UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #766
BURGESS, ANN

Narrator: 	Burgess, Ann
Interviewer: 	Sandy Pfahler
Date: 		2006
Location: 	Madison, Wisconsin
Oral History#:	766
Series: 		Women in Science and Engineering

00:00:00	Start of First Interview Session

Sandy Pfahler (SP):  My name is Sandy Pfhaler, and I am an interviewer for the UW Madison Oral History Project. Today, Wednesday, May 17, 2006, I'm interviewing Ann Burgess, who retired in 2002 as distinguished senior lecturer and director of the Biology Core Curriculum program on the Madison campus. Good morning! 

Ann Burgess (AB):  Hello. 

00:00:26 

SP:	Ann, let's start with your early history. If you could talk about where and when you were born, where you went to school, describe your childhood, your elementary school, high school. Were there any people in your life that were particular mentors for you when you were younger? 

AB:	Well, I have a lot of ties to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I actually grew up in Evansville, a town of three 3,000 about 22 miles from here. My father was an engineer, and my mother was a stay-at-home mom I would say my father always encouraged me to strive and work hard in school. 

	And as far as elementary school, I do remember, let's see, a seventh grade teacher, Mrs. [Wreckert?], who did a lot of science. And she told me one time, Ann, you'd be really good scientist. And it's really interesting to look back on that. Because I think I had never thought of that until she said so. 

	And then when it came time to go to college-- 

SP:	Oh, wait, what about high school? Was it a good high school? 

AB:	I think it was a pretty good high school, in Evansville. I did have some good teachers, and a lot of friends. And there were 54 in my graduating class, so we were a pretty close bunch. 

SP:	Did you have any brothers and sisters? 

AB:	I have one sister who's two years younger than I am, and she's an engineer. Lives in California. 

00:02:02 

SP:	So then you left Evansville and you went off to college. And where did you go to college? 

AB:	University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

SP:	Was that your first and only choice? 

AB:	I never considered going anywhere else. In my high school, at that time, the strong academic students went to UW-Madison. And so it was very interesting when my kids were getting ready to figure out where to go to college. I didn't have any clue about looking at all the colleges in the country and deciding, because I had never been through that process! 

	But I loved the university as an undergraduate. I was a chemistry major. And I think you want to know about influential faculty. A very, very influential faculty member was Harvey Sorum, who was my freshman chemistry teacher. I have such fond memories of him. I don't think I knew enough of my interest in science to take the chemistry course that was designed for chemistry majors and chemical engineers, and he was the one that taught it. He was an absolutely fabulous teacher. Very enthusiastic and very caring about the students, and welcomed us into his office. So I did go to see him a lot of times when I had questions. And he was so encouraging, and remained friends of mine when we came back to Madison. He was emeritus then, but he had an office in the chemistry building. He used to come over and see me in Nolan Hall occasionally. It was really fun. 

00:03:30 

AB:	So he was a very big influence. And-- well, I was a chemistry major, and I liked science. But when I was a junior, I started taking biology classes, and liked those very much, and was motivated-- I wanted to find out more about science and research, and sought out a summer job where I could work in a lab, and got hired by a graduate student in McArdle. His name is Jed Spalding, and he was a graduate student at that time. He's of course long since become a faculty member. Of Gerry Mueller at McArdle. And Jerry was actually off on sabbatical when this started. 

	So I worked in the lab and I loved it. And when Gerry Mueller got back, he said, Ann, you should do a senior thesis project with me. So I got started doing my own research with Gerry Mueller, and he was incredibly encouraging about going to graduate school. 

SP:	Now what was the work that you did in the lab? 

AB:	Well, I was working on a lot of things having to do with cell cycle. I was assisting the graduate student, Jed Spalding. And there were we were measuring a lot of things-- so he had a mechanism of synchronizing healer cells so that they would all undergo mitosis at the same time. And then they were studying lots of different characteristics as a function of cell cycles. So I remember we used to get these cells synchronized, and then we'd have this, like, twenty four hour long experiment where we had to take points every two hours, or every four hours. I can't remember exactly what it was. But it was-- we did these huge experiments that took a huge amount of time, and then we'd have a couple of days off. 

	And Jed was very interested in teaching, and he used to take me into the lecture room and give me little lectures on things relevant. So he really encouraged me, too. 

	So I was lucky to work there. And then this summer after-- so my senior year, I did a project with Gerry Mueller, which I still remember that it was a partition of DNA and of multiphase systems with countercurrent distribution. They don't do anything like that anymore. 

	But I have a really strong memory about that one time, though, and I was talking about my results with Gerry, and he said-- and I explained something, and I said, and that isn't the result. That isn't what it's supposed to be. And he looked me right in the eye and he said, Ann, the first thing you've got to learn about science is you go by your results, not by what you're supposed to get. And I still remember that. And I quote that to my students a lot. 

SP:	That's a good lesson. 

AB:	And Gerry was very, very encouraging. I mean, he's one of-- Harvey Sorum and Gerry Mueller were the two biggest influences in my life as an undergraduate. And Jerry encouraged me to go to graduate school, and he asked me where is applying, and I told him this list-- 

00:06:23 

SP:	OK, back up, though. Now, were you were one of the few women in the chemistry department as a student, or were there--? You were? OK. 

AB:	Yes. In fact, I remember-- now there's all these learning communities, and women in science and engineering dorm, and things like that. I think it's so wonderful, and I'm so glad they're doing that. Because I do remember feeling very isolated in the dorm. I lived in Chadbourne Hall the first two years. It was an all-women's dorm at that time. That was back in those olden days, they segregated the men and the women. 

	And if I had a question about a chemistry problem, there wasn't anybody around that I could just go work with. Whereas in the men's dorm, lots of people were. And I didn't know anybody well enough to call them up and do it on the phone. So I didn't even realize at the time-- I was very isolated, but I didn't realize it at the time. 

	The other thing I do remember, though, is people treated me as weird because I was a chemistry major. 

SP:	Other women students, you mean, or any students? 

AB:	Everybody! And I belonged to a sorority, and we used to have to go to these things called beer suppers that I just hated. I hated those things, but it was required to go. So the sorority and fraternity would get together for this Friday night dinner, and some fraternity guy would come up to me and start a conversation, and then pretty soon he'd ask me what I'm majoring in, and when I said chemistry, usually he'd just turn around and walk away! So anyway. That's my experience with chemistry. 

	And while I'm talking about sororities, anybody that got engaged, they had this huge ceremony. Everybody-- I can't remember how they called us to the living room, but it'd be a darkened living room, and you'd pass around a candle, and the person who got engaged blew out the candle, and oh, it was such a big deal! 

	I got a fellowship to Harvard, and it wasn't a bit deal to anybody! And I just remembered thinking, how ironic. 

00:08:23 

SP:	So all right. But you enjoyed your four years at Madison. 

AB:	I really did enjoy my four years. And I really had a wonderful time as a student helper in Jerry Mueller's lab at McArdle. And everybody there treated wonderfully and encouraged me. It was a lot of fun. 

	The other thing, I have this very happy memory about that. So I told you, we did these enormous experiments. And then we'd have a day off. And sometimes the day off, but often during lunch period, we would put on our swimming suits-- McArdle wasn't air conditioned at that time. In the summertime, at noon, we'd put on our swimming suits under our lab coats, and we'd walk over to the Liz Waters pier, and we'd have lunch and swim in Lake Mendota during lunch hour! And then when we were celebrating one of these big experiments, we didn't have just the hour over the Liz Waters pier. We had several hours, because we were recovering from the twenty four hour experiment. 

	And I got to know several faculty members at the Liz Waters pier when I was working as a student helper. 

SP:	So when did you know you were going to go on to graduate school? 

AB:	Well, I think this experience working in the lab, I really enjoyed. I liked it more than class work, and I liked the atmosphere. It was also fun. Chemistry had been OK, and I liked it, but biology excited me a whole lot more on the whole. 

	So what I ended up doing is going to graduate school in molecular biology and biochemistry at Harvard. And they had a program, special interdisciplinary program in biochemistry and molecular biology. 

00:10:02 

SP:	And how did you choose-- is that why you chose Harvard? 

AB:	I had applied several places. So I have to tell a story about Gerry Mueller. So I was telling you before that he encouraged me to go to graduate school. And I'm sure he's the reason I got in, because the letters he wrote and stuff. But I gave him this list of places I was applying. He said, I don't see Harvard on the list! And I said, I'm never going to get admitted to Harvard. Well, he says, you sure aren't going to get admitted if you don't apply! So I did apply, and I did get admitted. So. 

	It was interesting. I did not get admitted to MIT. You know right away, because if you got admitted, you got this great big packet. If you didn't get admitted, you got a postcard. I got a postcard from MIT saying, your name is not among those of the accepted graduate students. It was about the coldest thing! 

SP:	Well, how did you-- you must remember when you found out you got admitted to Harvard. 

