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Oral History, Educating Harlem Project, Teachers College, Columbia UniversityNarrator: Hope Jensen Leichter, Elbenwood Professor of Education, Teachers College (“R”)

Interviewer: Nick Juravich, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Columbia University (“I”)Date: October 23, 2014

Location: Prof. Leichter’s Office at Teachers College

I: And we are recording—

R: And if I need to stop for water or anything, we can stop, right?

I: Oh, yeah, absolutely. So—

R: OK.

I: Uh, yeah, so to open this recording, this is Nick Juravich, uh-, recording for the

Educating Harlem Project on October 23, 2014. I have the privilege of sitting with

Professor Hope Leichter of Teachers College, uh-, who has been uh-, involved in many

different aspects of uh-, paraprofessional training, family education, community

education over her career. And thank you so much for sitting down with us.

R: Well, thank you for coming to me. I-, it’s an honor.

I: And so to start with, we should say first off that this recording is being made in

accordance with uh-, what we consider to be oral history best practices, so before

anything said on this cassette is made public, and it’s not a cassette—. I should—. This

digital thing. Um-, you will have a chance to review the transcript, uh-, to strike as much

of it or all of it from the record if you’d like. And also to make any edits to anything

you’ve said. And then once that process happens, this will be archived for the Educating

Harlem Project, and also uh-, I’ll use it as part of my dissertation.

R: That’s fine with me.

I: Wonderful. Another thing with respect to the interview today, if at any point you’d like to

stop the tape, uh-, we certainly can. So for (___?), you don’t need to give a reason, for

Hope.Leichter.Oral.History.10.23.2014 1

any reason at all, if you say you’d like to go off the record, stop the tape, take a break,

anything like that, you stop it. And that’s that. And also if—

R: I—

I: —you’d like the interview to be over, too.

R: Well, we can—. Right. Right.

I: Mmm-hmm.

R: Uh-

I: And we can always come back to it later as well.

R: And can you just tell me the Educating Harlem Project—. Who-, who are the people?

I: Ah. So uh-, Ernest Morrell and Ansley Erickson are the co-directors uh-. Professor

Morrell with the Institute for Urban and Minority Education, and Professor Erickson with

uh-, the History and Education program. And now I guess the new Center for History of

Education as well.

R: All right. Uh-. Well, I was with Professor Morrell earlier today [laughing while talking:

at a search committee.]

I: Ah. Fantastic.

R: You know. (clears throat)

I: So I should also say that the topics that I was hoping to cover in the course of today’s

interview—and we’ll get as far as we can—I would love to hear from you about uh-, the,

um-, the programs you worked with that connected to particularly paraprofessionalism,

but also to hear about your own story more broadly. How you came to do this work. How

it fits into your larger uh-, work and the stuff, um-, that you’ve done both here at TC and,

and more broadly. Um-. There’s a couple of uh-, institutions and organizations and


programs I’m interested in specifically, one of which is the Women’s Talent Corps.

Another of which is the Parent Teacher Teams Programs here at Teachers College. Uh-.

And I’d also-, I’d love to hear you say more about the sort of-, the idea of both

paraprofessionals but also community-based educators more broadly. Think about what

was achieved, what proved challenging, and also as we talked about last time, what this

might all offer us today.

R: Mm—

I: So those are-, those are the big themes, the big, the big questions. But um-, sometimes the

best way to start this is to ask: Where should we begin? (heh, heh)

R: Well, um-, let me see. Um-. Chronologically, I guess, the first thing. I mean, I can tell

you my, my background, where I came from educationally, and, and how I ended up

doing family things here. But maybe that’s a longer story than you need for, for all of

this.

I: No. I’d love to start there.

R: —Uh—. (clears throat)

I: That’d be great.

R: Well, uh-. I got my—and then perhaps we said this last time, but we’ll pretend I didn’t.

OK? (heh, heh)

I: Quite all right. (heh, heh)

R: Uh-. (clears throat) I received my doctorate from Harvard University in the Department

of Social Relations, which was sociology, anthropology, clinical and social psychology at

the time. And I did not imagine that I would have a faculty position anywhere because at

the time I was at Harvard, there were basically no full-time women faculty. So I thought I


would be a researcher in various places. And I didn’t have the feminist consciousness to

say I should be a professor. I just thought: Well, I’m lucky to be here. I’m lucky to have

this opportunity. And long story, personal story, is I came to New York. My husband was

going to law school here. So I ended up in New York and worked for a while with the

Russell Sage Foundation. I had a grant from the Russell Safe Foundation later. I worked

earlier than that on a study at Cornell Medical School on Chinese who were exiled in the

United States. I did my dissertation using data from this project.

After the Cornell Project, I worked on research at the Jewish Family Service with

funding from the Russell Sage Foundation. The Foundation’s mandate at that time

included bringing social science theories and methods to bear on the “practicing

professions.” The history of the Russell Sage Foundation is an interesting reflection of

the times. In the book I did, Kinship and Casework with William E. Mitchell, there is a

Foreword by Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr., one of the key members of the Foundation staff,

that I think is relevant to the history of the time and why social scientists, who were

working in this country at least, were working in ways where the connection with

practice was considered one of the things that we ought to be doing. We shouldn’t just be

theorizing about society and what’s going on. We ought to bring the things we do known

from our profession to bear on the practicing professionals. These ideas made it seem

legitimate for me to go from Cornell Medical School to work in a social work agency

where we ended up doing a study of kinship and how social workers intervened in

relationships with extended family networks. The casework agency was doing family

therapy. Bill Mitchell and I had been very junior researchers on the Cornell Project.

When that project ended, we moved to the project at the Jewish Family Service with


support of the Russell Sage Foundation. We wanted to bring social science concepts to

bear on the then understanding of families.

The agency wanted us to prove that family therapy in their particular version was

the way to go. I think the term “evidence-based” was not the vocabulary at the time, but

the agency wanted social science proof that family therapy was more valuable than

individual therapy. We said: Oh, no, no, no. We’re social scientists and we’re trying to

help you see things you wouldn’t otherwise see. And so what did we do?

Well, one of the things anthropologists do is look at family structures and kinship

systems around the world. And there is such a thing as the extended family. The Jewish

Family Service was an agency that was working on family relationships, bringing family

groups together but mainly nuclear families or whatever pieces were intact. For example,

husband, wife, and children. And doing therapy with them. But not necessarily thinking

about kinship. And so a long series of negotiations, which I won’t go into at length—this

is really background for the work on the College of Human Services and

Paraprofessionals. Except that it’s background for why I felt it was OK to be working in a

school of education on a practical program in Harlem that involved families. So just to

finish up on the piece of the saga on the Kinship and Casework project (clears throat)

which you might find interesting—

I: Hm-. Yeah.

R: We did some research and we went trudging around—. Your recorder is teeny (pointing

to recorder) We went—

I: This thing?


R: We went trudging through the Bronx and to various homes of clients of the agency with

big heavy tape recorders.

I: (heh, heh)

R: Heavy, heavy [laughing while talking: tape recorders and they—] I don’t know what the

fidelity was but they didn’t screen out a lot of the background noises so there was an

awful lot of background noise. But in any case, that’s [laughing while talking: it was an

earlier time.]

I: Sure.

R: Families had the television on and we had traffic noises outside and the neighbors

screaming and all that kind of thing. But we were in people’s homes and studying the

families. And in the course of this, we’re trying to find out why they were going to the

social work agency and what family therapy meant to them. In this preliminary pilot

study, talking with people not as social workers but as researchers, we kept observing

relatives come in and out. There was one cast I can remember where there was an

extended family. They happened to be a Jewish family. Neither my colleague Bill

Mitchell nor I were Jewish, although my late husband was. But he was not religious.

That’s another story.

But in any case, we didn’t know the Jewish religion or beliefs or anything. But

this, this mother-in-law or mother, mother-in-law, depending whether it was the husband

or the wife’s point of view, was sharing the refrigerator. She lived next door or

somewhere nearby. And they were sharing the refrigerator. And there was some degree

of controversy over this because how can you be sure that everyone has the same degree

of care with respect to what makes it kosher or not.


I: Mmm.

R: But it seemed to be a viable relationship in some ways. But people were dropping in all

the time. Friends, neighbors, relatives. That’s just one example to try to make the point

vivid. We kept thinking about this. Partly it was the distractions on the tape and then we

were thinking things like: Maybe we should have had a way to screen out the sound or

gone into a little room within the apartment to talk to one person. Then we realized we’re

anthropologists. We’re seeing things that are interesting.

So fast forward. We ended up doing some interviews and surveys looking at the

relationships with the extended family. And how social workers intervened in

relationships with the extended family. We also got data from the social workers, for

example, their goals for therapy. We didn’t know what the outcomes were, but we found

that the social workers were much less kin-oriented than the clients. And the social

workers often saw their goals as modifying relationships with the extended family. We

have a whole section in the book that’s kind of neat on that point, showing that ways of

talking about kin relationships were different. The social workers would use

psychological phrasing and the clients would sometimes use rather (laughing) vernacular

accusations, let’s say.

The general gist was that the clients often had conflicts and arguments and

differences, but they didn’t necessarily want to cut off the ties with the extended family.

And the social workers believed that a part of psychological therapy was to cut your ties

with the extended family to “individuate” and “mature.” As anthropologists trained in

looking at kinship systems around the world, this was intriguing. So we got data. We did

interviews and questionnaires and so forth. It’s not a large sample or conclusive, but the


ideas were, I think, very interesting. It was also a kind of neat example of really bringing

the social sciences to the practicing professions because, frankly, I don’t think they

wanted to hear what we had to say. I really don’t. We argued in an appendix to the book

that while research doesn’t get applied to practice by being put in a book or put in a

folder or put in a research file, you have to continue talking with people about it. Indeed,

I think that’s what you do have to do.

Subsequently, there was a lot of talk in the social work field, and not necessarily

referencing what we had done, but we did happen to do it first. Saying, oh, well, maybe

the extended family is a resource and we should not be cutting people off from the

extended family. That is one piece of the background I brought from very, very abstract

Parsonian sociological theory at Harvard and social relations, bringing together these

different fields and disciplines. It was a very exciting time.

Harvard was great because we thought we were at the pinnacle of the world,

having all these intellectual breakthroughs. But I also didn’t know. You’d walk out in the

Harvard Yard and say: I don’t know which is true. Are the trees true or is Parsons true?

Then I got into this case where we were in fact trying to work with people. Then that

project ended.

In the meantime I’d finished my dissertation while doing both the dissertation and

the research project. And I had a son. But that’s all another story.

I: (heh, heh)

R: Then I had a chance to teach a course at Columbia School of Social Work because they

were very impressed with the work we were doing for the project. Then I was asked to

come to Teachers College. And because of my family background—my mother had been


a teacher and my stepfather also taught for a while. My mother had actually gone to

Teachers College for a while and studied in the heyday of the Deweyan emphasis here. I

had a feeling that in education, you can make use of your social science background to

make a difference in the world. You can do it with—how should I put it? More optimism

if you do it through a school of education than if you do it in a school of social work.

Social work somehow seemed to me at the time more remedial. In education, you

can start working with people who are going to be working with young kids. That’s

background on some of the ideas that I brought with me when I first came to Teachers

College. Do you have any questions on any of that? Or—

I: No. That’s great. Thank you so much. When did you come to TC?

R: Oh, dear, I can’t remember that. You’re [laughing while talking: you’re, you’re not

supposed—

I: (laughter)

R: —you’re supposed to do history for dates.]

I: I’ll look that up.

R: No, you can, I can—I could tell you. But I actually uh-, that’s my standard answer.

I: Mmm.

R: Because if you’ve been here too long, you say uh-, you know what I say?

I: What?

R: Too long to remember. Then people don’t start saying: Oh. Why are (laughing while

talking: you still here?—

I: (heh, heh)

R: —in any case. You can look up that secret.


I: Yeah. I will. (heh, heh)

R: I came here to teach a course in the Family Life Education Program and also in the

Clinical Psychology Program to teach field courses for social psychologists on

community mental health because I had the community background through trudging to

the Bronx, (laughing while talking: looking at real families with these heavy tape

recorders] that made me a community expert. That was an adjunct job of which there are

increasing numbers today, but then a chance opened up for a full-time position.

I: Interesting.

R: Parenthetically, professors of practice was a controversial issue in the faculty meeting I

attended today. But in any case, I wasn’t interested in families. I didn’t really want to

work on families. You know why?

I: Why?

R: Oh, I thought they wanted me to do it because I was a woman.

I: Oh.

R: I wasn’t a strident feminist. My grandmother had fought for the vote. I thought the

feminists in our family were my grandmother’s generation. And I didn’t need to be an

active feminist. My mother was avant-garde in everything she did, so I thought those

battled had been taken care of, even though as I was saying, I didn’t have any particular

consciousness about why there weren’t jobs for women at Harvard on the regular faculty.

There were a few part-time jobs. For example, one person, Johnny Whiting, who split his

professorship with his wife.

I: Huh.


R: Basically, there is a woman president of Harvard. When I was there, that was

unthinkable. In any case, I thought: you get what you can and you have to be glad. And I

had a husband who was an attorney in New York, and I had a son. And so I thought:

Well, you know, you’re lucky if you have any job. And that’s where the Women’s Talent

Corps came in.

But I didn’t want to do family stuff because it didn’t have prestige. I mean,

families are the lowest in the prestige hierarch within any university, in some ways. More

recently, I’ve learned from being on the University Senate that everybody thinks they’re

second class, (laughing) including the medical school that some say “we’re uptown and

nobody’s paying attention to us.” And the law school, “We’re not part of the general

graduate faculties and nobody’s paying attention to us.” And so on. But I think Teachers

College, having originally become a part of Columbia as a women’s institution as a way

to get women into Columbia, still is not treated with quite the respect that other parts of

the university are. Some say, “You’re across the street.”

