UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #547
SHEPPARD, JANICE R.

SHEPPARD, Janice R. (1949- )
Graduate Student; Assistant Dean of Students
At UW: 1974-83; 1987-

Interviewed: 2000	
Interviewer: Brian D. Bunk
Length: 2 hours, 27 minutes
Transcriptionist:  Premium Business Services (9/1/08)

[See Index for Key Words]

First Interview Session (April 13, 2000): Tape 1
Tape 1, Side 1
00:00:00  Start of Interview
BB:  	This is Brian Bunk of the University of Wisconsin Oral History Project, and today is April 13th, 2000.  And I’m in the ground floor offices at Bascom Hall of Jan Sheppard, and today we’re going to be interviewing her about her involvement in gay and lesbian issues on campus.  
00:00:21
And just a moment ago, we were talking about the terminology used.  And now it’s LGBT, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, but it was not always that way.
JS:  	That’s right.  As the movement nationally has changed to be more inclusive and include other issues around sexual orientation, that same change has occurred on our campus over the years.  But initially, the campus, when it was aware at all, was aware only of gay men and lesbian women.  Then I would say in the late ‘80s, the campus added bisexual to the letters, so we had the GLB community, the gay, lesbian, bisexual community.  And then in the -- beginning in the early 1990s but really not ending until -- not ending but not being completed, I’d say, until, within the last year, we’ve added the transgender to the list of letters so that we have lesbian, gay, bi, and transgender now.  So usually now, when this community is referred to on campus, it says the LGBT community.  But as I said, that was recent, and I believe it was just last year that our faculty Senate community added the transgender to their name.  So all of these things are evolutionary.
BB:  	Are evolving as we speak.  When we talked before, you had mentioned that there was another letter that was possibly coming on the horizon.
JS:  	Well, there are Q’s.  Some campuses use what’s called a Q for questioning.  And then as the transgender community becomes more vocal and aware of the kinds of differences within their own community, there are individuals who identify not as transgender but as members of both genders.  And then there are individuals who identify as members of neither gender, and I believe they go by A for androgynous.  And I’m not remembering right now what the individuals who identify with both genders go by.  So it’s getting more complex.
BB:  	Well, for the sake of this interview, I think we will just stick with LGBT but meaning that to be as inclusive as possible.
JS:  	Right.  I think it’s, you know, as, really, as a culture, the United States starts to recognize the diversity of ways in which people identify their sexual orientation and also their gender identification.  It’s becoming more complex.  People are recognizing it’s not as simple as being a male and a female and being attracted to the opposite sex or the same sex.
BB:  	Right.  And these are issues that are developing in society as a whole.  And then, of course, the university, universities all over the country as well as here, have to attempt to deal with that.
JS:  	Trying to recognize those changes, exactly.
00:03:13
BB:  	Okay.  Well, just to back up a bit, why don’t we start, I guess, with a little bit of your background here at the UW.  You came here for graduate school to begin with, correct?
JS:  	Graduate school in 1974, August of 1974, began my master’s program, and stayed here to get my master’s and my doctorate in cultural anthropology.  My major advisor was Kitty McClellan.  My focus area was northern North America.  I worked with Athabascan Indians in far north British Columbia.  My minor advisor, who I worked with as much as I did with Kitty, with both of them, they were both wonderful advisors, was Harold Scheub from African Languages and Literatures.  His focus is on narrative, and I was interested in narrative in northern North America.
BB:  	And how come you chose to attend the UW?  You did your undergraduate work at George Washington, correct?
JS:  	Right, in Washington, D.C.  I’m from the Midwest.  I’m from Illinois, and my family, my parents were both still in Illinois.  My partner, in the East Coast, he’s an Easterner, but convinced that we come back here.  And I wanted to be in the Midwest near my family again, and also because of Kitty McClellan and the very strong northern North America that the anthropology program had.
BB: 	So you came here with an idea that that’s what you wanted to study, and you carried that you.
JS:  	Yeah.  No, I came as a Northern.  I’ve always been interested in the North.
BB:  	Okay.  And then you got your Ph.D. in anthropology.
JS:  	That’s right.
BB:  	And then did you -- what was your hope then in terms of a career?  Did you think you would end up --
JS:  	No.
BB:  	-- in the dean’s office?
JS:  	No, I didn’t at all, but it’s been a wonderful place to end up.  It’s totally perfect for who I am and what I wanted to do.  But it’s not what I expected.  When I got my doctorate in 1983, I was seven months pregnant, and my son was born then two months later.  And I decided that I was in a position where I could, my husband supported it, stay home with him.  So I was home with him for three and a half years, him my son.  And at that point, I started to think about what I was going to do then.  That’s not the only point I started to think of it.  I thought about it before then.  So I had to figure out then what would I be doing.  My husband is self-employed.  His business is really dependent upon referrals and his links in the community.  He had established some pretty strong links in the community, did not feel we were in a position to be moving around the country, chasing tenure-track positions.  So I had to decide what else might I do.  And during the three and a half years I was at home, I also did some informational interviewing on the campus because I was thinking about was I going to go the traditional academic route?  Were there some other things I might like to do?
00:06:18
During that time, I had an informational interview with Mary Rouse, who was an assistant dean, was not dean of the campus at that point.  And what she -- the kinds of things she explained to me that the Dean of Student’s Office did, and the people in the Dean of Student’s Office, seemed like a very good match, that Mary herself has a background in classics.  And the person, Paul Ginsberg, who was dean, had a background in history and social work.  And another of the deans was a nurse social worker.  And another of the deans had a background in African studies in history.  And that was the kind of academically broad community that I was very interested in joining.  And the focus -- the kinds of issues that the Dean of Student’s Office dealt with were the issues that I was interested in in anthropology.  And I decided that maybe I could reach the students I was interested and be talking about the kinds of issues that interested me better in this office than I could in an academic program, that there was a clear focus on diversity and cultural differences.  And how do we serve all the students that attend such a large campus, whether they are returning adult students or veterans or students of color or international students, that we had to somehow be figuring how to reach people coming to us really with different expectations and understandings of what they wanted, and how would we reach them?  And it seemed to me that my background in anthropology could think about those kinds of issues and help the university make sure that they were including an awareness of cultural differences when we’re trying to help students.
BB: 	So you saw this opportunity.  It wasn’t a question that you didn’t enjoy sort of an academic life.  I notice that you had won a graduate teaching award, so you must have been an effective teacher.
JS:	I did, I loved teaching, and I -- one of the other things that made me think, well, maybe the Dean of Student’s Office is a good match is I loved teaching.  I taught introductory courses as a teaching assistant, and that’s generally what you do.  And I really loved teaching the introductory students.  They were so open and interested, and you could reach them really easily.  But I did, I loved teaching.  It was a hard decision to think about maybe not going that route.  But what I also -- I loved the immediacy of teaching.  And a researcher’s life is not very immediate.  A researcher’s life is writing grants three years ahead and reviewing research from two years ago.  And I did -- the sense of living in the now that you can get when you’re working with students in a Dean of Student’s Office was something that appealed to me.
