i Oral History Program Michael Wutz Interviewed by Ruby Licona 15 May 2014 ii Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Michael Wutz Interviewed by Ruby Licona 15 May 2014 Copyright © 2014 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 Weber State University Oral History Project began conducting interviews with key Weber State University faculty, administrators, staff and students, in Fall 2007. The program focuses primarily on obtaining a historical record of the school along with important developments since the school gained university status in 1990. The interviews explore the process of achieving university status, as well as major issues including accreditation, diversity, faculty governance, changes in leadership, curricular developments, etc. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Wutz, Michael, an oral history by Ruby Licona, 15 May 2014, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Michael Wutz June 2015 Michael Wutz June 2015 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Dr. Michael Wutz from the Weber State English Department. The interview was conducted on May 15, 2014, by Ruby Licona. Dr. Wutz discusses his experiences at Weber State beginning in 1992 and his teaching philosophies. RL: Good morning. Today is May 15, 2014, and we are meeting in the Waterstradt Room of the Stewart Library at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. Today we are talking with Professor Michael Wutz from the English Department here at Weber State. Although most of our interviews have been with people who are retiring, we are speaking today with Professor Wutz because he was awarded the Presidential Distinguished Professor Award here at Weber, and we are trying to get histories for those individuals as well as anyone who is retiring. So, good morning, Michael, welcome and thank you for coming to speak with us. MW: Good morning, Ruby. RL: We don’t have a set dialogue or script. We will just kind of get your story. As anyone listening to this will know, you are originally from— MW: Germany. RL: Germany. I know that you got your bachelor’s degree in Germany. Now, when you came to the United States, did you go directly to Montana where you got your master’s degree? MW: I did. RL: Was it with the idea of emigrating or just coming to study? 2 MW: Not at all. I had received a scholarship from the DAAD, which stands for the German Academic Exchange Service, and they placed English students all over the country, from Yale to Berkeley. There was one pretty much in every state and I indicated a preference for the Intermountain West, so they sent me to the University of Montana for one year as a non-degree special student. I was not supposed to earn a degree. I was just there to sample the courses and to give a good impression—be a good German and then go back to Germany, which is what I did. Then after that year, two things had happened. One was I met my now-wife, then girlfriend, Marilee, you know her. That was one reason for me to contemplate returning, and the other one was that the job market in Germany was such that in my area, there were dismal job prospects. I thought, “Well, I’ve got all these reasonably good grades and they may not lead anywhere in Germany.” So, that was another element that made me think about reapplying to the University of Montana and get a master’s degree. So, I went back to Germany for a year and applied to the University of Montana properly into their graduate program and got in. The dean there was kind enough to retroactively grant me credit for all the courses I had taken the previous year. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to do it in the timeframe. So, I only had one more year to do and finished my master’s in 1986 there. Then I transferred from there to Emory University in Atlanta. RL: That’s interesting. Did you go to Emory just because of their programs or was that where you happened to get accepted? 3 MW: Well, there were a couple of reasons. You know, I was a foreigner in this country, so I had to make sure that I would get an acceptance somewhere. I applied to ten or twelve different graduate schools. I wasn’t the only one. Anybody who has ever done that will tell you that it is a huge project. I had these flow charts of where I was with what university. I got into a number of them. I got into Brown, but Brown wanted to have some evidence of cash liquidity up front for the first year. RL: I was going to say, there’s a world of difference in the costs. MW: There is. I wouldn’t have been able to afford that, so I couldn’t go there. I was on the waiting list at Harvard in their graduate program and I would have been able to get in the next year, but I wanted to make a fluid transition, so I didn’t do that. I got into Michigan and maybe one or two others. I did not get into Berkeley, but that’s just how these things are. Emory, the reason why I went there—there were two reasons. One was that there was another student from the University of Montana who had gone there two years prior to me going there, and he left a pretty good impression. I think that was kind of a recommendation for a student from Montana to be accepted there—some of the recommenders who kindly wrote letters on my behalf made mention of that in their letters. The other reason I applied there was because at the time they had a famous scholar of James Joyce teaching at Emory. He was the James Joyce biographer, Richard Ellmann, a very well-known person in the field. He had, actually, two appointments—one at Oxford and the other one at Emory, and he was shuttling back and forth. So, I 4 was actually scheduled to work with him, but he got sick with cancer and died shortly thereafter. RL: Oh, that’s tragic. MW: The other person from Montana who had also gone there was the last person to write his dissertation under his direction. I would have been another one, but I changed academically anyway. That’s the other important reason why I chose Emory. RL: So were your studies and dissertation on James Joyce? MW: No, it was about something very different. I wrote about modernism and what I called, “Narrative engines in modern fiction,” and that is to say that modern writers, both in Europe and abroad—England and the United States—were very interested in using the metaphoric range of machines for their fictions. They conceived of their own novels in mechanistic terms so that they could, in many ways, be seen as engines or motors. So, that’s, in a nutshell, what I wrote my dissertation on. RL: And has your research and publication since then followed the same trail? MW: A little bit. I’ve written a couple of essays that came out of the dissertation, but the dissertation itself I never published. As I was entering Weber, I made some other professional connections, and one thing leads to another, as you all know, so I was actually starting to translate the work of a fairly well-known media theorist from German into English. I kind of focused on his work a bit and became more of a media scholar. Out of that came a series of books, really. One 5 is a collection of essays that I did with a friend of mine who teaches at