’t say those numbers exactly because I don’t have that information available to me. But it seemed to me, as new people were hired we were pretty much balanced. I think the second big thing in terms of faculty hires is that I’ve mentioned a couple of times, and that occurred at IUP as well; we began to advertise nationally, and we interviewed nationally, and we hired nationally. Now part of that is because, certainly in the humanities and in the arts, I don’t know what it was like in some other areas, those were also disciplines that at that time were producing more well qualified doctoral students than there were jobs for. We really could get the cream of the crop. We could get people from highly valued universities finishing doctorates in really strong programs, who were willing to come to a teaching university via a research university. Jobs were fewer nationally. So over the course of my tenure, I really feel we hired some of the best. Once in a while, if I go back and look at faculty lists on the website, a number of those folks are still there. So that’s good. When I was there, no department chairs were women. I will say, even over the course of my time there, I only had a few. And I’m not sure why, I wish a few more would have come through. And maybe it was just people at that time 28 were interested in other things. You know, that’s not always the position that you want to serve in. We did have, over that time, many, many more students who were coming from beyond Utah and the western states. That’s not something I, or we did; it was part of the times. As state colleges became more and more expensive in the east, Weber was a really good deal for people from the other states. And if they had programs that they wanted, then that was really important. And I will say, there were certainly times where the musical theater program, had a lot of students that were from the east and the southeast, and who represented minorities too. So that helped diversify. Curriculum changed, I think more growth was made from the more narrow traditional studies, to address current needs while still keeping a firm foot in the humanities. We had people developing Spanish for the medical professions and Spanish for sociology majors. English moved from just being literature and teacher education and grew into creative writing but then added the whole technical writing aspect to its curriculum. So I think all of those programs were more diverse and what I think a university such as Weber State does that many of the state institutions do is they really combine the traditional with the career aspect and professional fields. I think they are able to make those changes. Another major thing we did was to work with other deans and administrators. I think we upgraded staff so that their job descriptions fit the kind of work they did. When I first came, to work as staff, they still had you take a typing test. Typing so many words per minute! But, it had been a long time since I ever had staff 29 working for me type something for me. It might be when writing a formal letter, I word processed the body and gave it to staff to put on letterhead or something. And so I think what we ended up with in terms of staff, we diversified what their job descriptions were, we had more administrative assistants, and we got rid of some of just the secretary one or two designations. I think that’s made staff feel better about their jobs, and they were compensated better for the things they were really doing at that point. As computers came in, there were very few administrative or faculty who needed a “secretary.” What they needed were people working with students and doing so many other tasks. And I know my administrator assistants were wonderful and advising me on ways to assure that staff were aware of how important they were to our effectiveness. I think the payoff in that, was that we had very little turnover in most of our offices at that time. So that was another area that we worked just as we were trying to diversify faculty, we wanted to do that with staff as well. KH: What were the names of the three women that were full professors when you started? JP: Well if I recall correctly, Neila Seshachari was a full professor in English and she was the one that started the Weber Studies publication. And there was a woman named LaVon Carroll, and she may have retired just as I came in or just after my first year or so. But she came back and would teach a course once in a while. LaVon was a very well-known poet in the Utah, western region. I think she may have even come from the public school system and as she got her doctorate she moved to WSU. I’m pretty sure she was a full professor. Then Jean Anders- 30 Miller was a full professor in Foreign Language, in French. She was one of the few people I knew before I came to Weber State because I had known her through some professional associations. I think those were the only ones. Now, I might have missed someone, but there was not many. As I left IUP in 1987, we had a lot of women who were full professors. But as you said, it was almost like there was a twenty year hiatus there. And I guess that’s natural. I don’t think that was a weakness here, it’s just the way the whole university system funded. I mean, the founding dates of universities in Pennsylvania and along the northeast coast, dare to before Utah became a state. So those were natural occurrences, and so consequently the faculty change came in that way too. KH: What did a typical semester as dean look like for you? JP: Let me tell you, in some ways, the Fall was particularly interactive in certain ways and Spring was numbers. By that I mean, there’s always a certain energy with the beginning of a school year; and even though we have all three semesters now and graduations in all three, there’s still something about Fall with the beginning of school. We would have a college wide meeting that we would plan for over the summer. We did not do that every year because our college was so big, but we usually did that every other year, unless there was some major event we needed to plan for. Like, how to rearrange