Question:
... many years in the English faculty at Old Dominion - what is now University.
Wayne, I guess it wasn't Old Dominion University, or even College, when
you first showed up here. Would you tell us something about your initial
appearance at this college?
Answer: I first was
on campus in 1934 and '35 as a sophomore. At that time, the school was
called the Norfolk Division of the College of William & Mary, or
words to that effect.
Q: Right.
A: The name has been
changed so much, one has to be a little uncertain. There was one building,
the old Larchmont school, which has since then has been torn
down, and this space is now called Faith Park. There were so few faculty
in 1934-35. Some of them, by the way, commuted three days a week from
Williamsburg. There were so few faculty that practically all of them
taught two subjects. I had English and Philosophy under Dr. Gray, and
I had Economics and Psychology under ... -- I can't think of his name
right now, but anyway, he was primarily a businessman and has since
left teaching and, I believe, raises -- has raised beef cattle. Dr.
Gray is -- went from here to Wayne State University, I believe. Anyway,
he left here and is now deceased.
Q: What was he like?
Do you have any mental recollections of the way he conducted class or
any... Was he a real dynamic teacher, or just sort of run-of-the-mill,
or what?
A: I thought he was
rather dynamic. As a matter of fact, I -- _____ -- I worked for him.
We had, in those days, various relief agencies called FERA and NYA and
..... I worked on it my sophomore, junior, and senior years, grading
freshman English papers, and so came to know Dr. Gray pretty well. He
was, guess I would say, a dynamic teacher, and a little bit sarcastic
about American Literature, too, which was not his field, but he had
to teach it.
Q: Well, you mentioned
-- these are New Deal agencies I think you talked about, that gave help
during the Depression.
A: Yes. I paid my
tuition by grading.
Q: Did a lot of students
do that, d'you think? That first group of students.
A: Well, of course,
I was the only one doing it here at that time, 'cause we were so small.
The student body was so small that we were all listed in the catalog
of that year. The sophomore boys, or maybe it said men, the sophomore
women, the freshmen men, the freshman women. And, of course, that would
not be conceivable today.
Q: No. Not hardly. It'd
be a tremendous printing cost, if nothing else.
A: It was that following
summer, after I left here and returned to another school, that the --
what is now the Old Administration Building was begun. I suppose it
was finished during the next few -- that was a WPA project.
Q: WPA project, yes.
So was Foreman Field, wasn't it?
A: Yes, and the serpenti
-- the wall around the campus, I think, was done a little later on.
That was all athletic space at that time.
Q: Had you seen Old
-- the campus before you came here? Were you a local student?
A: I'm local. I hadn't
been on the campus until I came over to see about getting enrolled...
Q: But you saw the campus
develop, then, in its very earliest form, because there were no classes
here, really, until, what, 1930, thereabouts?
A: I think the first
classes were in 1930.
Q: Do you remember what
the place was like before there was a college at all?
A: No. I've often
thought it was too bad that there wasn't a four-year college then. I
might well have graduated college two years earlier, then had to go
away.
Q: And where did you
go to, after you left here?
A: Elon.
Q: Elon. I see. Then
you went, what, for graduate work after that?
A: Yes. I -- when
I graduated from Elon, I began teaching high school, while going to
Chapel Hill in the summers, and so I completed my Master's in English
within three years, and some few years later, after I came back from
the Service, I got another Master's degree in Dramatic Arts and actually
taught Dramatic Arts in another school for seven years.
Q: Going back to what
Old Dominion was like back in the '30's, you've mentioned,
of course that you did grading. What about the social life? Was there
any to speak of, or was everything just commuter students, and not ...
A: There was some
social life, as I became aware from the school paper, but I did not
participate in it. You see, I lived in Princess Anne County, a part
of which is now the City of Norfolk, as a matter of fact, not very far.
I had to walk out to the Virginia Beach Boulevard, thumb a ride in,
ride a streetcar out here, and then go back home. That took, probably
an hour and a half a day --
Q: Each way?
A: Well, no. I'd say
probably an hour and a half or two hours total, and, of course, that's
a lot of study time, 'cause I was carrying eighteen hours.
Q: Oh, I see.
A: And doing the --
the other.