the University of Illinois in Chicago. His name is Joseph Tabbi. We published a collection of original essays called Reading Matters. It was a play on words: reading does matter, but it also means the materialities of reading. In other words, how are books important—what they look like, how they feel, the visual appearance on the page, the way in which writers use that to their advantage. That was one collection that came out in 1997. RL: I wonder how those writings would change in view of Nook and Kindle now. MW: I’ve been thinking about that too, and we can get there eventually in the conversation. That was the first book in 1997 that came out from Cornell, and then two years later, the major translation appeared, which I did with another friend of mine who is a German, Swedish, English mix of various cultures and extremely gifted. His name is Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. He’s a professor at the University of British Columbia. We translated and introduced a book called Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, which is a translation of the work of the German media theorist by the name of Friedrich Kittler. That came out from Stanford in 1999. Kittler just died actually about two years ago and he was a very well-known person in the field. He’s actually more well-known in this country than he is in Germany, but even in Germany he’s fairly well established. Many of his books have since been translated. He’s had guest appointments at all the big Ivy League schools on both coasts. So, that was my second book out of that media theoretical angle, and the third book that I did was in 2009. It was a book that I did with the University of Alabama Press and it pretty much followed along those 6 media theoretical lines of development. It really re-appropriated some of the work from the dissertation from 10-15 years earlier which was useable, and so I connected them. The book is called Enduring Words. Again, the idea is that words are there for the long haul, but they are also on the page and they’re suffering. So, again, it was a play on the title. RL: You never waste anything. You can always go back. MW: I think that detours are always useful and productive. Not everybody goes down a straight path. RL: Well, had you just published your dissertation, it might have just gone out and dispersed, whereas reusing the data in something that more fitted society as it stands, that’s an accomplishment. MW: I like to think that it’s made a big difference, to have waited for a good number of years, and then sort of having had a chance to revisit the material and rethink it and sort of bring it to a new level. RL: Having suffered through writing the dissertation, it was probably better to let it sit a while and ripen and mature. MW: That’s a good way to put it. I also have to add that that’s the good thing about a school like Weber, where you want to be a scholar and work within your own means, but there isn’t this tremendous publication pressure that you would feel somewhere else. RL: Well, there is more now than there was when I first arrived, but they’re realistic about it. We still have small class sizes, you still get to know your students’ 7 names, and you still have time to create new courses along new lines and new ideas. It’s not “publish or perish.” It’s in tune with everything else, just like the Distinguished Professor Award that you received is for teaching and research and service. It produces a well-rounded faculty rather than people whose sole purpose is to be published so they don’t get axed. MW: That’s right. RL: This is a good environment for that. MW: It is. RL: Now, you did not know this about Weber when you first came here. What drew you here? Was it again a matter of dispersing lots and lots of applications and this one came through, or was it something that you really wanted to come back to the Intermountain West? MW: Well, I had sort of secretly hoped that a job might open up in the Intermountain West as I was wrapping up at Emory. I actually did a one year post-doc at Emory as well to give me a—that’s what they did for a good number of their graduates to give them a chance to position themselves and to gather some teaching experience. So, I was there for a year after the dissertation. What happened is that I attended the Dartmouth School of Criticism and Theory. It’s a summer school and I think they’ve moved now from Dartmouth to Cornell. At the time it was still at Dartmouth and it was this lively gathering of young scholars. One of them was Judy Elsley, who had already gotten a job here at Weber. She came in 1990 I think, and I came in 1992. 8 So, Judy and I became friends there and she said, “I’ll let you know if there are any openings,” and indeed there were. I applied to Weber among more than a hundred other schools and was lucky enough to make some of the first and second cuts and then I didn’t hear anything for a while. I had some other job offers lined up and campus visits and I remember thinking, “Gosh, you know, I have to make a decision, I have to earn a living.” So, I called the, then to me unknown, Chair of the English Department, Candadai Seshachari, and said, “Dr. Seshachari, I’m still interested in the job at Weber, but I haven’t heard anything about it.” He said, “Well, we really want you to come out here. Let me see what I can do with the hiring committee, but I know we are a little bit behind.” So, they apparently must have had a meeting and then flew me out the next week, and fortunately I did get the job. RL: You had not been here for an interview before that time then? MW: No, I hadn’t been. I’d been to other campuses for interviews and visits and offers, so I had to make a decision quickly and I’m glad that this one came through and I‘ve never regretted it. RL: So, you and Marilee have certainly made this a home. MW: It’s been a good twenty-two years now actually. RL: I mentioned the tripartite award. With your teaching when you first came here, were you assigned just kind of basic English, teach them how to write an essay kind of things, or were you from the outset able to create new courses? 