I: Mmm-hmm.

R: There is a less than glamorous sense of the intellectual caliber of the school of education.

I was there and I wanted to be there. But I didn’t want to do families because I thought,

you know, within this place (sighs) then I’m going to be still more out of the mainstream.

And yet, that’s what I had been doing through the Russell Sage Foundation and the

Jewish Family Service. Before that, I’d been interviewing for my dissertation through a

project for Cornell Medical School in New York.

In any case, the course in Clinical Psychology at Teachers College seemed to be

an opportunity. So I agreed to do both a family course and the clinical course and take


psychology students around the city. I was going out into the so-called community and

also teaching courses here in what was then the Department of Family Life Education and

Home Economics.

During this period, Lawrence Arthur Cremin was a professor of history and

director of the Division of Philosophy and the Social Sciences. At that time there were

divisions, the Division of Philosophy and the Social Sciences and the Department of

Philosophy and Social Science. It was a stellar department then. That’s been disbanded

and Family and Community Education was disbanded. But he invited me to sit in on his

classes on the history of American education, which I did.

Cremin was a kind of mentor, although I already had my degree and I’d already

published a book, Kinship and Casework. But he was a close advisor to me as a junior

faculty. I’ve always found history interesting, but too many battles and kings to

memorize. So I was quite fascinated by his course on the history of American education.

One of his key concepts was that if you want to understand the history of

education in the United States (it would no doubt apply elsewhere), you cannot look at

the history of schooling alone. You have to look at the history of all the institutions that

educate. And that includes families, communities, the media, the media of mass

communication, as he liked to call it, which at that point meant radio and television and,

of course at an earlier point, newspapers in terms of looking back historically.

Cremin was very persuasive that if we wanted to have Teachers College have a

really rounded background, we should not just be doing Home Economics and Family

Life Education that is training people to work with families in different capacities,

planning their household management or helping them with therapeutic issues. We


needed to have an intellectual agenda in studying how families educate. That, to me,

already made more sense. Because I had done various community work or was in the

process, I thought: that really does make sense.

So I was sort of coaxed into coming into a department. At that point, the Home

Economics was being phased out because there was a sense that Home Economics was

doing things that were going to go away, partly because it was gender specific, woman’s

work. There were also all sorts of interdepartmental issues. At that point, we had a huge

Nursing Education program, which is not as large now. And Nutrition Education, which

was not as big as Nursing at the time. I think at an earlier point it had split off from the

Home Economics. A Department of Family and Community Education grew out of the

earlier Family Life Education and Home Economics Department. I was instrumental in

redefining this department and eventually becoming chair of it. I was chair for 16 years of

this renamed Department of Family and Community Education. So it was not family

therapy. It wasn’t family life education. It was no longer Home Economics.

That’s a whole other saga for another time, another discussion, whether it was

appropriate to close the Home Economics Program or not, or whether it was a wise

decision. It was not my decision, but I had the opportunity to redefine a department and

take it in new ways. A primary approach from my social science background in the

Department of Social Relations at Harvard with sociology, anthropology, and social and

clinical psychology was to create an interdisciplinary Department of Family and

Community Education. And apart from that, I had the interest in education and, most of

all, I had Cremin’s framework of the many institutions that educate as a source of ideas

about what we need to include in this new department.


So I was in the process of moving in this direction and, therefore, teaching

courses on families, although at first I never felt very comfortable with them. In the early

days, I didn’t. I love the course I do now. But I’m jumping ahead a little bit

chronologically. Still, I always have mixed feelings about teaching on families because

they are everybody’s domain. Everybody knows the family. It’s hard to say something

that doesn’t seem obvious of something that other people don’t think they know better

than you do from their own experience. There isn’t really a lot of definite knowledge. If

you can go back historically, families look different and that may give a new angle. But

people still think they know the real story. There are some fields where most people don’t

have everyday experience. This is jumping ahead with an example. My youngest son is a

marine biologist and oceanographer, and he can talk to people about diving in the

Antarctic under the ice and that’s not everybody’s everyday experience. Even if he says

something that’s descriptive and not quantitative, it still seems scientific. It’s different

from the trouble of talking about families in your own society.

In any case, at that time I had the opportunity to develop a program where we

were trying to have an intellectual look at how families educate and bringing in various

disciplines, including drawing on the historians who were here. The book that I edited,

The Family as Educator came out of that period, and Families and Communities was a

sequel to it.

The possibility for actually doing things in the community was also a big political

issue. During that time, I became involved with Audrey Cohen and originally the

Women’s Talent Corps, which later became the College of Human Services. You start off

your paper with—


I: Yeah.

R: talking about the people there. I could easily have been one of these women who had a

degree and had a child and didn’t luck into a job. I was just very lucky that I ended up

with a job. And I came to Teachers College with a book that was already published. And

I got tenure fairly quickly.

But I might very well have been in the position of the people like Audrey Cohen,

who were saying, well, there’s this talent out there. There are these people who have

education and they’re basically these middle-class women or professional women who

aren’t working. And we should do something for them. And what’s the need? Well, the

need is to do something to train a new category of professionals to work in communities.

So that made a lot of sense to me. I didn’t come out saying: well, you know, they should

stay at home. I came at it feeling I could very well, as I was trying to say, have been one

of these women who were going to teach the people who came to the College of Human

Services. So I became involved with Audrey Cohen. Part of the ethos of the time was the

idea that there was great advantage to lived experience and to people who know how to

work with the community because they are part of it.

I don’t think the vocabulary was quite what it is today. You know more because

you’ve looked at the documents. In my mind, I get the vocabulary at the time mushed

with the more recent vocabularies. We weren’t talking about equity in quite the way it’s

being discussed today at Teachers College, where equity is one of the big mandates. The

words were slightly different. But the idea was we’ve had a society that was segregated

and people haven’t had a chance. There are all these problems—economic problems and

educational problems. I guess some of the roots of these ideas go back to the early history


of Teachers College. And Teachers College in terms of immigration and settlement and

training women too, maybe as servants for the wealthy, but still giving new arrivals to the

country a chance. This is early history of Teachers College in still an earlier era. But at

the time of the Women’s Talent Corps, we were committed to the notion of trying to

involve people from the community and give them opportunities.

These are things that are going on simultaneously and not like neat chronological

order, but kind of back and forth. I was doing the work in the community mental health

program and still working with the clinical psychologists and teaching courses on

families. And then working a little bit with Audrey Cohen, at least in the think tank stages

of that project. And then developing the newly defined Department of Family and

Community Education. Some of our graduate students did go and work in the College of

Human Services eventually.

I: Oh. Wow.

R: Yeah. There was someone named Bruce Buglione. He has passed away now. But one of

my doctoral students, Vera Hammad, eventually Vera Hammad Buglione, ended up

marrying Bruce. Divorcing someone else (laughing) who was a graduate student and

marrying him. You know, graduate school.

I: (heh, heh)

R: So we had connections with the developing project of the College of Human Services

through graduate students and through my keeping up with Audrey Cohen and

periodically being asked to come in and advise on this or that—

I: Yeah.

R: —set of issues.


I: Your name actually comes up twice in their archives that I’ve found. Or-, a few times in

two separate places.

R: What, what, what am I saying” [laughing while talking: Tell me what I don’t remember.]

I: Oh, no, this is-. So one is-. There’s a report noting that you were working with a graduate

student named Edward Storey on something that was sort of a report for them or an

evaluation of them.

R: That’s right. Oh, now. Edward Storey. I think somewhere in my files I would have a

letter about that. Did you see any letter I wrote for him?

I: It was just a mention of the report. It didn’t actually have the report itself. So I should—

R: Huh.

I: I should look further. But that was-, it was just kind of one line in a larger report about

what was going on at the time.

R: He was a graduate student. Yeah. I think I wrote a-. I would have-. And I, I-. It would

take some digging but I could see if I can find anything I had written. I think I probably at

some point wrote-, not only wrote a report, I might be able to find that. I had forgotten

about that particular connection. And I do remember that somewhere in the files of letters

of recommendation I’ve written, which are voluminous over the years, I’m pretty sure I

could find a letter of recommendation for him. And whether or not there’d be mention in

that of what he did, I don’t know. I try to write specifics, not just adjectives in letters of

recommendation. So I don’t know. But I can look that up if that’s any help.

I: Sure. Yeah. I thought I-

R: I can’t do it now because I-

I: No. No.


R: It would take-

I: That’s quite all right. (heh, heh)

R: [laughing while talking: Layers of archeological digging.]

I: (laughter) No.

R: But, and how else was I mentioned?

I: So they-, when they interviewed Audrey Cohen, and they did a few times over the course

of um-, the last several years of her life.

R: Right. Right.

I: Be-, as part of the college archive. She mentions you. And she talks briefly about going

out—. So there was Part-Time Research Associates—

R: Right.

I: —I think, which brings in middle-class women. And then it, the Women’s Talent Corps,

her idea of being to connect these women to the women in the communities.

R: That’s right.

I: And going out to uh-, meetings, community meetings around the city as part of this. And

she says that you were with her, and the part-. I wrote a quote down, she particularly says

that you were listening at the meetings and helping to define the jobs more effectively.

And that was a line about Hope Leichter.

R: I was listening at the meetings and what, what was I doing?

I: And helping to define the jobs more effectively. So thinking about the role-. I think she

means thinking about the roles for community women in institutions like social work and

—

R: Hm-


I: —schools.

R: That’s interesting.

I: And I can, I can send you-. Actually, I have an image of this document.

R: Wow. That’s interesting because in the descriptions that I was writing for the graduate

training for the department, I have a statement somewhere. This is not the jobs for the

paraprofessionals. This is the jobs for the people who are coming from Teachers College

training paraprofessionals. There is something I wrote in one of the old catalogs.

I: Mmm.

R: That I wrote with the advice of Lawrence Arthur Cremin. He was president of the

College and he was a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, but he made his point to edit every

word (laughing) in the catalog. And so I think he might have made some modifications or

corrections or suggestions. Say that again. Helping to define the-

I: Jobs more effectively.

R: Jobs more effectively. Well-

I: And I will. I can look up and send you these uh-, these documents.

R: That would be interesting because I, as I say, I was writing catalog copy for the program,

for the department, it wasn’t a program then. For the Department of Family and

Community Education at the time. Trying to define what might be potential jobs for

graduates of the program and what I think-. The big argument was—and I still think it

applies, I think it applies even more today than then—but the argument was that what we

are basically trying to help people develop the skills to do is to define their own jobs

because it’s a time of great change. You can’t say there are X number of slots and we’re

training them to fill these slots, for example, go through dental school and we know


exactly what their skills will need to be for the existing jobs. But we need to train people

to think and criticize and imagine new possibilities, visualize and define new jobs.

[laughing while talking: So that’s interesting.] Hm. I can look up that catalog if that’s of

any interest.

I: Sure. Sure. Well, that’s-. I mean, this is all very interesting. I suppose it’s a good place to

shift and just ask more broadly about your, your experience with and your impressions of

the Women’s Talent Corps. And the, particularly these, these paraprofessional programs

that began to develop.

R: They’re somewhat separate in my mind in terms of-

I: Sure.

R: —um, my view-, I would say my view of the Women’s Talent Corps is that it was-,

Audrey Cohen was incredibly effective. Incredibly effective. And she made things

happen. And she made things happen basically by starting a new institution. And so she

didn’t have to do the gradualism and the bureaucratic negotiations that she might have

had to do if she was [laughing while taking: trying to do it within Teachers College or

Columbia.] And so I think she was very effective.

I think that, as you bring up in your paper, the fact that the unions played into the

creation of not just an idea of jobs, but jobs that were central to the institutional structure

at the time meant that there was a real set of positions, um-, more, more solidly defined

positions than there would have otherwise been. And so to use a cliché, she was in the

right place at the right time. But that’s not quite right. She had the skills to define the

place the way it needed to be at the right time, at the time when there was an opening for

that. She had a broad network of connections and she was, I think, very skillful in terms


of all the different people. All the different people she contacted and her network was

incredibly large and she was very effective. From my point of view, it was good because

we could send students to teach at the College of Human Services. And so it gave her

teachers and it gave us students from our department. And it also gave a reality to some

of the things we were trying to do here in terms of the idea that we are going to train

people to create jobs, to define jobs. I say that today and it’s a time of decline in some

things, radical shifts and new kinds of technological development. I always feel

somewhat awkward when I sit here in a tenured position, advising students, and say:

What do you want to do? We’re going to help you think of possibilities and give you the

skills to define jobs. Now there probably are fewer possibilities. But at that time, it wasn’t

unreal because there was federal funding.

I: Mmm.

R: It was the era of the Great Society and these weren’t empty words. Someone could go out

and have an idea for how to create a more egalitarian society, create opportunities for

those who wouldn’t have had them. It wasn’t just abstract. “We’re going to work for

equity and we’re going to have benchmarks for equity.” I’m not saying it was all totally

sincere or ever is, but I’m saying it wasn’t unreal.

And I think the fact that Audrey was able to move from this little idea we talked

about in her kitchen to creating a college that had a faculty and had students and had

students placed in positions is astonishing. And it gave me courage that what we were

arguing for, for example, creating positions for coordinators of paraprofessional programs

for the students from our department was not unreal. At that time, they were almost all

doctoral students. We had very few Master’s students. Now it’s largely a Master’s


institution. Just in the last three or four or five years, Teachers College has shifted

drastically.

I: Right. Right.

R: I think that’s not good entirely, but that’s another issue. That’s a different timeframe. But

um-, I think uh-. Like Bruce Buglione, who’s the one that was a student in our

department and married another student, um-. I think he, he had a job there at the College

of Human Services. You might look him up. Bruce Buglione, do you have that name in

there?