Q: Well, how did you
become re-associated -- how did you become a member of the faculty some
years after you were a student? I guess it must be about twenty years
separating the two events. What transpired, in a sense, in between what
you --
A: What happened was
that I was at another school, but did not make tenure, and I was looking
around for another place. I had been looking otherwise, and I did have
-- most of my family were here anyway, so I came back here to get my
feet under me, and I came up -- I thought I might as well go -- come
out and see what they had out here. I felt I was qualified to teach
Freshman English, even though I had been working in Theatre more lately
-- more recently, and it happened that Mr. Seward, who was the chairman
of the department, had need for an evening teacher. Now, that was in
1954. I was only a part-time teacher for that first year. And I was
working with an electrical contractor, run by my nephew, and during
the year, -- well there's other things that bit by bit -- I taught my
first year here, actually on a one-year basis to cover for a man who
was on leave, and then other things opened up. You know, that first
year, 1955-56, there were seven of us in the English Department, two
or three part-time people, and that grew, until, perhaps ten years later,
there were forty-five or so in the department. Since that time, we have
lost some for reasons that we can't go into here, but I happened to
grab on just as the place was expanding. I've seen buildings being built.
My first year I was back, the new -- what's now called the Design's
Building was completed, and became the third brick building on campus.
And -- of those three, only two still remain, because the original buildings
have been torn down.
Q: Had you kept track
of the campus and the people here between the time that you left as a
student and returned then as a faculty?
A: Not particularly.
Q: Not particularly.
You just... Has it been a surprise, then, to come back and find the place
as it later stood, compared to what ...
A: Yes. Because, because
though there were only those three brick buildings, there were a large
number of frame buildings and Quonset huts, and they're very temporary
things.
Q: Well, obviously,
this was a really dynamic place in many ways, in growth. What about in
terms of ideas? Did you find the place really just sort of thriving with
vision and thought, or was it sort of ...
A: I felt so. We had
a very young English Department, I mean the faculty members, and I think
that, generally speaking, the people were young. Even those who had
been here when I was a student were still young. They weren't much older
than I. I speak particularly of Lewis Webb, whom I was acquainted with
as a student, because he was an office-mate of my Mathematics teacher.
But he's not much older than I am.
Q: So, was Gerald Akers
here?
A: Gerald, that particular
year, was on leave. He was in -- I think he was in the Canal Zone. So
I did not know him that early.
Q: I see. But the faculty
as a whole, outside of English, was still fairly a manageable number.
I've heard stories about having faculty meetings in small classrooms,
or things of that nature when they all assembled.
A: There is a lecture
hall in the old Science Building, a Chemistry lecture hall, in which
we used to have our departmental meetings, up to about, I guess about,
the early '60's, maybe the early '70's. I can't, in this little interview,
give an idea of the size of the lecture hall, but it was not nearly
as big as the lecture halls in the Chandler Hall and the Engineering
Building.
Q: It holds about seventy
people, at most, I would guess, in the Science Building. I've given lectures
there, myself.
A: Oh, you have?
Q: Yes. It's not real
big; it's larger than a normal classroom, though.
A: I've taught there
too, and it's not a very good -- it's maybe very good for Chemistry,
but I was either up there by the blackboard and away from the students,
or down on the floor, away from the blackboard. I never felt very comfortable
in it.
Q: Can you suggest anything
to us about the students of the period when you first started teaching
in the 1950's? Do you think they were very much different from yourself
as a student, or types of student that were here in the 1930's? Has there
been any change in that respect?
A: I think there was
some change. I found that the students who were with me when I was a
sophomore, by and large, I think, were people who wanted to go to college,
but couldn't afford to go away. And I think, I'm inclined to think they
appreciated it more, that they were here for an education. Now, there
was a lot of partying, yes, we'll always have that, but the few that
I associated with the whole time on the campus seemed to give that feeling
of seriousness. When I came back here, I ran across, really, a very
mixed bag. But ... there were a tremendous number of young people who
had been told, while they were in high school, that they couldn't go
-- they couldn't make a living without going to college, and they were
very frank about the fact that they wanted, not the groceries, but the
green stamps, if you get my figure of speech there. That they were concerned
with the credit and the grade. Not all of 'em. We also had, and I ran
across more of these at night, the older student who worked all day
and came out here at night. They were -- they often gave the difficulty
of wanting a little easier road because they were tired; I can understand
that. But they were the -- they were usually people in their 30's and
beyond, a great many of 'em were married women whose children were now
in high school and they had time to get back to -- people who had started
college and gotten married and now were continuing. There was a, I'd
like to say, a third group of people who couldn't pass our admission
standards, but were allowed to come at night as part-time students,
and they were often pretty bad. They usually didn't last to be sophomores.