AB:	Well, that's right. I got this big letter! And I was so excited. And you know, I went around the sorority, and said, hey, look at-- You know, and the response I got was not enthusiasm, just looks sort of like-- one woman said to me, why do you want to do that? Anyway, so then I didn't go around quite so enthusiastically telling everybody. But of course I called my parents, and they were enthusiastic. And like I said, my father always encouraged my interests. 

SP:	So what was the fellowship? What did that cover? 

AB:	It was some kind of a training grant. These are very common even now. Which pays your tuition and a stipend. And so anyway, I decided to accept it, and I'm glad I did, because that's, among other things, where I met my husband. 

	There were six of us in the entering graduate class at Harvard. I was the only woman. And he was in the same program. 

00:12:09 

SP:	Well, what was the experience like? The first week you were in-- 

AB:	I was terrified. I was sure they were going to figure out that I didn't belong at Harvard. I didn't know enough. I spent the whole first year in the basement of the chemistry library, studying. It was very exciting. It was fun taking classes, and it was-- I mean, it was very stressful, because I was worried all the time. But the way they do it at Harvard is that you take courses intensely the first year, but then after that, I don't think I took any courses after the first year. Then I was working in the lab. 

	My major professor was named David Denhardt, and he was an assistant professor, who was kind of associated with Jim Watson's lab. There were several assistant professors, who-- we had all our seminars together, and parties, and stuff like that. So I was not in the Watson group, but pretty closely associated. And my husband, Dick Burgess, he was a student of Jim Watson. So that was our connections. 

	And in fact, it was a very nice situation, because I had a lot of attention from the man that was my supervisor, who was only like three years older than I. But I also talked to other people, and got to be part of this bigger group. 

	It was very exciting. There were so many things going on. It was just at the time when they were figuring out all kinds of things about basic molecular biology and transcription, and then whether it's three prime to five prime, or five prime to three prime, and how rhibozomes worked, and how initiation worked, and now repression worked, and mapping a lot of phage genes. 

	My thesis project was, I worked on a virus called phi X 174. And it's a very tiny virus. Only has ten genes. And we were trying to figure out what they are. And originally, they thought this virus was going to be really easy to figure out because it was so small, but then it turned out, of course, it depends a lot more on the host than a virus that has more of its own genes. So it wasn't quite so easy to figure things out. 

SP:	Now, what years were you there, then, at Harvard? 

AB:	I graduated from UW Madison in '64. I was at Harvard from '64 to '69. Got my PhD in '69? 

00:14:44 

SP:	And then what happened to you? 

AB:	Well, so in 1967, I married Richard Burgess, fellow graduate student. And we decided we would like to go somewhere to Europe as postdocs. And it was kind of a track that people from the Watson lab either went to Cambridge, England, or Geneva, Switzerland. And we up going to Geneva, Switzerland. I wanted to work on animal viruses, and I worked with a man named Bernard Mach, who was in a department-- 

	Well, but we started out in the same department. Dick was working with Alfred Tissieres in the Institut Biologie Moleculaire, and at one point, it moved to a new building, and the person I was working with actually joined a different department. But it was in the same building. 

	So anyway, that worked out very well, and I got experience in a very different area, working with animal cells? 

SP:	What was like living in Switzerland and being a postgrad? Oh, that was a lot of fun. I mean, we worked hard in the lab, but we played hard, too. It was a wonderful time. There was a large number of American-- well, international, but a lot of Americans, but European and Canadian postdocs in this Geneva lab. 

AB:	And there was a wonderful atmosphere. We had a lot of fun. Everybody worked hard, but then we went skiing a lot, and we went on hikes, and we went in the mountains. And we had some very close friends that we've continued to be friends with all these years. They live in Australia, actually. And the four of us did lots of things together. It that was before any of us had kids, so we had a lot of freedom. We went out to dinner all the time, and cooked together, and hiked, and did science together. It really was a wonderful time. 

00:16:39 

SP:	Were you able to travel a little bit, too? 

AB:	Yes. Suzanne, one of these friends, was very good at instigating trips. We wouldn't have gone nearly so many places if she hadn't said, OK! We have to go to Provence! We have to go to Greece! So it really was fun. 

00:17:00 

AB:	And then Dick was offered a job at University of Wisconsin. Which was sort of amazing. And I was delighted, because I loved Madison. And so, of course, postdoc time is time when everybody's looking for jobs. And I had decided not to try to look for a job independent of Dick. When we figured out where he was going to go, I would look for what I could do. 

	And lo and behold, not only did he get offered a job at University of Wisconsin, he was offered a job at McArdle Laboratory, my old stomping grounds! So that was, yes, '71. We were in Switzerland for two years. So '71. 

	Initially, I worked in his lab, although I collaborated with some of the other people here in Madison for two years. But then I was kind of looking for doing something on my own. 

SP:	Now, this was a paid job? 

AB:	Yeah. So the first year we were here as a postdoc in his lab, and the second year, I was promoted to be an assistant scientist, which is a pretty fun title. 

SP:	And you worked well together? 

AB:	We did. But it was a little hard on me, because we'd always been equal before that. And all of a sudden, he was a professor, and I was not equal, and people kind of ignored me in the lab, unless they couldn't get ahold of him. And I was-- I don't know. I don't think of myself as a person with a big ego, but I was feeling like I was getting lost somehow. 

00:18:35 

AB:	And something had happened during that. I can't remember now. Probably the second year. We'd gotten a invitation to participate in a discussion about this program called biology core curriculum. They were inviting people to get involved, particularly in the labs. They wanted some new labs for the program. And Dick and I went to a meeting where we talked about all this. And we both agreed to do a lab. So he did one on protein purification. I can't even remember what I did mine on. 

	Anyway, I did this lab. And one of the people involved in this is Walter Plaut, who was, at that time, the chair of the bio core program. Millard Susman, somebody who continues to be a friend. 

	So I helped a lot with the lab on microscopy, and I did another one of my own, which I'm blanking now what it was. Which it seems like it should be significant to me, but. 

	I really liked doing it. It was really fun. I liked interacting with the students, and I liked the team, the faculty team. 

	And so it was just at that time when I was having these thoughts about, I ought to look around for something else. I went to see Walt, who I had known-- he was one of the people that got me excited about biology when I was an undergraduate. And so I know him from when I had been his student. And I knew from this Biocore interaction, and working with him in the lab. And I went him, and I said, I just want to come and talk to you about, to give me some advice. Because I'm looking for something new, and I'm not sure what it is. But I love what I was doing with bio core. And I thought, you're so connected with teaching. Well, maybe you have some ideas. 

	And he said, matter of fact, we were just thinking of hiring somebody to run the lab for bio core. Because we have a different person coming in every week, doing something different, and lots of times in week two, students have questions about week one, but week one person isn't there anymore. And we were thinking, we need somebody to coordinate this, and make it hold together better. Would you be interested in that? 

SP:	Oh my! 

AB:	And I said, that sounds really interesting and really intriguing. And he said, I'll go talk to the dean. Talk to the dean, offered me the position. I mean, it was totally classic old boys' network! And I just happened to know one of the old boys! No posting the position or anything. 

SP:	So that's how I got involved in Biocore. I first was teaching the cell biology lab. 

00:21:13

SP:	Well, tell us, what is Biocore? 

AB:	Oh, yes. So it is an interdepartmental honors program. We started in '67, and the people who started it-- Millard Susman was one of them, Bob Metzenberg was another-- they had the idea that this is such a strong campus in biology. We should have a really strong introductory biology program. And I think in the very beginning, they envisioned it as something all the biology majors would go through, but it very quickly turned into the honors track, And it had been expanded. Just at the time I got involved, every year there were more students who wanted to do this. 

	It was the more challenging route to go through introductory biology. And it's a four semester program, so the other introductory biology is only two semesters. This was four semester integrated, and there were series of chemistry, math, and physics courses that were semi-required. I mean, chemistry was absolutely required, because people had to take that. They wanted people to have a very firm foundation in chemistry before they started biology. So Biocore didn't start until people were sophomores, having had a year of chemistry. So I mean, I could talk for hours and hours about Biocore. 

	So at that point, well I was I was teaching the lab, and I think we had nine three hour labs a week. I mean, it was a very-- you know, we started Monday afternoon, and it was actually too much to handle. And some of the Wednesday and Friday morning labs were undersubscribed, because people had so many conflicts with other courses. So it kind of settled down to fixed three hour labs. 

SP:	Now, physically, were these labs all over campus, or what was it all in one--? 

AB:	This took place in Nolan Hall. So the students who enrolled in this program-- at that time, cell biology was the first course in the program. And students would take a three-credit lecture course and a two-credit lab course. But it was intended that they take them together, so almost everybody was taking this five-credit program. And at the same time, as sophomores, they were taking organic chemistry, and many of them were taking second semester calculus. So it was a very heavy load on the students. 

