DeNicola, Dan; Larry Gregorio; Paula Olinger; Carolyn Snively, April 17, 2018 [Interview]

Retiring faculty Dan DeNicola [Philosophy], Larry Gregorio [French], Paula Olinger [Spanish], and Carolyn Snively [Classics] participated in a panel on April 17, 2018, in which they gave brief reflections on their Gettysburg careers, discussed their experiences with each other, and answered audience questions.Potts, David; Glassick, Charles E.; Coulter, Chan L.; Glatfelter, Charles H.Charles E. Glassick Years; Gordon A. Haaland Years; Janet M. Riggs YearsRETIRING FACULTY PANEL – 2018 Dan DeNicola, Professor of Philosophy Larry Gregorio, Professor of French Paula Olinger, Associate Professor of Spanish Carolyn Snively, Professor of Classics Moderator: Julie Hendon, Professor of Anthropology College Union Building 260 4-6 pm, April 17, 2018 Julie Hendon: For those of you who may not know me, I’m the director of the Johnson Center for Creative Teaching and Learning, and I’m very happy to welcome you to this panel that four of our retirees have graciously agreed to be part of. Before we get started, I’ll say that one of our participants, Paula Olinger, had to leave for an emergency, but she is hoping to come back, so that’s why we’re retaining her fourth seat. [Laughter] I hope everybody’s had a chance to get some hors d’oeuvres, some nibbles, some punch, some wine, and if you want more, don’t feel shy to get up there and help yourself. Let me introduce our panelists for today. Starting at the far left, we have Larry Gregorio, who is from the French Department; Larry started here in 1983. In the middle is Carolyn Snively, Department of Classics; Carolyn started here in 1982. Dan DeNicola, from the Philosophy Department, came in 1996 to serve as provost. He was provost for 10 years, 2 and then returned to teaching full-time. And if Paula can join us – Paula Olinger is from the Department of Spanish, and she started here in 1979. Our plan is to have each of our panelists say a few words, and then open it up for discussion among themselves. But they would also very much welcome questions and participation from all of you. As moderator, I would just ask that you keep your question focused and brief, and that it actually be a question. [Laughter] Get a question in there – don’t make us guess. As you can see from the camera, Special Collections is recording this for the College archives, so that it can be revisited; if you have colleagues who had hoped to come but couldn’t, this will be a way for them to share in the experience. I do have a few prompts, and in case for some reason the discussion dies, I can leap in with a really pithy question; if you want to avoid that, keep the conversation going. Thank you. I’ll turn it over to Larry. Larry Gregorio: When we met last week to talk about what we’d be discussing today and how we all looked at it, Julie asked, “What’s a topic that you might like to address off the top of your head?” The first thing that came to mind was “institutional memory.” That’s kind of what we represent. We have one foot out the door now, and I think when the second foot goes out, a lot of memory goes with us. That happens with all senior faculty. In that light, I also thought about the term that always comes up when we discuss the College and our experiences and careers at the College, and that is “the liberal arts.” So, in 25 words or less, “What liberal arts meant to me.” When I started as an undergrad in nineteen-[mumbles, laughter], at a liberal arts institution, I didn’t have the faintest idea of what that meant. That meant nothing to me. You could’ve said “schmeggendorf,” and I’d have said “This means nothing to me.” After 3 four years in the program, I had a better idea. But the topic that I think interests me most at the end of my teaching career is the contrast between the program that was my formation as an undergraduate and the program we all teach here now at the College. Of course, there’s a significant contrast between the two, and I suppose even a notion as amorphous as liberal arts can evolve over a half a century or more. But it’s to me an incontrovertible fact that the two are very, very different. As an undergrad, I took 41 courses – 40 were required, but I took 41 – and they were all, I think, for credit. That’s a significant difference from what we calculate courses, even by credit hours, to be worth now. Ron Couchman and I started a very interesting discussion about 10 minutes ago. We didn’t agree – we had different impressions, I should say – about the formula for conversion from courses and whatnot. But Gettysburg had a 120-credit hour degree requirement up until 1969, and Ron Couchman was serving as registrar at that point. Right, Ron? Ron Couchman: No, I started in ’71. Gregorio: Oh, I’m sorry, you did say that. But I consulted Charlie Glatfelter, the College historian, about this years ago. According to him, up until 1969, the College had a 120-credit hour requirement for a degree, at which point the College converted to counting by course unit. That’s a separate discussion as to why. But Ron and I were talking about whether it started out as a 36-course requirement or 35, and we’ll find out from the catalogs. You can find that out, I assume. Couchman: Special Collections will know. [Laughter] Gregorio: Special Collections knows everything, thank you. You know it all. And then from 35 – and a lot of us have a better memory of this – we went to 32 during the