Interview with Nora McGuinness

by Christina Robinson

Download .pdf version

I started teaching in ’69, and I didn’t start teaching in the program [ISHP] until ’79, but my husband and I had this house shortly after, in ’70. We did a lot of the entertaining for the program, so I had a lot of students here, a lot of faculty members here. The house behind was a sort of pass-on house through Integrated Studies for about fifteen years. People tended to move on with their Integrated Studies friends into apartments and so on, and so this house was turned over—as people graduated some other IS people would move in—so we had a lot of social interaction for the first ten years. I began teaching in the program in ’79. They needed a composition class that would be specially tuned into Integrated Studies, because a lot of the kids had very good grades and very good SAT scores, which people had to have to get into the program, but they had not had much attention to their writing. So the kind of writing the faculty were expecting the students to do was beyond the grasp of some students. Obviously we didn’t take too many people like that, but there’s a great difference between the kind of writing that you want to do in an honors program and otherwise.

So I started teaching composition, and then I was asked to become the director [of IS]. I was the Assistant Director for a year in ’83, and I became director in ’84. I’d been in the program officially for two or three years, but I had been [involved] since 1969.

It began with a thing that was called Project Involvement, in 1968. There was so much going on on campus. We were never as famous as Berkeley—things were quieter here—but nevertheless people were not happy with the way things were being run. So Chancellor Mrak—you know, Mrak Hall—had what he called Project Involvement and he set up mics on the quad, and people could come up and say anything that they wanted to say. He sat up there most of the day. It was like ten hours, in the morning to the evening. And so a lot of people talked about the fact that it was hard to get a holistic experience of education: it was a piece here and a piece there, and students were responsible for putting it all together. And there were a lot of people saying that the degree requirements had not been carefully thought through and faculty were complaining that there wasn’t this sort of core disciplinary focus that there had been. So four faculty members, one of whom was my husband, got together and decided that they would put forward a proposal to have an integrated liberal studies version of a program put together. So they formed a subcommittee of the Curriculum Committee of the Academic Senate. They met in our living room too: we were still living in East Davis then. And they put together a proposal to the Academic Senate to start a program.

Why is it called IS?

Two of the faculty members had been undergraduates at the University of Chicago: Richard Swift was a music professor, who is now deceased, and Margery Green was a philosophy professor. Ken Brider was a physics professor, had been an undergraduate at Yale, and my husband had been at Holy Cross, in Worcester Mass. Almost all these founding faculty of Integrated Studies were people who had gone to liberal arts colleges themselves. The reason it was called Integrated Liberal Studies was after the famous one in Wisconsin, and my husband was a TA in that program when we were in graduate school at Wisconsin. We said, “Well, let’s have something like ILS,” and they said, “How about just take out ‘liberal’ and we can call it Integrated Studies?” We were going to do more, since one of the founders was a physicist, and one was a musician, we were going to do fine arts as well as humanities and social sciences and physical sciences. So Integrated Studies seemed like the best name.

In ’84, after I took over as director, Dale Marshall asked if we would come out of the closet as an honors program. We had not advertised ourselves as an honors program before, but because we always had so many more applicants than we had places, and we chose them as the University of California does, based on academic qualifications, it was a de facto honors program, but we just never called it that. So Dale Rogers Marshall, who went on to be president of Wheaton College in Massachusetts, asked us to become a formal honors program. She had been chair of a committee to draw up an honors program, and Integrated Studies was the only ongoing program that qualified. We still took pretty much the same students we always did, but we participated more in the recruitment of students to UC Davis, because if you get accepted to UC Davis, you’re probably going to get accepted to several other UC’s, and some other colleges. And parents, particularly, always want the best opportunities for their children, and so if they knew that there was a full-fledged honors program it would be helpful to the campus to recruit students to come to Davis rather than to go somewhere else. That’s the main reason why we agreed to do it.

After Jim Shackelford took over as director, he changed it from IS to ISHP, because we never had Honors Program in the title before, because everybody knew what Integrated Studies was when we started, and it wasn’t necessary to say it. But then the Davis Honors Challenge came in and people got confused. We’re a very traditional honors program, and the Honors Challenge is very non-traditional. It was deliberately made that way, because Integrated Studies is too expensive to do for a whole four-year program, and who would want to be that limited for four years? If you wanted that, you’d go to a liberal arts college. What people come here for is to be in a research university, and so they have very different requirements and very different needs, because we have three undergraduate colleges, it’s not just L&S. We did for a while have a second year, where students could stay in the dorm as sort of mentors to the first year students.