BB:  	So it was really fortuitous that the Dean of Student’s Office, in particular, you had this kind of connection with, because it sounds as though you didn’t have a career in administration in mind.  But rather, you wanted to deal with students.  And if teaching wasn’t an opportunity, then this was sort of a similar way of dealing with students.
JS:  	Well, I think this -- yeah, I think the Dean of Student’s Office provided me a lot of things that teaching didn’t.  It provided me with stability, whereas, teaching would require that I be moving, and I didn’t want to be moving my family. It also, I think, did give me this opportunity to respond to students on a more immediate level, that I -- the timeframe in research, while I loved research and it is one of the things I miss here, I really, I mean, I adored the time I spent writing my dissertation, and I spent it in one of the cages in the library. And I loved my little corner.  I had pictures up, and it was a safe haven.  I really enjoyed working there.  So I like the privacy of research.  But I also know that I almost like it too much, that it’s a way that I can become very isolated.  And that worried me.  I didn’t want to become isolated in that way.  Also, I think that research is a very individual endeavor, and I think I’m happier, whereas, I like that.  I think I’m actually happier and more effective when I’m working in more cooperative endeavors.  And again, what we do in this office we do sort of as a team.  You fail or succeed based upon everybody’s efforts, and everybody gets the benefit, and everybody pays the price, whereas, it felt to me, and maybe this is inaccurate, but it felt to me that research was more your own success or your own failure.
BB:  	Right.  Well, your field, I would think, would be particularly appropriate for that because I don’t know much about anthropology as a field, but it seems to involved more kind of interaction and contact with people than, say, as a historian, I know that I could do my research and not ever talk to anyone or deal with anyone, except for people in the past who may, probably are already dead, whereas, as an anthropologist, at least to my knowledge of the field, involves a much more interactive approach even to research.
JS:  	Well, absolutely, and it’s interesting that you say that because my dissertation had both of those.  Kitty McClellan comes out of a natural science tradition, which was very strong in the early years in anthropology and is very historically focused.  And so my dissertation was actually two sections.  It was almost like two dissertations, the first part completely historical, trying to determine who were these people and how did they get where they were, like the community where I was working.  And for that, I was spending -- I worked totally in archives, and so it was a historical analysis without people, whereas, the second part was based upon the field work I did, which was the result of interactions, being in the community.  Who were the people?  What were they valuing?  What did they care about?  How did they accept me or not accept me?  How did they respond to the changes in Canada?  So probably, those two components of my field were sort of echo -- or my dissertation echo the two components of my life, in terms of was I going to go the more strictly academic and, in this case, also archival way, or was I going to go the way that focused more on interactions?
00:12:50
BB:  	Oh, right, I see, yeah.  So your background then led you to this kind of position.  How did you become involved in LGBT issues?  Was that something that you were involved with throughout your graduate career, or was it only after you were employed at the dean’s office?
JS:  	Okay.  I came to the dean’s office when Mary Rouse had very recently been appointed dean.  So I started in December, and Mary had been appointed dean in September.
BB:  	In 1987, is this?
JS:  	Well, I’m worried about this.  You’d probably check that out.
BB:  	I can look.  It’s on the CD, which is in your folder in the Oral History Project, where anyone in future research is --
JS:  	I think it may be ’86, actually.  I think it’s December of ’86.  
BB:  	That was -- you were part time at first.
JS:  	I was part time, right.  Then I became full time in June of ’87.  So I was -- and Mary came in in September.  And Chancellor Shalala came in also right around that time, just before Mary did.  So there were a lot of exciting changes going on.  When I joined the staff, Mary had recently become dean, and she and Paul Ginsberg, during her 17 years on staff before becoming dean, had had a committee that worked with students, looking at, talking about sexual orientation issues.  And that committee had become relatively inactive during the mid-‘80s, 1980s.  So when Mary became dean, she decided that she wanted to make sure that there wasn’t an ongoing need for that committee and that she shouldn’t some way revise those issues, or readdress, I mean, those issues.  So she began talking with Kevin MacIntyre, who was a member of her staff and had expressed an interest in gay and lesbian issues to her.  And she also talked with me and said would I have an interest.  I said, yes, I would very much have an interest in helping in any way I could.  So Kevin McIntyre and I, at Mary’s request, really drafted a proposal to start a committee, to start a new committee, that could look at lesbian and gay issues on the campus.  And Mary was very receptive, liked our proposal, said yes, great, let’s do this, and that’s when we began the committee that was called the GLIC, the Gay and Lesbian Issues Committee.
BB:  	And this was -- was this when you first started, or was this later?
JS:  	When I first started, I think it was one of the very first things that I did when I was on staff.
BB:  	So it was ’86, ’87, right around in there.
JS:  	Yes, right.
00:15:37
BB:  	Now this was before the ROTC controversy, I guess, came about.  Or was this sort of going on at the same time?
JS:  	It was definitely going on at the same time because the election was taking place.  And there had been a lot of talk about addressing the national discrimination that occurred in the country against gays and lesbians on the basis of sexual orientation.  And of course, it was after Wisconsin had become the first state in the nation to pass a nondiscrimination law that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in housing and appointment.  So these issues were not new in Wisconsin and certainly not new in the state.
BB:  	Do you know why they happened to be kind of bubbling up or appearing at that time?  It seems as though there are several different strands that are coming together around that period, in ’86, ’87, ’88, and from many different points of view.  Do you have any guesses to how come that suddenly became a big issue at that particular moment?
JS:  	Boy, I should.  What else was happening right then?
BB:  	Well, I imagine that’s about the time when AIDS became more well, or became established more in the sort of mainstream media.  That could have been part of it.
JS:  	That could have been it.  I don’t know.  It certainly was present.  I mean, I think it has been an ongoing controversy about the kind of discrimination that the Department of Defense has, and I think it definitely was based on student interest.  The students were extremely concerned.  We had a couple of students.  Tracy Prouty was a student, and Dave Wilcox was a student.  There were a number of students who were very concerned about the fact that if a -- that gay students were not allowed to enter our ROTC programs and that ROTC did offer students a wonderful scholarship opportunity and that that opportunity was denied to students who were gays and lesbians because they couldn’t enter.  They could enter the program, but they couldn’t be commissioned officers.  So if they entered the program, it didn’t provide them any advantage because they would go through this program and couldn’t get the results that would be like going through, entering a university and not being able to get a degree.  So that was one of the issues that often came out is that ROTC people would say, well, we don’t deny you access to the program, which is true, but they could not be commissioned as officers after going through the program.
BB:  	So the question was an issue of discrimination, or a lack of equal access to scholarship opportunities, based only on sexual orientation.
JS:  	That’s right.  And this is not -- this is a Department of Defense, or was at that point, was a Department of Defense policy.  It wasn’t our local ROTC programs.  It was from the Department of Defense.  It was a federal policy.
00:19:10
BB:  	So then there was a resolution that was drafted and signed?