Gordon Haaland years. Some people were opposed to that – one of whom shall remain me. 4 [Laughter] I was opposed to the drop in the credit. But at any rate, we went to the curriculum we have now, where, for example, we have one humanities requirement. One humanities requirement. You can go through college without ever reading a sonnet by Shakespeare, or studying Islam, if you take your humanities credit somewhere else. I think we sacrificed some breadth when we went to this regimen, but that we can always discuss. All right, I’ve spoken enough. Carolyn? Carolyn Snively: I’m not going to talk about the liberal arts, because as I already indicated to my colleagues, that discussion can become exceedingly boring. Besides that, I think we all have some difficulty defining them. If you ask our students, they will have a great deal of trouble defining them in anything that we would recognize. We talk about institutional memory. Yeah – when we leave, the knowledge of where a lot of bodies are buried is going to leave with us. [Laughter] I’m going to talk a bit about what things were like when I came in 1982, and during the 1980s, and then make my way fairly quickly, since we don’t have much time, up toward the present. I arrived in Gettysburg on a one-year contract. It was my fourth one-year job in a row, and some of you realize that under those circumstances, you want to know: “Where’s my office? Where’s the library? Where are my classrooms? How soon do I need to get a new driver’s license? I need to do something about the car registration, and quite frankly I don’t care about anything else.” I found Gettysburg very odd, because I was a product of Michigan State University and the University of Texas at Austin, and had taught for a year each at Louisiana State, the University of Arizona, and Syracuse University. As you can imagine, that was a bit of a switch, moving from Tucson to Syracuse. But I rapidly realized that previous experience was useful, in that I understood that the way things were organized or 5 done here were not necessarily the only way that they could be done. And that’s a good thing to know. As I say, I had a one-year contract in a department of three people, the other two members of which did not speak to each other. [Laughter] So there were a great many [of these]: “Carolyn, perhaps you would mention to Bob that –” or “Carolyn, if you could tell Ruth that –” [Laughter] It took me a while to figure that out: oh, they don’t actually talk to each other. Then I got a three-year contract. Some of you may remember there were these three-year terminal contracts, because the College was worried about becoming “tenured up” or something, and also, we were going to shrink. There were various strange things going on during the Eighties. This position was converted to tenure-track in December of that third year, after the then-dean asked me to chair the department in the spring. I thought, “I’m bloody well not doing that if I don’t have a real contract at this institution.” So about two days later, I get a tenure-track contract, and about three days after that, I’m helping the chair, Ruth Pavlantos, to interview candidates for Bob Held’s job, as he was retiring. I can’t say that I had a great deal of loyalty toward this institution. Okay, it was a job. I also arrived shortly after President [Charles] Glassick brought in Dean [David] Potts, apparently with the express purpose of dragging the College into the second half of the twentieth century. He had done an evaluation of the faculty, and told most of them that they were in serious need of improvement. Again, what I didn’t realize was that about half the faculty were about to have a nervous breakdown. I was invited to a meeting at Dean Potts’s house, where research was being discussed, and then, because of this, I was accused of being a member of a cabal. [Laughter] 6 This was an interesting place to work. I was one of a rather small number of female faculty members. There weren’t a lot of us, and while I don’t think we can be described as exactly a close-knit group, I think it’s safe to say that any female faculty member in the Eighties knew exactly the status of any other female faculty member, and probably administrator, on campus. I served for a couple of years on the rather unfortunately named Commission on Women, which investigated salary inequity and was one of the factors leading to the approval of the program in Women’s Studies by the faculty. That was only one of the six committees that I served on, despite my temporary status, and very likely because of my gender, between my arrival in 1982 and getting tenure in 1988. I chaired the Executive Committee of the faculty in the year that I came up for tenure. Fortunately, the tenured members of the committee protected me by refusing to let me introduce several contentious motions about a new curriculum that had been proposed by the administration, whose eventual defeat was interpreted by President Glassick as something of a vote of no confidence. I did get tenure, surprisingly. After that, of course, I think I’d have to say that perhaps one of the most interesting things I’ve done here has been committee service. We bitch and moan a lot about it, but it is an interesting way to learn all sorts of things. Maybe the most interesting committee stint was chairing the Faculty Personnel Committee a few years ago. I taught a lot of courses at Gettysburg, and most of them were enjoyable