Spring when it was closed down for the Olympics. And how to shift the school year. So every other year we would host that. And then, annually, most of our departments had at least a half-day meeting, sometimes a full day for departmental meetings. So those occurred sometime during that back to school week. We made a real effort to hold all of 31 the college and most of the department meetings off campus. We talked about that early on, there was a payoff there in terms of—when you are on campus, somebody always has something that they have to run back to the office for. Or somebody that they need to meet with, or they’d leave a meeting at a certain time. We found that if we could take them off campus at different environment, free lunch somewhere else, it really gave a better start to the year. And then, I always tried to attend all of those faculty groups, it was a chance to reacquaint with what department priorities were or if they set new ones, so that I could then also move those into dean’s council when necessary. It was a time to make decision about which departments were up for five year evaluations, you always hoped there was only one each year. So just a lot of planning curriculum, things that carried over from the Spring, like hours, and how we were dealing with that issue, how we were recruiting, how people were fitting into curriculum. So as I said, it was a time with a lot of interaction. In Spring, then that was budgets: program assessment reports, faculty evaluations, salary determinations, scholarship awards, a lot of things that had to do with numbers and money. And then in Spring, a large commencement. For my first year there, we only had Spring Commencement and I forget at what point it was that we shifted to have a fall commencement as well. But I think that the initial fall commencements were just university wide. And then as they became bigger too, you had the two to plan. In sum, Fall 32 planning and ideas and issues, and then Spring what that mean in terms of budget and things like that. KH: Would you talk a little bit about what Weber did for the Olympics? JP: That was so interesting. What we did, and boy I have to go look at a calendar to see when exactly. When we came back for Spring semester, I think we were in session for two maybe three weeks. And then we were off for three weeks and then we had to come back and stretch into the summer. So it was not just a disruption in that, but it was a disruption in so many other areas. For example, when I first came to Weber, there was very little dormitory space. There were two kind of ugly three-story buildings on the edge of campus that were really ugly dorms. For the Olympics, other ones were built. But it also meant that the students who were in dorms had to find a place to live. We had to find a place for them to live for the three weeks. Their dorm space was given to the press corps, foreign visiting coaches, and some teams. And some of the students were international students who just couldn’t go home. Some dorm students lived in Boise, or some place they could commute back to. But international students had no place to go. So I remember faculty and staff taking them in and putting out a call to the community for spare bedrooms to help take care of those students. There was this issue also that was labeled “non-essential personnel”. So faculty and most academic staff had off, but for some reason, deans were essential personnel. I’m not sure why, I’m not sure we had anything to do with it. But that meant that we had to come to an empty campus and hang around. Just 33 some of the department chairs were there too. One of the really nice things, for some of our students, was that we had journalism and broadcast students. One of our faculty had some connections with the press, so we had students that were able to work both on campus as well as down in Salt Lake, and broadcast and to get some internships with the press during it. And almost all of our Foreign Language students got temporary volunteer and sometimes paid positions as translators. So, that was an interesting time, for everybody. The Olympics did give special ticket access for people on campus and events to go to. I do remember going to see the Bronze for curling. Princess Ann and her family came across campus because it was England and some other team playing. So we did get in on that. And then probably the thing that really was funny, I don’t know how much of this in the Archives—the alumni center, had been rented to the World (or International) Curling Association. And so that was their headquarters because a lot of the curling took place at our Hockey rink. Now, curlers are notorious for being big drinkers. But the Alumni Center was on our campus and there was no alcohol allowed on campus. And I don’t know how said the work around had been found, but someone determined that the Alumni Center was a private association that rented the ground from Weber State. But the building and the association were private and not state property or a state institution. Therefore the Curling Association set up a bar in their headquarters. And so it was funny, what would happen is for those couple of weeks, and I think this was started by one of the chairs/ Some of us “essential 34 personnel” formed a group so that on Friday afternoons, we would go over to the Alumni Center and they would let us come in as guests because of our role on campus. And we would go over and have a drink at the end of a Friday afternoon. Someone proposed t-shirts to made up that said, “I drank, legally on Weber State campus—Winter Olympics 2002.” So that was kind of a funny piece of that. KH: Did you get to go to many other events? Was it just curling? JP: I went to a few. You know what happened was, suddenly my sister, her friends, people that I hadn’t seen in ten years, suddenly I get a phone call and said, “Gee, are you going to be around during the Winter Olympics?” So I think I housed people for the whole time. Different groups came and went, I worked, so I said to them, “There’s a coffee maker, there’s a refrigerator, there’s the pantry you have to make