JS:  	Well, the chancellor actually as well, Chancellor Shalala, was actively trying to address these issues and trying to get some changes and had worked with the National Education Associations to have all of those National Education Associations also actively work to lobby the Department of Defense to get this changed.  And a number of those, perhaps all, I’m afraid I can’t remember right now how many.  There were four, I believe, National Education Associations involved, and I think it may have been that each of them independently drafted their own resolution that they sent to the Department of Defense, saying, we feel this is a discriminatory policy that does not allow equal access for our students.  So there were national efforts going on.  And Chancellor Shalala was very active in those national efforts through her involvement in National Education Associations.  So what was happening on our campus was just a local-level effort that was happening across the nation on other campus and on a national level on educational associations.  And I think it was really -- a lot of the leadership came from the chancellor to start to address these issues.  And the students ‑‑ I think there was leadership on a lot of levels. There was leadership in the faculty, from Joe Elder and Jim Steakley, and the faculty Senate.  There was leadership in the Academic Staff Assembly by a number of people, and then leadership on the student level.  And the chancellor also spoke with our Board of Regents.  And our Board of Regents passed a resolution saying this was a matter of concern to them and that they requested that each of the campuses, and our chancellor particularly, not ignore this issue.  Continue to work on this issue on a national level, that this was an issue that needed to be changed on a national level because it was a federal policy.
BB:  	Right.  It couldn’t necessarily be changed just on individual campuses.  It had to be changed from the top.
JS:  	Right, but that the Board of Regents supported these sorts of changes.  Now that was after this whole ROTC resolution that you talked about.  What happened was that the faculty Senate passed a resolution stating that they felt the ROTC policies on the campus currently were discriminatory and that, to be consistent with university policy on nondiscrimination that did include sexual orientation as one of our grounds for nondiscrimination, that the campus needed to be changing this, that they did see -- the faculty Senate said they saw an inconsistency between our university nondiscrimination policy, that disallowed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and the policy of some of our programs within ROTC that needed to be following Department of Defense policy, which instituted discrimination on sexual orientation.
BB:  	Well, it seems as though there would be a conflict with not only the university policy but also with the state policy now.
JS:  	That’s right, exactly, that’s right.
BB:  	So it was on many different levels, I suppose.
JS:  	That’s right.
00:22:35
BB:  	So this was about the same time that you were beginning to -- the draft or the formation of the committee.  So did you work --
JS:  	Yes.  The committee was right before this.  The committee began soon before all of this, so, yes, the committee was also very aware of what was happening and involved, all the members of the committee.
BB:  	And what was your particular role on the committee?
JS:  	I guess I was -- I’m not sure I remember exactly at the beginning, whether I was an appointee to the committee or I was a staff person.  I may have been a staff person.
BB:  	And this is the Gay and Lesbian Issues Committee.
JS:  	Gay and Lesbian Issues Committee, GLIC.  I see here you have as it began in 1989, so perhaps it did begin just immediately after the resolution.  But it was in the works long before that.
BB:  	Before when we talked, you had mentioned about the -- you had had some contact or role in the conversations or interactions between some of the student leaders of the LGB community and ROTC students.
JS:  	Right.
BB:  	Perhaps you can describe that.
JS:  	That was really a very amazing period, and it really, it gave some real student leaders an opportunity to shine.  When the ROTC issue was a hot issue on campus and students were in fact sitting in in Bascom Hall around this issue, there was a coalition of students, minority coalition, that was addressing issues of race on the campus at this time, which were also extremely controversial, hot, you might say, causing a lot of protests.  The minority coalition was an active coalition, and they decided to band with the LGBT students on the campus and provide their support to this ROTC issue, the issue of students not being allowed into ROTC based upon sexual orientation.  So there was a lot of activity on the campus around these issues.  They were being discussed.  There were students sleeping in Bascom Hall.  It was very much what was in the news, much as now, the issue is sweatshops on the campus.  But at that point, in the ’88, ’89 years, the issue, in ’87 as well, the issue was ROTC and discrimination on that basis.  And what came to the attention in our office and the Dean of Student’s Office was that students who were in the ROTC program who at times needed to be in uniform were experiencing harassment when they were in uniform and that they were feeling uncomfortable being on campus in uniform because students were making assumptions about how they felt on the issue of discrimination against gays and lesbians.
BB:  	So it was an issue that went beyond just the LGBT community and was more a campus wide --
JS:  	It was definitely a campus-wide issue.  It was the issue that was being discussed in the student newspapers on a day-in and day-out basis.  And we, of course, knew that just because somebody was wearing a uniform didn’t mean that they were hostile towards gays and lesbians, that they weren’t supportive of the Department of Defense policy, any more than we as a university weren’t supportive of the Department of Defense policy.  This was just a policy that was existing. And so we certainly did not want students that were in ROTC and had a whole range of ideas and opinions on sexual orientation to be unfairly harassed.  And we were quite certain that the leaders in the lesbian-gay community felt the same way, if we could only reach them and make sure that they understood what was happening, that there was no way they were going to be supporting a harassment of students in uniform solely because they were wearing a uniform or for any other reason, that they weren’t going to be supporting harassment.  So we decided that what we really needed to do was to make sure that the leaders in the ROTC program, that the students leaders in that program, the young men and women who were the -- I’m sorry, I don’t know the correct terms -- the students at the highest level of the student hierarchy that reported to their captains, who were staff people, and the students who were leading the ROTC, the efforts to change the ROTC policy, had a chance to meet one another and understand they were both students trying to get an education and trying to pursue what was of interest to them.
00:27:29
	So we contacted the various captains in the ROTC programs and asked if we could connect with their student leaders in those programs in order that those students and the LGBT student leaders could maybe come meet together and, in some way, communicate to the campus that neither of them wanted harassment towards the other, that the ROTC students did not want any discriminatory actions or harassment towards gay and lesbian students and that the gay and lesbian students did not want harassment or name calling towards the ROTC students.  And fortunately, everybody involved was very cooperative, and we were able to bring together all of those student leaders, and together, they signed a resolution stating that, stating that these efforts to end discrimination were meant to support all students and that uninformed, uneducated, hate-filled harassment towards either group was not what they supported. And it really required a lot of collaboration on both parts, that the student leaders in ROTC were very courageous, I think, in being willing to take these steps because they did report to the Department of Defense, and they needed to be certain that they weren’t being contradictory to their orders.  And fortunately, their direct supervisors, their captains, their staff people here on campus, gave them an okay to be involved in this effort and said it was not against orders, that they weren’t saying anything against the Department of Defense by signing a statement that urged students to not harass other students.
BB:  	Right.  So it wasn’t that the resolution that they signed disagreed with the Department of Defense policy in any way.  It was just an agreement to be civil to one another.
JS:  	That’s right.  It was separate from the Department of Defense policy.  But it was still ‑‑ because the Department of Defense policy was what the larger issue was about, it still took a lot of courage for them to –
00:30:06	End of Tape 1, Side 1.
Tape 1, Side 2
00:30:08
BB:  	-- we were talking about the interaction between the LGBT student leaders and the ROTC student leaders.