while I was in the classroom. As other retirees have stated, yeah, we could teach forever, but we can’t grade any more papers. [Laughter] The college supported my somewhat unusual research from the time I came on, and has supported the Gettysburg College archaeological project in Macedonia from its inception about 20 years ago. As many of you have figured out, 7 archaeology at Stobi and then at Golemo Gradište, our present project, is my passion, and perhaps also my salvation: I think if I didn’t have that to be involved with, I’d probably be in jail. [Laughter] You can’t just let things be as they are, you’ve got to keep poking at ‘em. You’ve got to keep causing trouble somehow – so I’m just as well off if I choose to do that in Macedonia. You know, they poke back. [Laughter] Anyhow, I would say, if you want a piece of advice, find a way to get out of here every now and then. Maybe you’ll even be lucky enough to find a subject of research that is also your passion. I spent almost exactly 20 years in a three-person department. Early in that period, we fought one another to a standstill, and I said openly that nothing was going to change until one of us left, retired, or died. Charlie [Zambrowski] died in 2008, Leslie [Cahoon] left, not quite voluntarily, in 2012, and I am now retiring. GailAnn [Rickert] will stand for a while . . . [Laughter] But the new members of the Classics Department will be responsible for carrying it forward, and perhaps providing that spice of eccentricity that’s essential to a college faculty. Thank you. [Laughter, applause] Dan DeNicola: Well, after Carolyn has declared the subject of the liberal arts “boring” . . . [Laughter] Almost everything I’ve ever had to say about that I put into a book, and it took 300 pages, so I’m not going to repeat that today, or say much about it. But I do want to say that I think retirement is a very natural point for reflection. We all have commented on this. You’re looking over documents, you’re thinking about the shape of a career, and so having this kind of reflection seems very natural. A couple of biographical things, and then I’m just going to make a string of comments on themes that maybe we can pick up on in the questions. 8 I left Ohio University to attend Harvard University on an NDEA [National Defense Education Act] fellowship. I was given an option: I could go to the Ph.D. program in philosophy – and there was some money available for that – or do this new program, which was joint between the Philosophy Department and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, or the Philosophy of Education program in the Ed. school. I could have wonderful advisors – Israel Scheffler, John Rawls, people who were of note even then – and the deal was that I would have an NDEA research fellowship, and it would last as long as I wanted to complete my degree. [There would be] no charges, and a small stipend. Now, just pause a minute. NDEA fellowships are National Defense Education Act fellowships. It was deemed in that era to be in the national defense to have a philosophy of education. That’s a surprising difference in climate and attitude. It wasn’t a scam, it was legitimate, and you were eligible if you did philosophy of education. I ended up having to begin my career earlier than I expected for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the stipend was small and the conditions of the scholarship changed – Harvard decided that you couldn’t have any kind of outside employment if you had this research fellowship. So I left. I didn’t want to leave Cambridge, but I left before I’d even begun my dissertation, and I was hired in the fall of 1969 at Rollins College in Winterpark, Florida. I started at the age of 24 as an instructor with a 3-1-3 load and the expectation that you would do another course in the evening school each term – all for a princely salary of $8,000. Recently, as I’m thinking about my retirement, I went through the year-by-year record of my teaching, and I realized that in the first four years, I taught 16 different course titles. That was a 9 continuation of my graduate education, and I loved every minute of it. But it also was wearing on me. That experience, though, after being at a public university as an undergraduate – a public university that existed before the state existed – and then a private research university, made me surprised when I took the job at Rollins. I was very impressed by the quality of the faculty. I was impressed by the vision. I liked the idea of being in a place you could get your arms around, that worked on what I call a pedagogy of the person, and yet was striving to have at least reasonable standards. So that sort of set my anchor at liberal arts and at liberal arts colleges thereafter, and I had a good time there, from ’69 till I came here in ’96. Of the 49 years since then, I’ve spent about half in administration. I entered and left administrative work three different times, to go back to faculty for various reasons – always returning to teaching. It had an effect of truncating my scholarship, at least in that period. Academic administration at its best is about helping other people do their work, not about doing your own scholarly work very much. But it allowed me to return to teaching with a kind of vigor for the scholarly and teaching side of it, and I was able to teach during the time I was an administrator. One of the nicest things about being an academic