	And the laboratory course then, and continued to be, very research-oriented. And students analyzing data, writing reports, modeling the format of scientific papers. So students complained all the time that it was too much work for two credits. But one of the strengths of the lab, of the program, was the experience students got in lab. Also, faculty came into the lab-- and it's been so many years, and there were so many different configurations of how we outraged all the labs to accommodate them-- by that point-- this is the early '70s now-- there were so many students wanting to take the program. 

	What happened, eventually, is we had-- this was encouraged by the dean. Because what would happen is, there'd be more students wanting to come take the program, and we would keep asking for more TAs. So the dean said, Look. You have to have an enrollment limit. You have to know how many students you have so we can plan ahead, and you can plan ahead. And that actually made everything-- we were not happy with that enrollment limit when the dean imposed it. But, in fact, it was a very good thing to do, because it made it much easier for everybody to plan ahead of time, and hire TAs in a timely way. And so, at that point, students had to apply to get into Biocore, before anybody who was willing to take on the rigor of the program was welcomed. 

00:25:43 

AB:	So anyway, I was in charge of the cell biology lab. And at one point, as I said, we were trying to accommodate so many people, we were actually teaching the cell biology lab fall and spring, even though the other courses in the program only were-- the people who took it in the spring, and the beginning were out of sequence. But there were so many people wanting to take it. 

	Anyway, we had these different things that we tried, and that was not a very workable-- those were orphaned students, because then they were out of sequence. So it settled down to cell biology in the fall, and other courses. Another course in the spring, which for a while was developmental biology, and then was a course called biological diversity. So there's a whole history of Biocore, and what courses got taught. 

	But I pretty early on got involved in the second semester course. And then somehow got just more and more involved in everything. Because I was the person who was around all the time, and I liked the students, so I did a lot of student advising. I got involved in faculty advising service, which just meant that you were one of their listed-- LNS had a whole list of advisers from different departments, and this advising service, students could call up and request an appointment, and if they said biology or premed, they'd put them on my list. And I'd go up there for a couple of hours a week and talk to students. 

	And I became very aware through that process of how difficult it was for students to figure out which biology major to undertake. Because there were something like thirty biology majors. So that's a whole another story about the biology major, and me getting involved in that. 

00:27:27 

SP:	Well, that's one of the questions I had. How, when you got to the point where students had to apply, what kind of application was it? What did you have to have to get in? 

AB:	Well, that's a very good question. So Biocore was governed by a faculty, staff, student committee, and that was a decision-making body. But what we came up with-- I didn't want to admit students solely on the basis of their grades. Because it would be their first semester grades, and a lot of people struggle in the beginning. And I also didn't want to have people choosing an easier course sequence so they'll get a better grade. For example, you know, taking chemistry 103-104 instead of 109-110 and one for chemistry majors. I want to encourage students to take the most challenging program. 

	So anyway, it was a very short application form that they had to fill out. And it asked them questions-- they did have to say-- and we actually made calculus a prerequisite, so that was another way of controlling the enrollment. Because we looked at the grades. People who had taken calculus did much better in Biocore than those who hadn't. And it wasn't because we depended so much on calculus. It was because people who took calculus were the stronger students, who were headed toward programs that needed it. 

	And one other reason for requiring calculus, actually, though, is their program-- biology majors such as biochemistry required it. So we wanted students to get the message that if you're serious, you need to be taking calculus. 

	So anyway. But as I said, there was a high correlation between having taken calculus and done well and doing well in Biocore. So the prerequisites, then, became chemistry and calculus, and concurrent enrollment in organic chemistry. Because by then, cell biology was a second semester course. We wanted a big picture course first. 

00:29:35 

AB:	I'm sort of getting sidetracked with the history of Biocore and history of Ann, but we have had times when a group of us, some of the core people, spent a lot of time discussing what would be the ideal sequence? Originally it started from small things and worked up to big things. So we started with molecules and ended up with ecosystems. But there were a lot of reasons why it was good to have students have the big picture first. In fact now, for many, many years, we start with evolution and ecology and genetics, because everybody wanted to build on genetics. And cell biology is second. 

	So anyway. At the time when all these things were happening, cell biology became a spring semester course instead of the fall semester first course in the program. 

SP:	And you were the lab director at this time. 

AB:	Yes. So my role, at that point, was director of evolution, ecology, and genetics in the fall semester lab, and cell biology lab in the spring. But I was involved in a lot. And in 1980, Walt made me the associate chair of the program. And I'd actually been doing a lot of administrative things, like writing memos to the deans about budgets, and TAs, and stuff like that. I'd been doing a lot of that all along. 

	But a core group of us met for a long time and got lots of input from people. Not everybody agreed with us, but that's when we decided to start with the big picture, evolution stuff first. 

SP:	And your title at that time was senior lecturer. 

AB:	Yes. Even though I was teaching labs, I wasn't faculty, but that was decided to be the appropriate title when I was hired, and then it never got changed. When my successor was hired, I think her title is faculty associate, not lecturer. 

	OK. Well, anyway, I can't remember where I was headed here. So Biocore always had-- 

00:31:34 [End side 1, begin side 2]

SP:	OK. You were talking about the labs. 

AB:	OK. Well, I guess, let me just finish up about sort of overview of my career with Biocore, and then we'll maybe go into more detail about what's special about the Biocore lab. 

	So in 1980, I became associate chair of the program, on top of the lab stuff I was doing. And through the '70s and '80s, I became much more involved in campus issues in biology education, and more involved with the whole Biocore program. 

00:32:10

AB:	And then a very sad thing happened in 1990. Walter Plaut, who had been chair of Biocore all those years that I was involved, died very unexpectedly and very suddenly of a heart attack. In fact, he was giving a lecture to Biology 101 students and he collapsed. And one of the students was an EMT, and they immediately called 911. And he was rushed to the hospital, but he never woke up. He died that day. 

	And it was so sudden, and so unexpected. And he was a very healthy person. He played squash, and all these things. 

	Anyway. The committee that governed Biocore met very shortly after, and very quickly and unanimously chose me to be the new chair of Biocore. Of course, these are all people I worked with, and people who knew that I'd already been doing a lot of administrative stuff with the program. 

	Anyway, that I was a real exciting time for me, and it really somehow gave me a lot of self-confidence that I hadn't quite had before that. And gave me the confidence to feel free to talk to the chancellor, and anybody else who had to find out about Biocore. And there was-- it took the University a while to decide if they could allow an academic staff person to be head of this flagship honors program, because it had always been headed by a faculty member. But there weren't any other likely candidates, and they finally accepted it. 

	So in 1990, I became director-- They wouldn't let me chair, but they decided I could be director. So my title was director of Biocore. 

	And it was very exciting for me, because before, I had lots of ideas about things that I wanted to do. I would propose them to Rob, and even though we had a great working relationship and I really respected him, he was involved in lots of other things. He was chair of Zoology. Well, most of these things took a lot of work. He wasn't eager to take on a whole bunch of new things. But now I could take on any new things I wanted to. And it was very exciting. 

	So I was then director of the program. And what that meant, besides I continued to be in charge of the two labs, which was extremely time-consuming. Which involved a lot of TA training, a lot of student interactions and assistance with their papers and all that kind of stuff. 

00:34:48

AB:	But recruiting faculty in the Biocore has always been an issue. Because they're not paid to teach in Biocore. And most departments-- some departments are great, and consider it part of somebody's normal teaching load. Botany, I want to give a big cheer to Botany, has always considered teaching a Biocore to be equivalent to teaching in Botany. 

	But many departments don't count it. I mean, there's some department chairs, particularly in the college of agriculture, who told faculty, you want to teach in Biocore, that's fine. But as far as we're concerned, that's like teaching in Sunday school. You do that on your own time. 

	Anyway. The wonderful thing about the team in Biocore is you had people who loved doing it, because the students were so much fun to teach. The honors students are very motivated. They're all there because they want to work hard and learn, and that's a big draw to faculty. 

	But it's very difficult when you're running the whole program. And so this was four lecture courses and three lab courses. Well, the labs were taught by academic staff, but we had a tradition of having the faculty present in a lot of the labs. And a lot of the original founding fathers, like Millard Susman and Bob Metzenberg, when it was their week that their lab was going on, they'd come to all the labs. And that's one of the things that made Biocore special, was all this faculty interaction. And Stan Peloquin was another one. He would come to all the labs when he was teaching. 

	Anyway. But recruiting faculty. On one hand, faculty who cared a lot about teaching and undergraduates and found that extremely rewarding were very drawn to Biocore. On the other hand, there were many cases expected to do this on top of their normal responsibilities. So that made it very, very difficult. And there were people who liked teaching, and liked Biocore and liked the students, but they were just overwhelmed by all that they were expected to do. So what happened is, people would come and teach in Biocore, but then they would decide, they just can't handle it, and they'd got to give up something, or they would be made chair of some program, and they'd have to look at their collection of things on their plate and decide they had to give up something, and so here was this volunteer thing in Biocore. 