JS:  	Right.  And the ROTC student leaders were a part of the military administration.  They were part of the military hierarchy.  And so they had to be very clear that they did not [unclear] be disobeying orders.  This was their education.  I mean, they had a lot at risk.  They couldn’t jeopardize their position within the ROTC program as the student commanders or the student leaders.  This was really an honor they had achieved.  They didn’t want to jeopardize that honor, and we wanted to be sure they didn’t as well.
BB:  	Well, I imagine too that there was risk, not only for the ROTC leaders, but for the other students as well because you don’t want to be seen to be cavorting with the enemy, so to speak, to put it in military terms.
JS:  	That’s right, absolutely.  And I think, you know, they have been on the receiving end of discrimination.  And so for them to be willing to take the risk and meet students who were in a system that actively discriminated against them was also, I think, very kind and open and willing to learn on the part of the gay and lesbian students.  And I think that, I hope, it was a positive experience for both of them to see that really none of the students involved had any interest in expressing hateful opinions towards other students and that they recognized they all were students and they all were trying to get through, that they perhaps did have different opinions on the Department of Defense policy but that that was a different issue.
BB:  	Do you recall any specific individuals that were involved in either side?
JS:  	Yeah.  Tracy Prouyy was, I believe it was Dave Wilcox and Tracy Prouty from the Ten Percent Society, on the gay and lesbian side, and I unfortunately -- there were four students from ROTC because there was Navy, Army, Marines, and Air Force all involved.
BB:  	Well, I think there’s a copy of that resolution.  I can probably get it and put it in the file, with those names of those people who -- so that they could be at least recognized for their accomplishments.
JS:  	That’s right.  That would be wonderful.  Dave Wilcox was on campus for a number of years after that and is still in the Madison area, as far as I know, right now.  And Tracy Prouty actually went to our vet school after her involved in Ten Percent.  I believe she graduated as a veterinarian.
00:32:48
BB:  	Oh, okay.  So this is all going on, and then the Gay and Lesbian Issues Committee now is formed.  It was, you said the process had been sort of going in motion for quite a while.  Was there any sort of pressure from any other groups, from student groups or faculty groups, to maybe make this a kind of visible presence?
JS:  	Sure.  I think this was seen as a way in which issues, such as the ROTC issue, would have a more institutionalized avenue to be talking about what’s happening to gay and lesbian students on campus.
BB:  	And when there’s an official committee, I suppose it means that it’s a serious topic or something.  It kind of gives it a stamp of approval maybe.
JS: 	 That’s right.
BB:  	What would you say -- what were the goals or the ideas behind the committee when it was formed?  I mean, what was the purpose?
JS:  	I think the purpose was to help the campus address, in an organized, coherent fashion, the kinds of stresses and pressures that gay and lesbian students had because we knew that although our campus had nondiscrimination sexual orientation issues and our state was the first state to have them, we knew that at that point, there were very, very few other states or campuses that had those kinds of situations and that our students were coming from high schools where probably the words gay and lesbian had never been mentioned.  Now that’s been an enormous change in the last 10 years or 12 years now, but at that point, it was extremely unusual that gay and lesbian students were out in high school.  So they were coming to our campus closeted.  And we needed to figure out how are we going to reach them?  How are we going to be assisting them?  How are we going to be assisting faculty and staff who wanted to be outreaching to gay and lesbian students?
BB:  	Was there an impression that maybe this was another case -- oftentimes, in Wisconsin, there’s this idea that Madison is this strange place that does all these kind of loony things.  And do you think that there was some impression that this was another case where here’s liberal Madison again doing all these, what might be perceived as strange and kind of crazy things?
JS:  	Well, I think as the state capitol and a relatively larger city in a rural state, Madison had for a long time, within the gay and lesbian community, was felt to have a larger gay and lesbian community.  It was considered a place where gays and lesbians could come to meet other gays and lesbians, whereas, rural communities certainly were not that way.  So I think there was a tradition, if you will, that Madison was at least a place where these issues could be talked about, that there were gay bars here and that there were long-time gay communities.  I think the fact of our being the first gay-rights state is hugely important.  I mean, it made a big difference.  So we have always been considered to have a larger gay and lesbian population.  Now it is still the case that gays and lesbians are actually, even if not closeted, they are not always necessarily very public in being a gay or lesbian person.  So I’m not sure we’ll ever know whether that’s really true or just in other cities, it’s not as visible.  But I think Madison has had a more visible presence of gays and lesbians for many years that most cities did not have.
BB: 	 Okay.  So I knew that Madison had a -- in recent years anyway, Madison has had a reputation as a city, a nationwide reputation, as a city that is very friendly.  And so that reputation is not just a product of the last five years but has gone back 10 or 15 or more years.
JS:  	Oh, no, since the early 1900s, I would say.
BB:  	Oh, really?
JS:  	Yeah.
BB:  	Oh, wow, I didn’t know that.  That’s interesting, okay.  Well, maybe you could talk a little bit about sort of the functioning of the committee.  I guess I’m not that familiar with how these things work.  
00:37:30
Did you meet -- did the committee meet every, once a month or once every six months, or how did that, the kind of nuts and bolts, the committee process?
JS:  	Sure.  Because it was a committee appointed by the Dean of Student’s Office, it was a committee to address student issues.  So that was the charge of the committee was to address the needs of students.  Were they being met?  How should they be met?
BB:  	And the committee was made up of faculty, staff, and students?
JS:  	That’s right.  The committee was made up of faculty, staff, and students.  We had equal faculty, staff, and students.  I believe it was about four of each.  I would have to check that.  I think that’s right.  It could have even been five of each.  It may have been a 15-person committee.  It was somewhere between 12 and 15.  And it may have even been that it changed somewhat from year to year.  I’m sure it was at least a 12-person committee.  That’s seeming more correct, that there were four faculty, four students, and four staff. And then in addition, I think I was an additional person, so, in fact, there were five staff.  And we very strongly wanted the faculty involvement.  We felt that was really key to get faculty on the campus aware of and working with the Dean of Student’s Office to be helping students who were gay and lesbian.  And the faculty leaders, we usually had a co-chair situation of a faculty person and a staff person.  So usually, the faculty member was a chair, and then the staff person was the co-chair.  We met monthly.  I think we even perhaps met biweekly for periods of time, when the report was in process.  We tried to have good representation from the student community.  I’d say our meetings were very well attended.  Sometimes, it’s hard to get students to attend committee meetings because they’re so over-committed, but I’d say we had excellent attendance on the GLIC Committee.
BB:  	Just on the interview outline here, I wrote down some of the people that appeared on the committee.  I wondered if you wanted to talk at all about some of these individuals and maybe what their role was on the committee.
JS:  	I’d say Jim Steakley had -- Jim Steakley and Claudia Card, I believe, were initial members of the committee.  And Jim Steakley was a strong committee member throughout its years, until it was replaced by the Faculty Senate Committee, and then Jim was actually the first chair of that committee as well.  Jim was also a faculty member in the German department, and Jim believes, and I have no reason to doubt him, that he was the first out faculty person ever hired on the campus, that he was hired by the German department as an out gay man and that that was really quite a milestone.
BB:  	And that was in the mid-‘70s, I think?
JS:  	I’m not sure.