So I had the contradiction of better sophomore classes at night, and
poorer freshman classes.
Q: Basically, then,
the college for years was a, in a sense, a cross-section of the general
population. I mean, it wasn't a selected group, totally, and therefore
it reflected the _____________ culture.
A: It was very mixed.
I don't know that anyone ever got kicked out for poor scholarship. I
think they kept 'em going as long as they could get someone to pay their
tuition.
Q: What kinds of courses
did you teach? I gather you kept up with the Composition courses for a
while?
A: Yes, I've always
taught writing courses, as an English teacher. Our normal class load,
incidentally, was fifteen hours, and our contract read that we could
be required to teach eighteen hours on semester without any addition
in pay, but in the English Department, the normal course load was four
freshman courses and one sophomore or upper division. There weren't
many upper division courses because we were not yet a senior college.
And the chairman got one course off. I can assure you that four composition
courses at one time are quite a load. Whenever I got an opportunity,
I would teach an extra course for extra pay, and that was almost always
freshman. Of course, I was younger then, had much more energy. I don't
think I could do it now, but things did get better as we went into senior
college standing and had, then, more people taking the sophomore Literature
and upper class courses. I taught, on occasion, specialized courses.
The ... Some of the students were Engineering students heading for VPI
and they had a course called technical writing. Well, we still have
such a course, but it's changed its nature quite a -- well that's a
different history, but I was one of the first people to teach that to
... Of course, in those days, largely male classes. But the interesting
thing about that is, that _____ the Engineering students were on a quarter
system, and the others were on a semester system, which meant that we
had to take some of the same courses, divide 'em into three's as well
as two's.
Q: Complicates your
schedule when you're setting up a lesson plan!
A: That went on for
several years and finally was changed by our -- by putting everybody
on the quarter system, not because they can hard for the teachers, because
creating chaos in the Registrar's and Bursar's Office.
Q: And they had to change
back to the semester system later.
A: So, we went on
to the quarter system, about '62, I think it was, and were on it for
two years. Of course, that's a matter of history.
Q: It was gone by '64,
when I first came here, it was -- had just shifted back to the semester
system.
A: The state required
for teachers one or more courses in Advanced Grammar and Composition.
So I was one of the earlier ones to teach the Advanced Grammar course.
That particular course, that I taught, was much more like one of the
linguistics courses that you have now, but I also taught the Advanced
Composition. And I taught, for a good many years, the Advanced Composition
course was sort of thought of as my course, although Conrad Wilson also
taught it at times.
Q: Have you -- over
the years you've taught 'till just a short time ago -- have you noticed
this so-called deterioration of the quality of writing of Americans, given
the fact that we're probably a fairly "normal" mix, what is...
A: I don't think language
deteriorates, I think it changes, and I have, in the study of Literature,
seen words or constructions that were scorned by the educated people
-- people like _______don't say educated. Some constructions Samuel
Johnson, for example, objected to very seriously, and he lost. The same
with Noah Webster. I think the Linguistics people hold (By the way,
I'm not a Linguistics person, but I talk with them a lot.) I think they
hold that a language is good as long as it achieves its purpose, and
that is to convey the ideas that are current. Of course, a language,
like ... Pidgin-English is entirely different from cultured English,
although we can understand it with a little effort there to learn some
of the vocabulary. But there's a lot of things, like not worrying about
whether you gotta put a verb, or whether a verb has tense or not, or
whether it's singular or plural. As long as it doesn't matter, they
don't ____. So I have a sort of layman's view of language: that it changes
with the times; it doesn't get better, it doesn't get worse.
Q: It doesn't get worse.
... Did you get any chance to ever come back and teach the Theatre Arts,
which is one of your fields?