Then we were asked by the Regents Scholars Committee if we would guarantee placement to Regents Scholars. We had a dorm, which was B Building, where we were for 27 years.

Was that from the beginning?

For the first year, we were in Emerson, which is Cuarto now. At the time, the university didn’t own those: they were private dorms, because the housing office has to plan so far out that they can’t start anything right off the ground. Then we moved on campus, because by that time they could plan ahead enough to give us a building. And the Terceros were just going up, so we got B Building Tercero, and the United Nations people got a building over there. There was one other special program dorm in Tercero, and we were the only one who survived.

We had 67 people, and theoretically we could have more than sixty-seven Regents Scholars, and that was always a worry for me. “What will we do?” One year it happened, and we had to move into a bigger building. We had 100 students, and we went up to 100 for two or three years, but the faculty didn’t like it as well. They really like sixty-seven, because that was the whole building. And in Hughs Beckett, which has now been taken down and is Primero Grove now, it was 100 students, but there were 50 on a floor, so the people from one floor never really knew the people on the other floor as well, and there were other people living in the building too. It wasn’t just Integrated Studies, so that didn’t work out. We moved back to B Building, and we stayed there until they built Segundo North on the corner, and that’s where they moved after Jim Shackelford took over.

When did IS become a living-learning community? Was it ever optional?

No, no. It was a living-learning community from the beginning. Because these people had all gone to the liberal arts colleges themselves, it was considered essential: You didn’t just come and take classes, it was a community, an academic community. We called it the ARC, the Academic Residential Community, but then when they named the activity center that, we had to stop; people would think we were running a track team! It wasn’t always an honors program, but it was always a living-learning community.

How did people know about the program before it was officially an honors program? How did you advertise?

We sent invitations to Regents Scholars. We appeared at Picnic Day, and all the times when there were big recruitment events, we always came in and spoke to people. But it’s kind of hard to do a lot of promotion, because you’re going to be able to take so few students, and they have no choice about whether or not they’re acceptable. Now, you can say to a student who already knows they’re a Regents Scholar, you may accept your place in Integrated Studies or reject it, but you don’t really want to go out and raise a lot of people’s expectations, have them choose Davis and then find out they can’t get in the program. That’s very bad public relations. So, we never really advertised much, we just participated in campus recruitment events, and then we sent the formal invitations to the Regents Scholars. Depending on how many Regents Scholars accepted their places, then we could invite others. Very often there are people whose composite scores are as high as Regents Scholars, but they wouldn’t actually be awarded one. We had a list that the Admissions Office would run for us of the people who were not Regents Scholars but who met the same cutoff. And then we could invite them.

What are some outstanding events or outstanding traditions in your mind?

The first banquet, Bruce really knocked himself out. I don’t remember exactly what we had, but it seemed like everything had been made by a gourmet chef, one thing after another kept coming up, and I finally said to him, “How many people did you get cooking?” and he said, “We never knew.” Not only the people who were taking the class for credit, but their roommates, and everyone else would show up to help with the banquet. Instead of just the members of this class, it became a whole building event. And I would say to so-and-so, “What are you doing here? You’re not in Bruce’s class.” They’d say, “Oh, but it’s fun, Dr. McGuiness, so I’m doing it.” The banquets were wonderful.

We had the banquet before Eric Schroeder came on and then when Eric started teaching Shakespeare and performing Shakespeare, we combined the banquet with the Shakespeare performance. There was a sociology professor named Bruce Hackett who started the banquets, because he thought that people didn’t really understand the sort of sociological events that are involved with formal things, and people in California are more “laid back” than in other parts of the country. He though that people would be involved with learning how to do it, how to set up the tables, how to order the food, and he thought of it as a sociological event. When Eric started doing the Shakespeare performance, we had them both together, and that used to be really the highlight of the year. And then, after Bruce retired, nobody else wanted to take on the banquet, because it was such a lot of work, and nobody else had that particular interest, and we didn’t have another sociology prof, and so nobody else who was teaching really wanted to gear their course around something that would not be germane to what they really liked. So we gave up the tradition, the banquet. But now they’ve restored it, is that right?