BB:  	Yeah.  I think he came on campus in, I want to say, ’75 or -- it was in the early- to mid‑‘70s, I believe.
JS:  	I didn’t realize he was even that early.  That’s wonderful.  And Jim had been a very active supporter of our Ten Percent Society, which is one of the student groups on campus, and had been an advisor for Ten Percent for a number of years, including these years.
BB:  	Oh, okay.  And Ten Percent started in ’82 or something like that?
JS:  	No.  Ten Percent started back in the ‘70s as well, yeah.  Ten Percent had started long, long ago.  It was a very old student group.  So Jim, Claudia Card from the Department of Philosophy and Women’s Studies was very active.  Marianne Whatley from the Department of Women’s Studies and Curriculum and Instruction, I believe that’s right.  Meg Gaines from the law school was very involved in the committee.
00:41:38
BB:  	It sounds like some of the faculty were on the committee for several years.  Was that the case of the students, or was there more turnover in the student representation?
JS:  	No.  When students could, we urged them to stay on the committee for several years.  Carmen Balentine, who is listed here, and Sarah Waddell I know were on for at least two years.  We did try to keep student -- as long as the student wasn’t graduating, we tried to continue them and just add new students.
BB:  	Right.  I’m kind of curious.  Like I said, I have no experience with the kind of university administration in the community.  I wonder how the kind of dynamics work in those situations when you have faculty and staff and students, especially in a committee like this, where at this time, it seemed a very vocal, very political kind of topic, and I wondered if maybe you could just comment on how sorts of interactions went.
JS:  	Yeah.  My memory of this committee, and I think it’s Pollyanna -- my memory was that this was actually a very unified committee, and I think it’s because all of the members of the committee had very personal and strong connections to gay and lesbian issues, and so I think they felt very unified in trying to help the campus move forward on something that had been hidden and ignored for a lot of years.  So I think that the sense of everybody working together to make a pretty important change, that this was the only way those changes were going to happen was if people like themselves stepped forward and worked on those changes.  So I think there was a real sense of camaraderie in the committee.  There’s certainly -- I don’t remember any senses of role differentiation based upon status.  So it was actually a very unified committee.  And I think it was an opportunity at that point, again, because these issues were still pretty new on the campus and were pretty hidden, for students to have contact with individuals who either identified as gay and lesbian themselves or were committee to working on gay and lesbian issues.  There was no other avenue for students to see adults [quote unquote] who were out about these issues.  So I think it was extremely empowering for the students.  Now it’s a little different.  Gay and lesbian issues are on the news and in the soap operas and on television and all over, so I think there isn’t as much a sense [unclear] no adults in this community being connected to these issues as there was in those days.  I don’t think it’s necessarily any easier for gay and lesbian students to connect with people who are understanding about gay and lesbian issues, but there’s not the silence in the community at large that there was then.
BB:  	Well, it’s just not as uncommon, I wouldn’t think, to be kind of publicly or more obviously out in the community as it might have been at this time.
JS:  	I think it still can be very hard for students to connect with gay and lesbian community members on campus.
BB:  	Well, especially depending, I suppose, on the background.  If you come from a small, rural community and then you come here, it can be intimidating just in that factor.  And then if you have this other issue to deal with as well, I guess it can be even more intimidating, I suppose, and difficult to reach out under any circumstances.
JS:  	That’s right, exactly.  And I think, you know, faculty and staff are just living their own lives, and their day schedule is very different than students’ days.  So it can just be hard for those groups to intersect, and that’s still the case.  But I think back in the late ‘80s, not only was it hard for the groups to intersect, I think students didn’t even know where to begin to ask those sorts of questions because there wasn’t the committee.  There wasn’t a full-time liaison.  There wasn’t a student center like there is now.  So the opportunity for gay and lesbian students to come forward, be recognized as gay and lesbian students, and be working on these issues with faculty and staff, I think was wonderful.
00:46:05
BB: 	 Okay.  So the committee was working on a report for the dean of students.
JS:  	That’s right.  The charge of the committee was to produce a report on what were the issues that gay and lesbian students faced, and how should the university respond to these needs?
BB:  	And how did the committee go about deciding on those issues?  Was it simply based on committee members’ experiences, or was there a kind of research that was conducted?
JS:  	There was very extensive research.  And as you see, the committee was -- the charge for the committee was 1989.  The report didn’t actually get published until ’92, and during that time, it wasn’t that the committee didn’t get down to the work, the committee was doing extensive work.  They interviewed widely across campus.  They interviewed students and faculty and academic staff.  They talked about spiritual issues and academic issues and social issues.  And once they had all that research, then they drafted extensively and over and over, and they send out drafts to other constituencies to get feedback.  So it was a very long and careful process to try to put together.
BB:  	Did the committee take any influences from any outside?  I think that there were -- this kind of process was going on at other universities too around the same time.  Was there a good deal of connection between universities?  Or are these sorts of committees at various locations?  Or was it really kind of an isolated, each one working kind of on their own?
JS:  	No.  I think there was, I mean, it was hard to make connections, just like it’s hard on any issue to make connections.  There’s just a lot to do.  But the committee definitely tried to make those connections.  We invited people from Minnesota to come and speak with us.  We invited people from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to come and speak with us because they were working to establish a certificate program in gay studies.  The people from Minnesota came specifically to talk with us on domestic partner policy issues.  We had, at that point, one of the committee members that we didn’t mention was Jane Schacter, who was also in our law school, whose area of expertise is sexual orientation in the law, and she would give presentations on issues.  So we tried very hard to be in contact with other campuses around the nation and get their reports as they got published.  Within the university system, I think that our report was the first, I believe.  That may not be the case, but it was certainly among the first because I remember that after ours was published, we had contact with Whitewater and River Falls and Green Bay as they began to put together taskforces to address the same issue.  
00:48:56
And, Brian, you had asked me before about the UW system, and this was actually the point at which we did start an informal UW system network on gay and lesbian issues.  And it was just for that reason, in that we wanted to make sure we knew what was happening at other campuses, that we did have a sense that at Madison, we had some advantages because of the Legislature, because of David Clarenbach, who was our local state representative, who had been very instrumental in the passage of the Gay Rights Act in our state.  So we did feel we had some real advantages being in Madison.
BB:  	Right, and kind of size probably as well.
JS:  	Size and just the flagship school.  I mean, the other campuses look to us, and we wanted to make sure that we were responding to that respect and honor.  So I sent an invitation out to -- I tried to get names from all of the different campuses as best I could, just through networking, saying do you know somebody at this school.
BB:  	Right, and this was the days before everyone had an e-mail or a website that you could go and search for to see who was interested in this kind of thing.  You had to do the old-fashioned kind of networking, phone calls and letters.
JS:  	That’s right.  The e-mail was just starting, and so it eventually was an e-mail list that I maintained.  One time, I was very proud.  Someone gave me the title of Queen of the E-Mail because I established an e-mail list of people on our campus and also an e-mail list around the network, around the system.  And people would forward things from around the nation and from the campus to me, and then I would send it out on the e-mail list.  So we tried to get names of contacts, and we tried hard to get those faculty and academic staff contacts around the system and invited everybody to Madison and had a meeting here in Madison.  And I believe we got 60 people to that 1st meeting, which was really very exciting.