I: I do. Yeah. And I think I’ve seen his name in some of the records. I need to go back and

double-. You know-

R: Well, he was there for quite a long time. He, he became ill and died much, much too

young, let’s say. But he had a longstanding job there. I’m not sure the number of years of

anything, but I do know he was there quite a while. And I think Vera, Vera Hammad, I

think she kept her name from her previous marriage, Andy Hammad. I don’t think he was

involved. Look up Vera Hammad.

I: I will. Yeah.

R: I think she, she never got a regular faculty position and I don’t know how they worked

out whether they had tenure of the faculty in the end or just were very god about

reappointing people who did well. I’m not sure how that ended up working out. I was too

concerned at that point with things going on inside Teachers College. I would say it’s a

quintessential example of a time when someone can make a difference. And by really

going outside-. I mean, it’s within the usual institutional models, but starting something

quite new, quite new. And it was possible because of federal funding. It’s like a lot of the


WPA things, a latter-day version of some of that, where things actually were started that

had a lasting influence and became institutions that continued. And I think that it

probably did. I don’t know the outcomes in terms of their graduates. I’m talking about the

general ideas and the outcomes for students who were graduates of this department to go

and work there.

I: And, but these things connect in important ways.

R: Oh, they do.

I: Yeah. Thank you.

R: They absolute do.

I: And …

R: It’s all part of the ethos of the time. You see? And it’s also part of the federal funding.

And the fact that it is, as I was trying to say before, it wasn’t just empty thoughts. It

wasn’t just hollow notions of: “Let’s have equity.” And I’m not saying what we’re doing

now in terms of equity is wrong, but we’re talking about equity in terms of more

positions on the faculty, more people graduating from high school, and all that. But this

was starting a new institution. This was really starting a whole new institution. And I

think I happened to be looking at some of that. You know that Ric Burns film on the

history of New York—

I: Yeah.

R: —series? I happened to be looking at a couple of segments of that with my son who was

in town on sabbatical. And we got to that section where Robert Moses is taking over and

the World’s Fair and all these models of cars. And then along comes Jane Jacobs, this

housewife. (heh, heh) She and her other activist women are taking on this great big


demagogue. Now in my childhood, he did great things because he did beaches and stuff

that we went to, but at a later point, he was from some points of view, he was really

wrecking the communities in the city. I’m not saying Audrey Cohen was quite like a Jane

Jacobs. But in a way, it was, you know, someone saying: Well, I guess if we father the

right people, we’ll do it. And she did it.

I: That’s amazing. And the WPA point you made reminded me also that she even had some

people who had connections to the era. A woman named—

R: I-

I: —Ann Cronin in particular.

R: Right. Right. I think that while the Great Society was in a way harking back to some of

those ideas. And it was, I think, locally, too, because some of the things that were done in

Harlem were started during the WPA era. That was also a model. I keep thinking that I

would like to go back to that more now than I have. It would have to play out differently

now. But it was a model for doing things in communities and creating jobs. Not just

creating jobs, but also trying to deal with real needs. Now you can argue from today’s

ecological perspectives, some of the things that were done during the WPA, like the

Tennessee Valley Authority, were too big, the dams were too big and they hurt local

communities by flooding and removing them in the interests of rural electrification.

There were some things that one might do very differently now from an engineering/

ecological point of view. But it was a time when there was a sense that it was possible to

pull us out of disasters and crises and problems through government action, in that case

the federal government mostly, but with all kinds of involvement of local groups. And

you could redefine things and you could think of things that hadn’t been done.


And I think that was part of the—I can’t say the impulse for the Parent Teacher

Teams here, but it was part of the ethos of the time in which that project developed here.

I: That’s a great segue into the Parent Teacher Teams then.

R: Right. Right. And the Parent Teacher Teams I was involved as the one who was directing

the training program. But Fritz Ianni—you must have his name somewhere. Is he all over

the place?

I: Yeah. Just let me-. I don’t know, I don’t know much about him. I know the name because

it’s on the various documents that are associated with the-

R: He was an anthropologist, very flamboyant. He wore very smart Italian suits and he was

Italian American. He studied the Mafia and made a point that he did. He drove fancy cars

and had [laughing while talking: his office in the trunk of his car.] And he kept moving

offices around Teachers College, when he would get tired of one and move to another.

And he was one of the Division Directors. At that point, the College was divided into

divisions. (That went out in a subsequent reorganization.) There was the Division of

Philosophy, the Social Sciences, and Education. There was the Division of Psychology

and Education. There was the Division of Educational Institutions and Programs, the

Division of Instruction, and the Division of health Services, Sciences, and Education.

There are people who have never gotten over the demise of the grand old Philosophy and

the Social Sciences Division.

There will be a memorial next Tuesday for Professor George Bond. He was one

of the long-time faculty members, an anthropologist in the Division of Philosophy and

the Social Sciences. Lawrence Arthur Cremin was very involved in the ideas supporting

this Division. There were similarities with the Russell Sage Foundation idea of making


the social sciences available to the practicing professions. The idea was that Teachers

College was not just a normal school and not just a school where we had the practical arts

of teaching, but where we truly needed to incorporate intellectual frameworks from the

social sciences and humanities. This meant incorporating these foundations on the TC

faculty, not just by drawing from the departments at Columbia University. As I see it, this

was a different version of what the Russell Sage Foundation was doing. Both were trying

to use scholarly knowledge to teach people who were going to be in the various educating

professions so they could think themselves and figure out how to do the practical tasks in

classrooms. The education of those in the educating professions in this view was not just

the more practical training of how to discipline students when you walk into the

classroom or how you will write on the chalkboard.

I may be simplifying it, mocking stereotypes and critiques of the more practical

views. But that was very much part of the ethos that Cremin and others were setting forth

at that time at Teachers College. That was one of the struggles. And there were critics, for

example, Harry Judge, who wrote one critical report. Do you have his name anywhere?

I: Hm-. [rustling papers] No.

R: He was a professor from Oxford University. He was on the adjunct group of the National

Academy of Education (clears throat) which I was privileged to be voted into way back.

Cremin was one of the founding leaders. Harry Judge wrote a report based on interviews

with a number of faculty, oral history interviews, but not extensive interviews. Those

interviewed were social scientists on the TC faculty to see whether they were like the real

deal, real social scientists, and what they thought they were doing in a school of

education.


This led to some very controversial discussions about whether social scientists

should be on the Teachers College faculty or the School of Education should draw on the

graduate faculties in the disciplines. And whether faculty in a school of education have

come out of actual work in schools. Does anyone who was looking at the history of

education or who was looking at the sociology of families or the anthropology of kinship

structures, do they really have a place in education? Or is that too remote?

And Cremin was arguing, partly because things were changing rapidly, that we

need the disciplines. And they’re fundamental. And others were saying no, that’s putting

down the practice and we need to emphasize the practice. That was a debate this

morning-

I: Mmm.

R: —in another guise—

I: Yeah.

R: —in the faculty meeting. In any case, the Parent Teacher Teams were supported in part

by a grant from the Ford Foundation for work in the practicing professions that also

included some anthropological studies in schools. I was very young and very new and

maybe very timid, and glad to have any chance to do something that looked important.

And this looked important.

We had in the course of the larger grant done some work in studying schools on

the Lower East Side. Somewhere there should be a report on that. This offered

background for the Parent Teacher Teams. In studying schools, I was going with Fritz

Ianni and others to a school on the Lower East Side and trying to get a view of the

everyday life of urban schools. As social scientists, we actually studied in and looked at


schools. Even if we were teaching in schools, we also studied in and looked at schools. I

can remember one fascinating thing we observed. I didn’t tell you about this, did I?

Kids would be sitting on the sidewalk outside the school. We would go in and try

to be anthropologists and ask what is this? What are the kids sitting on the sidewalk?

They were right outside the principal’s office. It seemed you could sort of smell a little

bit of questionable smoke in the air. (laughter) And it turned out there was a grating and a

heating vent, so that it was a warm comfortable place to sit. When you’re doing field

observations, you’re not going in with a questionnaire. You are going to look at the

school and try to figure out what’s going on. But what did we find? We found kids sitting

on the sidewalk outside the principal’s office. With a little whiff of very familiar smoke

at that time everywhere. (heh, heh)

I: (heh, heh)

R: [laughing while talking: But whiff of something unmentionable. Legalized

unmentionable now. But—

I: Right.

R: —not then.] (laughter) But then we found out, by digging around and going in and

talking with people that the funding for the school was dependent on attendance. This

was generally know, but we didn’t know how it played out in this particular school. The

funding that schools received was based on attendance. If the attendance was low, the

school funding would go down. There wasn’t all the high-stakes testing there is now. But

the principals were very concerned with keeping the attendance up because their funded

depended on it.


On the other hand, the kids were very determined not to go to school any more

than they had to. Because why would you, for heaven’s sake, get in a stuffy classroom

where people are telling you things that you don’t want to know? Where are you going to

do? You can’t go just anywhere. But outside there’s this nice warm place because the

heat is coming up from the vent. It happens to be underneath the window of the

principal’s office. But are you going to get rounded up and brought back to school?

Somehow or other, it seemed as if the kids went in and checked in, so they had

checked in as present. Then there was a tacit agreement, and I’m not saying this was

openly known, but there was a tacit agreement that no one was going to reprimand them

for [laughing while talking: sitting and smoking in front of the principal’s office on the

heated sidewalk if they kept the attendance up.]

I: This is a, this is a middle school?

R: What’s that?

I: This is a middle school?

R: It was a middle school. Yeah.

I: That’s incredible.

R: Yeah. So that’s what fieldworkers saw [laughing while talking: in those days. And that

was an example of the kinds of projects that Fritz Ianni was involved in.]

At this time, the Parent Teacher Teams became a possibility. And since I had

done fieldwork in schools and I was doing families and had taught community mental

health through the Clinical Psychology program, and had written on families and kinship,

I had by then accepted the idea that I needed to do family studies. I was working on

families and television, and had a grant from the Spencer Foundation. Later I received a


Guggenheim to study family memories. And by then I found research on families really

interesting, that is after I started working on family memories. But that’s a later saga.

I: Yeah.

R: In any case, the paraprofessional training program came to us with funding from Ford. It

seemed to be a great thing to do because clearly out views of the schools that we got

showed that all kinds of things were going on in schools and that some sort of school

reform was needed. I don’t know that it was so terrible that the kids were [laughing while

talking: enjoying themselves outside the principal’s office and nothing was going to

happen to them because of this.] At that time, there wasn’t the amount of test prep there

is today. And it was attendance rather than test scores that was the big budgetary

consideration. Maybe it wasn’t a terrible thing.

But it clearly alerted us, or alerted me. I can’t really speak for others to the idea

that it would be a very good thing if people of the community who understood a little

more about what’s going on in the community were involved in the schools. Probably the

people in the schools were pretty savvy about what the kids wanted and maybe this was

an unnecessary argument. But the argument I bought and a lot of people did was that it

would be really good for the school if there were more people from the community

involved. You just start off your paper with that idea. There is a great virtue of this

woman who was of the community, had the experience, was a good mother, and knew

what was really going on.

At the same time, there was all this wonderful notion of the community. There

was a lot of sense that Columbia is that institution on the hill and you walk down the

other side to Harlem and Columbia is up above. This image meant that it was arrogant


and exclusive. I think it’s much more so now in many ways because it’s not so selective.

This year, they had 33,000 undergraduate [laughing while talking: applications and

rejected 31,000.] It’s—

I: True.

R: —it’s exclusive in different ways. But it was very much the notion that if you want to

work in the community, you’ve got to get into the community. And the people on the

faculty, unless they happen to be of the community—and what that meant exactly wasn’t

clear. It didn’t just mean race. It meant maybe class. Maybe background. In order to have

the proper understanding of the community, you had to have people of the community.

And then there was the question of the need for more people in positions in the

schools. And so the Parent Teacher Teams project seemed to be an ideal way to work

forward. I certainly did not anticipate that paraprofessional positions would become

institutionalized in the way they did when we started the Parent Teacher Teams project.

At that time, these were marginal positions. But we had the notion that the people who

were going to be these paraprofessionals—I think “paras” is a slightly later term.

I: Mm-, yeah, that’s probably right.

R: In any case, they had to have an educational level at least of the grade in which they were

working. So if they were going to be assistants in fourth grade, they had to have a fourth

grade literacy level. Whatever that meant and however you measured it. But they didn’t

have to necessarily be high school graduates or have certainly no college or teaching

credentials, obviously. And then there was this very strong feeling, I think in some ways

romanticizing knowledge. And putting down, sort of like a guilt trip against academic

knowledge as being Ivory Tower. (We had a similar discussion today in the faculty


meeting about “professors of practice.”) If you come from a discipline, if you’re not a

professor of practice, you can’t do the real deal. You don’t know the real thing.

But there was very much a sense that somehow the knowledge of those who have

been disenfranchised, the knowledge of the minorities, the knowledge of the people in the

community was more powerful, more relevant in many ways than the knowledge in the

university. But then what are we doing? Well, we have some knowledge that those in the

community don’t have or, you know, or do we just have the credentials? There were big

debates about this. What knowledge is it that matters?

So there was a notion that the whole program would include a career ladder,

which you mentioned. This should be, on the one hand, a way to build the knowledge of

the community into the schools and into school programs. On the other hand, it should

create job opportunities for those who were doing these jobs and that would mean a

ladder of advancement. That would mean, first of all, some literacy skills that some of the

Parent Teacher Team members didn’t have. If you’re going to be helping with teaching

reading or helping with teaching writing, then you should have a certain level of fluency.

The idea was that there would be a program of courses in education that would include

literacy skills. And then eventually a chance to move up the career ladder to teaching. I

don’t know what it was from the very beginning, but this was all being negotiated and

worked out in many quarters, not just here at Teachers College, One idea was that the

career ladder should include high school equivalency and should lead to college

admission for those who qualify.

Eventually someone who came in from the community could get whatever level

of literacy improvement was needed to be at the level of grade in which they were


working. They were presumably at that level when they came in, although we didn’t

really do any screening to be sure. And then they could do high school equivalency and

they would have an equal opportunity to go to college. And the institution in which they

were getting this training would open up the doors.