A: No. Dr. Akers and
I tried to set up a course because there were some people that said
they wanted it. But every time we scheduled such a course, it was going
to be a very broadly based course, it turned out people couldn't take
it at that hour, and so we got it up. I mention Dr. Akers because at
the time I first came here, we had a different structure. The several
departments were organized into divisions, and so the Division Chairman
______ one of the...Department Chairman. I forget what they call it
is, I think it was called Fine Arts and Humanities, but he was Chairman
of the Foreign Language Department. He was very interested in starting,
but they just failed to sign up, so the whole idea was dropped. And
it came back - revived - a little later on in an entirely non-academic
basis, I mean, non-credit, by Chuck Burgess. You may get a chance to
interview him in the near -- not in the near future 'cause he's certainly
younger than I am, and then the Speech Department began offering courses,
and it's a very flourishing thing, and I'm glad to have had a little
bit of a finger in it, but I ...
Q: What about the location
of the English Department and the English instructors when you first came,
and what happened to that over the years, the physical location on campus?
A: When I first came
back, during that part-time year, we were in an old frame structure,
which has long been -- long ago been torn down.
Q: Was that a World
War II building?
A: Yes, one of those
two-storey buildings ...
Q: Two of them ...
A: Yes. The one that
we were in stood about where the New Administration Building stands.
And then that -- late that summer, we moved down to the Original Building,
which is now being called "Old Science" because there was
a new science building, and then -- we were there until 1959, when we
moved into the then New Education Building. We had the top floor.
Q: Or do you mean the
Library?
A: I'm sorry. It was
not the Education, it was the Library. Hughes Hall. Get that correction,
ladies.
Q: Right. We got that.
A: The Hughes Building,
which was called the library. And we were there -- well, we were all
there for a while, and then, for various reasons, the part of the department
including the Chairman's Office were moved to the wing of the Science
Building -- the wing that had been the cafeteria and bookstore. I remained
in the Hughes Building by preference. And then in 1969, the -- I think
that's right, the New Education Building was completed, and Education
moved in downstairs and we moved in upstairs. It was very neat for us
because Dean Peale was also upstairs, and then, I'm not quite sure of
the date now, I think it's '72 or 3, this building was ...
Q: '72, I think was
...
A: And we moved in,
and, of course, we've been here ever since.
Q: Sort of a nomadic
existence, until the last few years, at least. Been moved around quite
a bit.
A: Yes, but we did
have some long-term stays, and it generally got better. My office got
bigger every time we moved, so at least we could -- could be happy for
that. Because that has not been true with everybody. I think some departments
on the campus have -- may feel mistreated. I can't say that I blame
'em.
Q: I wonder if you could
talk a little bit about some of the people you knew, faculty and the students,
administrators, what they were like, the people that you became acquainted
with, or friends with, over the years, just so we can have on the record
what they were like.
A: I spoke earlier
about Lewis Webb. I didn't know him very well. It was mostly that I'd
be going in to the office of my math teacher. His name was ... Alva
Lee Smith. He has, since then, quit teaching, going into engineering,
but I was taking calculus under him, and I had been out of school two
years, so I was having trouble, and he was very kind in coaching me.
I made a better grade on my Math than I did in my English for that semester,
as I recall! I think in part it was that my English teacher didn't like
the American Literature he was teaching. So and then, Ed White, who
later became Dean of Engineering, and has since retired. Those three
were office mates. I became acquainted with Mr. White and Mr. Webb.
The others that I knew have gone on other places. When I came back,
as I said, my first year here I was teaching part-time, and at night.
Now, Robert - -what was the Evening College Director's name?
Q: In the 1950's ...
A: McClelland.
Q: Oh, McClelland, from
the History Department. Was that the McClellan --did he teach History
at one time? I don't know the McClelland ...
A: He told me that
History was his discipline. He wasn't actually teaching at that time.
Q: Oh, at the time,
he wasn't teaching. Okay. So he has been a teacher, I assume that's the
same one. We have to clarify that for the record!
A: He also had taught
Greek, apparently, and I think that probably he had been doing it at
Williamsburg when he was there. McClelland was a very energetic person.