Eric Schroeder’s been doing it for the last few years.

We would put the course proposals together three years at a time, and try to get a theme that we would use. In Hughs Beckett we were offering fifteen courses, but most of the time we were offering nine, because we didn’t have so many students: we had sixty-seven students instead of 100 students. And so we would pick a theme, like, say AIDS, and all the courses, or at least a significant number of them were related to AIDS. And then the seminars, which we always gave on Mondays from 4-5—is that still IS seminar?

No, Tuesdays, 4-5.

Still end of the day. We just kept it at the same time so the faculty could all keep it in mind, not to volunteer one course or another. But we would pick a theme that we wanted to do for three years, and then we would move people in and out. The faculty were never paid by Integrated Studies; they were always in their departments. They were never hired for Integrated Studies, and so we did what’s called borrowing faculty. If your department said, “You cannot teach for Integrated Studies this year, because we need you to cover for somebody who’s going on sabbatical,” somebody might not be able to teach for us. So every year we turned over a third of the faculty, even though people would commit initially to try to teach for three years, it didn’t always work out, because their departments have first call on their services.

The theme was ideal, and it gave people a way of focusing on a problem for a given three-year period, and it gave us something to do with seminars, but it didn’t always work out that we could offer six of the nine classes really related to the theme. And we always had classes that wouldn’t relate, there were courses that we didn’t want to give up, that were so popular. Every course that we offered was not an off-the-shelf course, not something that was in the catalog that somebody taught in say the psychology department and then just plunked it over and taught it to a different group of students. It was always a course that was assigned to fit in with Integrated Studies.

What sorts of courses were ones you didn’t want to give up?

Well, we had a core for a while, which was called Society and Literature in Modern Blank. It meant you could fill in whatever. Dan Wick used to teach Society and Literature in Modern Europe, which the kids called SLIME, because that was the acronym. And I taught Society and Literature in Britain, and Jay Mechling taught Society and Literature in America, and I think Eric has taught that once or twice too. And we had another professor who was in the Department of Anthropology, which was before Oriental Languages split out, before there was East Asian Studies, when Oriental Languages was part of Anthro. And so he taught Society and Literature in Modern China, and then we had Society and Literature in Modern Africa, which Div Curley used to teach. We didn’t always offer all six of them in the same year, but we kept that core going for maybe ten years, and people could come in and out: Sometimes Peter Hayes would teach the American class if Jay went to teach something else, and I’m the only one who taught the British class, and I think Dan Wick was the only one who taught his Modern Europe class, because he was French and Russian, and that’s a hard combination to get anybody else to pick up on.

People always designed their class, and that’s why we got faculty. Not only did they want to teach very good students, but a lot of faculty members in a research university don’t get to teach undergraduates very often, so we would get people from the Med school, from the Vet school and they couldn’t always teach a four-unit class, of course, but they would teach a seminar, and people would flock to that seminar. And we would try to get them to come back and teach it again. We had a vet—a physiologist, basically—who taught a class on how heat controls your body, and how the functions of your body are dependent on proper temperature, and he basically did taught that course with animals, because he was in Vet School. And it was fascinating. Kids really liked it.

We had people from the Med school who taught with us, particularly when we were teaching the AIDS class. In fact, Scott Christianson, who was an Integrated Studies alum, had gone to Medical School in Davis and was over at the Sac Med Center teaching and running an AIDS clinic over there. And so he came back and taught a seminar on practicing medicine on people with AIDS. He would come back and give seminar presentations for us. He’s the only alum we’ve ever had teach in the program.

We did the AIDS course for our three years, and at that time we had nine course, and we had six of the nine for all three years. We had biologists teaching about the biology of AIDS, people teaching about epidemiology of it, I taught AIDS drama. I had no idea there was so much AIDS drama I thought I’d be having trouble putting this course together, and by the time I finished the three years, so much more had been written from the time when I started till I finished, I could have taught three more courses, just on that subject. Not all the plays were wonderful. Some of them were propaganda plays, which I wouldn’t have taught if they hadn’t been related to that theme. For their projects, I had the students go and find other plays. They were much better going online than I was. They are still much better at doing that. So we made copies and put them in the archives. After we finished the three years, I think everyone had had enough. The faculty said, “This is too depressing, we can’t keep teaching this,” so we went on to something else.