BB:  	And when was this?
JS:  	Oh, I was afraid you were going to ask me that.
BB:  	This was after the report was issued or before, during the drafting process?  I guess maybe that’s a good way to pin it down.
JS:  	It was probably, I’m not sure it was after, but it was probably near the completion of the report.
BB:  	So it was around 1992?
JS:  	Yeah.  It was probably ’91, and then eventually, the report was released, and then people continued to come.  Initially, we -- so it really began as a faculty-staff effort, that we thought that students were pretty good at networking themselves and that we wanted to be sure we were addressing the needs of people really on the firing line within the institution and helping one another move the institution.  And initially, we felt maybe by, that maybe we wanted to not include students in these meetings because we needed to be talking very honestly with one another about what were the pressures on our campus, and we didn’t really feel it was appropriate that students kind of know where some of the stumbling blocks were because we wanted to be supporting students and saying, giving -- we were afraid that would be discouraging to students and not really information that should be shared.  I think, and I can’t remember at what point we did this, whether this was actually at the very first meeting, but we did invited students, but we invited them so that they could have their own separate meeting, or whether we did that at the second meeting.
BB:  	Students from around the campus?
JS:  	From around the campus, yes.  What we did, and that may have even been the first meeting, that we invited staff, faculty, and students and asked that all three constituencies be represented.  I think we did do that at the very first meeting, but that we actually planned for the students to be meeting separately, that we would have one initial meeting as a whole group, and then we would break out as administrators and students so that administrators could talk about how do we facilitate change on the campus.  Where are the obstacles? Are the obstacles ideological, or are they just process, procedural, and that students had their own issues they needed to be addressing, and we should let students meet separately.  So that committee met here at the Memorial Union, that first UW System Network Committee, and we decided to meet three times a year.
BB:  	Now was it still -- it was an informal organization at that point.
JS:  	Yes, informal organization.  It’s still an informal organization.
BB:  	Okay.  There’s no -- I don’t know anything, again, about how the UW system works.  There are system-wide committees or organizations?
JS:  	There are.  And actually, over the years, we’ve approached the system and spoken with them and spoken among ourselves, in terms of what are the advantages of becoming recognized, and what are the disadvantages?  But at this point, we’ve always been informal.  We’ve met, I think, at least twice over the years with Tess Arenas, who used to be in the -- is now a vice president but was a special assistant to the president, to address minority affairs, but LGBT was not included among the minority affairs.  But we felt Tess was probably still our best ally there, and also Evan Norris, who is also in system administration and works with chancellors over the different systems schools, advising on student affairs concerns.  So I remember specifically one meeting we had at Milwaukee.  We’ve also tried to rotate the meetings.  So the first one was at UW-Madison, but we tried to rotate it around the system so people didn’t always feel they had to come to Madison.
00:55:00
Actually, eventually, after moving it around, people said they all liked to come to Madison, and we ended up turning it back to Madison.  But we did go to Green Bay.  We went to Oshkosh.  We went to River Falls.  I believe we went to Whitewater, and we went to Milwaukee, for sure, I remember.  And I remember in the Milwaukee meeting, both Evan Norris and Tess Arenas came to speak to us.  And at that point, they advised that we remain informal, that they said that we had their support and that they were there as allies for us, to advise us, but that based on the regents and the Legislature at the time, that they felt politically, we were in a better position to remain informal than to draw the attention of more conservative members of the board and of the Legislature, who may not want the university moving in these directions.
BB:  	So there was a feeling that if this was formalized, as an official committee, I don’t know what the word is, committee or network, then that would have repercussions with the Legislature?
JS:  	That it could and with the board.  This was in probably ’93 or ’94 when we got that advice.  And I believe ’94 and ’95, UW-Milwaukee was in the process of establishing a UW, a certificate program on Gay and Lesbian Studies.  And they were virtually complete with that process when there was some resistance raised among legislators that then contacted the Board of Regents and said, what are we doing?  Why are we [unclear] gays and lesbians?  This is terrible.  We shouldn’t be doing this.  And this is not a valid area of academic pursuit.  That’s what some of the legislators were saying.  What happened was that the Board of Regents did investigate, did open this as an area of discussion.  And I believe fortunately, what they discovered was that Milwaukee had gone through all of the absolutely appropriate processes on that campus, had followed all of the correct permissions, received all of those permissions, and because it was a certificate program, there was no way in which the board was involved in that process.  And they said they had no say over it, and the certificate program should stand.  But it was very worrisome for a period because the legislators were trying to pressure the board to basically override what had happened at the Milwaukee campus.
BB:  	Well, that seems as though that’s a dangerous topic to get involved with if you’re the Board of Regents, or the Legislature for that matter, because essentially, it’s an issue of telling the university campuses what they can or cannot teach, I suppose, ultimately.
JS:  	Well, but I think that there was, that it was really because it was a certificate program.  I wish my memory was more exact here.  But had it been some other kind of program, I believe that there is a step where the Board of Regents needs to approve new departments or new something.  And it was only because of the kind of program that it actually was that it did not require a board approval, that the board was able to kind of just sidestep the whole issue.  The legislators were saying the board needed to be involved in the process.  And had it been some other -- I believe had it been a full-fledged department, the board would have at some point had to sign off on it.
BB:  	And then what do you think would have been the --
JS:  	Well, at that point, it would not have passed with the makeup of the board at the time.
BB:  	Was there a feeling among the people who were involved in the network that remaining an unofficial entity was a good thing?  Or were there people who thought maybe that they -- in other words, to kind of challenge or force the hand of the Legislature and to say, to refuse to be sort of, not silenced is probably not a good word, but do you see what I mean here?
JS:  	No.  I’d say that there was a question, and I remember we had one whole meeting devoted to this, at least one whole meeting, where we had at least 40 people in the circle, and we were all talking about it.  I think that the group was split, that we saw the advantages, that there were advantages and disadvantages to each.  One of the disadvantages to becoming formally recognized was that many of the people in the circle probably would not become the people who were members of the committee, that people who were in this circle were people who had self-identified as interested in these issues, and they were not necessarily in a Dean of Student’s Office.  They might have been in housing, or they might have been in a counseling center, or they might have been in an academic department.  But they were interested in moving these issues forward on their campus.  They had been perhaps an advisor to a student group –
01:00:29	End of Tape 1, Side 2
Second Interview Session (June 14, 2000): Tapes 2-3
Tape 2, Side 1
00:00:01
BB:  	This is Brian Bunk of the Oral History Project, and today is June 14th of the year 2000.  I’m in the offices of Jan Sheppard, and we’re continuing the interview that we began a few weeks ago.  We concluded the last session talking about the UW network, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Issues Network, and you were discussing the debates within the organization about whether or not to become an official affiliated UW system group.