	So recruiting faculty was something I spent a huge amount of time doing. And it helped, actually, that I'd been connected all over campus with all these other things I'd gotten involved, so I knew a lot of people. It's a lot easier to recruit people that you know than strangers. 

SP:	Hard to say no, right? 

AB:	Yeah, exactly. And the other thing I learned is, you do it way ahead of time. You know. Start like a year and a half before when you're getting people, because they're much more willing to commit. Well, next year I won't be so busy as I am now. But of course, you will be! 

	So recruiting faculty was a big responsibility. And there were lots of efforts at various times to try and figure out a better system. Because Biology 151-152 was a two-semester introductory sequence, also had trouble recruiting faculty. Because they were expanding. Biology was expanding all over campus, and student interest-- I think something like over a quarter of students who enter University are headed for some kind of biological science major. Anyway, and all these people have to take Introductory Biology. So both Biocore and 151-152 had this continual problem with recruiting faculty to teach in the program. So there were lots of meetings with lots of bodies about how we could make this look better. And it was very wearing down, too. 

	And the other thing with this volunteer program was that people were doing it on top of their normal stuff. So lots of times they were supposed to do something for Biocore, like write in and, see you. And it just didn't quite get done, and it would be two days before the exam, and it hadn't gotten started. And so I'd jump in. Because it's not the faculty that suffer if there's a bad exam. It's the students that stuffer. And so I was doing all this stuff all the time, and sort of exhausted. 

SP:	How many hours a week did you work for twelve years? 

AB:	I had a lot of fourteen hour days. I had a lot of times when I hadn't planned-- you know, I sort of had looked ahead, I had the lab at all set up, and everything was-- and then all of a sudden, I'd have an exam to work on. And I don't want to make this a criticism of the faculty, because it was just because they were so involved in so many things. And somehow the date sort of slipped up, and there it was. So I ended up getting involved in these things that took a huge amount of time and was a huge crisis. 

	I mean, I sort of a lot of times felt like the little boy with his finger in the dike, but I had all ten fingers in the dike. And Dick would say to me, Ann! And I’d complain about it. They know you're going to do it! They know that you'll pick up the pieces! It's your own fault! And then I'd say, but it's the students that will suffer if we have a bad exam! 

	So anyway. So that’s my responsibilities. And when I finally decided to retire-- It was this sort of overwhelming job. And I was frustrated that the University kept promising to figure out a better way to recruit faculty. Because that really a big, big issue. If there were some kind compensation for people teaching to in Biocore, or that every department was counting this as a big chunk of somebody's teaching time so that they got out of something else, then people would have more time to do what they needed to do, and it wouldn’t be kind of patching stuff together at the last minute. 

	On the other hand, the advantage of this system-- and I probably shouldn't even say this-- is that it really selected for people that really cared about teaching. And there are people on this campus who really do care about teaching. And usually the department conversations over lunch and stuff are not about teaching. And Biocore was a place where you could have all these conversations. 

	I instituted, as soon as I became director, a monthly chairs meeting. We'd get together and have breakfast together, and talk about whatever the issues were. Partly to give me input on what they were thinking about, things that I had to deal with, so I could be making community decisions, not unilateral decisions. But also, again, just to give these people that love teaching a venue where they could have a conversation about it. And struggle with the issues that we were struggling with. How can we do this better? This is a four-semester sequence. How can we do a better job at connecting and building on what we do in one semester to lead into another semester? 

00:41:53

SP:	Now, was this and is it still a unique program to Wisconsin? Or are there other programs like this on other campuses? 

AB:	Bob Metzenberg, who's one of the founders, told me that at the time when Biocore was founded, it was happening all across the country. They were doing lots and lots of programs like this, but most of them didn't last very long. 

SP:	It's still going on, right? 

AB:	Oh, Biocore is still going strong, yes. And in fact, when I retired, they decided to split my responsibilities among two people. One person to the interacting with the University and recruiting, and another person to the lab. In fact, in reality, what's happened is the person doing the lab is doing what I used to do. So I don't know how well it's working. But it's because the other person, who is a wonderful teacher and a wonderful person, has a million other things on his plate. 

	The advantage to academic staff is you can focus on the thing that you're supposed to do. Whereas it's very hard for faculty to have all these different responsibilities that they have to juggle. 

	So anyway. Biocore is still going strong, which I'm very happy. I'm very delighted with the new team. They're wonderful people, and they even care about the prairie, which is one of our-- So when we get-- 

	OK. I think I've finished Ann. Because I've now got me retired. So now I can talk about teaching labs. 

SP:	All right. 

00:43:30

AB:	So there's been a big movement in science education, biology education. One of the big leaders is something called the Bioquest Consortium, that I got involved with years ago. Based at Beloit College, but it's a national movement who feel very strongly that the way to teach science is for students to do science It's not to-- I mean, my kids got turned off of biology in high school because they had to memorize a bunch of stuff. And they saw biology, they didn't see it as something fun. They saw it as memorizing all this stuff. 

	And in college, I think, for many years that happened a lot. That there was a lot of memorize all this stuff, in the teaching the biology. But now, what more and more people are trying to do is teach the process of science. And Biocore has been way at the front of that, from the very beginning. 

	And the labs, we're trying over the years, more and more successfully, to have students working on projects where they're doing real science. They're asking their own questions, and they're designing their own experiment, and they're getting their results, and they're drawing conclusions, and maybe their results don't support their hypothesis, and that's very hard for the students, because they think they've failed somehow. But we keep emphasizing, no, that leads you to the next step. And that's what science is. It's not about getting the right answer. It's about finding out how the world works, and doing experiments, and then going on to the next experiment. If you get a surprising result, that's telling you something. 

	And so as I said, the students work in teams to do this. And then the other thing that Biocore has emphasized from the very beginning, so before I was involved, but I totally supported it, is becoming a writing-intensive course. So all of our lab courses are writing-intensive courses. So part of the process of science is presenting your ideas to peers, and convincing the scientific community that your ideas are that correct. So this whole idea of doing experiments is not enough. You have to get it out there for criticism. 

	So the students have to do that. And they have to write. And because we want them to learn-- a very, very big goal in Biocore is to help the students improve their writing ability. So they had to write individual reports. Even though they worked as a team, and we encouraged all kinds of interaction and collaboration and discussion. But then they had to go home and write their reports on their own. 

	And then many times they would turn them in-- sometimes they had peer reviews of their reports, sometimes they had a chance to turn it in, get a grade, and rewrite it, because we learned from the writing people, Brad Hughes, et al, who's been wonderfully helpful in this whole process over many, many years-- rewriting is how you learn. 

	And before I got clued in by him, I assumed that students turned in a lab report, they get all these comments about the strengths and weaknesses of their lab report, and then they learn from that. They read all that, and then they use all that, what they learned, to write their next bio report. That isn't how it works. Because when they get this lab report back, they got a grade on it, that's done, they put that in their file. They don't look at all those comments! You spent so many, many hours writing out the comments about the strengths and weaknesses of their papers! So if you want them to read all that, they have to redo the paper. 

	So that's one of the many things I learned from Brad Hughes. Another one is to emphasize rewriting, not editing. Now, don't go in and edit the student's paper. Give them big picture comments, and make them redo it and edit it. 

00:47:21 

AB:	So anyway, 1997, we started the Biocore Prairie Restoration Project. So the evolution, ecology, and genetics lab had been doing a project called our pickle jar experiment, where we went out to University Bay, and collecting all these critters and plants and mud and everything. And students brought it back to the lab, and they worked in a team of two, and they made their own aquarium in a gallon glass pickle jar. And they put in what they wanted, and then they-- and it worked amazingly well. They had their own little ecosystem, and they were all different. We had to encourage them, in the beginning, not to put in too much, because they had the idea, the more you put in, the better it's going to be. But in fact, the less you put in, the healthier the other stuff will be, because you can overload the system. 

	So anyway, this was one of our projects. But the problem with this project is, the students didn't see it as real. They saw it as something they're doing for the lab. So for evolution and ecology, I wanted a real project. 

	And just at this time, there was a big presentation by Virginia Kline, who was the ecologist at the Arboretum at that time the Arboretum was managing all the campus natural areas. And they were just announcing a master plan for the campus natural areas. And one of the big thing was for community and class groups to take on an area and follow the master plan, but to do the work and restoration in a way for hands-on learning and also getting the work done. 

	And so the person, Curt Caslavka, who was our laboratory manager and I, we got very excited about this. And we walked all over deciding, where would we like to do a project? And we picked this little spot that's between Picnic Point and the Eagle Heights Community Garden, which was an old, weedy field, to do prairie restoration. So we started this project for the course. 