9 MW: It was probably a mixture of both, Ruby. You know, we all have to sort of do the bread and butter work in the English Department, which means introductory writing courses like English 1010 and 2010. Back then it was the 101 and 102 or 201, I’m not quite sure anymore. So, I did those, but I was also thrown in from the very beginning into new classes. RL: Did you direct writing labs for a while? MW: I didn’t. RL: You didn’t. I didn’t know if that was also something that got assigned to all the newbies or not. What kinds of courses have you had the opportunity to develop? I know you mentioned earlier a Jazz Age class. What other kinds of things have you had fun with? MW: Well, I’ve done a whole range of courses and they all are on my website, the ones I still teach and the ones I have taught in the past. They are the basic introductory courses, the Writing I and II and English 1010 and 2010, Introduction to Literature, Fiction and Poetry. I’ve done a number of courses in the major. I’ve done the Jazz Age course, as I said. I typically teach Modern American Literature and Contemporary American Literature. These are sort of my areas of relative strength. I’m teaching a course in Victorian Literature Culture occasionally. I’ve taught a couple of courses for the Honors Program, classes in film. I’ve done a course on the intellectual history of the west from the Renaissance, Shakespeare to the contemporary moment. It’s an insurmountable task, but you just have to pick a couple of high points there. I’ve done that of course. What else? Altogether I think I’ve done about twenty different classes. I’ve done one course with Mark 10 Dyreson who left many, many years ago, about American urban history, historical fiction and film and historical texts. That’s a course I’ve only taught once. My other big assignment which I’ve actually been working on ever since I’ve come to Weber is the journal. It used to be called Weber Studies and now it’s Weber – the Contemporary West. RL: I was going to ask you if that was a continuation, because that had been done as Weber Studies by Neila Seshachari for so many years. Did you take over immediately after her passing then? MW: I didn’t. When I came to Weber and they hired me, I think I was sort of earmarked as the one hire to help Neila a little bit with the journal. I assumed it was partly because when I was in Germany, I was working as a student assistant in a very low level capacity on the German Shakespeare Yearbook, because I was working with a professor that was sort of involved there. I think they spotted that on my resume and thought, “He might be a good fit to help her.” I really enjoyed that. I did that for a good number of years in exchange for a little bit of reassigned time. Then, after, I want to say 8 or 9 years, the journal was taken over by Sherwin Howard, our former Dean who then was at Deep Springs College, and he came back from there and took over the journal, redesigned it and gave it a somewhat different name. He took it over for a number of years and then it was taken over by Brad Roghaar, my neighbor actually, and also colleague in the English Department. Once he retired, I took it over and that was in 2007, I believe. RL: So about the same time as you received your award then. 11 MW: That’s right. I didn’t even think about that but they seemed to coincide. RL: Who are the major contributors? MW: Well, I’ve been trying to steer the journal in a hopefully good direction whereby we offer the journal as a coffee table type book. RL: With just general appeal. MW: General appeal, but also with an eye toward local and regional authors. Our center is the Intermountain West, so we try to feature articles that deal with issues, broadly conceived, that touch on the American West from California to Colorado—environmental issues of course, issues of ecology, Native American issues. We just published, actually, a Native American special focus issue last year that was quite well received. So that’s one part, but the other part is that we always have an international global feature that tends or wants to introduce a writer that may be unknown here, but is fairly well established in other parts of the world. So, we try to do that. It’s sort of a balancing act between local and regional issues and also having a national and international component there as well. So, that’s what I’ve been trying to do. RL: Now, is that considered as part of your teaching assignment or is that considered a service? MW: It’s part of my teaching assignment. It’s very labor intensive, I have to say. RL: I’m sure it is. MW: So, half of my teaching assignment goes toward the journal, and in terms of net number of hours, I no doubt spend more time on the journal than I would on my 12 two classes that I don’t teach, but I enjoy the creativity and we’ve got some good work behind us. Actually, for next year we plan to have a feature issue on Chinese media and culture. RL: Is that in relationship to the trip you took to China? MW: Not really. The person who’s helping me there is somebody you also know, Greg Lewis, in the history department. Greg is well connected both to scholars in this country and in China. RL: We know him well in the library because he has connections with the film festival that he’s developed, and trying to catalog Chinese films is quite an adventure. MW: I would imagine it is. Greg always brings back loads of material. RL: Yes, and he’s given carte blanche to purchase the things that will be added to the collection—Weber is coming to be known for what is probably a primary collection in this country, because I don’t think people had that much foresight. Greg, I think, has helped to grow that. It’s good to have him because he’s connected and well acquainted with the topics, I’m certain. MW: We wouldn’t be able to do an issue like that without some inside connection, somebody who’s really in the field. There would be no way we could’ve assembled that material into a good issue. Greg’s been very helpful there. That’s 2015, and for 2016, either in the spring/summer, or the fall, we are planning to publish a special issue on South Asian/Indian writing. That’s already in the works. I’m working there with a colleague from Osmania University in Hyderabad in India, who happened to have been a professor at the University of Utah this past 13 year. I was in Hyderabad last year, as you may remember. I was there for seven weeks, but independent of that, he was at the University of Utah. Before I left, we actually had a chance to meet a couple of times and we hit it off and decided to do a project together. We’ve been working now to get this one underway and that’s going to be two years from now. RL: In librarianship we had a process called pearl seeding and tried to teach the students that if you find a good source of information, you then look at the resources that they list in their bibliography and from that keep growing the project. I was thinking of that as you were speaking just now because it’s amazing where you come up with ideas, how you make contacts and how you decide what direction things are going to go. So, that will be in 2016? MW: 2016, either the spring/summer issue or the fall depending on how well the essays and submissions come in. It’s one of those two in 2016. RL: Well, for months now I’ve highly admired the photography project of your trip to China. I go back and I look at things at different times and it’s amazing to me how each time I look at one of those photographs, I’ll see something different, something new. You have one photograph or portrait that you did of an elderly gentleman—I don’t know if he was a monk or what—but it’s kind of a three quarter picture and I was looking at that the other day trying to see what I could see reflected in the pupil of his eye, you know. Like I say, just different photographs will just catch your eye. The women in their finery and jewelry and the landscapes and so forth. When I first saw that I thought, “Oh these are so beautiful.” Someone said, “Yeah, Michael Wutz did those.” I said, “Michael?” I 14 didn’t know necessarily that photography was an interest of yours and yet every one of