We would try to have the courses be pretty regular, and faculty who were in the professional schools loved to teach undergraduates, and also people had interests that are not what their department considers their field of expertise. Your department has to service the majors, the graduate students, so these courses have to be offered. If you’re the person who’s supposed to teach them, they don’t want you to go off and teach something that’s only interesting to you but doesn’t fit the curriculum. You could go do that in Integrated Studies. We invited professors to teach, we always invited the people who got the teaching awards, you know the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award, the Teaching Award from ASUCD, and the Chancellor’s award, which is the big $30,000 prize award, once a year. One professor is selected who does undergraduate education and excellent research, and this person is king for a year or queen for a year. We always invite those people to teach. We would send out a request for proposals, and we would get proposals of courses that people wanted to offer and that they were free to teach in the next two years, and then the curriculum committee would decide.

In Project Involvement to begin with, one of the biggest complaints was that getting your degree requirements was very hard. There was never much thought given to that. So we always wanted to make sure that students in Integrated Studies could offer their Integrated Studies classes to meet graduation requirements in certain fields. We have a disproportionate number of kids on this campus in biological sciences and engineering. If you went to Berkeley or UCLA, you would not find so many people with that concentration. So we always had to offer a lot of humanities and social science classes for them, so that their GE requirements would be met. And we had all the social sciences and humanities people who had to have enough physical sciences courses that they could meet their GE requirements. If we were getting nine courses, which we were most of the time when I was director, we wanted three humanities, three social science, three physical science, and we wanted them across the quarters, so that every quarter you would have a choice of one of the three. Now that was really hard to manage when you’re talking about borrowing faculty all the time. And students would get very upset because they would come to spring quarter and there would be only one course available that would fit their particular GE requirement needs and they couldn’t get into it, because of the way the registration system was set up. We would give waivers, so that people could come back and take them in the fall if they couldn’t actually get into it in the spring. But we tried very hard to make students’ needs to fulfill their GE requirements work, with faculty that we had available who could teach. So, that was a big challenge to get all that to go together: recruit the faculty, recruit the students, schedule the classes, and make it possible, for as many students as possible to meet their GE requirements.

What did you do in addition to being program director?

That was always a half-time job. I taught one course, I taught the seminars, I was the instructor/director for the seminars, each quarter, and then I did all the administrative work, and that was a half-time job. When my children were small, I only wanted to be working half-time, because I wanted to be home, I didn’t want to be tied to teaching full-time. And then, after my youngest daughter went to junior high, I decided I would work full-time again, and I went into the College of Engineering for a year, because my daughter was in the College of Engineering, and I thought that they were not treating women very well. My daughter wanted to drop out, and she was very bright and should not have been stressed beyond belief. I thought, “Well, I’m gonna get in that college and find out what’s going on over there,” and this was going to be a one or two year job. When the dean left, I was going to leave. When the new dean came, the old dean said as he was going, “Don’t leave, because he will need someone with your skills and your knowledge of the campus. Stay at least another year and help him.” The new dean came from Michigan; he had gone to Berkeley for his PhD, but he taught at NYU and then he had been teaching in Michigan for years. Well, I liked him so much and we got along so well, we had such convergent plans for what ought to happen, that I stayed there thirteen years. I was first the editor of their publications, then I was director of their public relations, then I directed their honors program, then I did their education abroad program. I always find something interesting and challenging to do.

I only left the College Engineering when the Davis Honors Challenge started, because I had been involved in the planning for that for years, endless numbers of task forces and committees. We finally got the proposal through, and then I went to be the Associate Director. But I did only stay at that for two years, and by that time, Integrated Studies was being asked to do a lot of other things. I did that full time until I retired. And then I ran International Program, Summer Abroad programs—that was my lunch time job. I would start out in Sproul, which is where Integrated Studies was, and then I would go to Mrak, and get all the stuff done there by maybe 1:30 or so, and then go to Engineering and be at Bainer, and then go home. I was never bored, that’s for sure.