I: And so how did that all work? Or did it?

R: Let me take a quick break [laughing while talking: and come back and tell you that.]

I: Absolutely.

R: —next part of the saga.

I: Yeah. Let me find my, my pause button.

R: Yeah.

I: I’ll press stop.

R: Press pause.

[End of Part I Recording, Beginning of Part II]

I: And so this again is Nick Juravich back with Professor Hope Leichter at Teachers

College on October 23, 2014.

R: All right. I'm happy to continue. This is, this is actually great—

I: Thank you so much.

R: --fun to-. It's fascinating to and fantastic to have someone interested in--, and I told you

this last time, of the period that I lived through and people seem to think didn't happen.

You know. So I think this is, it's recent enough history so that it's, there still are people

who have [laughing while talking: done it and feel they ought to know about.] When we

recapitulate it today.


But let me just tell you, you're saying it's helping to know something about the

intellectual atmosphere at the college at the time—

I: Absolutely.

R: --and how this fit in with the intellectual frameworks. And I do recommend you look at

Lawrence Arthur Cremin's--, I mean you probably have.

I: A little bit. Yeah. But—

R: Well—

I: --probably not as much as I should.

R: You more-, more, more and more. You can't read too much of Cremin. Um-. Uh-. And

um-, he did push another program. He was very supportive of the Family and Community

and also started a program on educating and the educating professions, which was to have

people who would do rotations in various community organizations and um-. That's a

whole other history but the social atmosphere at the time is, is, is just one little anecdote.

(clears throat) Um-.

Not even an anecdote. A vignette rather. Um-. During part of this history, John

Fisher--. Do you know? Have you? Has that name come up?

I: (flipping papers) Don't know it, I'm afraid.

R: John Fisher was president of Teachers College. He passed away I think a couple of years

ago. He was a very proper and upright um-, former school principal, and I believe in the

Baltimore schools, and had been involved successfully in desegregating schools. And he

had-, and he's Johns Hopkins and he had a very lovely, lovely wife who was um-, very


adept at the social graces of a-, sort of Southern social graces. And (clears throat) she

would, they would give at the president's house which was in a building that's now a-. I

don't even know what's in there now. But um-, Cremin, when he was president, never

moved into the house cause he believed in keeping your own residence and not getting

hooked on the perks of the job. And he had an apartment on the East side where he kept

(___?). But this was used for, for receptions and things then. But, and he, he would give

dinners there. But um-, John Fisher and his wife would give um-, dinners, Christmas

dinners for the family. And (clears throat) with a little bit of a problem because there

were, I think, at that point a couple of us who were--, and that the family would be--, the

Teachers College family would be the Chairs, the department Chairs, and maybe the

division directors, and the president and his wife. And then there would be-, it would be

formal, black tie. Uh-, not white tie, but black tie. And the distinction was well known to

[laughing while talking: those of Southern heritage and] um-, and you would go. And

there was a little problem because two of us who were women department Chairs both

has spouses and what do you do? Because after the dinner, you are supposed to retire and

the ladies go to powder their noses and the men go to smoke cigars. And I mean, I-, I

[laughing while talking: swear this is true.] (laughter)

I: I believe it. (laughter)

R: And but on the other hand, the cigar smoking is a time for the Chairs to get together and

um-, you know, [speaks with a deep voice: informally talk about the big issues of the

day] and so forth. And what are you going to do with these two uh-, women Chairs who

clearly can't smoke cigars. I mean, first of all [laughing while talking: I don't smoke.

But--] that wasn't even an option. We couldn't smoke cigars. We had to powder our noses


because heaven knows, we had to powder our noses [laughing while talking: whatever

that meant.]

I: (laughter)

R: Um--. And so it was of course divided as you could guess. The women Chairs went to

powder their noses.

I: (heh, heh)

R: And (laughter) [laughing while talking: the spouses of the women Chairs went] to smoke

cigars and um-, discuss the politics of the institution with the men. And Norma came--,

the, the president's wife, came with us to powder our [laughing while talking: noses and

John went] and we were, per John and Norma, if we were Chairs. (laughter) Others, I

think, on the faculty had to call him Professor and Mrs. or whatever, but we were (___?)

Chairs so we could, we could call him John.

I: Huh.

R: But um-. At a certain point--. This went on for a few years and I can't tell you how many.

It seems like quite a few cause it was always a thing, I mean, what are you going to wear?

Do you have a--, proper--. And, you know, I think [laughing while talking: most

academics don't have—

I: [laughing while talking: Right.]

R: --and] um--. We happened to go to Vienna to some occasions the-, parenthetically, so I

think my husband, at that point, had a tuxedo or he knew how to rent them. So that was

OK. We, we managed to do that. But at a certain point, um-, Fritz Ianni, this is getting


back to the paraprofessionals a little-, it's a little uh-, round about. But it's talking about

the atmosphere at the time. Um-. That was, you know, very sort of hierarchical and

proper in a sense that you were in your hierarchical position because of proper

publications and uh-. And yet we were doing good. John Fisher was here out of the

school system because he had desegregated schools. And yet, we-. I mean I don’t think

that we had um-, I don't know who was waiting on table. But I don't know what their race

was. (heh, heh) I--. [laughing while talking: I was too busy worrying about whether I

was properly dressed.]

But I suspect, I suspect they were of the community, serving us at the dinner.

Yeah. Actually, I do remember. They were.

I: Right.

R: By and large. But in any case, we had desegregated the schools and we were, we were

doing this in our formal attire [laughing while talking: and--]. But, at a certain point, Ed

Gordon, who was um-, head of IUME [the Institute for Urban and Minority Education at

Teachers College], Ernest Morrell's-, one of his predecessors, um-, professor here for

many years. You, you must, he must be in records.

I: Yes. Yes.

R: And have you talked with him?

I: I haven't spoken with him personally yet. No.

R: Well, anyway, he was um-, very, very um-, fine psychologist, African American uh-,

married to a white woman who was a physician. But um-, um-, he was African American.


Uh-. The fact that his wife was white was, you know, one of these things that some

people did [laughing while talking: but--] but um-, no, but they had a wonderful

relationship. I don't mean in any way to say anything in anyway critical of them cause

they had a longstanding relationship. And, and uh-, um-, but he was very for working

with the community and so, and Fritz Ianni was, you know, studying the Mafia and very

flamboyant. So one Christmas, Fritz Ianni [laughing while talking: arrives in a velvet

tuxedo of some color.] Not like, you know, like this kind of bright colors.

I: (heh, heh)

R: And a velvet tuxedo. And Ed arrives in a dashiki. And (laughter), and they, they still-, I

mean we have our name tags at the table and the formal setting and all the silverware in

the right places and all. And um-, um-, we still retired and I think uh-, the women

[laughing while talking: didn't have the benefit of any one in more, more--.] I mean,

women get to dress up at an occasion like that. But segue a little bit forward, and I'm, you

know, skipping all the details.

In any case, that was kind of a-, that represented--. The reason I tell you the story

is cause it represented the tensions internal to the institution at that time of where we

still--. And it comes up later in the Parent/Teacher Teams where we are a very renowned

institution with all those formalized traditions and tenure and status and distinctions of

rank. And, and yet we're-, our big mission is equity and redressing the balances of

slavery, and, and the segregation of the schools. And the same kinds of things we're still

talking about today. Um-, and, you know, we're still getting over the, the, the well, World

War II got us out of the Depression if you want to have one interpretation. But in any

case, we weren't dealing with the Depression mentality. But we were, we still knew that


there were works projects that could get you, could make, could help you improve the

economic system. But we weren't going to lose the formality.

So—

I: That's fascinating.

R: Segue a little bit forward. Larry Cremin becomes president. And his wife, Charlotte, have

you talked with her?

I: I haven't. No.

R: Well, she doesn't--, she's very private. But she's now I think in California and one of their

children died-

I: Mm-

R: --uh-, shortly after he passed away. And, and um-, um-, but she was a daughter of

someone who was a faculty member at Columbia, Barnard, here maybe. And super, super

smart math person. And she happens to be a crossword puzzle champion. And sort of like

a real super brilliant, brilliant, brilliant person, but, but was happy to have two kids and,

and uh-, do the wifely role. But she was not about to do the elegant Southern dinner. And

Larry was a very fine pianist. Almost become, became a concert pianist rather than a

professor of history. And so, we suddenly had parties at their house. And what was

everyone doing? Well, we had to wear skirts that were long enough so that we could sit

on the floor and not be uncomfortable. But everyone was sitting around, sitting on the

floor.

I: (heh, heh)


R: [laughing while talking: And Larry was playing the piano brilliantly. And] then we were

still talking some of the same issues. But there was so uh-, thing of the Chairs dividing up

by [laughing while talking: gender and powdering their noses or smoking cigars.] We

were sitting on the floor. And, and uh-, listening to Larry play or singing song and, and I

don't think we danced. Dancing was maybe--. Somehow--, I don't know what it was about

sitting on the floor. It was part of the sort of the [laughing while talking: liberation of the

time.]

I: (heh, heh)

R: And, you know, I think if you want to understand a move of liberation of any kind, it's

useful to have the, put it juxtapose it in images so you know what we were rebelling

against.

I: Yeah.

R: Not that it was a big rebellion. But Charlotte also said um-, admirably, we are not going

to serve a single meal at the president's house. And she was a housewife, except mainly

she was doing math and crossword puzzles. But she was not working in, in a profession

outside the home. But she loved to cook. And she wasn't going to have the people, the

staff, doing all the work.

And I don't know whether that was an equity--, it partly was, I think. I don't know.

She'd have to talk to that point. She'd probably come up with a completely different

recollection. But in any case, she was going to cook part of every meal at the president's

house.

I: Oh, wow.


R: And she was a very good cook. And so she would uh-, cook the food and she didn't cook

the whole thing. She didn't cook all the courses. But every meal, I think she started out

with that, but then it became a little too big. But every meal that there was a party at the

president's house at that point, she would, if she was.-- I'm not saying he didn't have other

parties that maybe were more work related, but the, the holiday celebrations and all, she

would always cook a meal and serve it. And walk around and serve it.

So I think that little vignette maybe gives you a sense of these, these mixed

messages that were going on. I mean, John Fisher was the great integrator of the schools.

Of public schools. But the hierarchy, the formality, the sense that we are here because we

know somehow more than other people was still there. And yet there was Fritz Ianni and

his [laughing while talking: velvet tuxedo and Ed Gordon in a dashiki.] And then,

Charlotte having us sit on the floor.

I: That is really--. That's quite a transition.

R: Well, it is and you see, I think it's representative of--, I, I think we're not sitting on the

floor quite the same way now. But uh-. Although last, the year before last, there was a

floor sitting episode. But that's another story. [laughing while talking: In any case--]

Students sitting on the floor outside—

I: Right.

R: --and the faculty revolting on uh-, bonuses [laughing while talking: that the

administration but--.] Another. That's outside the [laughing while talking: historic period

we're talking about so I won't—

I: That's true.


R: --bring that in.] But I, I do think that to understand what we thought we were doing, one

needs to think about the-, both the bodies of scholarship we were drawing on.

I: Yeah.

R: And then the kind of way it played out in the, the social relations within the institution.

That said, um-, Fritz Ianni was, you know, he was um-, very flamboyantly idealistic. And

he was an anthropologist in the sense that he went everywhere and papers would get lost

in his car trunk. But then they could be found if you found out where he parked and

[laughing while talking: got the key and went and got them and] and um-. But he

believed in going into the community and being of the community and he also believed in

kind of emphasizing the more informal side of relationships here. Although he was, he

ran the division with an iron hand. I mean, he, we-, we did all the things you, you do in a

meeting. You, you um-, you come at a time and uh-, and you meet and you have papers

and you process them and you vote on things and, you know, that didn't change. We

weren't doing a, a occupy [laughing while talking: movement at Teachers College] and

sitting around without formal structural leadership. But what specifically about the

Parent/Teacher Teams in this kind of context-. And I'm mixing some of the periods, but

um-. There was this sense of possibility. And there was this sense that we had to play our

part in working with the community, in helping the community, in making up for the past

crimes. And I don't think the vocabulary then was that-, there's a lot of that today in

certain quarters that you, you have to um-, recognize white privilege. And if you don't go

through whatever training program it is to uh-, recognize that you're privileged or

recognize, I don't know, male privilege. It's more talked about white privilege. But maybe

recognize male privilege. But um-.


We had one of those mandatory--. What was it? What were we being mandated-,

mandated to do? This is one of these like FRPA, new federal requirements. A year ago

we had-. I think it was mandatory sexual harassment, which is a funny way to phrase it.

But I think we had to-, somehow we had an outside consultants come in and that's a much

more now than then. And we had to go through training where we recognized our white

privilege and, and uh-. I don't know. Could it have been sexual harassment?

I: Yeah. That has been a big issue certainly—

R: I think maybe it was—

I: --for the university.

R: --It--. I think it was. But in any case, um-, one of the first issues that came up with the

paraprofessional training pro-, program specifically was where do we hold-. I mentioned

this last time.

I: Yeah. I know.

R: And in this context of on the one hand, you know, this is the school where we stand for

desegregation. Um-. There was a very strong sense that we had to go to the community.

And we had to set up storefront uh-, offices in various places. And I was doing that for

the clinical psych program. I took the clinical psych students over on, on where was it? It

was Lexington or somewhere and 117th Street to get to this community clinic at one

point, and arrived - maybe I told you that last time -- and arrived and found that there'd

been a couple of people shot—

I: Oh, you didn't tell me this. No.


R: Drug related things. And so the community was a real community. That was, you know,

real community. Well, I was a little unnerved because I had all these like 15 or so, 20 uh-,

clinical psych students. I was about, about the same age they were at that point. But in

any case, I was, I had the professorial responsibility for their safety and we get to this

place where we're supposed to see community um-, mental health program. And

somebody's been shot in a drug-related act of violence, and, and uh-, um-.