He was getting a little along in the years, so he wasn't as dynamic
as some of us might be. But ... I've often thought that he helped me
get my full-time job here. He told me one time that he thought I'd done
a very good job, and I jokingly said, "Well, how do you know?"
and he said, "I stand outside your door and listen." So, ______
McClelland, of course, was a poet, and the--I'm sure that a lot of the
... archives have a--have his poetry.
Q: Yeah, I think he
also had a hand in drawing up some of the Decade Reports that, you know,
mark the progress of the institution, in the few years.
A: Yeah, o' course
he was an historian. Now that I came -- that's about well, I'm back
there with McClelland. Well, I worked with -- my first Chairman here
was Bill Seward, who is now retired, also one of our Emeriti Group.
And, well, I don't know, I got along with him fine. I thought he was,
on the whole, an adequate chairman, though perhaps not Machiavellian
enough, as a matter of fact, he seemed to have difficulty asking people
to do things and he would do it himself. So, for that reason, three
of us took over the advising of English majors when we started -- when
we went into senior college status. And I stayed with that, advising,
until I retired. As a matter of fact, for a good many years, I was chairman
of the English Majors committee.
Q: That was in the days
when you had comprehensive exams, was it not, for part of that, at least?
A: For part of that.
I forget when they -- I associate them in my mind with the geography
of being in the Hughes Building. And I didn't have a great deal to do
with that, 'cause not having the Doctorate, I didn't teach -- I wasn't
teaching upper class courses as much as I would've liked to, so other
people were making up and grading the questions on literary aspects.
People contributed "spot questions" with which the answer
was right or wrong -- you wouldn't have doubt about that -- and so I
-- I had the job of checking those. That -- I don't know the reason
why he got rid of the comprehensives, except it was just about or just
before we went into graduate work. I think that may have been some association.
I hated to see it go.
Q: That was part of
the -- must've been part of your advising role, I would assume, getting
students somewhat prepared to take this kind of exam.
A: Well, actually
the way it worked is very much the way the Master's reading list is
often set up, or the Master's exam. We had a reading list, and certain
questions or certain topics would automatically be covered in various
courses, though no student would take all the courses, and so he'd have
to fill in the gaps on his own. And I don't recall that I had much to
do with that aspect of it. We had -- the department had a list of courses
for students to take -- a list of requirements. They didn't have the
most choices in some cases, and so the student just took courses according
to his taste, whether he liked the teacher or not, whether he could
fit it in at that particular time, that sort of thing. I once had an
Evening student who had three chances to take a certain course, but
put it off until a certain other teacher should teach that course at
night and she never got the chance. As far as I know, she's never graduated,
either. But that's pigheadedness, I think.
Q: Did you have an opportunity
to serve on any of the committees the university or on the college level?
A: Best I can recall,
I've served on two committees. One was the Faculty Scholarship Committee
and I was on that for a number of years. I couldn't tell you now what
years they were, but we collected money (That's always a job!) and then
we also got together with the students' applications and records and
argued about who should get them.
Q: ... who should receive
them.
A: We always had the
conflict between those that wanted to place more emphasis on need and
those who wanted to place more emphasis on scholarship.
Q: This was on the college
level?
A: It was at one time.
Q: It was at one time.
I see.
A: Then we decided
-- we got to the point that we were giving two scholarships, 'cause
as we -- we didn't get richer but we got bigger. As the faculty got
larger, we were able to give out a scholarship and a half, and then
two scholarships. Meantime, there were some people who were insisting
that certain majors were tougher than others, and that's of course,
could be just a matter of opinion, but it seemed advisable -- the committee
decided it would be advisable to disband that committee with the admonition
that the schools pick it up. The School of Engineering, by the way,
already had their program started. And so that's what happened, we asked
them to do it and they did it. We've lost track of it. For several years,
though, after that I was still on the Arts & Letters Committee.
When you have a good thing, you keep it, and I think that Dean Peele's
one that doesn't like to rock the boat. When things are going well,
don't make a change.
Q: So if you did well
on a job, you retained it for a good long time, eh?
A: Well, I don't know
what would compare with it, 'cause you have no control over how much
money you get. I have -- I have collected as much as fifty dollars from
one person; I've collected as much as sixty-seven cents from another
person.
Q: Some people didn't
give anything at all. This is raised ...
A: Oh, yes, those
that gave ...
Q: ... raised among
the faculty, of course.