That’s my second love: International Education and honors programs are right up there. I did the Summer Abroad programs for twenty years, and I stopped in 2005. I was in the London Bombings at King’s Cross, and I had been at 9/11; my son was living in Manhattan at the time and I was visiting him, and I was down at the New York Public Library, which is about twelve blocks from the site of Ground Zero. My children said, “You know, you might not be so lucky the third time, why don’t you just give this up?” So, 2004-2005 was my last class in London. Now I visit my grandchildren and teach volunteer stuff.

What did you teach in London?

It was a course called London writers, and we started with Shakespeare, and went up through Virginia Wolff and Winston Churchill, and we did 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th century, so we’d get it done before the four weeks were up. And shortly after that, John Boe came over and did a course in Shakespeare, and Eric Schroeder started the Australia courses when I was director, and then he started doing the South Africa one.

How many people are taking IS now, how many courses are offered?

There are five courses each quarter, and 114 students.

Oh, poor Jim Shackelford. He’s probably still doing it as a half-time job too. When I was in the College of Engineering, Jim was the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in Engineering, so I go back with him a long time. “Why isn’t my daughter happy?” “Well, I don’t know, Nora, but we’ll see what we can do.” He’s a great guy: very good administrator, very able.

Is there anyone who stands out in your mind over the years?

You know, there are so many. I’m afraid to say any because I’m afraid I might miss somebody, and then I would feel terrible. We really had among the best of the people, faculty people who were interested in teaching undergraduates. And we had some fantastic colleagues along the way. The faculty that stand out in my mind are the ones who were stretching the most. Because everybody had proposed a course that he or she would never get to teach in their own department. And some people went really out to the edges of their knowledge, got so excited. I had one faculty member (who shall be nameless) come to me after he met his class for the first time, and say, “These kids are too smart. I can’t try to teach this. I don’t know enough about it. I have to stop.” And I said, “You can’t. I’ve got all these students lined up, you better teach it till January, just get up there and do it!” And he was very nervous for at least the first month, because he thought, “I am really at the edge of my knowledge.” If you just give your lecture and don’t let anybody else talk, you could absolutely control what happens in the classroom. But you don’t lecture in Integrated Studies, someone’s always got a hand up. And someone always has a very interesting question, which you want to follow. And that’s a very hard kind of teaching. Well, he thought that’s what he was getting into, because in his field, he lectured to graduate students, and he lectured to upper division students, and nobody asked questions. I really thought he was going to quit on me. What would I have done? But I don’t think we want to talk too much about that. He got by.

I did go through my grade books, and I have a lot of students’ names here, people that were outstanding to me, the students who stick out in my mind. The first student who sticks in my mind—I wasn’t teaching the program then, when he was in it. His name was Ken Levy, and he had bright red hair and a bright red beard, and he went on to be student governing ASUCD president. Then he went to law school here, and he got leukemia, in his first year at law school, and he died very suddenly. He was such a brilliant young man, and so affable, and so…just outstanding. At the law school commencement, his sister crossed the stage and took his honorary degree.

A lot of times people that were outstanding to me are the people who came back and worked for us, or did other things, or people who married other people in Integrated Studies, and people who asked for a letter. Carol McMasters, for example, was in the class of 1980, and she came back to be the Program Assistant for Integrated Studies for seven years, the job that Jenny does now.

There was the only Integrated Studies student to whom I ever had to give a D. And he was the funniest kid. And it turned out after he finished the program, a faculty member that I knew very well told me that he was his uncle, and I never knew it. Here I am giving this kid such a hard time, and he was very good-tempered about it, and took his D with a stiff upper lip and was very good at contributing to the program and everything. He was just one of the nicest kids that I can remember, because nobody likes getting Ds.

One of the outstanding traditions we had in Integrated Studies, when Allen Strambusky was in dramatic art, taught with us for a long time, and he and my husband used to put on events at the end of the year; this was before the Shakespeare plays. And people would transform the dorm into Chaucer’s London, and this kid was one of the characters in Chaucer, and he was wonderful. And I thought that if I gave him this D, he’d probably never do anything for the program again. But you know, he tried out and took this very large role and played a big role in getting the whole production put together. He was the best-spirited kid I could remember in the whole program.