	This is totally real, and it's fraught with all kinds of problems and difficulties, because when you're doing something that's real, you don't know how it's going to come out, and the data are very messy. Anyway. Well, we got the students involved, and this has now been handed on-- this project started out six tenths of an acre. Last fall we just planted six and a half more acres. The whole thing is now nine acres. It's not prairie yet. Parts of it are prairie. But there's different parts that have been planted at different times. 

	And it's not just getting the students out there to work and do data collection, but every year, they talk about what's going on, and propose some experiment. So for example, the first year the experiment that we did was to figure out, what's the best way to get rid of the weeds? Because it's an old, weedy field, and that's a big challenge. It's a much bigger challenge than I realized when we started all this. 

	So we divided this six tenths of an acre into nine plots, and three got mulched, and three got herbicided, and three got rototilled every couple of weeks to figure out what's the best way to control the weeds. But the thing is, and then students become involved in this, and they learn about replication, and they learn about error analysis, significant figures, and standard error. And they have to be able to look at some data and decide, can you draw any conclusions? In fact, what it turned out, I mean, it took us several years to get enough data to actually decide that there was no difference between the weed treatment programs. In fact, none of them or very successful. 

	But the students, every year, would be part of some ongoing experiment. I mean, there are different experiments started all along. And got very-- even the premeds got very excited about prairie restoration. So that's an example. 

	But then they would have to, we would have all this data that students would analyze. And it was a very edge big challenge to me to figure out how to make this doable by introductory students, and how to-- for example, what we would do is give different teams different sets of species to analyze. So we'd go out and get all this data about what's growing out there. And of course they had to learn plant identification and things like that. And they did quite little plots that they looked at what's inside the plot. But figuring out how to put all the data together, and then separate it into the pieces that different teams could work was a challenge. But anyway. We figured out all that, and I'm hoping that the students will come back years later, and bring their families, and say, I helped do that prairie! 

	And it became a model, actually, for lots of other programs to do research in the campus natural areas, which is now called the University of Wisconsin Lakeshore Nature Preserve. 

SP:	That's right. I just dropped by it the other day. Now that I know the story, I'm going to have to go back and take a closer look. That's great. 

AB:	So and in other courses, each semester of Biocore, we progressed more in this mode of having them design their own experiments. By the third semester lab--organismal biology lab, they spend most of the semester on a really big project that they're working in a team. It's their question and their method. And then they do Powerpoint presentations for the rest of their classmates at the end, and in fact invite in a lot of faculty and interested other people. 

	So one of the things about the Biocore lab was this whole process of science. Not a cookbook lab where you know the answer in the beginning. And another nice thing about students designing their own experiments is that they're coming up with new things all the time. So you have less worry about last year's materials in the fraternity files, stuff like that. 

00:53:31

SP:	Now do you survey the students after they're finished with the program, and is it pretty much overall satisfactory, or more than satisfactory, as far as the students are concerned? 

AB:	I would say, overall, students who go through the program are very enthusiastic about it. And we tend to hear, many years later, from the ones who are enthusiastic. We don't hear years later from the ones who are unhappy. But we get comments back many years later about, I didn't realize how wonderful this problem was until I became a TA at, you know, X university, and see how they teach introductory biology, or somebody will write back and say how well it prepared them for medical school, or whatever. 

	Or one very common theme is the writing experience. At the time I hated it. I just hated it! But it's the most useful thing I learned in a while four semesters. 

00:54:34

AB:	So I guess the other thing that is different about Biocore is-- I really pushed this-- the whole idea of cooperative learning and students interacting with each other. Much, much more learning occurs when students are discussing things than when they're passively taking notes from a professor lecturing. 

	So want the fourth semester course-- so there's a four-course sequence. We wanted the fourth semester to be a course where students pull together what they've been learning from the previous semesters. And I wanted it not to be a lecture course. 

	It was very hard recruiting faculty who would be willing to do this, that when I was going through this process, that was the ground rules. I mean, we're going to teach a totally new kind of course. And I was very fortunate in being able to recruit some new young faculty who hasn't ever taught in other ways, and one, in particular, who was very frustrated with the old ways and embraced this totally. 

	And so we came up with this cooperative learning. It was focused around papers in different areas of biology. So we picked the four faculty who had each taken a topic. And there were topics that the faculty member was interested in, but would draw on several areas of biology. And then students worked in teams of about four students and they read papers from the primary literature, and then a large part of their grade was these worksheets that they did cooperatively in class. 

	And they had to-- we got lots of advice about people who do cooperative learning. Because accountability is a really big issue. If you've got a team working on a team worksheet where they're going to get one grade, some members of the team aren't prepared, the whole thing falls apart. Because everybody gets mad at the ones who aren't prepared, and-- 

	So accountability was a really big thing. So we structured it so there was a quiz the day before. The quiz questions were, have you prepared for this experience? Not in-depth thought questions, but lots of straightforward questions out of the reading. And there was a study guide for each week, also, that gave some background information, because sometimes students needed to know something that they haven't learned in the previous Biocore semesters. 

	So there was a quiz every Tuesday, and then Wednesday they did this group worksheet. And the quiz, of course, gets everybody prepared, because they get an individual grade on that. And we have some very challenging questions on these worksheets. I mean, the idea is to ask such challenging questions that it would be very hard for somebody to do it on their own, but when they discuss it as a team of four very smart, well-prepared people, they can do it. 

	So that course-- and I'm very enthusiastic about that. Because I think it did help them. It gave this opportunity to go back and draw from the other semesters. Because one of the things that seems to happen, is students, when the semester ends and the final exam is over, it's like they close that part of-- And so we kept having to draw back. We'd tell them to keep all their textbooks, and we would refer back to-- remember when we studies genetics? 

	And the reason I'm describing all this is because there were quite mixed feelings about this collaborative course as the capstone course. Some students loved it and thought that they'd learned more than they ever learned before, and some students hated it. 

SP:	Now, when the students come into the program, is that all that they're taking? 

AB:	The first three semesters are five credits. The fourth semester, this capstone course, is only three credits. Doesn't have a lab. So they've taking very challenging courses in addition to this. So it's very hard. It's a very big challenge for them. 

SP:	And if somebody is struggling, is there individual help? 

AB:	Oh, yeah. One of the things that's a really big advantage about Biocore is we have more TA support than-- for the number of students that we teach, we have more TAs than other courses would for that number of students. And part of it's because the exams are essay exams. They're not machine-graded exams. And all these laboratory reports have to be graded, and the TAs do that. I mean, I spend a huge amount of time working with the TAs. And we would do these workshops in the beginning where we would talk about a paper, and everybody grading the same thing and discussing it. Because students are very sensitive to-- My roommate's TA is an easier grader than my TA! So it's very hard to be consistent. 

	But anyway. And Biocore had gotten a reputation as being a really good place to be a TA, especially for future faculty people who want to get some teaching experience, and especially some nonstandard teaching experience. Also, we were very lucky. Because it was a desirable place to be TA, so we could interview people and pick the and best candidates as TAs. And I learned as much from the TAs as they ever learned from me. It was a total partnership and wonderful experience working with those graduate students. 

SP:	Sounds like just a fantastic program. And you said that a lot of the programs on other campuses have not continued. 

AB:	That's what Bob Metzenberg told me. 

SP:	That's really sad. 

AB:	Yeah. 

SP:	But I would think, then, that students, science students, would be drawn to Wisconsin because of the program. 

AB:	There are some people who have told us that they had heard about it ahead of time, and they wanted to come here because of that. 

SP:	Very interesting. 

01:00:36

SP:	OK. We've talked about teaching. Let's see. What are the most significant developments in your field of study? And I know that's a broad field, so talk about any part of it. Or all parts of it. 

AB:	Well, I think I should talk about teaching since we're-- I alluded to some of this earlier. In all of science education, there's been a big movement toward making the labs investigatory labs rather than cookbook labs. And in the lecture part of the course, there's been a very big movement about involving students in some kind of discussion. 

	So this was led by-- well, one of the people was Uri Treisman, who was at Berkeley, and found that-- he was teaching calculus. And the Asian students were doing very well, and the black students and Hispanic students weren't doing very well. And he hung out to find out what was different. Because he was convinced that it wasn't difference in ability. And he found the Asian students were all working together, and they had these study sessions, and everything was working on the problems, and they wouldn't quit until every member of the group understood everything about the problem. Whereas the black students and the Hispanic students were working totally on their own, and they weren't working together. And when they couldn't figure out something, they got discouraged and dropped the course. And he got them all working in teams, and everybody succeeded! 

	And that's the model for the Wisconsin Emerging Scholars here, the math program. You're probably familiar with that. And it's been extremely successful here. The Emerging Scholars-- well, I'm a little out of date. But I know a few years after it started, they'd take the same calculus test as everybody else, and even though they were the at-risk students that were counseled into the Emerging Scholars program, they always got the highest score on the exam! Their section. 