those photographs is professional quality. MW: It’s nice of you to say that, thank you. RL: Well, It’s true. Was that something that you planned to do prior to your trip, or was it an idea that occurred to you after you got back and had these spread all over your dining room table? MW: The exhibition that’s in the library, that’s been there for a while. Thank you again for mounting it. That wasn’t part of my original game plan, but I did want to bring back some good ones, including some documentary and maybe artistic shots. I do like to photograph and always have. RL: Have you published any of that? MW: I haven’t. RL: When you mentioned earlier of coffee table books, I was thinking every one of those could go into a wonderful photo essay because they’re just that good. MW: Well, maybe I’ll have to do that when I retire. I do like photography and always have my camera with me. In fact, just yesterday, maybe that’s off the record, but I was driving with my wife down Wall Street and there are some of the homeless shelters there. We saw one homeless person with a shopping cart and he had a big poster out in front of his cart that said, “Why lie? I need money for beer.” I wished I’d had my camera with me because that would have been such a telling moment to capture—a moment of authenticity. 15 RL: So it’s not a lie that says, “Will work for food,” because they won’t work for food. They won’t give up their corner and they want you to just give them money. Some of them look as though they could use some food, but some of them look rather well-fed already, so this would be refreshing. Why lie? MW: It was a refreshing moment and I just wish I had my camera with me. I would have treated him to a beer, maybe two. I just didn’t have my camera with me. RL: Is it a Hasselblad or something or— MW: No, it’s actually a very simple, small Panasonic that fits into your pocket. It’s a good mix for me between portability and reasonably high-quality pictures. RL: Well, it’s a matter of finding the right subjects. MW: Yes. I like to be able to carry it and put it away and be inconspicuous as a photographer. RL: With your teaching and your editorship, let’s talk about students. Having studied in Germany and Montana and Emory, what were your impressions of students when you came to Weber? MW: Well, initially, of course, I didn’t have any impressions, but I did collect them very quickly and students come in all shapes and sizes. We’ve got really, really gifted students and students that maybe shouldn’t be here. So, it’s a mixed bag that you’re always going to have. RL: Well, the admissions policy has changed over the years since you came here. I know that in the early nineties, I chaired the Academic Standards and Student Affairs committee and we came up with the tiered admissions policies just 16 because we were under constraints by the legislature and by the Board of Regents to open our doors to all students. At the same time, we wanted to have a standard that new students had to meet. So, as you say, they came in all shapes and sizes. I think things have changed a little bit. We do have more of an admissions standard that students have to meet that maybe they didn’t have to before, but I still think that there’s a certain level of innocence and a personality that is developed by the environment that we have in Utah. We do have the schools now that are doing the international bachelor’s programs, but we still have students that suffer going to class in the high school classes and so forth. Have you noticed any change or different in the students over the years since you came here? A different level of sophistication maybe or different level of attitudes toward learning since you arrived? MW: I have, but it’s difficult to put those observations into categories and general observations. What I would be permitted to say, I think, is that student’s attention span has sort of decreased. I think that’s something I’ve certainly noticed. RL: They have a texting mentality. They don’t want to read a five page— MW: That’s right. In fact, in my syllabi, I call myself the iBoss these days. That seems to click with them. I try speaking their language, you know. I do think that whole computer culture, as productive as it is, also—especially the texting culture, I should say, makes students often be distracted. I’m one of the teachers here who allows students to use their iPads and their laptops in the classroom if you use them for classroom purposes, for notes, particularly. Sometimes, if we need a term or something I ask somebody, “Google that quickly,” in the classroom and 17 that’s useful. But, that policy is also being abused and you always walk a fine line between allowing technology in the classroom and having to police it and come down hard on students. RL: Well, and you want to use it as a learning tool, not as an amusement. MW: Yes. A footnote there that might be of interest is one of the ways I’ve used and developed technology in the classroom. I have not used Canvas and I’m one of the few people in my age group who hasn’t used Canvas. Instead of that, I have a rather extensive website for all of my classes. For the upper division courses, for most of them, I’ve developed a Pal, a friend that sort of corresponds to this particular course. I have one course called CalPal, which stands for Contemporary American Literature Pal. I’ve got the MalPal, the Modern American Literature Pal, I’ve got a JazzPal, and FilmPal and a whole range of those web resource hubs that students can access. RL: Is it all one website and you just have these Pal links to guide the students, or is it separate websites for each of the courses? MW: It’s one comprehensive, my own homepage, and then there are dozens of links to the particular courses. Embedded in each of those courses is a link to a Pal, but you can also access those Pals directly from the main page. In fact, I was on a sabbatical this past year and one of my major projects was to revamp the website and bring it up to speed. Even before I had revamped it, the CalPal, the Contemporary American Literature Pal, had received more than 100,000 hits. That’s a lot for a site that’s being generated here. I think it’s probably a good service to students outside of our campus as well. 18 RL: I know we have some sites that we direct students to for different things. At Purdue they have a big site for bibliographies and we direct them to that. I’m sure they’re in the millions as far as hits and a lot of them from our students. The OWL tool. MW: Yes, that’s the OWL. RL: Does your website and your approach to teaching—do you think that works better than the students who are being taught on campus? I’m just curious because I know I’ve quit teaching strictly online. I teach the hybrid courses where you load the information on Canvas, but you meet with students face-to-face and that, for me as an instructor, works better. I was just curious if you had observations. Of course, having your own website or your own homepage, you are more motivated to keep it up to date, I think, because it’s not something that’s going to have to be redone and reloaded every semester. MW: There’s a lot of personal commitment that goes into the site. I started it maybe 15 years ago with the Microsoft program Front Page, which the university at the time had purchased and they had some tech support. Then they dropped it and I had to sort of do it on my own for a while. I did it, but then, you know—what else should I learn and do I need to maintain? Eventually I said, “I need to bring it up to speed.” I talked to people in IT and they helped me to put it on a new platform, Expression Web, which is sort of an upgrade, in essence, of Front Page, which is being maintained by the University. So, they have helped me quite a bit to get it up to speed. What I do now, that I have some facility with the software again, once a week I update the courses and the Pals of the classes I’m teaching that 19 particular semester. Now, with regard to my experience or how I view in class teaching as opposed to online teaching—I’m probably one of those old fashioned persons. I hope I don’t look it, but I do believe in what I call embodied teaching. That is, teaching in the classroom with all the bodies present. Of course, you can do that sort of with chat rooms, I’ve done that also and that’s not difficult to do, but I feel that there is a different energy when everybody is sitting in the classroom and hopefully keeps things along with what you were saying. RL: There are different nuances to your teaching because you can do asides and get back to the main plan, but it somehow allows you to deal with the students’ inquiries and curiosities and so forth. Like I said, you can always bring it back to the main plan, but you never know what’s going to spark an interest that will send someone off in a direction that they may be using later on. MW: Detours are really productive. I do think they are and what I really feature rather prominently in my teaching, it’s also on the website—a couple of things—I like to quote one of this country’s most famous “philosophers.” That’s Arnold Schwarzenegger. He said, “No pain, no gain.” It’s a simple reductive phrase, but students are familiar with it and to me it becomes sort of a shorthand for suggesting that the more time you put into a project, the more likely you are to get out of it. Effort is proportional to the thing. RL: Or E=mc2 or something. MW: Something like that. That’s right, but you’ve got to catch them at their level, so I’ve always found that you’ve got to find that spark. Either Schwarzenegger or Wittgenstein—two Austrians. The other issue that’s really prominent to me is that 20 teaching is a collective enterprise, which is to say that as a teacher, you’re responsible for the lion share of what happens in the classroom. Each of us as a student, the whole body of the class, is responsible for bringing his or her intellectual energies into the classroom. RL: Well, and you can’t ever forget that there may be the occasion where you’re the student and they’re the teacher—you’re the learner and they’re the teacher. MW: Absolutely. It happens. RL: It’s always delightful when you can identify that moment. MW: I love those moments, and they don’t happen a whole lot, but they do happen— especially with returning students who have raised families, both men and women, or people who have had a career and they bring that perspective to bear on the classroom and that’s really always productive. I don’t think anything is wasted. RL: It’s good when you can have a varied class because each of them brings a different perspective. I think the younger students, when they are meeting with an adult or an older adult on an even plane, everybody’s trying to get that grade, but every so often there are those little gems that come just from life studies. The students are more willing to accept rather than just a talking head at the front of the classroom. Now, as far as your research, you’ve spoken about what you’re publishing and so forth. What about service areas, have you been involved with campus politics or different programs on campus since you’ve been here—any of the 21 outreach things on campus? What has been your emphasis in the areas of service? MW: I have not been involved in campus politics. I’ve never been in the Faculty Senate, even though colleagues have asked me to serve. I just think my time is better served in other capacities. So, what I’ve done is I’ve—of course, like all of us, we do a lot of work within the department, lots of committees there and library committees, scholarship committees— RL: National committees and associations, etc. MW: I’ve done those also. In the college level, I’m often involved in some way with the tenure and promotion process—not just our college, but other colleges as well. I’ve served several times now both in the College of Social Science as well as the College of Science as one of the outside members of their tenure and promotion committees and I’ve always enjoyed that. I like not just working with people across the aisle, but also in other colleges. I really like that. I’ve served on a number of the presidential scholar committees, like the professors, I was one of those. I’ve done that. I’m being asked to serve in areas and committees for this and that including numerous hiring committees, but not on a policymaking one. That’s not something I’ve ever pursued and I don’t think that’s one of my strengths. I’m good with smaller groups. RL: But interaction with administrators might not necessarily have to be in a policymaking capacity. You could still share ideas in less formal settings. When you first got here, the Provost was Bob Smith and you got here just after Paul Thompson was hired as president. So, you’ve now served under three 22 presidents—all very different styles, all very different individuals, but all very open and accepting. One of the things here at Weber, even though I know at the time you and I came we had about 10,000 students. Now, we have closer to 25,000 students. We don’t have many more faculty than we had back then. So, we still have opportunities to meet with the administrators and so forth. Have you worked in any kind of committee capacities with any of the different administrators? You’ve served under four different deans? MW: Yes. I met with our deans, I wouldn’t say regularly, but there would always be a chance to meet them either formally or informally. Dean June Phillips, and before her, Candadai Seshachari for a little while, and Sherwin Howard, who actually was the Dean when I was hired. So, I’ve met with them more regularly, but I really haven’t met with the presidents. I’ve bumped into them many times and they’re very friendly and open as you were saying, and open to suggestions, but I don’t think I’ve ever made sort of a programmatic suggestion that was implemented university-wide. I don’t know enough about administration, I feel, to share what I think might be constructive. RL: Sometimes little ideas lead to bigger ideas and programs and so forth. I just didn’t know your background in that. Do you have any opinions on the directions that the University has taken? I know you arrived at about the same time that Weber became a university. So, there was a little bit