your own food.” And I did that, but while my sister was there I did take a day off or two. They had packages they had to buy that included things they wanted to see and then a few extras. What I did was, I would find the things that they had tickets for and I could sometimes get a single ticket into them. I went to Bobsledding up in Deere Valley. They had seats, I had standing room by the fence but that was okay. Or maybe the Bobsledding was in Park City. Downhill was at Deere Valley. I went to about three things, I think, but not a lot KH: What committees and organizations either on campus or outside, have you or are you a member of? 35 JP: I was active in my profession before I came to Weber State. So I’ve been a lifelong member of ACTFL which is the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. And also I belong to the MLA, the Modern Language Association. And I’ve continued those memberships since I’ve retired. Actually MLA is nice, it gives membership to you free after so many years. Then, I’m also a member of what they call the American Society of Academic Palms. It was an award I got from the French government for French language. So I still belong to that. ACTFL, I did become president of while I was at Weber State and I was vice-president of ACTFL in 2001 which is another story. I was chair of the Foreign Language Advisory Committee to the College Board for five years. I was trustee for Center for Applied Linguistics. I guess those are some of the main groups that I played a role in. And some of them I continue to hold membership in. KH: What topics have you written about? JP: I’ve written on a number of articles on teacher education issues. My research was in second language reading. I co-chaired the project that wrote the standards for Foreign Language Learning and the teacher education standards for NCATE (now CAEP). I’ve written on proficiency testing, I’ve done a fair amount of writing on teaching of culture. And then, I edited the Foreign Language Education Series, which was our professional annual research volume. I edited that for, I guess five years, 1977-1981. I’ve edited some other volumes for the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages that was primarily where my writing was. 36 KH: What recognitions have you received for your accomplishments? JP: At Weber, I received the Crystal Crest award my last year and that was much appreciated. I’ve received leadership awards from ACTFL, from the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, awards from several states, Pennsylvania, New York. I’m in my high school’s Hall of Fame. I guess, that’s mostly it. KH: What advice would you give to students and women starting in your field? JP: I’ve been thinking of that a lot particularly, in these times. One thing I think is that people should make the move that intrigues them. Go with a job that intrigues you, interests you, and challenges you. And don’t be afraid to take a chance. Now that I’m retired and can watch some T.V. in the morning when I’m drinking my coffee, I do watch Morning Joe and Mika Brzezinski has this effort that she’s putting out called, Know Your Value, which is a way of trying to get young women in particular involved. I guess she has a book on it and has held some conferences. And I think that’s important, to use your own strengths and be persistent, and don’t be bullied or put off by voices that are just louder or invasive baritone voices. I’ve never met a woman at some point in the higher ranks or profession that has not gone through the experience of sitting around in a meeting with mostly males, you’re talking about ideas, you put some ideas together, there is a murmur, they move on. Half an hour later, some male voice comes out with your exact same words and then suddenly it’s a serious topic. I don’t know anyone that hasn’t had that experience and I wish that changed over time. And then I think that another thing is to be professionally active beyond 37 your job. To be really active in associations. A lot of my continued interest and support came out of the work I did with professional associations. And they helped me in my administrative job. When lots of people applied to the dean’s job, at least the foreign language person on that committee could be like, “I know her, I know that name.” And I’m sure that that at least it carried some weight because I knew no one on the Weber State Campus, but I did know the names of two or three people in the Foreign Languages Department or they knew mine. So I think those are things that women need to do and not to be put on by the lack of advancement we sometimes feel. Also I think now the other piece is for students in the humanities, to start to look closely. And I will say your current dean’s page has a nice statement on why to continue to work in the humanities. But in so many schools today, they are decreasing in majors. Some places they are not decreasing in gen-ed, but they are decreasing in majors because there is such an initial concentration put on a defined career field. Be an accountant, be this or that. But as people move up, then that’s something different. So if you are interested in these fields, go into them, you can add the other things later. You can do those, and I think because we have become in oriented in recent years to that professional first step, you are starting to see more writers look at that as they move through. Fareed Zakaria who is one of the correspondents on CNN had a book come out a couple of years ago called, In Defense of a Liberal Education, and it’s quite well written. That’s why I say students need to follow where their interests are and their heart and the rest will work out later. KH: How have you become a mentor to others in your field? 