But nevertheless, there was the sense that, that if you want to get over the um-,

hostility that the community feels towards Columbia, the hatred of the institution on the

hill, the sense that there's privilege there that we don't have, um-. If you want to get

beyond that, you have to walk the walk so to speak. You have to go into the community.

And I'd done a lot of that and that maybe was one of the reasons I was asked to do this.

And it was also cause I was doing stuff on families and, and these were basically--. They

were mostly women, but they were bringing-, it was the idea of bringing families into

schools or family members into schools and, and therefore bringing the voice of the

community.

But then what, where, where were we going to hold it? Well, we--. Related to that

was the question of what kinds of knowledge did we have to impart or offer? And um-,

there was all this: Well, you know, you want to be participatory and it was phrased a little

differently from the way it is now. But you want to let people choose what they want and

so forth. But we had a question of who's going to available to teach. And, and partly for

scheduling reasons, if we wanted to have lectures and workshops, uh-, and take

advantage of the faculty at the college, and take advantage of the scheduling issues of the

people in the paraprofessional training program (coughs) we couldn't go running around


to a lot of-. We couldn’t get enough people to run around on the right schedule. It's not

that they wouldn't have been willing to do it. But we couldn’t have a whole program by

going out into the community each time we did it.

And so we ended up--. And there was, it was very controversial. And I don't know

whether it's in any of the reports or this may be something that um-. You know, it was

very hard to pull off because it was so frowned on. It was seen like so politically incorrect

to say we're going to-, we're not going to go into the community. We will offer courses at

the college. Um-. But we did and I, as I say, it was partly for practical reasons. But then, I

also--. I don't know whether I really knew in advance, but I also thought, and I’m not sure

where Fritz Ianni was, cause he was always-. You could hardly ever find him. He was

always somewhere. So he would have been anywhere but in one of his Ferraris or

something. (heh, heh) But um-.

We decided uh-, that we would hold the training programs at TC. And we would

have lecturers. And then--. And I don't think you could do this today, uh-, cause the

whole financial structure's different. I don't think we had to--. As far as I know, and Fritz

Ianni was handling the budgets of the project. And I don’t know, and I don't think there's

anything in the files that I have that would talk to this point, but I don't think we paid the

college for the use of rooms, which you would have to do now.

I: Right. Right.

R: And I don't think we had to--. We didn't have IDs. You didn't have to have IDs to get in

the college at those points, that time. So we didn't have um-. Anyone could come in and

so--. But they couldn't use the library. You had to have an ID to use the library. But not


to-. Now you would use the ID to get in and then you can go right into the library. But

um-. We did get permission for the members of the parapro-, Parent/Teacher Teams to

use the library and to bring their children into the library. And we even got permission –

and this, I think it's closed now anyway, but we got permission for the children, or the

parents and their children to use the swimming pool.

And that, you know, that sounds like a trivial thing, but it was a big, big deal then

to the people in the program. A lot of people really liked it, took advantage of it. And

then they could go home and say, which was in a way only partly true, that they were

going to Columbia. And, and that I didn't really anticipate, it was-. I sort of thought that

would be the welcoming thing to do, but I also, it was-, as I say, partly pragmatic in terms

of scheduling. But uh-.

So we did that and I don't think we could do that today here in the same way. I

mean, the swimming pool doesn't exist. The children lib-, books and children's section of

the library doesn't exist. And I don't think we'd get permission for bringing a, a group in. I

was on the library committee to get permission for a group that's working at the Natural

History Museum to come here and graduate students, not even of the community. I don't

think we could pull it off. For an event, maybe, but not for a--. You know, they had

passes. They could just come. They could come do their homework. They could come

with siblings. And um-.

Anyway, that was one part--. Now what's the message in that? The message is

that you do things and you don't always know all the implications as you're doing them.

You don't quite know what's, what's going to unfold. But I think it was welcoming and

democratic beyond what we in some ways would have consciously been able to plan. But


it was held here. Our, our part of the training program was held here. We did go out into

community areas and schools and stuff. But, but mostly what we did was here.

Then the second issue had to do with the curriculum. And that, I suspect in those

files there may be some--. There may or may not be. But um-, there probably are records

of who the lecturers were and what kinds of content. But it was, there was a lot of

controversy because again, the idea was that we would um-, have the community

involved in the decisions. The, the people in the program involved in the choices of

subject matter. And in those days, it wasn't like today. Any time you turn on NPR, there's

like half the program is people from the community calling in with their opinions and

their stories and their reactions. That kind of wasn't part of the ethos then.

But it was very much the idea that, that because these people in the community

had superior life experience – not just had life experience but had superior life experience

cause they'd overcome the hardships of poverty and racial discrimination. So they had

life experience that those in the college, some of the faculty had the same experience.

But, but institutionally, we didn't know this story. So, so the belief was. Um-.

So we thought what was needed--. We being the people who were involved in, in

planning the program, thought we needed to include things on the arts and music. So the

broad gamut of a humanistic education. And uh-, I can remember some heady meetings

with the, discussing with some of the community members who were, the para-, the team

members, para-, paraprofessionals who were part of the group that was trying to make the

decisions about what we would do. And they were saying: Well, you, you just want-.

This is racist. You just want to-. You just want us to have art and music cause, you know,

that's part of the stereotype that that's all we can do. Yeah. And, and--.


We were saying: Oh, you know (___?). No, this is (___?). (heh, heh) It's needed

and, and uh-. Art and literature is, is part of reading. Well, we want to, we want to have-.

You're, you're trying to block us from getting the basic skills. And—

I: That's fascinating.

R: Isn't that interesting? And it was, it was a-. I mean, I'm not saying it dominated the whole

thing. But these were very um-. It was, it was high energy. Every, everything we did was

high energy because it was always needing to be discussed. And it was a real thing. It

wasn't like the, the kind of nervous energy to figure out whether you're wearing the right

evening gown to John Fisher's Christmas party. That's a different [laughing while talking:

kind of high energy. Where you're going to hold our wine glass and the proper form.]

This was really--. I mean, we were negotiating real issues. And, and, and trying to decide

whether where we stood morally and, and what was, what was right and what was wrong.

These were real intense issues. And there were disagreements. It wasn't all like smooth

and happy and everyone saying: Oh, isn't this wonderful? We're being asked to

Columbia.

I mean, every single decision was, was a matter of either, either personal

discussion and negotiation or it was a matter of personal angst and, you know, sleepless

nights wondering are we doing the right thing or not. Or what are the issues here. But, we

ended up--. I think I mentioned last time, we had, among other things, we had Leland

Jacobs who was a professor of children's literature. Did I mention him before?

I: I don't know.

R: Well—


I: I'll write him down.

R: Leland Jacobs. He's passed away, retired and passed away a long time ago. But he was a

incredible-. He's just one example. We, we said well, we'll-. We had to get who we could

get. And there were a lot of people who were saying: Oh, isn't this wonderful. You're

doing this community thing. And isn't it nice we have young people on the faculty who

are doing such real important work in the community, like, you know, you're, you're too

young to do [laughing while talking: the real scholarship, but isn't it nice that you're

doing something.] [R: speaking here but out of range and the section that follows, she's

having trouble with the microphone: (___?)]

I: You've lost your lapel.

R: Oh, dear. No, that won't—

I: It's all right.

R: --do. I have--. (___?) words to say. You don't want to lose them.

I: Exactly. (heh, heh)

R: Um-. Um-. But we-, we--. (sighs) I can't say we were flying by the seat of our pants, but

we're-, it was really--. We didn't know how it was going to come out. And we were doing

something very new. And we had, we

had--. How am I going to get this on again?

I: The clip's kind of behind it.

R: What have I done? Did I twist it around?


I: Actually, I think you're OK. Yeah. If you pinch the clip there, it's sort of behind the mic.

R: Sure. I had it before. There. I should be able to get it again. Have I got it on now?

I: Perfect.

R: It's all right?

I: Yeah. I think it's, it's caught on your leg. That's why it—

R: Oh, well, I've been moving around.

I: That's quite all right. I've been doing the same. (heh, heh)

R: Moving around too much while talking. Um—

I: Don't worry about it.

R: But uh-. What were the principles that we were going on? One was that we needed a

more egalitarian society. And education was key to that. But two, that education needed

to include the broad gamut of the, the history and, and philosophy, and social science

and, and the arts. And that that was all part of it. And not just the reading, writing,

quantitative skills. Uh-.

And so it took discussion to try to get people in the, in the paraprofess-,

paraprofessional team, Parent/Teacher Teams to, to see our rationale. But then Leland

Jacobs managed to--. He was incredibly charismatic an incredible speaker. And he um-,

could just get a whole audience--. He'd be reading, like reading a children's book in this

incredible dramatic voice. And we'd have-, you know, like an auditorium filled with these

um-, 99 women and one man. We had one man in the group. And um-, they would just

be-, they were enthralled by him. And he would be just showing them the value of


children's literature. And then he had one among many sayings that um-, his mother, I

think somewhere in Minnesota, or somewhere in the Midwest, would say to him: Well,

you know, if you don't know a word when you're reading, don't stop. Just say teakettle.

And go on. And so he would [laughing while talking: read these, you know] very (___?)

get into the whole language, phonics debate. There isn't--. We were debating that at the

time. I mean, we were. That was being debated. But he was just saying, you know, let's

be practical. Let's say that this is a great story. You're going to lose the thread of the story

if you just don't keep moving. So teach the kids to just keep on and say teakettle and

move on.

But he would do this. And then the room was-, it was like a, it was like a church.

People were standing up and cheering and, and, and thoroughly engaged cause he was so

utterly charismatic. And so, that kind of was, to me, one example. And then it was partly

his personal style as much as the content. And you could very well have someone who

would give a much less engaging lecture on how to use children's literature to teach kids.

But we, we managed to have um-, I think a series of lectures and workshops

where people um-, from the college faculty who weren't ordinarily teaching um-, people

with a fourth grade, fifth grade literacy, um-, could do it. And, and, and could reach the

audience. And I'm not saying we always did. But then we had the issue of it being a, a

career ladder.

I: Right.

R: And the question of um-, high school equivalency. And I think I did mention this last

time, but you don't have it recorded, so I will tell that part of the saga again. Um-. We


wanted to get people through the high school equivalency, and nobody on the faculty was

really qualified to teach high school equivalency specifically. We had people doing math

and doing literature and writing and so forth. But the, the specifics of the test were less

known. And we happened to have a couple of people here. One was, one was named

George Ganzel who was, happened to be the husband of uh-, a woman who unfortunately

passed away, was a secretary, administrator in the, in the department of Family and

Community Education. George Ganzel. And he-, he was like a math whiz and really good

at, you know, acing exams. And so we hired him. And there was another person who was

an adjunct professor here, Charlie Slack. He'd gotten a doctorate and Harvard and, and

uh-, during the Timothy Leary era. And uh-, Harvard and Princeton and moved around

and was very sort of, like one of these genius types, sort of like overall genius types, who

can tackle any subject and has big ideas about everything. And his um-, he eventually--.

Well, another clothing--. I seem to have too many clothing stories. I think I've told you

this before, was a graduate student in the Department of Family and Community

Education who was a nun in a long habit. And—

I: Oh.

R: And then she moved up and the skirts got shorter and then eventually she was wearing a

mini skirt and then eventually she left the order, remained Catholic, and married Charlie

Slack. So--. [laughing while talking: It seems like this was a--. Family and Community

Education was a hot bed of romance--

I: (laughter)


R: --of unexpected kinds. But] in any case, he um-, Charlie Slack and George Ganzel were,

took over the, the um-, uh-, high school equivalency training program. But they couldn't

handle-, you need fairly small groups. And so we kind of--. And I can't remember

whether it was Fritz Ianni might have been the one that helped with this, but I don't know

for sure. I'd have to see if there are any records of that. Somehow or other, we managed

to find out that one of the best rates of passing the high school equivalency was at Riker's

Island, in the prison. And we were perhaps a trifle naïve. We didn't think that there might

be [laughing while talking: special reasons why the, the rate of success] on the exam was

high there. But um-. We got a couple of people from that program to come and, and work

in the program.

And we had so few people who passed the high school equivalency. But it, you

know, it's a, it's a long haul. And we didn't have the rates of high school um-, equivalency

passing that Riker's Island did. But then, the people in Riker's Island apart from any other

possible ways that the might have had an advantage uh-, were there. (laughter) And they

—

I: Right.

R: --[laughing while talking: had time and they didn't have children and they weren't

working in a school and they weren't commuting and uh--.] I subsequently worked with

someone who was in prison for 20 years, but she, when she got out, or--. She's now on

the School of Social Work faculty, but when she got out, she said--, I was working with

her on her doctorate and teaching out there, and she said: Oh, we had so much time in

prison to read. And, and, you know, that's [laughing while talking: not a reason to go to


prison obviously, but in any case] uh-, we didn't have great um-, high school equivalency

results. Um-.

I guess today in the high stakes testing, we might have been shut down for that.

But, but that was not the only thing that we were supposed to be doing. That was

supposed to be the career ladder by-product of the program.

Then, if, if you are doing it, and you know, some of this is not, not one step after

the other. But you, we're anticipating we're going to have a lot of people, so we have to

negotiate where are they going to go once they have the high school equivalency. And I

think I mentioned this last time. But I will tell it again. So somehow it fell to me and I

don't remember whether Fritz Ianni came along or not. I have a feeling he didn't uh-,

cause he had a way of not being there [laughing while talking: when it was tough and

being there when it was--]. No. That's unfair. But in any case, uh-, I don't know whether

he came with me or not. But I have this recollection of going very unsupported and alone

to one of the deans of General Studies and um-, arguing that um-, in addition to the high

school equivalency if someone had life experience in the community and could do all the

things you mention in your opening story of, of, you know, bringing the knowledge of the

community and working with children and making them, acting like a teacher, being as

good as a teacher. They surely qualified for um-, going to Columbia.