That was a very cool tradition, in the ‘80s. We did it for about three or four years: we would transform the dorm. Once it was Miss Haversham’s house, because we did something with Dickens. And Elliot Gilbert, God rest his soul, who was a Dickens expert, came in. My husband taught Swift—an 18th century Irish writer—and he would dress up like Jonathon Swift, with his graduate students. And then people said, “Why don’t you do it for your undergraduates?” So he did it. Elliot was so amazed that my husband would do this, that he decided to dress up like Charles Dickens, and he was the moderator of this abbreviated Dickens production. They turned B Building lobby into Miss Haversham’s house: spiders hanging everywhere, and a moldy cake. Some of the most astonishing people, who never said anything in class, were very good actors, they would get up and do these outrageous things. And you would say, “Is that the same student I had in class?” This student who never said a word in class, standing there, being the starring role, and just seeing her come out from almost absolute silence. You never would suspect this person had that talent, so that was really fun, to see kids in other contexts.

Then there are the legacy children. You know, the older sibling is in the program and then the younger siblings want to be in the program. And especially as it got harder and harder to get accepted, we had a lot of very unhappy parents, because the second child could not get in, and did not have the same academic qualifications, so we always tried to put them on the alternate list, because we knew that if something happened, even two days before class started, that people would give up where they were living and come live in Integrated Studies. Aaron Waters was the oldest sibling in his family of three, all of whom were in Integrated Studies. Then there were the Romingers. There were three Rominger children in Integrated Studies. He went on to be the Deputy’s Department of Agriculture Secretary. And they’re very big people in the alumni association. He’s on the foundation. He had three boys, all of whom went to Davis, and I think we had all three of them in Integrated Studies, and then one of his nephews as well.

Jaqueline Ross. She went all through Integrated Studies and I never knew she was a Native American, and then I saw, after she graduated, that she came back and was the administrator of the Native American Studies program, or something. And she came back to work on campus through the Alumni Association and the Baldwin, and just did really wonderful things. She was in the class of ’85, so we’re moving on here through the decades.

Did we talk about the tutors? They’re sophomores and juniors, and they’ve all been in Integrated Studies. The first person who helped me set that up was Cathy Conn, she was the first Master Tutor. She had been a peer advisor, and then I needed somebody that I could trust, that I knew was responsible and so she took over and was the first Master Tutor. We selected the people and she helped me train them and we met every weekend and got those things in order. She also went to medical school, she went to Northwestern, in Chicago. And she came back, and she’s now a doctor at the Med Center.

Casey Cameron. She was a peer advisor for two years, I think. And she was very involved in setting up the program called CASA. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. It’s not a campus program, it’s a county program. It’s children’s advocates: They go to court with children who don’t have people to stand up for their rights, and she was very active in that when she was a senior. And then she went to law school. She had been going to go to med school, but she got so involved in CASA, that she thought juvenal justice needed some lawyers that specialize in that field, a new field too; there weren’t very many people in that. She also married somebody from Integrated Studies.

How often did that happen?

It used to be very common. It used to be two or three out of each class. And then, you see their children grow up, and that’s really fun. I always thought I was going to retire when I had the first kid in my class, and it happened! Before I retired! The child of an IS student, that I had taught myself.

This is the only student who ever turned up on my door without a place to sleep. He was on the golf team, and something happened, he got left at some golf tournament or his ride didn’t show up, and the dorms weren’t open yet, and he had no place to stay, so he turned up on my doorstep, and said, “I hate to ask you, Dr. McGuinness, but I have no place to sleep tonight.” I said, “Come in, my guest room is yours.” So, when people ask me, “How involved were you with students?” I say, “Very.”

And then this kid nearly flunked out. Smart as a whip, and could not get it together socially. You know, he was an only child, and he was not used to sharing, the way you have to do, and he just stopped coming to class. And I emailed him once, and said, “You know, this is not good. You’re going to have to turn up here. You can’t just come when you like.” And so he came for a few more days, and then he stopped coming again. So then I thought, well something’s going on, and I had to talk to the RA and see if they could see what was going on. So anyhow, he did not do well. He lived in Sacramento, and his parents made him move back home for sophomore year, because he did not get very good grades. So his sophomore year he lived at home and he knuckled down and he got his grades back up. He came back in his junior year and asked if he could be a tutor, so that he could help other people to avoid the problems that he had had as a freshman, and so that they would not have to take that detour that he had had to take. I thought that was a very community-minded thing to do. And he went on, he tutored even through his senior year, got accepted into an Ivy League graduate school, and just went on like gang busters. But if he had not been able to turn himself around as a sophomore, you know, he probably would have dropped out of school, and, you know, been living out of a dumpster for all we know. He was our biggest rescue story.