38 JP: I think a degree of that started with my first job. When I was a junior high teacher, it was only after a few years that I started having student teachers. And now that I’ve moved “back home,” every once in a while I’ll see someone here that I had as a student teacher. They are retired and grandparents now, but they remember those times. So there is always a certain amount of mentoring that had to occur with student teachers. And then when I went on to IUP I was advising students, working with people in that sense. I think as academically when I came to Weber, we didn’t have an associate dean, and that was an area that I felt was important because it’s a place for faculty to try out administration. It’s a nice stepping stone if they want to do that. I mean, I never in my life thought about being a dean until at IUP. I had asked for a reduced teaching load and ended up being an associate dean. So it gave me a whole new look at things. I always wanted to work as much as I could with staff advancement, helping them see new opportunities and to move forward, and the same with new faculty. As a dean, I wasn’t dealing directly with them, but I did try and keep my eye out to make sure that they were integrating well and that they felt at ease coming forward with ideas and that. Professionally, because of the professional associations and positions that I’ve held, I’ve always been very careful to make sure that as new people came into the field, that we inducted them into the profession. I’ve directed a number of research grants and we always made sure that the people serving on those were a combination of the more experienced people in the field and new people in the field so that we could integrate those into projects. And I think of the mentors I 39 have had and how helpful they were. They weren’t official mentors, those weren’t those days when you put a cap on and say, “You mentor this person.” But they certainly did that and encouraging me in directions I had not initially thought about. KH: What are some of your favorite memories at Weber State? JP: If you think back certainly the Olympics were one. I think another was at IUP I had been in humanities and social sciences, and one of the things that even appealed to me right away at Weber State was having humanities and arts. I think for two reasons: one, the arts played such an important role, not just on campus, but in the community and that was pointed out to me the day that I arrived. The day I interviewed it was funny, I was staying at a hotel downtown and people would talk to you, somebody in the hotel would say, “What are you here for?” And I would just say, “I just have a job interview.” And they’d say where, and I’d say, “Weber State.” And they’d say, ‘Oh, the university plays such a big role, we do this, that and the other thing.’” And they would talk about “up at the campus”, which was a new term to me until I realized it was just uphill. I think that was a part of the ambience; I was interested in the faculty that I met when I was there. I found them good to talk to, they were energetic. They liked where they worked, they talked about students that worked well together, I found the whole campus atmosphere was mostly congenial, creative. I tend to work with the same expectation that it would be a good day. And then, just the physical location, I really, really liked the west. I lived up around 33rd—I went up 36th street and then turned in and had a hill on the mountain up there on the ledge. 40 Every day I would come back from the school and I would turn up 36th street and as the sun was setting, just the view across the mountains, the colors, the illumination, it changed every day. I really liked the house, and the views, and the sunsets, and the climate, and all that. And I guess some of my other memories are the construction that we did so that I saw as we left, these old disciplines in arts and humanities were in good spaces for teaching and learning to occur. KH: What have you done since stepping down as dean in 2007? JP: Well I retired and moved back, my husband had died while I was at Weber. I have parts of family in Seattle and parts of family in France and then I have a sister here. So I just decided to come back home. For the first few years, I continued directing grant that I had written that just started in 2008 and once that had been funded, I knew that was the right time to leave. So I worked that grant and I could work that from home for three years. And then, as Tony Spanos left campus, I started teaching the Foreign Language Methods Course, so I teach on CANVAS and I upgrade that course several times a year. And then I—I left Pittsburgh in 1987, came back in 2007, and I’ve come back to a very different city than when I left, and it’s been fun to get to know it and to see how much it has changed—mostly for the better. I know that the President wants to bring the steel mills back and the coal mines but most of us don’t want them. We think there are better jobs, we like the clean air and the clean water. It’s a culturally active city, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra is superb. Pittsburgh Public Theater is something that I supported 41 before I left and I still do. And so maybe that was part of the thing at Weber State, I don’t do any art, but I’m a good audience and I always have been. And maybe some of that comes from having taught French. French was something where I didn’t teach French without teaching the impressionists. I didn’t French without teaching the history of Napoleon or the revolution. I didn’t teach French without looking at French ballet and the terms in it. I think many of the languages have often had that diversity of content. So that’s something I can bank on now that I’m home. And I do visit my daughter who lives in France, my granddaughter is a young working adult in Paris. And I have friends with apartments that periodically come available. So I do spend a month or six weeks in France, once or twice a year. And I’m in a good place to do it from because it’s easier here from the east coast. , I still travel a lot. I’ve always traveled a lot. September a year ago, I went to China for three weeks into western China—the national parks, I’d never been there before. I’ve been to China five times, twice while at Weber State, by the way on school business. Because Weber has an agreement with a university in Shanghai (or did, I’m not sure now). And then, I just got back from a trip to Greece in October. I travel, I teach a little. I find now, I can teach while I travel because all I need is a computer and Wi-Fi. KH: How many languages do you speak now? JP: I speak French. I can read in Spanish, I speak enough to get by. I have some conversational German. I can say, “Hello” and “Goodbye” and “Order Beer” in China. 