|
1. What were your early impressions of the school?
I was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins when I came here in 1964.
The university seemed full of great potential. It was a relatively new
institution in that it had just become an independent four-year college.
It really seemed to have boundless potential. Of course, one of the
recruiting things that they used was the old university plan which ran
the university down 38th Street, was going to take over all of Lambert's
Point all the way down to 38th Street. And they talked about having
something like twenty professors [in the history department] by 1968
or 1967 or something, and fifty in the department by 1975-totally inflated
figures, totally unrealistic, given the fact that it's the Commonwealth
of Virginia. But it was really a neat place. In 1964, it was very much
of the region. There were very few students who came from outside the
region. That didn't really start until the end of the sixties. And when
they built the dorms.
I guess they were building the dorms the second year I was here, in
an effort to attract more students from out of the area. It had very
much a Tidewater feel to it. And we got excellent students because we
got all the good students from the region who couldn't really afford
to go anywhere else, who for one reason or another had to stay home.
So the quality of the students was excellent in 1964 and 1965. It deteriorated
after that, but it was very good then. So it was really exciting. Teaching
was exciting, and it was really an interesting, go-ahead place. The
faculty was small at first, and there were intimate relationships between
faculty. Of course, every year the faculty grew. Now the distance has
increased. But the whole attitude of Old Dominion College then was that
of a cooperative venture-struggling to get the school off the ground.
And it was just an interesting, fun place to be.
It's hard now looking at the campus to imagine what it was in 1964.
There were still houses on the south side of 48th Street. Where the
mall is, across from the library, it was all houses, and the university
buildings, the college buildings, had been part of the poverty of its
early years as the Division of William and Mary. Finks Flats on Hampton
Boulevard. Dr. Webb had of course gone around and scrounged-literally
scrounged-buildings they were tearing down on the Naval base. One of
those buildings was where we were. It was from St. Helena. So, it had
a kind of raw, homemade quality to it. It had the new library, the Hughes
Library. It's now Hughes Hall. It had the Business Building-now Constant
Hall. And the Art Building. And then it had the two old buildings left
from the 1930s.
And a constellation of other little buildings tucked around here and
there that the president had assembled. So it was a very peculiar-looking
kind of collegiate institution. That has nothing to do, of course, with
what goes on inside the walls. And it was really a very interesting,
fun place to be. And of course it was the Civil Rights Movement, the
middle 60s, so it was the cutting edge of that. Segregation was rapidly
breaking down. The first black students were coming to Old Dominion
College, so it was kind of an exciting social experiment. It's difficult
to imagine now how segregation was, and how completely it has gone away
in terms of combinations of people being able to go to things they couldn't
do before. The physical restraints have gone, at least.
2
2. Was there tension on campus during the
time of the civil rights movement?
There was an absence of tension; there were no black students. Of course,
when the first black students came, there were very few, so few that
they were totally singular. In the middle 60s, I guess the first year
I was here, they organized the Human Relations Council. Human Relations
Councils were big all over the south in the early 60s, where forward-looking
people wanted to bring the races together to form a Human Relations
Council [the official name of the organization was the Virginia College
Council on Human Relations.] Willard Frank was part of that. It was
formed in 1963, I think. It was happening in 1964, when I came here.
The council was composed of black and white students, and the objective
was to bring them together. They did tutoring at the Betty Williams
School in Virginia Beach, and for some whites, it was their first contact
with blacks.
It was an experience of doing things with others and it expanded, widened
their horizons. The council was one of the casualties of the greater
integration. The world did change in the later sixties for the better
and the necessity for it went away. It was basically a means of bringing
black and white students together. I think for many of the African American
students, it was a way of feeling more attached to the university, and
I think there was a real feeling of being excluded from activities.
Until there was a fraternity that was largely black or accepted them,
they had no Greek organization-not that that's the most important thing.
But it's symptomatic of the way things were generally. It was difficult
for blacks to feel comfortable in activity situations, and I think the
Human Relations Council helped to overcome that. And of course it gave
a vent to white students who were interested in getting involved in
civil rights, and whose parents attitudes were not nearly as progressive
as theirs. You got into some demonstrating, and one white student came
home one Sunday night from... I'm not sure what, because it shaded over
into opposition of the war in 1965.
It may have been a war demonstration in Washington-and when he got
home his bags and everything, all his belongings were packed on the
front porch. He was out of there. His dad wasn't willing to put up with
that. So that was kind of the atmosphere of that long-ago time. What
I'm saying is, the same students who got interested in human relations
tended to oppose the war and get involved in those protests. Most of
the black students on campus and some white ones who were sympathetic
were in it. I can remember discussions in class, though, when I first
came. Students were still very resistant to the idea of integration.
The school closings in Norfolk were just five years in the past, and
there were plenty of students who had never gotten over it.
That persisted into the early 70s, I guess-the residual, overt willingness
to say so. By the time the early 70s came, the whole atmosphere was
different. Black faculty members were starting to come, and the number
of black students was so great that you seldom had a class that was
all white where a student would feel free to express these ideas. So
even though they may have had them, they didn't express them. It's like
the more modem thing, the antipathy toward women I've felt in classes
because we changed the focus of the course to be more inclusive of.
. . we added women in a major way into the history curriculum, and there
was a lot of resistance to that. A certain kind of young male student
who doesn't want to hear about women, who doesn't believe women are
equal, doesn't want to have it rubbed in his face that the old ways
are over, is resentful of competition from women.