A: There were two
members of the faculty, whom I will name, that said they didn't believe
in it, that the students had more money than they did. So, it was --
it was one ideal way of getting acquainted, though. I got to know --
at that time I think I knew everybody in the School of Arts and Letters,
but I don't know. The other committee I served on, I think it was a
service of two years was the Student Conduct Committee. I call it the
Student Misconduct Committee. But the idea was if a student got tangled
up with drugs or plagiarized a paper or something like that, he was,
as you probably know, sent to the Honor Council, and they had the privilege
of asking for this committee to deal with him. So that was rather interesting--the
things we learned about human nature, including the one case -- again
I won't name a department -- but gross carelessness in almost inviting
plagiarism on an examination, which shows that we aren't perfect, either.
Q: Too much temptation.
Did the Student -- is that Student Conduct Committee still in existence,
or did that go out some years ago?
A: I don't think it
is. Of course, we no longer have lists of committees in the catalog.
Q: But did it handle
anything that did not come before the Honor Council? If somebody were
in trouble ...?
A: I think it was
just a level. It was ______. I mentioned the catalog. That's another
thing that I have done, as a matter of fact, had reduction in my teaching
schedule ... I took over the catalog from Dr. Reese in about 1960. It'd
be interesting to look at a 1960 catalog. You probably don't have one...
Q: I don't think I have
_____.
A: But even the first
one that you got. See how thin it is! And then we were keeping things
in there that, like the listing of all the graduates from the last year,
which we long ago gave up. It became a very expensive thing, of course,
over the years, as it got bigger. And again, it got bigger because the
university got bigger and had more courses and more majors.
Q: Programs...
A: This is the undergraduate
catalog I'm speaking of. The graduate catalog has been handled by the
Graduate Office in some way. It made rather an interesting combination
because I was learning things in there that helped me in advising the
students, so I could feed that stuff down to my committee, things that
they needed to know -- to help them know it. I was in a position to
know what things were going to happen, things that weren't secrets,
but hadn't been advertised.
Q: The basic nuts and
bolts of how the college and the university operated, basically.
A: Oh, I knew about
the History Department's honors courses long before anyone else in my
department did. I think I picked that up at the cafeteria, though. Well,
those particular courses don't exist anymore.
Q: Yeah, that gets --
raises a question I think that might be interesting, that is, of course,
the university grew so rapidly. What about faculty camaraderie? Was it
a close-knit faculty when you first came here? Of course, you were from
sort of the Evening College, and then the question really is when you
started teaching regularly, did you find the faculty rather good friends?
A: Yes. There was
something that happened before I came that became a standing joke, that
at a faculty meeting, Dr. Akers posed a resolution that now that the
faculty was getting a certain size, we no longer feel that we had to
send Christmas cards to everybody else.
Q: Oh, hee-hee, I've
heard that story several times!
A: You've heard that.
So as we have developed, there have been differences of opinion, enmities,
I'm sure, based on trivialities, between schools and between departments.
Some of it was pretty petty, some is only to be expected in a place
where we were all scrambling for funds and space, but I think that the
fact that we were a small school only a quarter century ago still shows.
I come over here, normally on Tuesday, and go to lunch at the cafeteria
because that's the only place I see some people that I've been friends
with all that time. One good particular, Frank Gulmeyer [?] I think
he and I came here the same year, by the way. We're very close. I would
never see Frank, I don't see him every Tuesday even there, but I wouldn't
see him except on those Tuesdays and I feel closer to him than to most
of my own department, largely because I've known him so much longer.
Some of the people in my department, I've known just two or three years,
and I've been retired three of those years.
Q: Well, the business
of the cafeteria -- was this so before they built the new cafeteria, back
in the rear of the Science -- what's now the Old Science Building, that
was originally the cafeteria, at least in the 1950's, I think.
A: Yeah, well ...
Q: Was the same atmosphere
there, did that just carry over into the new building?
A: Yes. In fact, the
dining room's never been big enough, so some people just don't bother
with it, or very seldom do. Some, you have the feeling that they're
there, it's for a committee meeting.
Q: Yeah.
A: 'Course, there
are some people who prefer to go off campus, and some that don't eat
lunch at all, and so ...