administrator in college is your chance to meet interesting people. I won’t bore you with all of those, but I treasure being able to have lunch with Kurt Vonnegut, and I very much treasure a dinner that [my wife] Sunni and I had with Maya Angelou, on our own, with one other person. Those kinds of things are unforgettable. Some themes and observations about topics. Technology has changed. Some of us, and certainly I lived with this, remember the purple mimeographs, and the tragedy of 10 finding the o’s and e’s that had popped out on the stencils so that they made little black circles and you had to go back and redo them. [Laughter] But I have to say, I was looking the other day at senior theses that I had saved from decades ago, and some of them are 85 pages, 95 pages: these were senior theses that were tight. That’s a whole other burden on a student. I’m certainly not a Luddite, I love new technology, but it makes me wonder whether there is a different kind of attention one gives, a different investment, when you’re trying to figure out, “Oh, God, if I change that, I’m going to have to retype every page after it in that document.” [Laughter] Faculty governance. Something about the sense of governance has changed. The time and nature of the debate has changed, and the pressures of career on people have changed. In the same way that the US Senate has changed, Faculty Senate has changed. The corporatization of the campus is strong. Administration is much more concerned about institutional liability these days. It’s hard to get faculty members to think about their ownership of the whole degree, I think. More and more, the major rises to prominence, and control over the major one can speak about. I can speak almost constantly about my own course content, a little less about what the major should be, and when it comes to what the language requirement or the science requirement should be, you feel a little less likely to comment about it. I grew up in an age in which people had quite strong views about those things, in which languages knew who their friends were. What I mean by that is that, in those days, if you were in the German Department, you knew the Chemistry Department was going to be sending you people. You knew the Physics Department was going to be sending you people. The need for correlation in that way isn’t there as much anymore. 11 Curriculum. Many wholly positive developments on curriculum – the wonderful expansion of subjects now available, the move toward inclusiveness. But then we’ve got increased specialization, and, as I say, more emphasis on the major and more concern about individual requirements. Student evaluations. [Laughter] I’m looking over 49 years of changing student evaluations, and I’m deciding: “Okay, do I just dump these? Do I preserve them, digitize them, in some way?” What I’ve done so far is to be able to look at them – and some of them are pretty musty stuff – to pick out some of my favorite comments. I have quite a long list. I’m not going to tell you all of them, but I will at least give you two, and a number of them run in this way. “I was never very well-prepared for class, but I was highly motivated.” That’s a conflicted student. [Laughter] And perhaps my favorite of all time, because it’s so quintessentially male undergraduate: “This course was valuable, in that it’s like going to the park and getting laid. You don’t forget it, and it broadens your horizons.” It was another era. [Laughter] I mean . . . have you ever written anything like this? On the other hand, it’s sort of disappointing and disheartening [to see] the issues that never go away, never get any better. I sat in a faculty member’s office yesterday, talking with a student who was complaining of the social climate – the impact of Greek society on our intellectual environment, utilitarian student goals. These are things that I heard about when I first started teaching 49 years ago. It seems like we should get better; we really should get better. Some of those discussions, after 49 years, get very unimaginative and seem very old – reinventing the wheel many times over. There are lots of things we’ve done right, and particularly I think that Gettysburg has done right. I think Gettysburg has an unusual balance for the student athlete; we manage to avoid a lot of 12 problems that other schools have in that area. The school where I worked at first used to have such a generous policy on incompletes that two-thirds of the student body owed their soul to the previous term. [Laughter] We don’t do that, and it is such a relief. It is absolutely such a relief to have very little of that here. I want to second what Larry said about institutional memory. If someone were to prod me with a question, I would tell you about the kinds of things I’m talking about that I’m sure will fade, that aren’t known, and that go with you, and that it’s a shame that they go with you. But you know, in the end, it’s a privileged life. We work in beautiful places, with interesting people, who by and large want to be doing what they’re doing, and want to be where they are. They’re marvelously bright. I have students who have an incredible sense of promise and worth. We’re in a profession that has cycles of renewal. I’ve always tried to keep with my favorite toast from graduate school, which was, “To high standards and good times. May they always be together.” [Applause] Paula Olinger: I’m first of all really sorry about not being