	So I guess another thing is-- Eric Mazur-- he's in physics, he's at Harvard. There was this-- or somebody named Hestenes in Arizona-- started giving physics students a test-- physics exams—[End side 2, begin tape 2]

	Professor Hestenes gave a conceptual test. It wasn't problem-solving. It was things like, a small car and a big truck have a collision. The force of the truck on the car is equal to more than the force of the car on the truck. Or you have a boat in a bathtub, and you remove a brick from the center of the boat, is the water in the bathtub going to go up or down? Or just very broad-- I'm really not even giving the exact examples. But I'm trying to give an impression of the kind of questions. 

	And to his dismay, his students, even the students who got A's on the problem-solving test, didn't do well on this at all. And he published this, and started a revolution in physics education. And Eric Mazur at Harvard just grabbed the ball on that, and he said, not my Harvard students. And so he gave them the same test, and they did just as poorly! 

	And so he totally changed the way he taught. I mean, this is just examples of, in science education, different people finding what works and what doesn't work. He started doing this thing called concept tests. So first of all, he realized that most of his teaching was stuff that was in the textbook. He would lecture on something, and then the students would take notes, and then they would know that's what they should study in the textbook, because that's what would be on the exam. 

	But somehow, this was all backwards, so he started telling students, he had to give them assignments of what they had to study before they came to lecture, then they'd get to lecture, and he'd give them some kind of a very brief test. And he had his classroom all wired up, so it was all electronic. He'd know the results instantly. And it was wired to the each student. So he not only knew the group scores, he knew individual student scores. 

	So his system was to have students prepare ahead of time, give kind of a very short minilecture on something, and give a set of conceptual questions that they had-- they're multiple choice and they had to choose. He had the students vote on the answers, then he had them get in a group and talk together. 

	And he found that when they talked together, the incidence of getting the correct answer went way up. And the idea behind it is that somebody who's just mastered a concept is much better at explaining it to a person who's struggling with it than the professor who mastered it twenty years ago. And if it continued that people will struggling with concepts, he'd explain it some more. But then if people did pretty well, then he'd go on. 

	So much more of the time was spent with the students talking to each other in lecture, and much less time was spent with him speaking. 

01:06:07 

SP:	Now, do you see things like this happening in high school classes, too? Is science education in high school changing? 

AB:	So I haven't done any surveys of high school. I only know what happened to my kids at West High. And in physics, my daughter took a physics course where they spent the whole time for rolling soup cans down inclined planes and stuff like that. They would do it. And then they had to explain their results to the other people in the class. So it was very much-- her teacher must have gone to a workshop where they discussed all these things. It was much more like this. 

	I think that's not universal, by any means. And when my son went through biology, he hated it. And he's four and half years younger than my daughter. So certainly biology wasn't taught that way at West High School. And in universities, it's spreading, but it's certainly not universal. But there's an incredible amount of data that shows that students learn more when they spend a lot of times struggling with concepts and working problems together, rather than sitting passively in lecture. 

01:07:23

AB:	And the National Institute for Science Education-- this was a five-year, very many million dollar program funded by the National Science Foundation. In Wisconsin, there was a series of pre-proposals and Wisconsin was a finalist, and then had to put in this full-blown proposal. And Wisconsin won it. So the National Institute for Science Education was based in Madison for five years. They didn't renew it at the end. I think they gave them an extra year to finish off some stuff, but. So I got very involved in what's called the College Level 1 program, which was teaching introductory science. 

SP:	And were you teaching? 

AB:	I was just teaching the lab. But I was very interested in all these issues, and already very committed to interactive teaching. And promoting. So I was promoting it in Biocore. And I was more successful with some people than others. 

01:08:27

SP:	Did you have any time to get involved in other activities on campus while you were director of the Biocore program? Other campus committees, or academic staff governance, or anything like that? 

AB:	Well, I was involved in a lot of committees that had to do with TA training, biology major, getting a biology adviser-- that was cross-campus, and turned out to be the model for the cross-campus advising service. So lots of things involving the Center for Biology Education, organized an Undergraduate Biology Education Committee. I was a very active member of that. In fact, I was the chair of the subcommittee that proposed that we have a Biology major. Because what had happened was that we have like thirty different biology majors, and students are expected to figure out which college-- when they came to Madison interested in biology, they had to not only know what major they wanted. They had to know what college. Because certain majors are in certain colleges. If you want to major in Zoology, you had to be in L&S. If you want to major in Horticulture, you have to be in Agriculture and Life Sciences. And lots of students would come and say, I don't know what I want to do. I just want to major in Biology. 

	So we proposed that there would be a Biology major, and it would be in both colleges. And we proposed that there would be a Biology adviser, who would advise people from all the colleges. Because before you could even talk to an adviser, you had to say what college you were in. And before you could say what college you were in, you had to know what major, because certain majors were in certain-- and it was just totally wrong from a student's viewpoint! 

	So this Undergraduate Biology Education Committee was a bunch of people who cared about how it was for the students, and tried to fix it. And we did. And we now have a Biology adviser, and you can talk to her without knowing what college you're in and you can major-- we now have a Biology major, and you can major in it in CALS or L&S. So we did these things! I'm very proud of that. 

SP:	Oh, you should be. 

01:10:42 

SP:	Could you talk about-- what's your opinion on the climate for women here? How does it help or hinder the participation and advancement of women, and then, this is kind of a side question, but maybe you want to talk about that first. And then just the whole issues of girls getting involved in science. You know, how you get involved in elementary school through middle school and high school, to get them to what to come to university. 

AB:	OK. So let's do the girls in science one first. And I'm very interested in this, because I have a daughter. Getting girls involved in science has to happen early. I mean, by the time they come to college, they've already decided. And our daughter had a wonderful middle school science teacher, and she got all excited about science. She never got excited about biology, but she now has a PhD in physics! And I think this high school physics teacher I told you about, and what they were doing in that class, I think that had a big role in it. 

	And our son was totally turned off by his experiences in science in middle school. Unfortunately he didn't have the wonderful person that our daughter did, and just never had any interest in science, even though he was very good at math. And it's fine with me that he's not in science. But I just see that the decision, in both of my children's case, got made very early. 

SP:	Well.

AB:	So I think—

SP:	The way of teaching itself is one thing that's going to help. If it's going to get any more people involved. Not just girls, but all student involved. 

SP:	Yeah. Because I think you're right. The issues are not just to get more women involved and girls involved. It's to get everybody more involved. I mean, to be a citizen in this country, you have to understand science! There's so many important issues. And the polls that they do when they ask people questions about basic science are just-- it's terrible to hear the results! So we need everybody to be more literate, and more interested in science. 

AB:	And it's a really, really big question, and I don't have any good answers. Except that you need to start early, I think. And I guess the other thing is, I don't know a whole bunch about how elementary teachers are prepared to teach science in schools of education. I do know-- I was quite involved in little projects in my kids' classrooms from the time they entered school, because I was eager to help out. 

	Some of the elementary teachers welcomed me, and just loved having access to resources at the university. And I get them a skeleton at Halloween! I mean, there was all kinds of things I could get them! Or x-rays when they were studying bones! And some of the teachers embraced that, and some of the teachers looked at me like, oh my God, she's going to find out I don't know anything. I don't want to even talk to her. And that was very hard to deal with, because I wasn't in any way being judgmental. I was wanting to help. 

	So I don't have the answers. But early just important. And kids are so curious when they're little! You know. They're just asking questions all the time. It's like you have to work to not have them interested. And this memorize a bunch of stuff is the first way to squelch it, I think. 

01:14:28

SP:	OK, how about the climate for women on campus. 

AB:	OK. So my colleagues have always treated me incredibly well, and everything to do with the Biocore program, it's been wonderful. The one place where the climate is not so good is treatment of academic staff. So I never felt discrimination about being a woman, but I felt huge discrimination about being an academic staff member. And that's a little bit related, because there's a lot more women who are academic staff, and a lot fewer women who are faculty than men. So I don't know how to quite tease it out. But I'll just give you one example. 

	And that is, I mentioned earlier that I was the chair of the subcommittee that instituted the Biology major. And this was a very long process. We had to convince a lot of people. A lot of departments were threatened by this. They thought they'd lose majors, and they thought they'd lose resources because of it. Even though the deans assured that they weren't counting things like that. Anyway, we worked hard and we finally succeeded. 

	And at some point along this process, the person who was the chair of the Undergraduate Biology Education-- we got a new chair, and he decided he wanted, this was really moving along and going great, and he decided he wanted to be chair of the committee. Which was fine with me. I just wanted to get the job done. Anyway-- but I'd been involved from the beginning, and knew a whole lot more about it than he did. And we just continued getting the job done. 

	And then, lo and behold, the Biology major is going to be implemented. And I get a letter from the dean of CALS and L&S asking me if I would please be on the implementation committee. However, I was to be a nonvoting member, because I was not faculty. 