of a different status than previously. At the time, we had three master’s programs. I think now we have seven or eight master’s programs including English. Are you involved with that at all? 23 MW: I am. Yes. RL: As an advisor or is there a Board that runs the program? How is that affecting the department? MW: Well, I’m sort of involved, like many of us are, I’m not the only one. I’ve taught a number of courses in the graduate program—two or three. I’m scheduled to teach another one in the fall, which is part of what I wanted to do for my sabbatical, to prepare me for that and I’m almost there. So, that’s one way in which I am involved. The other is, there is a kind of an advisory body and I’ve been serving on that for several years as well. So, I think I do make contributions and I think it’s been a productive relationship between me and the other colleagues in the program. So, that’s what I do pretty regularly and I enjoy doing that. I also think that’s a good development forward for the University, to have those master’s programs in place. Many of our students, as you may know, are from the region. We’ve been able to recruit some from outside the state, but we are serving, at least at this point, predominantly local and regional clientele. Often, teachers who want to go back to graduate school to improve their income, but also their level of certification. We’ve got interested students who just want to sort of sit in and do some graduate work, so it’s a really nice mix of students we’ve had. That’s also true of the other graduate programs that I’m familiar with. So, it’s increased to eight or nine by now, I think it’s really a good way forward for the campus and for the region as well. RL: I know when I first came they were saying, “Weber will never have graduate programs.” Now, I hear people throwing around the ideas of maybe developing 24 Ph.D.’s in some areas. I think that’s—until we get a different funding base, I think that’s not necessarily the most realistic thing. Weber does have a more formalized policy now of trying to provide a workforce, with a lot of emphasis on STEM and a lot of students are business and technology and so forth. Do you feel that the arts are getting lost? MW: Well, the arts have always sort of been a stepchild, at least since I’ve been at Weber. Unless you are an exclusive liberal arts college, I think that the arts play second fiddle, not the first one. But, you know, there are ways to enrich STEM programs with the arts, and I have never felt that my discipline is sort of under siege. I do think English will be around in the foreseeable future. Certainly, in a different configuration than it is now. It’s already sort of morphing from one to another, significantly, really. I think that it’s part of this whole complex of communication, transparency, learning a new language, even if it’s a language of English, or learning software or learning another foreign language. It’s all part of this whole complex of communication, I feel, that every student needs to master on one level or another. It seems to me that English will be here to stay for the foreseeable future. It also extends under this whole domain of interpretation. We interpret one another’s acts, we interpret what other people are doing. Our job in our department, partly, is to teach students certain reading skills, whether it’s reading a book, reading somebody else’s behavior, or reading somebody else’s demeanor. So, I think that the idea of reading, broadly considered, falls into that category. Then, I think, articulation, and being able to verbalize your thoughts and doing that well is critical also. No matter what you do, no matter what major 25 you pursue. I do think that English will have a considerable function in the future. I don’t think it’s going to disappear any time soon. RL: As long as we can drag them up so that we can feed them. Sometimes they act as though one is trying to force feed them and maybe so. I know that having studied several different languages, each time I studied grammar for the other language, I learned English that much better. I know that there are times when I cringe when I get a message from a student or in an assignment they write their responses in text speak and totally forget to capitalize. I’m trying to show them, “Here’s the difference in citing in MLA as opposed to APA,” and APA capitalizes all proper nouns. They look at you like, “What’s that?” “Well, just don’t hand me in a paper with United States all lower case.” It just makes one cringe. MW: I’m all for breaking down and questioning hierarchy if that’s appropriate, but students certainly have lost a sense of netiquette, I think is another term. So, it’s often that I get an email as if I were their “bro,” their friend, and I try to write back in a way that draws attention to that—very careful and very nuanced, not offensive at all, but often students don’t register that they’re writing to me as if I were their buddy. So, I think that too is sort of a sign of the times and I like to correct that as best as I can. RL: Well, you can be someone’s friend and instructor without being their pal. MW: That’s right. I couldn’t agree more. RL: Although in your case, you have a lot of pals that you’ve created. 26 MW: That’s right, but these are digital pals. It’s just something I’ve noticed. Every other day I’m getting emails that don’t address you with your name and title. It doesn’t matter to me at all, but “Dear Mr. Wutz,” or whatever, they don’t do that. RL: Nope. “Hey Mike.” MW: Yeah, “Hey Mike.” Or it’s just a very casual, no punctuation, as I said, and with complete disregard for spelling. That’s not okay, but I can look beyond that for the time being, but be a little more polite in your communications. RL: How has your teaching philosophy changed over the years or has it? MW: I’m not sure whether it has changed significantly, but again, if I can sort of put this into broad generalizations, I would say I’ve become more relaxed as a teacher. Even today, I walk into a classroom on the first day and I’m still a little bit on the edge, you know. That’s a good sense of nervousness, I think, that sort of builds you up. So, I still have that, but I’ve become considerably more relaxed over time. That’s one change—a good one. The other one would be that I try to give more of myself as a human being. If students see you for the genuine article—who you really are—I think they come to respect you more with all of your warts and faults and whatnot—within reason, of course. So, I try to be up front about who I am without sort of putting on a false front or a mask. RL: Without trying to become a buddy. MW: That’s right, without trying to become a buddy. I’ve been able to learn how to use it in a more nuanced way. Then, I think as you age as a teacher, you become better at responding to the little asides that students ask. I can think more on my 27 feet and be a little more flexible. I am honing a pedagogy of resilience, if you will, that allows you to respond very quickly to what a student has to say and bring that into the discussion in a productive way. Not all the questions being asked are