And it was a time when, you know, there was a lot of ferment in the air. But I

was, was like: How dare you? I was not greeted with open arms. And uh-, it was well-, I

mean I can't say that they quite said how dare you, but in essence, in a probably more

flowery, more academic way, I was told that oh well, the qualifications require a, a lot

more than just the high school equivalency. And the, you know, it's not the-. In those


days, there weren't the 33,000 applicants, which is partly an artifact of people applying to

so many schools, but there—

I: Right.

R: It wasn't like that at all. In fact, Columbia was not high on the desirable list because it

was considered unsafe in the middle of Harlem and drug infested and, and not, not a, not

on a--. It may be Ivy, but it wasn't an ideal place to go. The way it's seen now.

I: Right. Right.

R: But in any case, we did not have success getting um-, any idea of any sort of admissions

advantage even to general studies for people--. But mostly, they didn't get that far

anyway because, you know, it's a, as I say, it's a long haul if you have not just one child

in school, but many children in school. And you may be an ideal teacher whether the

training that we gave helped them in the schools in terms of the content, I don't know. I

don't think you can really ever know or measure that exactly. Even though we have all

sorts of supposed ways of measuring it today. But I think it gave them confidence. And I

think part of the unwitting effect of--, this is opinion, not, not evidence based, but

nevertheless, I think it gave confidence that they knew what real educators thought and

said and how they talked and what they did and what they were striving for. And I gave-,

I think it gave them personal confidence that they had, had the nerve to go into Columbia

and to be here. And to bring their children in and to take them for swimming lessons or

just swimming or--, and use the library here. And I think that may have been um-, as

valuable as the particular content. And possibly it's true with uh-, you know, what do you


get from Chicago or Oxford or Harvard? You get partly the confidence or lack of

confidence [laughing while talking: that you've been there and you can—

I: (laughter)

R: --do it.] Um-. But I think it came to an end. We didn't get the funding. Um--. I think it

was partly that we didn't, couldn't deliver on the career ladder. It's partly that part-, one of

the funding models at that time and subsequently, was seed money. And that was very

prevalent. And I can't tell you the details of how that worked out and, you know, whether

that was really, you know, whether we were supposed to, for renewal, we had to bring in

a certain amount of money or not. I can't tell you that. It may be in the files. But-. And I

didn't do all the financial negotiations. But the model was seed, seed money.

And uh-, again, I think that's often with start up community projects, not just then,

but subsequently. And if then there's some notion of a foundation or a government gives

a grant, if it's really good, then somebody else is going to pick up the tab to continue it.

And it doesn't happen that way. So it had a very-, it had very heady moments. Uh-, and

very painful aspects to it. And for me, it was very hard because I failed. I managed to run

a very exciting, good program, bring people here and have a lot of people just cheering

and thrilled and happy and-. But I didn't get anywhere in terms of negotiating a career

ladder or some sort of admissions preference to Columbia. And I was therefore

considered a traitor. A failure.

I: By whom?

R: People in the program.

I: Hm-


R: You know, why-. Who are you? Are you, are you just taking the side of the institution?

Why can't you do it? Or, you know. And it's, you know, at the time, well, what are you

going to do? Barricade the streets? Are you going to have a sit down? Are you going to

march? Are you--? And uh-. So it was very hard. It was very hard that we didn’t manage

to continue it.

Now, at-, subsequently, it became much more institutionalized and then there

were funding and I, I don't really know what happened through the City University. But-.

And now we're doing another version of it. We have uh-, the department of Family and

Community Education was closed and another round of negotiations, then Philosophy

and the Social Science was closed in yet a later round under Arthur Levine of

reorganizing the college. Now suddenly under Susan Fuhrman we have um-, EPSA, with

Educational Policy, and Social Analysis. But culture is out of it. And the anthropologists

are wandering around. And so a lot of institutional reorganization and a lot of change.

Uh--. And it, it--. Some of the things that seemed that, seemed so important then, I think I

mentioned that, that um-, I'm on the advisory board for the Teachers College Press. And I

was told at a meeting someone was doing something--, you know, community thing. And

I was saying how nice, but you ought to know the history. And they were saying, oh,

well, that history was all corrupt. It was all corrupt. The community boards were corrupt.

And money went-. Well, money goes, money goes in [laughing while talking: in, in the

elite institutions, money goes in places that some might deem uh-, less than savory. I'm

not going to say it in any other words for the moment cause this is being recorded even if

I can delete it.] But—

I: Fair enough.


R: Yeah. There may have been money in some of the community school boards that um-,

had accounting practices that would not pass muster and uh-, you know, maybe uh-, uh,

the powers that be were occupying the community school boards and later they [laughing

while talking: were occupying Wall Street. But uh--] it um-, was not a simple uh-, easy

time and not a straightforward success. And yet I think um-, I think it-.

I really wish, I hope that you will be able to write something that the people who

are doing another version of it now will be able to look at and understand um-, how, as

you say, it's not a simple model for something today. But to understand the parameters,

the special features of the social and economic situations at the time. And, it's not best

practices or what worked or what didn’t work, cause you're not going to recapitulate

those exact circumstances again. But to at least be aware of the fact that something has

been tried. And I think the lesson of what was hardest and what was, was seemingly most

enthusiastically greeted at the time is, is something to-, that people doing another version

now should know. I mean we have big um-. One of the-. I don't know whether she's a

provost. But in any case, we have a whole-, under Susan Fuhrman, we have a community,

school, university community school involvement and uh-, that's sort of a separate entity.

I have a graduate student, one of my advisees, working on it now. But some of the issues

are, are not that dissimilar.

A few years later, uh-, I was involved in a project just a couple of years ago, like

five years ago involved in a project with the Harlem Children's Zone and um-, again,

different time, different cast of characters, different uh-, configuration. Ed Gordon was

involved with the Harlem Children's Zone in the initial phases, but uh-, he wasn't wearing

a dashiki anymore. (laughter) [laughing while talking: That was of the earlier period.]


And Fritz Ianni, I think is long gone. And probably was wearing a velvet tuxedo to the

end of his life. I would imagine. (laughter)

So I don't know. Is this helpful?

I: This is tremendously helpful. I wonder—

R: Well what questions do you have?

I: I have questions in all directions now, so—

R: Please. Please. You ask questions cause I'm just talking and sort of reminiscing and

talking out loud. But I can probably tell you things that I haven't hit my mind in trying to

tell a saga. That if you ask questions—

I: Well, there's--. A few different ones. Maybe one thing to start with is so did you--. I

wanted to ask first if you taught some of the courses and the lectures and the actual

content that some of these, these Parent/Teacher Teams participants came into. And sort

of wondered if there were particular moments, you know, anecdotes, vignettes that stood

out from these interactions, from, from working with the parents themselves.

R: Well, I was involved in a lot of the workshops. I didn't do the lectures specifically cause

—

I: That's fine.

R: --the things I could have lectured on where families, and that was deemed the knowledge

of the community members already.

I: Right. Right.


R: But I think the, the, the one anecdote I gave you of the Leland Jacobs—

I: Mmm-hmm.

R: --was, was, you know, like an example of a breakthrough moment where something that

was not what was wanted, was not what was deemed um-, uh-, the chosen-, it wasn't the

first choice of, of if we could have all these--. I think we even ranked different, the

possible subjects and people--. I don't think everybody, but some people in some sort of

committee voted on what we would have. And then we did what we could do.

I: Right.

R: But uh-, I think there was, there was a-. You see, it was very mixed. I'm telling you the

bitter end.

I: Mmm-hmm.

R: But it was really very heady and very exciting. And, and uh-, I'd been-. And the reason I

told you all the background of-, perhaps more than you need to know, but I had-, it's not

as if I hadn't been doing the kind of sociological, anthropological work where I was going

out into the community. I wasn't doing anthropology. I never, I never had malaria. I didn't

go to New Guinea as my co-author did. And I, I haven't done overseas anthropology. But

I did a lot of walking around in wherever it was I was studying. So that part wasn't um-,

for me a new experience. But the idea of recognizing-. I came to see and I still do this in

my courses, the, the notion that there is a lot of wisdom. But it's not just empty to the

whole notion of life experience. Now I don't know that that translates into academically

phrased knowledge. I think there is a translation issue. But I do know that I was very


impressed by the um-, level of curiosity and interest and um-, you know, the abil-,

juggling ability.

We had a study of literacy in homes later, sub-, sep-, separate. But the-, one of

things the NAME Center did, but that, that was separate. But I think um-, the notion that

you know there is everyday literacy. I mean that was part of-, again, another part of the

academic atmosphere at the time. There were studies of literacy in community and

studies of practical--. Like there's some study, I think it was in North Africa or

somewhere, one of the-, Jean Lave or some one of the anthropologists that was um-,

doing--. Michael Cole, Jean Lave studying um-, everyday math. And, you know, the

notion that, that tailors in some-, I think it was North Africa, I can't-, I, I could find the

reference and look it up for you. But there's a whole body of literature showing that

everyday math is very uh-, the people know, people who can't do the math in school are

actually doing it in everyday life. And, you know, tailors and, and the, the-. We did this,

another, a separate study but it was not quite (___?) but, but also as I said, work (___?)

the center. Where you, we were going into homes and looking at everyday skills, reading

and writing and math and everyday literacies in the home. And the, the-, part of the math

example was always tailors in the tailor shop in wherever it was, Egypt, North Africa,

somewhere, were able to visualize and cut the patterns and, you know, not waste any

cloth and know how to rotate it and, you know, the kinds of things you get on a, on an

SAT or on a-, um-, an aptitude test. But they were doing it. And uh-.

I remember in, again not through the Parent para-, Parent/Teacher Teams Project,

but I was predisposed to look for that from the work with the, with the women, the

parents in the Parent/Teacher Team Project that we would-, we looked at patterns and


sewing in the home. And partly out of a literature. But, you know, yes, indeed, we did

find that um-, the everyday skills were cognitively sophisticated. And uh-, people who

did sewing and had limited budget could indeed figure out how to maximize the amount

of stuff you got out of a piece of cloth. And this is a mathematical skill. This is maybe a

geometric skill. But it's definitely a cognitive skill. And uh-. I had-. I think that kind of,

the-. That plus another aspect of the-. So the, the intellectual skills in the-, and this whole

argument that, of the knowledge, the life experience knowledge.

Another thing was juggling. Call it time management. But it was like just

juggling. Juggling things so you're keeping all sorts of things going at once. And we had

someone who did a study of grandparents as educators with a little grant we got from the

Ford Foundation. And she followed a grandmother through her daily life. Just ev-. One

grandmother's day kind of thing. And followed her through her whole day. And she had

all kinds of problems. She was taking care of the kids, grandchildren, and-. But the point

is that her everyday skills, even though she had the children taken away from her because

she had diabetes and they, they, the homemaker was, program was cut and so it was very,

very, very sad story. But she had these intellectual skills, cognitive skills, management

skills to be able to handle a son in a mental hospital and a daughter in a drug

rehabilitation program and four grandchildren and going to all the different schools and

social service agencies and getting there on time unless the previous one held her up.

But so incredible manage-, life management skills. And that I think I didn't know

about in, in the way-. I mean, I saw vivid examples of that. And that was then made a

rationale for needing to study that and make that a, an area of scholarship and something

that you look for.


Another example in the literacy ski-, literacy in the home was, was coupon

clipping. Coupon clipping and organizing coupons and, and people who, you know, had

maybe fourth grade literacy, they could clip the coupons and they could organize them in

little pock-, packages and, and um-, save a lot of money that way.

I: Yeah.

R: So there was a bringing together and the, the thing if it's not quite as simple as the way

I'm saying it because some of the people on the faculty have similar backgrounds. But

that’s not the discourse that's the predominant discourse of academics. But the, the

notion-, I guess what I'm trying to say is this whole notion of live experience, if you look

more closely at the life experience, it, it's-, I'm not sure you can or should necessarily

give credit toward college admissions for life experience just in general. And certainly

not just on the basis of being a minority or being a, either um-, racial minority or

economic minority. But if you can indeed find out what the cognitive skills of everyday

living are, they can be very real.

I: Yeah. That's a-. I mean, that's actually a go-, a great way to think about some of the

language I have in the paper where I talk about uh-, the (___?), the Women's Talent

Corps coming to realize this and Harlem's sophistication and that kind of thing. And that's

a, that's a very vivid description of, of how to think about that.

R: Right. And again, you could tie that in with the academic literature from some of the—

I: Yeah.

R: --Jean Lave and the sort of cognition and situated cognition. It's called situated cognition.

One version of it.


I: One thing I wanted to ask you about was sort of the, the, you know, thinking again about

sort of a larger zeitgeist, the spirit of the times and what not. So this is happening in the

late 1960s.

R: Right.

I: And it includes then people who are coming from Harlem during a period when there are

really quite enormous fights over community control at I S 201, over decentralization. I

mean, the sort of very much still thinking about both the Civil Rights movement and

Black Power and these kinds of things as well as a sort of burgeoning Latino rights

movement as well in parts of—

R: Right.

I: --Harlem-

R: Right.

I: --and East Harlem. So I wondered if and how these things played in.

R: Well, I think they played in from the perspective-. Probably in a variety of ways from the

perspective of those in the college, they played in that the Civil Rights movement gave a

rationale and gave an impetus and an idealism to it. Um-. It became tricky, though.

Because in the versions of Civil Rights that were not the Martin Luther King more

inclusive versions, in the Black Power um-, part of it, then and--. Yeah. Geoffrey Canada

was, was reportedly did not want to have anything to do with Teachers College, in a

much later version. Um-, but there was a sense of you can't-, it has to be done by the

community. It's (___?), it's Black Power and then that's not going to be inclusive. It's


going to be a revolution that leaves out the people who are-, and it's going to be taking

over the university with, with another group in the extreme version.