Q: But that's one of
the places where people talk, and maybe ideas are shunted back and forth,
and people find out what's going on at the university.
A: I have rarely gone
over there with anyone. Sometimes, maybe someone who was new to the
campus I'd take over there, or a visitor, but I'd go over there and
sit down with someone in another department, because it so happens that
not a great many of the English Department go. That may be a matter
of geography; the ones you see over there tend to be, going by departments,
those that are closer by. Oceanography used to be better represented
when they were in Chandler than over there across the street. But there
-- I could more likely be found sitting with someone in Engineering
or Sciences than from Arts & Letters.
Q: So it's very likely
that all these changes that have taken place physically have had a social
dimension to them, that is, they affect the way we operate.
A: Well, there's more
distance now, and, of course, will be in the generations to come, because
people that are coming now are not going to have as much opportunity
to get with oth -- get associated with people in other departments.
Some people have done their meeting of people through the service of
the Faculty Senate. I never was in the Senate, never evinced any interest
in it, maybe I should have, but I preferred to work, insofar as I worked
at all with the Faculty Senate, through our representatives. Some people
say, "yes, I know him; I've been on committees with him in Faculty
Senate."
Q: Well, is there anyone
else you recollect in the period, say the '50's and '60's, friends or
otherwise, or ...
A: Well, by the '60's,
it becomes more, of course, and they become less special, I guess.
Q: I see. In other words,
your friendships were probably pretty well formed, though, in the first
few years you came here, those ...
A: Yes. In our ...
Q: ....people you've
kept in touch with.
A: In our department
we have, these are not factions, now, but we have people who are teaching
Writing and who are publishing, and I have less in common with them
because I'm -- When I say "Writing," I'm talking about "Creative
Writing"
Q: Yeah, right.
A: The writing that
I have taught has been the factual writing. There are the people with
their Doctorates and they're publishing scholarly work, and I have done
very little of that sort of thing. I did have a writing textbook, but
that's not associated with this -- not particularly associated with
this school. It got to the point that I'm older than most of the department,
naturally, and so the young group that I have tended to have little
to do with.
Q: Now, we were talking
about the specialization, really, I guess, in the English Department and
I was thinking while we were talking, Wayne, that probably when you first
came here the entire faculty didn't really outnumber what the English
Department later became. In other words, there are some forty-some members
of the English Department and probably over the years -- when you first
came, at least -- there were probably about that many faculty members
in total. It shows a rather significant growth rate.
A: I couldn't give
you a figure on that, but as I said, as a sort of rule of thumb, we
had seven in that year, and we have as high as forty-five. It's down
to thirty-five now, but that's easily five times as many.
Q: Right. Now, you were
talking about the fact that you tended to associate more with certain
people in the English Department, and of course, the English Department
itself got so large that it would be hard to know all of them really well.
That probably is a characteristic of the school as a whole, perspective,
at one time you knew practically all the people in the faculty, and some
of them quite well, a large number quite well, and just could not keep
up with that.
A: Well, since I'm
not here every day, I haven't had the opportunity to get acquainted
with the ones who have come in the last three years. Of course the young
instructors just come and go, the ones on the non-tenure track.
Q: Did the transient
nature of the student population, as well as perhaps the faculty, ever
bother you? Would you have preferred to have been at an Elon type of school,
which probably has a four-year run of students?
A: I might have. I
don't think, though, that the faculty was very transient the first years
I was here. They came and they stayed.
Q: The attitude, really.
Yeah, the students came and went.
A: The students, of
course, were something else. I think -- I observed that when I was working
with students, with a major's records, that well over half of our English
majors were transfer students.
Q: So, the one stable
feature of the place may be its faculty, in a way.
A: I think that more
are leaving -- a higher percentage now are leaving than did then. I
might say in passing, since -- as a curiosity perhaps, that at least
two people that I taught, that took my Freshman English later became
faculty members here, Dick Crutina [?] and Pat Patterson, whose now
also retired. I don't know of any others, there may be others that are
not -- there might have been, because, naturally, I don't remember all
my students.
Q: Well, I want to thank
you for coming today, taking your time to talk with me and with our future
audience as to what Old Dominion has been like over the years. You've
got a lot of insights that I think will give the future a lot to think
about. Thank you very much.
A: Thank you, Peter.
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