Oh, Susan Churchill! Very quiet student, never said a thing, would write perfect exam papers, you know. I hardly ever read the Aggie, because it’s so badly proof read it used to drive me crazy, as a professional editor you can’t stand it. But I picked up the Aggie when I was in the Coffee House waiting in line or something and I saw Susan’s picture on the front page. She was the outstanding pitcher for the UC Davis Softball Team, and an All-American, or something. And here she is, a girl who never says a word in class, and she’s this famous athlete. That showed me not all kids’ talents always show up in the classroom. I think she got straight A’s all the way through college. To be an athlete on the Varsity team is really time consuming. And she wasn’t just anyone, she was their star pitcher. Never would have found out from her…So she’s my ideal of what a student athlete should be.

The objective of the program is to be an academic residential community for honors students. Why wouldn’t we do it for everybody? Well, because the university can’t afford it. One person teaching twenty-five students costs way too much. Who do you give it to? You could say the people at the bottom need the most help. But the people at the bottom are getting help, institutionally. The people at the top are not. We said, “We’re going to devote the resources that the campus gives us to providing this very special kind of attention to people who will be able to take it and run with it.” And those are the honors students. And they have.

Can you comment on the IS community?

Always tight. When we had money for events, we used to go on retreats, we used to take people off campus the first weekend that they were here, and we would go to the Marin Highlands, or we’d go down to Santa Cruz, or we would go…People would have to pay something, but we subsidized. When budgets got so bad in the eighties we had to give that up, which was really too bad. One of the events that we kept the longest, as long as we could, was the last weekend before everybody graduated, we had a reunion, and there was never a person that you could mention in the class, and somebody else in the class—this was three years after IS is officially over—knew exactly where that person lived, what they were doing, where they were. The tightness just stuck.

Some people even went off to graduate school together. In fact, one couple, a boy and girl who had gone out together all through college—he was an engineer, and she was going to medical school—and they thought it’d be no trouble to get on the same campus. Well, didn’t work out. She got accepted to a number of medical schools, and he got accepted to a number of graduate schools, but they weren’t in the same place. And so, they decided, they had to part, or else one of them would have to give up the career for the other, and that wasn’t what they wanted to do. That was really too bad. It took both of them a long time to get over that. And I was hoping maybe when they finished school they might get together again, but he got married in the meantime.

It was always a very tight community. You could go to an apartment like The Trees or someplace and maybe out of the sixty-seven people who’d been in the program, maybe forty of them would be living in The Trees. And all the people who wanted something slightly different would go live in another complex. But hardly anybody ever went off and lived with anybody else. They stuck together. Even when they graduated, some of them had been together as roommates for three years.

I remember we had an unexpected extra person, we still cannot figure out how it happened. She returned her card, and we thought she had not returned her card. She thought she was accepted, and we didn’t think she was coming. She turned up! So we had to turn a double into a triple, which is all housing can do under the circumstances. Another year we had two, and we had to house them in the building next door, and we never did figure out how they got there.

It was always a tight community. And it was never incidental. A lot of what you learn, especially in your freshman year of college, is not what’s happened in the classroom, it’s what happens outside the classroom. And we always felt that there are some very, very intellectually gifted students who have terrific social problems. And they get all through elementary school and high school, they think they’re nerds, they think they’re geeks, everybody tells them that, they think they have no chance socially, and we think that they ought to have a chance to start over in college, where nobody’s going to react to them that way. Not the only socially acceptable people are the athletes, which happens to a lot of kids in high school. They’re very good students, but who cares? And so, we always thought that it was important that people would meet other people who had intellectual interests and intellectual abilities of their own, and get a chance to get a new social start.

Learning is not just intellectual. It has to be developing your whole person. And you can’t do that unless you have a holistic environment that promotes that. And of course, since we’re an off-shoot of the sixties, that was very important. It was always community.

[«Back]