JS:  	Yeah.  At at least one of our meetings, and perhaps even a couple, we discussed our relationship with the system and whether it should be in some way formalized because it was not a formally recognized committee or organization.  It was an informal committee of people who basically took the day off to get together and talk about these issues at various -- and we would move around the system to various campuses.  I would say most of the meetings were here in Madison, but we did meet at Green Bay.  We met at Milwaukee.  We met at Whitewater.  We met at Oshkosh.
BB:  	Now were these monthly or every couple of months?
JS:  	No.  For the first couple of years, I think it was -- I think a couple of years we had three times a year.  Most years, it was twice a year.  So it was usually in the fall and then in the late spring or sometimes early in the spring semester, usually more towards the end of the spring semester.
BB:  	So these questions about whether to become an official part took place over several years.
JS:  	Yes.  It would come up again year after year.  The question was whether to approach system in a more aggressive, assertive manner, to ask them to recognize us.  We had been in touch with people at system, primarily with Tess Arenas from the -- she was, at that point, the special assistant to the president, Minority Affairs, I think, was the title, and Evan Norris, who was an academic planner.  And in speaking -- in fact, Evan and Tess came to one of our meetings that was in Milwaukee after we had one of these discussions.  So the discussion was really should we become official, or should we ask to become officially recognized?  Should we push for that?  Or should we continue as an informal group that tried to make change among ourselves and then take the change back to our individual campuses?  And I think the question about that was the advantage or disadvantage of being recognized officially.  The advantage would be that people wouldn’t have to take a day off work.  It would not be something you would have to go and sort of beg your supervisor to let you do.
00:03:00
	Some of the people there did not have to take a day off of work.  Their supervisor was supportive, and it related to the work they were doing on a day-in and day-out basis, and the supervisor said, fine, I want you to be involved.  This is good that we’re working on this and that we’re working with the system.  For some of the people, for example, in particularly for some of the faculty, who really this was -- it’s not like they were working in student services, per se, and their dean or chair was not necessarily feeling this was appropriate or connected to their work, so they would come, but they would come on a day that they weren’t teaching or something.  It clearly was not within their -- or they weren’t feeling that they could talk to their direct supervisor, in terms of it being within the purview of what they normally did.
BB:  	Was there any cases of people who were maybe pressured not to, or they maybe suffered some sort of ill effects?
JS:  	I think we probably didn’t see those people because they didn’t come.
BB:  	Oh, okay.
JS:  	So I don’t know, but there was the sense that -- and then there were some people who were maybe in student services but not necessarily working with LGBT issues but themselves had an interest in the issues and just maybe because they were either an out lesbian and gay person or maybe not even out on their campus but still offering support to other students on the campus.  They wanted to come and be involved because they were concerned about the issues.  But it was ‑‑ they felt it likely that were the group to get officially recognized, they would no longer be the appointed person, that it would be someone in housing or someone in counseling or someone in one of the offices that maybe had a clearer, director connection to student service provisions for lesbian and gay students.  So I think there was -- there wasn’t a clear sense in the group as to which was better.
00:04:50
I think after the discussion, there was a sense that the advantage of being recognized would be visibility.  It would be more easily being able to schedule the meetings, getting perhaps some campus support for paying for the meetings, providing a location, all of those, just the sort of nuts-and-bolts administration piece.  Having a centralized person to be just managing the group, that was difficult because there was a fair amount of administration involved in sending e‑mails and notifying different people.   So the advantage would be that it would be more formalized, and it would give us the advantage of having a formal structure.  The disadvantage was that we weren’t sure what system would say, that we were working.  We were being able to meet.  We were having access to system people, even though it wasn’t formalized, and that it might change our membership base, and that did we want people assigned to be in this group, or did we really want people who were interested in being in the group and wanted to be in the group?
BB:  	How large was the group?
JS: 	 It was large.
BB:  	I mean, was it the kind of thing where there would be people -- people could just come if they were interested in joining?
JS:  	Yes, yes.
BB:  	I suppose people dropped out sort of, and people joined.
JS:  	Yeah.  We just had kind of a mailing list of people, of contacts, in the different campuses, and we asked people to spread the word and bring who they wanted.  I would say we generally had at least between 30 to 50 people at the meetings, so it would be a big circle.  In some meetings, that included students, and some meetings it didn’t.  I can’t remember if we discussed that at the last tape.  Whether students should be involved or not was actually a relatively big issue as well, and that changed over the time, over a number of years.
BB:  	Okay.  I don’t think we got into that, so we can.
JS:  	Okay.  So at the meeting following the one where we really had more, where most of the meeting was devoted to whether we wanted to formalize, what we decided is that for the next meeting, which was going to be in Milwaukee, we would invite Tess Arenas and Evan Norris to come, and they both came.  And what they said at that meeting, and I’m sorry, I don’t have the year.  It was probably, I think it was ’93, 1993.  And at that meeting, what both Tess and Evan said was that they were happy to work with us, happy to be a contact, that we should keep in touch with them, talk with them, but they did not feel that we should become formalized. They didn’t feel we would be able to become formalized, that system would back it at this point, and that it would be a wiser move for us to wait, using the resources in the informal way that we could but not push to get formal recognition, and that they felt that the political situation at that time would not be friendly to formally recognizing this group.  And so that’s what we decided to do.
BB:  	And it stayed that ever since.
JS:  	It has to this point.  Last year, meaning in the fall of ’99, we got a message from system.  It went, I believe, to people in the chancellor’s office, who then got in touch with me, from systems, saying that system, the President’s office, had interest in knowing what kinds of services were being provided to LGBT people on all the different campuses, that they wanted each campus to produce a list of what was happening on their campus, and that they were going to be reviewing this.  And somewhere in there, there was the sense that they were reviewing it towards the [words unclear] whether some sort of system-wide committee should be established.  But that’s the last I’ve heard.
BB:  	Were they aware that there already was an informal system?  They must have been.
JS:  	I’m not sure.  We certainly told them in our system, in the UW system that UW-Madison provided.  We mentioned it.
BB:  	So it’s still ongoing.  It may change then in the near future.
JS:  	Right.  The last couple of years, I haven’t been as involved, and it has been meeting but not ‑‑ probably only once a year, and the meetings have been pretty small.  I think it’s been largely an administration problem.  We haven’t had anybody who’s been willing to take on the administration.  It’s just, it’s a lot of work to maintain mailing lists and get the messages out and schedule the meetings and plan the rooms and get speakers.
00:09:37
BB:  	Right.  You had mentioned just a few minutes ago that there was some question about whether or not to include students.
JS:  	Right.  At the very first meeting we had here in Madison, what we did is we had advertised it and discussed, really thought about it as an opportunity for staff and faculty to talk about issues that affected them, as well as issues that affected students, and for an opportunity for staff and faculty to be talking among themselves, basically really without students.  We had invited students with the concept that students could have their own meeting separately, that we would reserve a room and that if any students accompanied the people that came, they could meet separately to form their own network.  And that’s how we proceeded for a couple of years, maybe not a couple of years, a couple of meetings, probably.  And then there was talk that why were we excluding students?  And shouldn’t students be here?  And aren’t students what we’re all about?  So we had those discussions.  And again, there was, I think, some differences of opinion within the group.  I don’t think there was ever a sense that we wanted to exclude students.  I think that -- and I think this was also the reasoning initially, was that the feeling was that these were issues that were sometimes very difficult, sometimes politically sensitive, and that faculty and staff wanted an opportunity to talk about them with other campuses and other people in a pretty honest way and that we didn’t necessarily want students to be hearing some of the not-always-positive things that we had to say about what was happening on the campus.  We didn’t think that that was always the best for students or the best -- that wasn’t the public face we wanted to be presented.