	Anyway! So I sent out the e-mail to Phil Certain, who's one of the signatures of the letter. And Phil Certain was a wonderful dean. Incredibly supportive of academic staff, incredibly supportive of women. I had no complaints whatsoever, and a huge amount of respect for Phil Certain and I couldn't believe he sent this letter. And he sent me back an e-mail saying, Ann, I totally agree with you. I just want to get the job done. It was the other dean that insisted on this. 

	So I forgave Phil. And I served on the committee. But that's the kind of attitude they have. You know, here, I worked more with undergraduates, and advising, and biology issues, and major issues than anybody on that committee. And they tell me-- Oh, and the one other person who was in my same role as Pat Hendrickson, a biology adviser, who also knew more about the biology major and the problems and the students, who was also academic staff-- she was also a nonvoting member. So the two people who knew most about the issues and cared most about the issues were nonvoting members. 

	And it's so ridiculous, because we never voted on anything, anyway! There was no reason to have that sentence in the letter, other than it was a big putdown. 

01:17:40

AB:	Or when the Undergraduate Biology Education Committee, which was assembled by the Center for Biology Education, and was just-- anybody could it be part of this that wanted to. They had contacted people they knew were interested, and got this committee together, and we did all these good things. And then the divisional committee decided that there should be more-- the Biological Sciences Divisional Committee was in charge of curriculum, and strategic planning, and all kinds of things, but really, they spend all the time doing tenure decisions, and the other things weren't getting done. 

	So there was a big reorganization at some point, and decided that the divisional committee would expand. There would be three arms. There would be an education arm, there would be a strategic planning arm, and then there would be the tenure-granting arm. And these were all elected committees. And it was a very good move. Because this needed to happen. 

	But these are faculty committees. Not only was I not allowed to run for the undergraduate education committee, I wasn't even allowed to nominate people for it. Even though, by that point, I had what's called faculty status, which is really an honorary thing that let me vote in the faculty senate elections, that's all. This was a perfect example how being academic staff with faculty status meant nothing. 

	Anyway. So that committee went on without me, which was fine. I had plenty of other things to do. But that's an example of-- faculty are in charge of teaching. There are certain academic staff members, like me, who are full-time teaching undergraduates, who are immersed and totally committed to all these issues, and we're not allowed to be on these committees. So I don't think that's right. 

01:19:27

SP:	Do you think there's an answer to that? Do you think that's ever going to change? Do you think younger faculty will look at differently at academic staff? 

AB:	I don't know. I mean, it would be easy to say that academic staff-- I mean, I don't know. I guess the faculty senate would probably have to be the ones making this rule. It would be easy to say, academic staff who have primarily teaching responsibilities are eligible to be on the appropriate committee. 

SP:	Right. You'd think that would be easy, I agree! 

AB:	So anyway. Like I said. I actually didn't feel discrimination about being a woman. I mean, I didn't feel any bad climate issues. But then, I didn't have to come up for tenure, or anything like that. 

SP:	But you worked with a lot of faculty. That was your primary responsibility, outside of the students, of course. 

AB:	Yeah. I did work with a lot of faculty. I mean, it was a real pleasure. I especially enjoyed working with young faculty, who were starting out teaching and eager to get feedback. And we worked together very well, because they really wanted to do a good job, and they appreciated my opinions on how they could improve. And I appreciated that they wanted to improve. So that worked out very well. 

	And all these committees. I mean, there's lots of committees, besides the ones I talked about, that were eager to have me participate. So I did a lot of stuff there. But it helped me, too, because it got me connected with people all over campus, which helped very much when I needed to recruit. 

01:20:58

SP:	I'll bet. Yeah. What about the national demand? And have you been involved-- I would think, because this is the program that's been around obviously the longest, were you involved nationally in spreading the word about this, or involved in a professional organizations, anything like that? 

AB:	Well, let's see. Nationally, I was involved-- yeah. First of all, the Bioquest Consortium, which I alluded to earlier. I was on their editorial board and involved with many of their workshops. Had many fun colleagues from all over that I know through that organization. 

	The National Institute for Science Education. I mentioned that earlier. We put on a workshop here on cooperative learning, and had quite an impressive website about how to implement cooperative learning, and lots of resources on it. I worked on that. That was national, even though it was based in Madison. So it was actually very nice for me to not have to travel. 

	Another national thing I was involved with. The chemistry department was the recipient of a big grant called New Traditions. They had several-- there were maybe six of these all over the country-- multi-university college consortia of improving chemistry education. And I was very interested in this, because I mentioned earlier that we have a prerequisite of chemistry for our course, for Biocore. And we were a little bit shocked when students would come into Biocore, and we'd allude to some basic chemistry concept, and they wouldn't seem to know what it was. 

	And so I was really interested in the issue of how to connect chemistry and biology. And I think that if we would have taken a student and asked that same question that we asked that they couldn't answer, if we would have walked them across the street and ask them that question in the chemistry building, where they had the chemistry box open, they could have answered it. 

	But anyway, I was really interested in working with the chemistry faculty. So they had mentioned, occasionally, some important concept, like energy or something, that's going to relate a lot to biology. And so chemistry faculty know there's so many more biology majors sitting there in their chemistry class than there are chemistry majors. I mean, I think there's something like thirty chemistry majors a year, and there's hundreds and hundreds of biology majors. 

	Anyway. The people who were involved in the New Traditions program were very interested in this issue, and they're very interested in learning communities and connecting. And so they welcomed me, and I became part of the leadership team for the New Traditions chemistry, having to do with the interdisciplinary course master group. 

	So another thing we tried to do was set up-- and this is happening actually quite well at the University now, but this was the first-- connecting chemistry, calculus, and-- we went to the register's office and found out-- I wanted to connect biology, but of course, our program with for sophomores. But we needed to, when freshmen first came, we were trying to get them into learning communities where they would be with the same group of students in their chemistry class, and their calculus class, and maybe their psychology classes. So we'd link these three courses. Not everybody in all the courses is together, but one discussion section, you'd come and you'd have the chemistry course with these students, and you'd have the math course with these students, and you'd have the psychology class with these students. And then you meet with them. 

	And what we were trying to do, which didn't work so well, was have the professors meet and make connections among the courses, too. But because this was a small subsection of their great big course, they weren't too interested in putting a lot of effort into that. 

	But anyway. So this whole idea of learning communities, I worked on that quite a lot. Connecting chemistry with other things. And of course with my chemistry background, that kind of made sense for me, too. 

01:24:53

AB:	So national stuff. Well, one of the most exciting things that I did is, there's a group called Biology 2010, which was a very high-powered task force. National Academy people. Looking at how we should train the next generation of biologists and medical researchers. And they met several times. I mean, it's all very prestigious people doing it. And they had a workshop, and they invited thirty educators to come and talk to them about teaching. Because, you know, preparing the next generation of biology researchers, that has a lot to do about teaching courses. So I was one of the people invited to that. And that was really fun. 

SP:	Oh, I bet! That's very impressive. So you, did you actually--? 

AB:	I'm talking about presentation about Biocore and what I thought was important, and some other things I've been talking about here. About students interacting with each other, and what we've learned about how important that is, and about the process of science in the labs, and about writing. So some of the themes-- you can tell what I have passions about here. 

01:26:03

SP:	Talk about any honors and awards you've received. And I know there have been, because I've read about you. But just talking about the ones that mean the most to you. 

AB:	OK. Well, I received three teaching towards. One that meant a particularly-- Well, the Underkofler Award, which is a system award, meant a lot to me, because I got a lot of recognition with that, and that felt really good. But another one that I got was from the undergraduate Medicine Chapter of the Golden Key Honor Society. And the reason that one meant so much to me is because it was totally student-chosen. 

	So the Underkofler award was one of these things where you put in this huge packet where you tell your teaching philosophy, and you give examples of your materials, and lots of colleagues write letters, and students write letters, and it's a whole big deal. But the student thing was totally student-organized, and they just told me that they wanted me to come to this banquet, because they wanted to give me this award. I mean, they gave awards every year to a small number of faculty. So that meant a lot. 

	I received a leadership award. Every year there's an Academic Staff Leadership Award in many different categories. And I received a Leadership Award from the Alumni Association providing the money. And then there was a big reception at the chancellor's house. So that was very thrilling. 

SP:	And you retired a distinguished lecturer. 

AB:	Oh.

SP:	That's an honor.

AB:	So that was a very big honor. And that one, totally, my colleagues organized that. They said, we want to nominate you for this. And I said, oh gosh, I'm really honored. And so-- yeah. I think for academic staff to be called distinguished is-- there's a whole process you go through, and there aren't very many of them. 

	And then I received a Career Service Award from the College of Letters and Science the year I retired, which was very nice, too. 

01:28:05

SP:	Well, now you're retired. And have you stayed involved with the campus at all? Are you doing some things, or have you done some things? 