42 KH: Were you involved at all with the Utah Musical Theater Program? JP: Yes. I mean it was under our college, yes. KH: Would you talk a little bit about that program? JP: Let me say first, you know how sometimes programs are really rooted in a person and a personality? And to a great extent, Utah Musical Theater was rooted in the creativity and the vitality of Jim Christian. The first summer that I came up, Utah Musical Theater was just a smaller summer program. And I also remember that it did one show a year for children and we sat on the ground behind the Browning Center to watch that. But Jim involved his students and students from elsewhere, they brought in kids to do that summer program. And then, it was good and it was vibrant. It always remained good. But then, with the Egyptian, part of the agreement with the Egyptian, was to move it downtown. And I’m not 100% sure, but I think Jim was in on those discussions. Partly because the Austad was too big, the—what was the other little theater called? I forget now, it was too small as it was growing. So they started putting it on downtown, and it had some very good years, but there were always issues that Jim had to deal with because there wasn’t really a stage or a sound system set up for the musical theater. But it had some wonderful years, and then I think that people wore out. Jim tired of it a little bit, he took some time off. The other thing was he was very creative and he had some scripts that he had written himself that had some possibilities for Broadway, and he wanted to work on that. And then we had to 43 hire someone else to direct Utah Musical Theater. And people worked really hard on it, they had some successes and some not. But especially because that’s such a creative field, everyone comes in with his or her own vision. Some of them were a hit with the public, some the public resisted. So over the years, I don’t think it met the expectations that it did at its height. . I have no idea where it is now or what’s happening. KH: I think the program ended in 2008. JP: Did it? Okay. And that’s why I say it was so much tied to Jim’s vision, his personality, his working with students, his excitement for the program. It \ often happens that when you lose a person, you start to lose a program. KH: How do you think women receiving the right to vote, shaped or influenced history, your community, and you personally? JP: When I saw that as your question, that’s why I asked the intent. And I guess I’m sort of at a point in my life and a time in our country where I’ve become a little disappointed and so I don’t know. Of course, I’m old, but I’ve never not had that right to vote. With its centennial next year. I try to be optimistic, yet there are times that I’m in doubt of the impact of just having the vote. Now, I know it would be worst if we didn’t have it. I don’t feel that. But there are times now, that I feel that The Handmaid’s Tale is a reality in some places and some issues. We’ve had the vote for a hundred years. A hundred years later, women paid between 78-82% of what a man does for the same job. Still, 100 years later! And in a way, that happened to me at Weber State and that occurred at the time of my 44 wind-down. When I was on the state campus in Pennsylvania at IUP our salaries were published. We knew them all of the time. When I was at Weber, salaries were secret. After I had been there for over 10 years, something happened to make salaries public. And at that time, I realized that I had the largest faculty, the largest gen-ed program, the largest number of student credit hours. I did not have the largest number of majors, and I was making less than a recent male dean in one of the smallest colleges. I tried to not let that grate at me, I talked—I did, but still, that occurred. The same job, sometimes more. 100 years later, and recent data show that women are 52% of the vote. But, we have 102 women in the House and 25 in the Senate. Which is roughly a quarter of people. Now I’m not saying that women voters have to vote for women. There are women that I wouldn’t vote for. But it does say that there is something wrong in that balance. Here in Pennsylvania, women make up 26% of our House and 24% of the Senate. Pennsylvania was one of the 13 colonies. It’s been around for a long time. No woman has ever been elected for Pennsylvania to the U.S. Senate. This year, in the November elections, we sent four women, four of eighteen to the House of Representatives. All four came from the Philadelphia suburbs. All four are from suburban Philadelphia swing districts, and they swung toward women. So when I look at that, I’m sort of looking at the vote and the results. I think there could be lots of reasons, but it’s still been 100 years later. We need more women running and winning. Just this recent stuff where it showed that mostly male legislatures are passing laws in the various states governing women’s bodies. Now 45 regardless of ones views on choice, that’s not the only issue—but there’s something wrong with that number of men making that number of decisions over other people. I guess the other thing that I really hope to see a woman president in my lifetime or at least a vice-president. But, as I’m in my 80’s I’m not sure that I will live that long. Contrary to earlier expectations when I always thought that would have happened, so I guess what I’m saying is that we’ve had the vote, but obviously, it takes much more than that as history has shown to find some other advancements in terms of equality. KH: Is there anything else that you’d like to share? JP: No I think that’s it. It’s been interesting, your questions made me think back over some things in my own life and so that was a good exercise. KH: That’s all the questions that I have. Thank you so much for your time. JP: Okay, you are more than welcome.