equally good, as we all know, but you can sort of recuperate them. RL: Some you just want to ignore. MW: That’s right, but you want to bring them in if you can and validate that student as best you can and then they get into a good subject of conversation. So, that’s, I think, where my teaching has sort of broadened and carried me over the years. It’s always been there, but I’ve gotten better at that. RL: Your colleagues in the English Department, well, certainly you had an interesting character in Candadai Seshachari when he was Chair of the Department and you’ve mentioned different individuals, Sherwin Howard and Brad Roghaar. You have some people who are very much individuals in your department. MW: I like the way you phrase that, Ruby. RL: They all have a contribution. I think the world of Judy Elsley. I think she’s a great scholar and some of the things that she studies and writes about, just, I have to wonder, how does a person come up with those ideas? Last year, when Diane Krantz gave her final lecture, I thought that was brilliance the way she brought together the arts and sciences and made sense of it for people. Are there individuals in the department that you’ve gotten to know better that have in any way contributed to or changed you and your worldview? 28 MW: That’s a tough one, I’ve never actually even thought about it in those terms. Generally speaking, I would have to say I’m one of those people in the department that does not belong to any particular group. I’m sort of, you know, I wouldn’t say neutral, but— RL: No, but I always think of you and Marilee as very, for lack of a better word, it’s not even a matter of being cosmopolitan, but certainly multicultural in terms of your approach to friends from all roads. MW: Certainly, I would not be a partisan. I’m trying to listen to all points of view, and if I were to sort of really put my role in the department in a nutshell, I would say that people are comfortable coming to me with issues that they have knowing that I would keep them confidential and that if I have anything constructive to offer, I would do that, or even something human to offer, I would do that as well, I do that all the time. I’m not part of a political block, or, it’s not, to me, young versus old or science versus humanities, it’s— RL: And I wasn’t intending that, I just was wondering—you have individuals from all over there and one can always learn from people with different attitudes and different ideas. I was just wondering if there was any one direction. MW: Not professionally speaking, but I am good friends with John Schwiebert in the English Department, a colleague of mine who has been here for 25 years now. We, as families, also meet pretty regularly. He lives in Salt Lake with his wife, Ann, and children. So, he’s a really good friend and we share many ideas and so it’s always been a shared platform that we’ve had. More recently, I’ve been working with Hal Crimmel, who is one of this year’s Presidential Distinguished 29 Professors. Hal and I are just finishing up a scholarly project that’s going to be coming out next year. So, we’ve been good friends over the— RL: Is it an environmental thing? MW: A little bit like that. Last year for NULC (NULC stands for the National Undergraduate Literature Conference) we had W.S. Merwin on campus. I’m not sure whether you remember that. He’s a fairly well-known poet in this country. He’s in his mid-eighties and one of the few remaining links between modernist poetry to the present. So, that’s interesting from a historical perspective. He’s also been on the forefront of ecological and environmental concerns as a poet and a historian. So, he was on campus last year, and we’re editing a collection of his interviews that he’s given over his seven decade long career and we’re almost finished with that. Something I wanted to add that just occurred to me, Ruby, on one of your earlier questions is, one of the contributions I think that was important on my part was, I was a member of the founding committee of the Matthew Shepard Scholarship. Arthur Adelmann, at the time, asked me if I would be willing to be on there and I said, “Yes,” and I’m so glad I did. It’s made such a big difference to me, personally, and to the region and the country. If I can say I made a little contribution somewhere, that’s where it would be. RL: We were actually the first campus in the country to set up an award to honor Matthew Shepard and we had his mother here. When you think about the difference then and now, we have an LGBT Center on campus and we had the Diversity Conference last year that was very well received. As a co-chair of that conference, we had an opportunity to speak with students who were saying that 30 they needed places where they could feel safe. The point was made that when professors don’t speak up against angry or anti comments and so forth, it makes them feel that they are not safe because they cannot be open about who they really are. I think being on that scholarship committee, that was an accomplishment. MW: It was gratifying to see the changes. RL: And it has come a long way. I don’t know if you saw the film recently that we had here, the documentary that— MW: Matthew Shepard is a Friend of Mine? RL: Yes. MW: I did see that, I went to one of the screenings. RL: The response to that was so different than the kinds of things, you know, things that when I came here were not possible. I’m on the board for the Women’s Studies Program and as we’ve tried to expand that into a women’s and gender studies, I’m finding all the classic LGBT literature to include and it wouldn’t have happened five or ten years ago, much less twenty years ago or twenty-two years ago when we came here. That’s one of the big differences that I see on campus and I see a little bit more difference in the acceptance levels on the part of the students. I think it’s not so much lock-step marching anymore. People are actually starting to open their minds and question what they’ve always been taught. 31 MW: I see that also, and what I would add is that you see it reflected in, not just the number of courses that touch on gender issues, but also on the syllabi of regular courses that have sort of a gender component in their syllabus. That, too, I think is really refreshing. I do that pretty regularly in my courses if it’s appropriate. Good luck with your project too, Ruby. RL: Oh, well, thanks. How would you wrap up your time at Weber? And I realize you’re nowhere near retirement age or anything, but if you had to describe in a nutshell what you came into, how it’s changed and how it’s changed you, how would you talk about it? MW: Well, again, I’ve got another ten years ahead of me, but I like my job, so I’m not looking toward retirement, but when the time comes, I will. RL: It’s amazing how many people here don’t retire at retirement age. MW: I mean, I plan to do it when I can do it financially, but I like my job and I enjoy being in a classroom and doing the journal as well. By the time I will have retired, if I get the privilege to retire, I will have probably taught for about thirty-plus years. I will say that the University