3
Really fearful of the new kind of woman. Wanting the old ways, where
women are subservient and doing what men want, seems to them natural,
the natural order of things. So there was a gap-not just in students,
but in people-in accepting the changes that came to society. And of
course, a university has to be out there in the forefront, and if you
happened to believe very strongly in equality and express this as part
of your teaching, then you got this hostile reaction. Now, the university
has a much more diverse student body in terms of race, economic status
and age. It's done a remarkable job. It made my heart leap to walk in
class and see students in their thirties and forties-they really care
about learning. ODU is an important cultural presence in Hampton Roads.
Its diversity, its outlook and presentation are wonderful.
3. When the curriculum was expanded in the 70s and 80s to include
an emphasis on women, was there resistance from the faculty?
Well, of course, faculty are people too. So yes. Some did resist, and
I suppose some do. But you get reactions with black students or foreign
students. However, that kind of resistance only gets you into trouble
in an age when we are becoming more aware of the need to adapt the curriculum
to changing times. One of the best things that ever happened in my opinion
was the general education reforms of 1985 when we did expand the history
curriculum, particularly-I'm not going to speak about what other people
did-to include much more about women routinely, not just a drop now
and then. But to rework the course so that women's contributions became
apparent.
And we did the same thing of course with the third world. Instead of
concentrating on European culture, you concentrate much more on world
culture. And I thought it wonderfully stimulating as far as opening
up the Western Civ. course to be much more interesting to teach, much
more fun. It makes you re-think your own values and the ways you looked
at it previously. You look at it in a new way, and this is much better.
However, not everybody felt that way. Of course, you have to throw out
some of your cherished yellow notes. As well as your cherished useless
ideas.
4. Do you recall the friction between the administration and students
during the sixties over freedom of speech and freedom of the press?
There were a few protests during that time. You were always getting
into trouble whenever you did anything along those lines-stirring up
trouble where there was no trouble. By your nature, no trouble. By your
nature, if you were involved you were marked out as a radical. Communism
was a big bug-bear during that time. The sixties were exciting. A lot
of questions were being asked-everything was questioned and not always
wisely. The Student Affairs Committee had to approve new groups, and
it was not easy to get them accepted. Dr. Whitehurst was chair of that
committee. Our radicals here were not so radical, but there was a little
band of crazies. Poor Dr. Webb. In 1970, I think it was, the Poor People's
March passed through here on the way to D. C. It started out with mules
and a lot of people. It stopped at Foreman Field.
4
This was a troublesome problem for Lewis Webb. Here he's just built
all these new things and he's feeling very proud. Taken an insignificant
branch of William and Mary and made it an independent university. Then
he sees it torpedoed by radicals-with poor people coming out on Foreman
Field. He saw his school burning down. He agreed they could come-Foreman
Field belonged to the city and they allowed it. But Webb was unsympathetic.
He was afraid the campus would be sucked into a radical morass. The
idea of poor people was not appealing to him. He made a speech to the
university faculty before they came and infuriated many of us by being
scornful of the aims of the march. He was expecting a riot at the school.
In the spring of 1970, there was the first Earth Day. The hippies were
appearing. Although ODU was always in the back of anything forward-looking.
But Earth Day was an event that questioned the state of the environment
and the use of the earth's resources. That spring, there was also the
bombing of Cambodia by Nixon, and students erupted across the country.
Some of the students here were very passive. They had military connections
and saw Vietnam as a good thing. But when Cambodia was bombed, the revulsion
even among passive students was great.
5. In a recent interview, Dr. Willard Frank credited you with stopping
white flight in Colonial Place during the 1960s. I was wondering if you
could talk about that time and what you did to help make the area more
diverse.
In 1967 and 1968, the whites were leaving, basically, and the blacks
were coming. Colonial Place at that time was in a good position to prevent
this from happening, and from having both races coexist and share their
lives. We created a committee and tried to persuade whites to accept
change. We had to persuade real estate interests to bring in white families.
Real estate was a very segregated business. We made a multi-pronged
effort with schools, with real estate, with the advertising of black
property in the Virginian Pilot. We blazed a trail toward the future.
We worked to recruit white families to come. It worked. It was lucky
timing-the time to break down housing segregation and take a pro-active
role. The time had come nationally. The Nixon administration had begun
to enforce housing legislation. We made it work.
It was a joint effort. We seized the moment. It's nice for a historian
to know he's got it right! We had the moment and the movement both right.
It became possible for other neighborhoods do the same things. The committee
was called the Stabilization Committee, and it was part of the Colonial
Place-Riverview Civic League.
I did receive a threat. There was a bomb threat. It happened one night
while we were out, and the baby-sitter was frantic. It happened for
the most innocuous things-like writing a letter to the newspaper. I
wrote one about the integration of schools and a local didn't like it.
There was plenty of scorn, odium. But how can anybody have said those
things? About women and blacks? It's nuts.
5
6. What do you make of ODU's plans for the future, with the emphasis
falling on distance learning and the expansion of the campus?
I think President Koch's plan for expansion is a good use of the land.
The physical expansion of the university is done more cleverly now than
in the 60s, when it wiped out blocks of African American housing. It
was Marchello's problem when he wanted to expand in Lambert's Point.
It's in the nature of universities at the end of the century to find
a niche, a unique thing, to carve out niches with various groups. Distance
learning is our thing. I think President Koch is very smart politically.
He's been keenly aware of ODU's problems of finding a focus and willing
to be innovative. But universities today are not the academic villages
of fifty years ago. Universities are part of the business culture now.
I think the focus of teaching has been lost. I mean. . . is TELETECHNET
education or is it information management?
But there's a difference in scale, of course, with ODU now. It went
from being a small, forward-looking campus to being a big university.
You know it's an institution of higher education when you pass by now.
I'm glad to have been a part of it.
Interview Information
Top of page
|