So I think there's a-, well, much critiqued liberalism in the notion that we as a

largely white institution were probably even less Hispanics or we're maybe bilingual stuff

comes in there, so there--. Then the language issues are another matter. But that we are

qualified to help and we're going to help out of goodwill. Um-, rather than being forced

to help. And I think that's, that's a very difficult set of political questions to wrestle with.

And I don't know that we-. I don't think-. I think a lot of my thinking on it came after the

fact. It was just-, we were just too involved in doing it to uh-, uh-, think about it. But

certainly the Black Power issues were right there.

I: Mmm-hmm.

R: And uh-, you know, again that's part of the John Fisher story of the dinner party. I mean,

that was-. Ed Gordon in a dashiki. I mean, he's a very, very mild-mannered uh-. This is

not Black Power movement. That's like a decorative dashiki. It's not a [laughing while

talking: Black Power statement and--]. I don't think he had an afro either. Uh-, maybe.

But um-. It-. I think he still had enough hair then. But--. Anyway, I'm [laughing while

talking: mixing time periods now.]

I: No. No it's—

R: But, but I think that it was perhaps a reason for some of the backing off.

I: That's interesting.


R: On the part-. I mean, I'm reading between the lines and I have no way of knowing cause I

never got my foot in the door enough to find out what was in the minds of those in the, in

General Studies, or the deans who did not see the value of life experience or, or, you

know, those who--. They weren't saying we have to keep the, keep the college segregated.

No. People weren't saying that. But an easy route in or an affirmative action route in, they

may have voted for affirmative action and still said well, no, they're not going (get credit

for?) life experiences. Not good enough. And I think the, the uh-, you know, it's all very

well when you're still in the dominant role and you can parcel out a little bit of help.

That's a very different feel to it. And a different kind of institutional welcome as

compared with the Black Power movement, which was not about sharing power in the

rhetoric.

I: Right.

R: You know, and that changed over time, too. But, but I think that maybe that was one of

the, one of the stumbling blocks from the point of view of movement within the

institution.

I: and that makes—

R: It was very present.

I: That makes sense. Well, and of course, there's an enormous uh-, Black Power inflected

student strike at Columbia.

R: Oh, absolutely.

I: Right during--


R: Absolutely.

I: --this time.

R: Well, absolutely. And that was very much part of why on the one hand this was greeted

as a heady success. Uh-, on the other hand, where it was, you know, you can only go so

far.

I: Right. That's very important. And, you know, it-, when you, when you were talking about

the experience of going to these G.S. deans, um-, it sounds like you were sort of out there

on your own. I mean, it was, were you able at all to get any other faculty at TC, other

deans here, or leaders to sort of put pressure on G.S.? Or was it really just—

R: No. No. I-. Well, I didn't even know how to try, frankly. Um-, because for one thing, we

weren't getting renewed funding. And you know, cause of the seed money issue and um-.

And it-. Oh, Fritz Ianni would have. But he-. And I gave-. He may have gone with me.

But I don't-. I have this feeling of being all alone. And I, I would, I'll have to check in and

see whether in fact there's any record of, of the meetings I went to. I do know that I felt

very alone in taking the brunt of the criticism for failure. And, you know, again it, it was-,

they were heady times. And I think one of the reasons it was so painful because I didn't,

wasn't sure in my own mind whether I was being--. I mean, the, the vocabulary again was

different. But whether it was, I was being a privileged white liberal. I mean, people

weren't saying: Oh, be aware of your privilege and give up your privilege in, in the way

they are today. And whether it means anything today, I don't know either. But I didn't

know for sure--.


There were moral choices that I didn't-, that I was struggling with all the time.

And it wasn't just that, that we didn't succeed and we didn't meet a certain set of criteria.

We failed on an exam. It was much more difficult, real moral choices. Ethical choices.

And I wasn't sure how to think them out.

I: Sounds like a very—

R: And, you know, the things that I thought were my ideals were, were not quite working.

I: Sounds very challenging. (heh, heh)

R: Well, it was. And, and again, uh-, it was a time when, when nothing other than revolution

was enough. And yet, we weren't real revolutionaries cause we wanted-, the revolution

we wanted was opening up an institution. And keeping the institution there. (heh, heh)

I: Right.

R: And to go, again get back to the metaphor, the analogy, uh-, when Larry Cremin was the

president and Charlotte was cooking the meals, or part of them at least, and we were

sitting on the floor, we were still going to the president's house. You know.

I: Yeah.

R: So it, it's--. (heh, heh) It's a gentle revol-, it's a gentle modification. Gradualism,

liberalism, if you want, rather than radical, more radical stance and uh-. I guess I was

also, a personal part of it that, that my husband's father-, my husband was from Vienna.

And his father was an Austro-Marxist scholar. Journalist and historian. And so, you

know, there, there was that sort of-. And I don't know. I, I would never-. I know some

German, but I, I would never, never-. I mean, you-,. Do you know German?


I: Not really.

R: Well,) to read any of that scholarship on, on the theory of Austro-Marxism and how

Austro-Marxism was different from other Marxism, and you can't even get to the verb

without going through three or four pages. And it's a very intricate-. But there was a

sense of a Marxist revolution is what's necessary if you really want to make a change.

And that was in part of my surround. And then that would mean the Black Power was

more of a revolution than, than these gradual approaches.

On the other hand, you have to act where you are. And where we were was here. I

—

I: Yeah. You know one other ism I wanted to ask about is, is the question of feminism. And

also the fact that most of the folks coming into this program were women, women and

mothers, often, as were you. I mean, what-. Was that something that was spoken about,

acknowledged, or did-, were there inflections sort of along lines of gender solidarity in

certain ways? I don't know quite how to phrase it, but—

R: Right. Um-. I don't know how to answer it except personally because I think there was

certainly a feminist movement at the time.

I: Mmm-hmm.

R: And there was very much a feeling of, of we need equality, we need another form of, of

uh-, gender relationships and, and yet, and as I was saying, that's partly why I was telling

you the story of, of, of Harvard not having women. I mean they actually did not. But, but

—


I: Right. Right.

R: --I didn't feel-. I felt that because my grandmother was as suffragette and my mother was

someone who danced with, you know, Isadora Duncan (___?) things at the University of

Wisconsin and, and very, very disrespectful and, and so-. There were a lot of-, in my

personal life, there were people who had fought versions of that and I sort of thought I

wasn't an ardent feminist of the sort that had a family where, where when I [laughing

while talking: didn't have their, their say, it was] quite the contrary.

I: Right. Right.

R: And so I didn't have that personal impetus that some of the people I know did have that,

that sense that, you know, finally I'm going to have, I'm going to get to speak up in my

family. And, and this is a real personal issue. For me it wasn't--. I was already liberated.

But that didn't mean I had the, the jobs.

I mean, I might very well have not. It was just a fluke that I got a job here. It was

just a fluke that I--. It wasn't just a fluke. I mean, I had a Harvard degree. I got a third of

the salary. They, they didn't pay equal salaries. And they eventually equalized salaries,

introduced a salary scale and equalized salaries. And they said the difference were

great--. And there were a lot of nursing educators, but the differences were so great that

the college would go broke if they equalized it in one year. And they took five years to

equalize the men's and women's pay. And so, I—

And I remember another example of um-, being in a meeting. I think it was-, I

don't know whether it was with Fritz Ianni, but some one of these administrative

meetings, division meeting or something, and we had to meet every other week or


something on something college--. Separate--. This is not Parent/Teacher Teams. (___?)

talk about the atmosphere of the college, and uh-, I-, you know, if one of my kids was

sick, I would never say-, and I had to rush to school to pick him up or take him to the

pediatrician, I would never tell the truth about it. Never, never, never. It was not a

legitimate excuse cause I would have been told: Well, you know, then you shouldn't be

working. Um-

And I remember one time when a meeting had to be changed because one my

male colleagues, who lived in one of the TC houses, had his turn at the laundry facilities

in the basement during the time of our meeting. And I wouldn't have even dared to say I

have to take a child to the pediatrician, can we reschedule? And he said: But, well, that's

my time for doing the laundry. I'm doing the laundry. And I thought: What? He has the

privilege of having the schedule reworked because he is doing the laundry? I mean, you

know, [laughing while talking: like who are you kidding kind of thing?]

I: Right. Right.

R: But um-, yes, it was inflected with feminism. But it was uh-. And there were probably

those who, who felt a lot, lot more intensely about the feminist side of it than I happened

to because I had, as I say, I, I thought my grandmother was the feminist.

I: Mmm-hmm.

R: And I'm sure there were, there were a lot of people for whom-. And my mother was a

progressive educator. So, you know, I already--. Uh--. Some of those battles were fought

in my family, but um-, it was an issue, but it, it did, it didn't uh-. I think it was, it wasn't a


place where the women's rights were being discussed per se. I think that the um-. And

the-, I think one of the people who was most successful was the one man in the program.

I: Interesting.

R: And um-. But I-. You know, it's an-, it's a complicated thing because you get the, the,

um-, Civil Rights, which was in some ways some of the current more recent analysis says

was, was, the leadership was male. And, and so the feminist, feminism within the Civil

Rights movement was, was not there. And I think in a way the, going back to the Audrey

Cohen and the College of Human Services, that was more of a feminist uh-, set of--. The,

the discussion, the vo-, the terms, the way it was talked about was more feminist with

Audrey Cohen and the white middle class women who were trying to use their talents.

That was a more feminist set of ways of talking than about the Par-, Parent/Teacher

Teams. Because for one thing, the, the poor, less economically privileged African

American women, they didn't want the privilege of working outside the home. They were

already doing it on several jobs and juggling the jobs and so, it was just a very-, insofar as

it was feminist, it was a very different version.

And I think these two things, it's a-. I don't know whether in any of the

documentation it's there, but in my memory of it, I would say it was-, that-, the, the

College of Human Services, for at least the faculty, initially for the faculty, was more

feminist than the Parent/Teacher Teams for the um-, participants.

I: That's great. I think that's, that's quite consonant with what I've seen, the sources.

R: Is it?


I: Um-. And, and it makes a lot of sense. One of the things that's come up when I've

interviewed some paras is that there was a challenge for them once the opportunities to

go to things like an all day training at TC, or, you know, or CUNY later on appeared, that

it meant, of course, restructuring family time and that sometimes husbands, boyfriends,

partners found this an imposition. Um-, and reacted to it poorly. Not all. Some, some

were very supportive. But, but that was one, that was one of the challenges or

impediments to sort of training, was that, you know, there's already so much time being

taken up by all the work you mentioned they're already doing, plus now coming into

schools—

R: Right.

I: --and then training on top felt like a bridge too far for some, particularly men in the

family.

R: Right. Right. Right. Well, my, my own husband whose mother was um-, not just a, a

socialist in Vienna, but a woman's leader, and very important in, in arguing for the rights

of working women, and um-, he didn't like it if I brought students home. [laughing while

talking: You know? He-] he liked some students. But if it was a student he didn't happen

to like, he just didn't like the idea that my job would extend into, into the home.

And he cooked, only certain things. And [laughing while talking: he didn't do the

dishes and uh--. You know. And I think these uh-, it's not a simple one,} a simple thing,

and then you know, and really his mother was a leading feminist.

I: Mm-

R: But that's another generation.


I: Right. Well, the one other thing, and I-, we've been talking for a long time now, so thank

you so much for all of this. One other thing I wanted to maybe do is just sort of play the

name game. Cause there's some other names that come up in my paper and that were

involved in this kind of world of, of thinking about paraprofessionals and community

education. I wondered if you interacted with them or if they were people who you were

reading or talking to.

So one of them is Preston Wilcox, who was involved with the Women's Talent

Corps and was on the Columbia faculty and being very involved in community control.

R: Right. I knew of him and, and I'm sure I was at meetings with him, but I didn't know him

personally well.

I: Yeah.

R: But he was a figure.

I: Right. Right.

R: He was definitely a figure.

I: A couple of other people were-, these were new careers thinkers, so Frank Riessman and

Alan Gartner were people—

R: Oh, yes-

I: At NYU, and then later I think at CUNY.

R: I know of them both and that, that was again part of the intellectual apparatus of the time.

I: Right. Right.


R: And people at the Columbia School of Social Work, too.

I: Yeah. (___?) and Wilcox was at the School of Social Work for a bit as well.

R: Right. Right.

I: And then there were people at Bank Street College as well. This is another group—

R: Well, Bank Street's interesting. Bank Street's very interesting. Uh-, some of the-, in fact,

some of the faculty at Bank Street went through the Department of Family and

Community Education.

I: That's interesting.

R: Uh-, here. And then went there. And so I've had a lot of connections with Bank Street

over the time. But I think, and, and um-, I was just-, with someone who's now at the

American Museum of Natural History and Marissa McDonald, I don't know if you know

her, but—

I: I don't know.

R: --she's involved in their education program. But she went to Bank Street. And I was with

her the other night at a program here for science education. And she's been involved in

Bank Street and they do museum stuff which is one of the things I do now. And um-, I

think Bank Street, in certain eras, has been um-, they have kind of an ideology, which is

sort of the uniform ideology, which Teachers College doesn't have in quite-, and they're

smaller.

I: Right.


R: And they-, we don't have that uniformity of, of a worldview, and particularly now. But I

think they're more interesting and radical in some ways than Teachers College. But that's,

that I'm going to delete from the—(laughter)

I: (laughter) That's fair enough.

R: From the record.

I: When you were--. There were a couple of people there. Garda Bowman and Gordon

Klopf were two people who did a lot of studies of paraprofessional programs.

R: Right. I know, know--, not personally, but know, know both.

I: I read some of their things.

R: Yeah.

I: And another name that comes up a lot um-, in the actual documents from TC, is Nelly

Jones.

