UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #1085
CARLSON, KAREN

CARLSON, KAREN (1943-)
Clinical Professor of Communicative Disorders
At UW: 1974-2003

Interviewed: 	2010
Interviewer: 	Charlene Tortorice
Index by: 	Stephen A. Pierce
Length: 	45 minutes

Abstract: In her March 2010 interview with Char Tortorice, Karen Carlson reflects on her nearly 4-decade career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focusing especially on her role as clinical staff in the Department of Communicative Disorders. She relates the challenges academic staff faced and the steps they took to organize in the 1970s and 1980s. This interview was conducted for inclusion into the UW-Madison Oral History Program.

Key Words: University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UWSP); University of Wisconsin-Madison; Madison Academic Staff Association (MASA); Joann Elder; academic staff governance; Joseph Czarnezki; Academic Staff Executive Committee (ASEC); Donna Shalala.

First Interview Session (March 24, 2010): Digital File

Time	Keywords
00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:00:09	Question: Talk about life before becoming academic staff. Answer: Carlson observed that before coming to UW, she was trained at Syracuse U. and U. Minnesota as a speech pathologist and worked first at Maine’s state institution for the mentally retarded. She’d done research in audiology and child development and had taught at Stevens Point and at rural NJ schools. Follow up: Your thesis? Answer: She explained two projects she’d done in lieu of a thesis.

00:03:13	Question: Why did you come to UW-Madison? Answer: She explained that there were two factors—1) at UWSP at the time she was never sure that she’d have a job if enrollment wasn’t good, and 2) she wanted a larger community than Stevens Point.  So she applied for a job at UW-Madison and moved in 1974.

00:04:31	Follow up: The interview process? Answer: She didn’t remember anything remar-kable about it other than that the department and clinical staff were very large and a much better program nationally. 

00:05:50	Follow up: What were your expectations upon coming? Answer: She said she didn’t know the formal difference between clinical and teaching faculty, and talked about her “aha moment” when she realized that specialists (later clinical staff) didn’t always have the right to vote.

00:07:21	Follow up: What’s the difference? Answer: In her department, academic staff did teaching and some research, but were a core part of the function of the faculty, since many of them couldn’t provide clinical training. Thus the atmosphere was quite collegial, though she’d heard that the department chair had quite wisely negotiated for TA funds to be invested in clinical staff, which paid dividends later on.

00:12:45 	Follow up: You had quite a bit of flexibility to define your job. Answer: Yes; the department gave them a lot of flexibility. She even took courses (on her own time) related to her specialty and sat in on all the courses in the sequence for her students. Follow up: So it was quite collegial? Answer: Yes; occasionally there would be decisions that would draw hard lines between faculty and academic staff, but she responded by talking to people and advising them to revise their decision since the clinical faculty were such a crucial component of the dept.  She gave examples.

00:19:08	Question: So why did you get involved in academic staff issues? Answer: Carlson discussed why she got involved in academic staff, probably because of being disallowed to vote in that early faculty meeting. After advocating for a while within the department, she met Joann Elder and joined MASA, where she learned that her situation was actually unusual. She felt she needed to use this position of strength to advocate for other academic staff on campus. Follow up: How did you meet Joann Elder? Answer: She didn’t remember specifics, but guessed that she read about it and went to a meeting.

00:24:43	Follow up: Why stay with it? Answer: She thought it was partly to be more educated about UW (where it was easy to remain in one’s department); and partly a growing horror at how she heard people were treated (feeling powerless and vulnerable) 

00:25:24 	Follow up: What was MASA working on? Answer: A lot of it, she recalled, was organizing, making people aware of the problems, and governance. Follow up: How were you received? Answer: In the early years, they had to talk about who academic staff were over and over.

00:28:07	Question: How did you accomplish your goals? Answer: She remembered that her department found out that they could vote to include academic staff in voting, so they did this. She didn’t think they were consciously the model for these kinds of moves, but it just made sense to people.

00:29:47	Follow up: Getting governance codified? Answer: She said she was a little fuzzy on how this happened, since she travelled around for a while and she thought she might have gone through a period when she was less active.

00:30:58	Follow up: Talk about getting leaves of absence early on. Answer: She said this was “tricky” since she didn’t at the time have a long term contract; but she leveraged one of her colleague’s decision to go with her husband on a sabbatical to Hawaii. She explained what she did on her sabbaticals and why she decided to come back.

00:33:54	Question: You were there when we met with [Joseph] Czarnezki? Answer: She didn’t recall exactly, but did remember contacting him when she was writing her history. She talked about her memories of the morning she heard that academic staff had gotten governance. Follow up: You were active in the first expressions of academic staff governance. Answer: Yes; she remembered going to meetings of the first ASC advisory committee and then being on the Academic Staff Executive Committee.

00:38:28	Question: What did you want to accomplish in the first year? Answer: She said that they wanted to find out what issues were important to academic staff and which could be handled by governance. She said they didn’t want to see certain groups “cherry picked” and given privileges, relating how much time they spent discussing the Hays-Hill retitling proposal. While she understood the need to grapple with the variations among academic staff, their overall purpose was to try to keep them together.

00:42:26	Follow up: How far has governance come? Answer: She answered this by relating how, when Shalala came to UW, she just accepted their role since she had no history with UW’s previous faculty governance.

00:44:44	End of First Interview Session

End of Oral History #1085