AB:	Oh, I'm very involved. Well, first of all, I was one of the first four ombudspersons. So Peter Spear started a new program based on some things he had seen at Colorado, when he was there. And actually, this had been recommended by the Committee on Women and a whole bunch of other different groups, that there would be an ombuds program And the way it works in Madison is four retired faculty and staff have an office and share an office, and it's roughly quarter time each person. But we get a lump sum consultant fee. It's not anything like a quarter time salary. We're doing it for love, not for money, anyway. 

	The idea is to try to help people solve conflicts, try to get people-- So if somebody's having a conflict, rather than having it escalate until they hate each other, and they're suing each other, or some awful thing is happening, have them come to the ombuds office, and they make an appointment ahead of time with one of the ombuds, and sit down and talk. And it totally depends on what the person wants. So any person initiates it by making an appointment, and then comes and talks to ombuds. 

	And lots of times, people just want a sounding board. They just want to say, this is what's happening to me, and I don't think it's right, and what are my options. And we just talk and sometimes we have some ideas that they hadn't thought about. And sometimes they want to set up a meeting with the person they're having a conflict with. I mean, it's totally dependent on what the person who initiates this whole thing wants. 

	Sometimes they want it to be totally confidential, and then it is. In fact, we even got the university lawyers and everything to rule on all this confidentiality. So there's a very high degree of confidentiality. And so maybe somebody, for example, thinks they've been sexually harassed, but they don't want to go to the office to report it that deals with that. Because that's not, that's a public-- I mean, it's confidential to a certain extent, but if the process goes a certain distance, the names because open. So they might want to come to the ombuds office and talk about whether they want to do that or not. And then if they decide to do it, then they go to the-- I think it's the-- Oh gosh. I stopped doing this, I put in Diversity Office. Or anyway, the place that handles that. Louis Pinero is the person in charge of that. 

	So one of the things we did as ombuds is get lots of training about all the different organizations at the university that help people solve problems about, you know, if it's a civil service, who are the people that deal with that, who are faculty senate, academic staff, assembly. And we met with all kinds of university lawyers, anyway, to learn all about these different bodies and what they do, so we would know where to either get more information, or where to refer people. 

	And so sometimes people just want information. Sometimes they want help drafting a letter. Sometimes, as I said, they want to meet with somebody. Oh. Another common occurrence is a group of people who have to work together, and for some reason they're having trouble working together, and they want to just all meet together, and maybe the ombuds might-- I remember one department where there was a supervisor and a bunch of people that worked. And the supervisor came and said, can I get some help? And the ombuds working with that, and that was a supervisor, and then each of the four individuals-- and later on, they all met together. But everybody got to be heard in a non-threatening atmosphere. 

	And so sometimes we're really able to help people. Sometimes people are trying to figure out, maybe the best thing for me to do is just apply for a transfer to a different unit. So I being a sounding board is a lot. And then there was another case I was involved with, where the people just wanted to tell their story and be heard, and for me to say, you were really treated badly! 

	I mean, we're supposed to be neutral. I've got to be careful. But I guess you just have to use your judgment about when something wrong has happened. And then in some cases, we're also charged with, if there's some policy that the university either doesn't have an appropriate policy, or the policy ought to be changed-- because it's under the whole idea of improving the climate. The ombuds office is trying to improve the climate. And I think I think it's very good. 

	And we do a lot of publicity. People have to know we're there. That's one of the issues, is getting the word out. So we go to a lot of new employee orientation kinds of things. 

	And anyway, I think it's a very good program, and I'm very happy to be involved, but I actually am no longer involved, because it was stressing me a lot. I wasn't very good at detaching. Even though I think I could act in a nonjudgmental and fair way, my emotions were getting all riled up when I'd hear these stories. And I said, this isn't what I retired about. 

	But is a failing of me. The other people didn't. They were much more able to detach. So it's not, in any way, a failing of the ombuds office. It's a failing of me. 

01:33:34

AB:	Well, the other thing I do now I love. So the prairie project got me involved in what was in the campus natural areas, which used to be managed by the Arboretum. And then there was a task force, which I was a member of, that recommended a campus committee, which became a Campus Natural Areas Committee, and then I was on that committee, which had to do with governing all the green space, like lakeshore path, and Picnic Point, and Eagle Heights was Biocore Prairie. 

	Anyway, this has just gotten better and better all the time. Now we have new name, which is the UW Madison Lakeshore Nature Preserve, and all kinds of good things are happening. There's going to be a lot of fund raising so that we can actually do a lot more work to things like removing invasive species, and planting native species, and controlling erosion, and making the trail system work better so that it's more logical, and removing redundant trails that are causing erosion. So anyway, I've become very involved. I was—[End tape 2, side 1; begin side 2]

01:34:34

AB:	UW Madison Lakeshore Nature Preserves. So I do think they have the field manager, Cathie Bruner, somebody I love working with. And I do stuff like pulling garlic mustard. You know. The ever-present nasty invasive species. And I also work a lot in the Biocore Prairie still. More weeds to pull there. Part of the prairie are doing really well, but parts are still really weedy, so we're struggling with weeds. 

	So I spend a lot of time on this. And I've taking up quilting. I meet with a group of women every Monday morning, and we work on our projects, and bring them in when they're done and show them to each other, and learn new things from each other, which has been a lot of fun. 

01:35:12

AB:	And my two children are grown up. Our daughter is at Princeton. She's a postdoc there. I visit her. Our son is a filmmaker in Los Angeles. I can visit him. And my husband, Dick Burgess, gets invited all kinds of interesting places, and I never could go before, because I was teaching--

SP:	Wonderful!

AB:	--And so now I can go on trips with him. So I've traveled a lot. And my days are so unstressed! I still feel like I'm on vacation! I can't believe that-- you know, I don't have terrible problems to solve anymore. 

SP:	Well, I hate to back up, because all that sounds so wonderful. But this is an important question, I think. When you were working, how did your balance your life? You had-- 

AB:	OK, well, yeah. I don't think I did a very good job with that. Very fortunately, when my children were little, I had a nine month appointment in the beginning, and then I got very involved in doing stuff in the summertime, too. But for a long time, I only worked part-time in the summertime. And when my kids were really little, I was not working full time. And at that point, I was just doing the cell biology lab, and I didn't have all those other responsibilities. So it was much more manageable. 

	And then, when things got really intense and crazy, they were already gone. I mean, they were either-- well, 1990. Twelve years ago. Andreas was still home then. But anyway, my kids kept me grounded for a long time, because you've got to be there to pick them up when the after school program gets done, or whatever. I had to be there. 

	In the summer-- what I was doing during the summer was revising the lab manuals and deciding new labs. And the time was very flexible. So it was beautiful in the summer that I had work to do, but it wasn't full time, and I could do it on my own schedule, because it wasn't teaching. 

	But during the academic year, when there were six three-hour labs a week, and I wasn't present at every lab all the time. But I had a tremendously scheduled day. Because I also, since I was doing all this coordinated stuff, and trying to help courses make connections, and know what's going on the other course-- I went to a lot of the lectures to be aware of what was going on, and because some of the faculty who wanted my feedback. And then there's a lot of TA meetings, and-- 

	I didn't do a very good job of balancing. I think one of the reasons I retired early is because I was going crazy. And the other thing I was not very good at, is I couldn't get say to myself, Ann, do the best job you can, and then forget about it. I would get all emotionally involved in all these issues. I was much too emotionally involved. Which in hindsight, I can look back now. I mean, I even knew it at the time! But even if I told myself that with my head, it didn't change the way I did stuff. 

	So was passionate about what I was doing. 

SP:	Well, that's it. I think that's a positive way to put that. Well, we're finished with the questions. Or, well, the last one is, what do you do for fun and relaxation? And you talk about traveling, and your quilting, and what you've done with the prairie and the Preserve. How do you keep your energy up? 

AB:	I just have-- There's no problem with that. I just love the stuff I'm doing. I guess the other thing is that my mother-- my father died a long time ago. But my mother remarried, and still lives in Evansville. Little tiny town, 23 miles from here. And she's quite old now. So one of the things I do, is I spend time with her. And now it's just great that I have time to do this. And when she needs to be taken to a doctor's appointment, I can, and stuff like that. 

01:39:07 

AB:	So I love the freedom of retirement. I thought I'd might miss having people need me, or something? I haven't missed anything. I mostly haven't missed-- after I retired, it's just like this huge weight was off my shoulders. I loved what I did. I love my colleagues. I love my students. But then I was so-- It was such a big load. It was such a relief step. 

	Every day still feels like vacation to me. I have no problem with keeping my energy up, and I'm doing a million things. I thought I was going to be sitting around at home, reading books a lot. But somehow! I mean, I am involved in a lot of things with the Preserve, and I love doing that. It's something I care about, and it's something, I feel like I'm making a contribution. It's important to feel like you're making a contribution. 

	OK. So that's probably a good place to end. 

SP:	Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Great story. 

01:40:06  End of First Interview Session