R: Yes.

I: Who was-, um-, I mean she seems to have-, she was sort of a coordinator and a—

R: She was, she was very involved. Very involved. Yeah.

I: I didn't get a great sense of who she actually was with respect to TC. Was she a

professor?

R: Was Sonny, Sonny Jamison in there?

I: I don't know. I'll look.


R: Spencer, Spencer Jamison?

I: Well, Spencer Jamison sounds familiar.

R: Yes. Well, his nickname was Sonny.

I: Ah.

R: He was another one who was involved. He was, I think, close to Fritz Ianni.

I: And they were, they were faculty or—

R: They were adjuncts probably. I can-. You know what? Let me write the names down

because if I get these names, I can look—

I: (___?)

R: If I get—

I: I can email these to you.

R: I mean if you want to come back another time and look through, if I can get into the files.

I: Yeah. Well, I'll-, I can email you these, too, so you don't have to write them down.

R: All right. Do that. Do that.

I: That'll be-. Um-

R: Email me the names and because I might, I can see-, I can tell you what I recollect now.

Or, but I can also see if the names are in any of the files.

I: Sure. Yeah. That sounds great.

R: And they could be.


I: That'd be great. Yeah.

R: There could be. There could be reports that have specific names and, and we probably

have, in those files if they're still there, I don't-, haven't even had a chance to go in check

that the-, that the many people who use that locked office [laughing while talking: aren't,

locked storage-]

I: Mmm-hmm.

R: --room aren't-. Cause it goes right through the boiler.

I: Right. Right.

R: And I, I, I do need your help. And this is maybe for another discussion. But I do need

your help figuring out how should I try to find a way to archive this.

I: Oh, I have spoken to a couple of people about that. So I can a little more about that.

R: Oh, good. Well, go on with your names and I will, and but, but tell me them now. But

then if you can email them to me and then I-, when, if I get into the file before we

manage to get together. And I can't promise that I will cause I've got—

I: That's fine.

R: I've got, you know, people who need to graduate and—

I: Yes.

R: --that kind of thing. (heh, heh)

I: Fair enough. (heh, heh) Well, the only--, the actually, the only name I'm looking at was

um-, so-, Congressman James Scheuer was someone who spent a lot of time and effort in


promoting these things at the legislative level. He was running-, the Sub professional

Career Act, which attaches to the um-, Economic Opportunity Act, but then also, he

meets with paras in New York. He gets involved sometimes at the local level in

supporting these. He says some things about their um-, the teacher strike uh-, and the

also, the um-, the paraprofessional contract fight. So I wondered if he was a name that

came up or-

R: My husband happened to go to college, Swarthmore, with his brother and um-, Wally

Scheuer, and uh-, and another person who ev-, married Wally. Marge Scheuer. And they

were very close friends in college. I didn't, I, I wasn't there then. But—

I: Mmm-hmm.

R: --they were close friends in college and then my husband, after he graduated from

Swarthmore, came to Columbia to the School-, it was the, it's SIPA now, the School of

International and Public Affairs.

I: Right.

R: But it was the School of International Affairs. It didn't have the P for Policy and he-, and

Marge Scheuer, who was the sister-in-law of Jim Scheuer -- (heh, heh)

I: Mmm-hmm.

R: --um-, studied um-, international affairs. Then my husband took extra time studying

Russian because that was the language that you needed then for—

I: Right.


R: --international diplomatic work. And then he was overseas for a while. And then, then

came back and went to law school here. But um-, that's the personal answer that's not an

answer as to whether he was influencing what we were doing. He was in the newspapers.

I: Ah. Yeah.

R: I mean, I happened to know him personally, but—

I: Right. Right. Right.

R: --but not, not, not-. I would say--. It was a time when you-. There was a more hopeful

[laughing while talking: view of (___?) officials than] there is today. There wasn't the

sense that, you know, well, gee whiz, uh-, it's such a deadlock.

I: Right.

R: That, that nobody in Congress or the Senate's going to be able to anything anyway, so

why bother talking to them? Uh-. It was a time when the atmosphere at the college, and

in terms of programs of this sort, was that absolutely the publicity matters, and, and you

would looking through the newspaper. And if somebody had something good to say

about it or something bad to say about you, you need to worry about it, you need to take

it seriously. You need to try to write letters of if you had any personal connections, get

there and do something. But I never did in terms of anything with Jim Scheuer. And, and

there were [laughing while talking: family uh-

I: Right. (heh, heh)

R: --uh-, I (___?) wasn't necessarily all the Scheuers—

I: (heh, heh)


R: --weren't, weren't of a piece.]

I: Right. Right.

R: I don't know how to put, how, how to put it otherwise.

I: No. That's quite fair. But his papers are at Swarthmore, so I've been down to look at

those. Um-

R: Yeah. Yeah. You have?

I: Yeah. Yeah.

R: They have a very helpful library, don't they?

I: They do, yeah, they're great. They were very helpful.

R: They, they-, that's a—

I: It's a nice place.

R: It's a good school. My, my uh-, husband went there. Uh-, his brother went there. His

brother's wife. Um-, my oldest son. His wife. And a grandson—

I: Oh?

R: --so it was—

I: That's really cool.

R: Very-. And grand daughter said no, I'm going to Carlton. (laughter)

I: (heh, heh) Fair enough. Back to Minnesota.

R: She-. Yeah.


I: My wife's from Minnesota.

R: Yeah.

I: Family up there. I'm looking-. I'm looking over my notes just very quickly, but we've

covered a great deal of ground. Um-. I wonder if there was anything, anything more you

wanted to add?

R: Well, my--. I would add again my wish that um-. And, and very, very--, not just do well

with your dissertation kind of wish, but my wish is that you, of course, have a successful

dissertation, which you clearly will. But that you find a way to publish it to communicate

it. Um-. That people who are doing related projects today will somehow pay attention to

—

I: Mmm.

R: --even though it's not as simple, you know, as you say very well—

I: Right.

R: --in there at some point that it's not, you can't exactly say there's a model of best practices

that are going to apply from one era to another. But that somehow the issues that we need

to be alert to from the time you're writing about. Um-. You know, why we need to study

history. We don't have enough history at the college now. I mean we may-, we're going to

move back to that. But why does this history matter to people who are doing it today?

And I think my wish is then-, and as a social scientist, I haven't, I, I don't know. It was

just too close. And as I say, it was too painful. And I wasn't--. I felt that, that we'd failed

even though it was successful and a heady success and people were, were--. I didn't feel


alone. I've got-. I-, I felt alone in terms of that one encounter with General Studies or, you

know, that particular negotiation. But you know, people on the faculty would: Oh, how

wonderful you're doing. You know, there was a lot of--. I don't think insincere, but a lot

of sort of: Oh, now nice.

But how you get the story of that era with all the struggles and tensions and, and

the, the particular time socio political climate of the time. And, and, and how you can--.

How do you go about learning from that time something that's going to be uh-, something

that will help us understand a different time now? With a different set of communication

practices, for one thing. And a different set of political uh-, and economic circumstances.

A very different time.

And yet, some of the rhetoric we, we're using is, is, is the same without know that

it's had a history.

I: Yeah. See, I almost want to ask, are there any ways you'd recommend I do that? But I

suppose that's—

R: Well, I recommend you come back and talk to me so I [laughing while talking: can try

and get your, you know, you teach me—

I: (heh, heh)

R: --how you're doing it.]

I: We'll keep working on it.

R: Yeah. I really-. No, I really think it's, it's absolutely essential. And I don't know-, I mean

there's awfully good writing in history. And some of the-, I think the writing that's most


accessible from my perspective is people who do historical biographies. Cause there

you're got people and you get the real people feel and um-. Uh-. That has a universality

that you can latch onto in a way that some kinds of historic writing don't.

But I just think it's, it's-, I, I hope that we will return to a time when we're both in

the schools and in the universities. We don't lose that. We did have this, this uh-, vote this

morning in the faculty in terms of having um-, increasing from five to 15 professors of

practice. And OK. That's fine. People are going to be doing their practical because those

of us who made our careers in the academy don't know anything about the real world or

we're in the Ivory Tower. I don't think we are. And I've always tried going back to the

whole Russell Sage mandate to make the knowledge of the, of the uh-, uh-, social

sciences of use to or available to or have some help or affect for the practicing

professions. And I've always been very applied in that sense. And I believe that the

academic and intellectual (___?) can come out of the practical situation. But I just think

we're, we're, we're at risk of losing the intellectual foundations of a place like Teachers

College in a new era of practical.

There's a-, I, I mean, I wish we were more activist. (heh, heh) I wish some of the,

some of the ways of expressing activism of an earlier time. I don't want another Viet Nam

war. Uh-. I don't, I think the Occupy movement is extremely interesting and I didn't go

participate in it. The farthest I got was with a Socratic conversations here and uh-, Ron

NAME who was down there and then one of these discussion in the library for the

community. But I, I just think we, we, we're, we're too wimpy. (laughter)

And yet we can't just-. It's just a different time. And I, I wish we had--. I don't

know whether I want revolutionary change. But I want a ch-, that sense of possibility.


And I don't know. I remember years ago someone was taking--. I taught a course on

families and television at that point, looking at how families mediated television, which

was--. Then I got the Guggenheim to do family memories. And then I couldn't go back to

the television because it, in a couple of years, I was doing the other and it had changed so

much that I'd have to start all over. Uh-.

But I thought we were onto a very important set of issues of how do we-, how do

families media-. It's part of the Cremin thing, of the many institutions that educate and

more is going on there than in schools in some ways, more time and so forth. And but-, I

taught a course on families and television, looking at the research we were doing for

Spencer support then. And I remember one of the students in the class said: Well, but you

don't understand. I'm of the generation that stopped the Viet Nam war with the use of

television. And you don't have that on the agenda. (laughter) [laughing while talking:

And I thought: Whoa. Yes, you know. You're right. I don't have it on the agenda.] But it's

true there was this--. So--. Even the media were because the war was shown and was

visible and things that weren't shown-, I mean the-, World War II [changes voice: (___?)

now the Japs.]

I: Right.

R: Literally, the Japs [changes voice: who have done this and that and] still, you go down to

the, the um-, the ship museum. The, the um-, Intrepid.

I: Mmm-hmm.

R: They still have some of those old—

I: Oh. Yeah.


R: Have you seen those?

I: I-, years ago I saw them in coursework. But I haven't seen the Intrepid.

R: Well, they're, they're incredible. I mean, they still have those voices of, of, you know,

righteous indignation over these savage tribes that are attacking us and then the--. But--,

I-, that sense that you can do something. I think that's why I was so-, sort of--. I was very

pleased when my son who's, who's not a social scientist. He's a scientist scientist. But he

was so interested. He wanted the Jane Jacobs book and he wanted-, he was so interested

to think: Well, you know, maybe--. That sense that you can make a change. You can do

something. And, and um-.

I don't know what the version of that today is. I just don't know. But, but um-.

This project had all that. But it also had the struggles and it had the failures in it. And it

went on to succeed and it was partly just we didn't get to continue it. But I don't think it

went on to be a major career ladder.

I: That was always the biggest sticking point. And it, it continues to be. I was speaking to

paras last night at SUNY Empire State College, um-, where they have a paraprofessional

training program for the UFT now, and they, they can get credit as they move up. And

they can move up in salary increments. But to move from being paras to teachers,

incredibly difficult.

R: Yeah. Well, you see—

I: And that's—


R: --that's so interesting because that's where I felt I was the biggest failure. I was really

crushed by that and then, then some of the people who are working in the teaching started

attacking me for failure. That, you know how could you? You're, what are you? Aren't

you an activist enough to--. Why, why? You know. Then, then take some stronger means.

And so, do you want us to go sit in at General Studies? Uh-.

And I didn't think that was going to help. And I'm not sure it would have been--.

You know, maybe I wasn't enough of an activist. Maybe if I'd been more of a Jane Jacobs

and sat in at General Studies--. I don't really think so. And it's interesting to me that it's

still a sticking point. But that was-, in a way, that was the biggest sticking point. I think

the most um-, enthusiastic moments of the project were the actual encounters here and

the course and the discussions and this incredible sense that these people with amazing

um-, knowledge and understanding and, and uh-, you know. I still uh, have that in the, the

discovering the, the wisdom in families kind of thing.

I: Yeah. Yeah.

R: It's already there. Um-. I gave you a brochure for the center, didn't I?

I: I don't know. Uh-. I actually don't think you did.

R: I didn't. Uh-. Where would I be able to lay my hands--. (___?) Oh, I can't do it without—

I: (heh, heh)

R: --(___?)

I: Well, shall we wrap up? On the recording side?

R: We can wrap--.


I: (heh, heh)

R: Yeah. I think--. Well, it's it been a long time--

I: It has.

R: --that you've been listening.

I: No. This has been wonderful. And here, I'll, I'll hold this closer to say thank you. (heh,

heh)

R: Oh, well—

I: But—

R: --thank you very much.

I: --(laughter)

R: I really, this was-. I-. Did you get my wishes? Was that recorded?

I: I-, that was indeed recorded. So this is still running.

R: All right. All right. This is still running. So I thank you. I think it's, it's been, it's been

wonderful for me to have a chance to reflect again on these things.

I: Thank you so much.

R: They, they seem like ancient history. And I've kind of-, some much else has happened in

between that I kind of put this out of mind. And doing other things. But related things.

I: Sure. Well, and—


R: I'm very eager to continue the discussion and if-, you were going to tell me--, and I don't

know whether you-, you need it recorded or not. But you were going to tell me some,

some thoughts on the archiving of the materials.

I: Oh. Yeah.

R: If they're there.

I: Oh-. There is some-. Yes. And it's-. Actually, let's stop the tape here and I'll talk to you

about that. Because—

R: OK.

I: --I don’t' think we need to record that. And I can send you emails about this. We’rd

signing off.

R: Right.

[end of recording]


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