has become really progressive and forward-looking and not just in terms of the number of graduate programs, who knows what may happen in the next ten years, but I do think that it’s a University that is poised well to serve the needs of the region, Northern Utah, but also beyond. In fact, if you look at the number of online courses and the degree programs that you can do online, maybe that’s also the right moment to think about the degree to which any university can still adhere to a regional model given the fact that it can reach students all over the globe. That actually might change, so universities 32 have to think about themselves as being—I don’t want to say global players, that sounds too big, but you know what I’m saying. I think we may be able to draw a student body from not just across the nation, but across the globe. I think that might be sort of a change in terms of the University’s profiling and direction. So, that’s one point. How have things affected me? I would like to think that I have become a more compassionate human being. I may already have been one, I like to think, but you know what I mean. Working with students and seeing how they are— some of them have to balance family with a job and a full load to maintain whatever financial aid they get. It’s something that, to me, is mind-boggling and also admirable. I don’t think I would have been able to do it, but it gives me a really good perspective of what students have to do to pursue their education. So that, I think, comes with, for me, with more compassion and more understanding. It doesn’t mean you have to cut corners, but many times when students are running into issues of time and scheduling, I’m really flexible that way because I know what it means to balance all of those commitments that they have. So, I think that—and I would like to think that’s true of most of us in a teaching profession—being in a classroom and working with mostly younger, but also same-generation students makes you into a more complex and more compassionate human being. RL: Are there any individual students that you’ve become particularly close to or that you feel you somehow influenced? 33 MW: I wouldn’t say close to, Ruby, but there are a number of them that sort of pop into my head right now. Some really young, others in their seventies, who still write to me after having taken my classes many years ago. So, I do think that they have a particular place in my heart. One of them actually left Weber to go to Cambridge, England to get another degree. He is now finishing his Ph.D. at Boston University and he’s still in touch with me and we often speak about the classes together. Then there’s a woman who’s now approaching eighty who still writes to me about her experience in my classes and that, to me, is really rewarding and fulfilling. Then there’s the spectrum in between those two. But, yes, there are a number of students who I think seem to have been affected by my teaching more so than others and that’s always gratifying to a teacher. Of any class of, say, thirty students, if you affect two or three of them profoundly, that’s more than you can ask for. RL: If you can get two or three to listen to you. MW: That’s right. Profound is even maybe too big of a word, but you know, it had an effect on them, so that’s been really gratifying to see. Also, the other day I got an email from a student who’s a faculty now in the business school who took classes with me fifteen years ago and still remembered me. He wrote and said, “I’m back on campus now.” It was just nice to get that email. He said nice things about my teaching. RL: Have you started getting your students’ children coming and taking your classes? MW: I have. I have had some student’s children show up in my classes, and I’ve even had mothers and daughters in the same class. The mother was coming back 34 after a twenty-year hiatus, or maybe even longer, and that’s interesting in that constellation, but also when the students’ children come in to my classes. RL: When they say, “My mom took your class back in 1994,” and you think, “Oh my gosh.” MW: I’ve been here twenty-two years now and it doesn’t feel like it, but it’s a long time. RL: Well, you must be having fun because time is going by. MW: I do have fun. I really enjoy it. I enjoy all of the aspects of my life here at Weber State. It’s been really good. RL: Well, I’ve asked you a lot of different questions, but is there anything that I haven’t touched on that you’d like to mention? MW: When I do interviews with writers I ask the same question, but now that you’ve asked me that same question, I’m not prepared. That’s a good one. Let me see. I can’t think of anything in particular right now and short of pulling something out of my imaginary hat, I’ll say no. RL: Well, your award was the culmination of a lot of service and a lot of energy expended on your part. Just in talking to you, one can tell that you love what you do and it’s come through in your accomplishments. I just want to congratulate you on that and thank you because you’re part of what makes this a great institution and a good place to be. MW: Well, thank you for those kind words, Ruby. I’m not sure what to say except maybe to respond by saying that I was fortunate to have received that award, and together with me some other individuals who are extremely deserving. I 35 know there are many other people out there that haven’t gotten and may never be able to get those awards, but they should also be here. I was just the lucky one. I’m mindful of that. RL: You were in the right place at the right time, but more importantly, you had the right attitude and the right energy. MW: It’s usually a confluence of circumstances. Maybe one more thing that a person might be interested in for the archive is that one of the involvements that I’ve been spearheading is, I’ve helped to establish an exchange program between Weber State and the University of Bayreuth in Germany. I did that about ten or twelve years ago and it’s really been flourishing. I did sort of the faculty part and Erika Daines, who’s a retired professor of German in the Foreign Languages Department, took over the student part and she’s been really very helpful in maintaining that exchange on the student level. We try to get Bayreuth faculty here to our campus, and one of our faculty will go over there for a semester, and that’s been really flourishing for a number of years. We’ve had, not just me going there, but Russell Burrows went there, Gary Dohrer and his wife, Diane Krantz went there for a semester, and we’ve got some other ones lined up. It’s been a lively opportunity for us to get some foreign teaching experience and have some foreign faculty come and spend a semester here at Weber in our department. RL: And that always opens horizons, doesn’t it? It’s good for both the faculty and the students. Well, again, I would like to thank you for your service and thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. 36 MW: It goes without saying, Ruby. Thank you again for your kind words, and if you need some more of my time, I’d be happy to do it. RL: Thank you. MW: Thanks, Weber State.