00:11:31
Yet, we wanted to be able to talk about the real political challenges if there was some, either formal or informal, homophobia going on, the kinds of challenges we maybe were facing from outside legislators, that those weren’t necessarily things we felt appropriate for students to be hearing about.  Also, I think, I always felt that there was a need for faculty and staff, who struggled so hard on these issues, to have an opportunity to talk with one another about them honestly and not have to worry about the response of students.  You don’t want students to know that you’re not necessarily feeling supported or that you feel there are some bigger problems.  Those aren’t things that are helpful for the students’ learning.  You want the students to be able to be moving through as smoothly as they can.  You want to be helping them over the hurdles, not exaggerating the hurdles.  Or, and you wouldn’t be exaggerating the hurdles, but there are some hurdles the students shouldn’t have to be worried about.  And so I felt that that was, in fact, what isolated faculty and staff on campuses really didn’t have, was the opportunity to talk about these issues with likeminded people, that sort of putting the good face on it, they had lots of experience with that.  So that was the challenge we faced was how do we not forget about the students and invite students and help them do the networking, yet also support the faculty and staff that are facing a lot of hurdles themselves?
BB:  	Was the sort of parallel student network very successful?
JS:  	I think not as successful because they somehow felt that we were doing the important or interesting things.  You know, you just, you wanted to know what the people downstairs were talking about or the people up.
BB:  	Right.
JS:  	So after probably three or four meetings, where we kind of didn’t openly invite students, or if students came, they were on their own, we started to incorporate students.  And then we had several meetings like that. My perspective was that really wasn’t as useful, that there were times when it became the students being angry at the situation and putting the people, the faculty and staff who had come, into a pretty defensive position.  You know, they weren’t coming to this to be defensive.  They were coming to be, to get help for themselves.  So I felt that that didn’t ‑‑ that really didn’t accomplish anything.  It didn’t help the students, and it certainly didn’t help the faculty and staff who came.  And I think that after that combination is when our numbers started getting a little bit smaller.  Then there was a later incarnation, when I was not -- after I had moved out of the liaison role, when we decided to make it more of a small working group, so it was more just identified people that were going to be coming each time, so that we didn’t have these 30‑person roundtables.  And we probably had three or four meetings like that.  I did attend a couple of those but not all of them.  
00:14:50
And they were useful in that they probably were a little bit more focused and, I think, more action oriented.  But I do think we lost some momentum because he didn’t have as many people, and there was more of a workload on a fewer number of people. In my view, the big meetings, well, they weren’t action oriented, and it wasn’t like there was necessarily a result.  I think they addressed the issues of visibility and energizing people and helping people address isolation, giving people ideas, not giving people an action plan to go back and do this, but giving people ideas that they could then take to their campus and personalize for the campus.  And that was really the view I had of the goal of the group was really just to keep people sort of excited and connected and networked.
00:15:44
BB:  	Do you think that -- I imagine that there was probably a growth of visibility in organizations on all of the campuses during the lifetime or up to now.  Do you think that the campuses -- the LGBT services and the presence became more visible or more, I guess visible, I don’t know, at some of these other campuses when it wasn’t back in, say, 1992?  That would tend to lessen the need or people coming to this sort of thing?
JS:  	Probably, I think it would.  And I think the issues have changed too.  I think that, you know, and I don’t know for sure about some of the smaller campuses, but I think that probably the service and the visibility issue for LGBT students is much better now at the smaller campuses and that the issue really now is that, probably the largest issue is now domestic partnership coverage for faculty and staff and for students at some campuses. On our campus, students have the coverage.  So for on our campus, it’s just faculty and staff coverage that’s the issue.  And those are issues that are being addressed by other networks, by a -- there is a statewide, what do they call, state employees’ network, which is called Wisconsin Legislators, or, sorry, I can’t remember the name of that organization. Larry Davis on our campus is very involved, as is Dan Ross, in that organization, and then there’s an organization called Action Wisconsin, which is just a statewide network of people not connected to the university, per se, just a statewide network of people looking at LGBT issues, and one of their highest priorities is domestic partnership coverage for state employees.  So I think that the venues for those issues is not necessarily on campus any more.
BB:  	Well, that sounds like an issue that would be better dealt with through a kind of official system, committee, or through larger networks than just individuals from campuses getting together.  I mean, those are much more organized and pressure being applied for that sort of thing.
JS:  	Right.  Pride in Wisconsin Government is the name of that other organization, and that’s a network of university, not university, network of Wisconsin employees, State of Wisconsin employees, addressing things like domestic partnerships.  So those two organizations, Action Wisconsin and Pride in Wisconsin Government, together are working on domestic partnership coverage, not only for university employees but for state employees.
00:18:26
BB:  	Okay.  Well, we can move on I guess, or move back sort of to the Gay and Lesbian Issues Committee, the GLIC Committee.  I think we sort of took that diversion to the network from there.  But maybe we could talk -- I think we discussed the members and sort of the background of the group, but I don’t think we got to the report, which was issued on January 23, 1992.  And there was a series of recommendations there, and I just listed them and some of the main parts.  And I thought we could maybe go down and talk a little bit about some of the recommendations, and maybe you could comment on them if you have any specific comments about the sorts of things that were planned and maybe why they came about.
JS:  	Sure.
BB:  	The first one, I guess there was a series of different areas that were addressed, and these are all in the report, which there is a copy of in your file in the Oral History Project.  So the first one was the Dean of Student’s Offices, and there were several recommendations regarding kind of establishing a permanent liaison, some about police and security, and then health service issues.
JS:  	Okay.  And the permanent liaison is how I got the role.  I was not a full-time liaison.  The report, I believe, requested actually a half time.
BB:  	Yeah, I think so.
JS:  	And at that time, the dean said she -- we were a very small staff, as we still are, and she said she just did not feel she had the person power to ask someone to commit half of their time to this but that she would appoint someone as a liaison, and she asked me to do that.  I agreed.  And at that point, I think we agreed that I would be quarter time.  And so that was the role I was in from when the report was released until 1995.  Police and security, I’m sorry, I’m not remembering what that recommendation was.
BB:  	These were issues that were listed under the Dean of Student’s Office.
JS:  	Yeah.  I’m not sure why it would be listed under the Dean of Student’s Office, since that’s its own division, and health service, because health service had very recently been incorporated into, as part of the Dean of Student’s Office.  And health service, soon after that, did get a new director.  And you can see down below here, in the list you’ve provided me, there were actual specific recommendations for university health services that they did follow up on.
BB:  	Well, maybe we could talk just in general about how these particular recommendations came about, I guess.
JS:  	Sure.  I think the sense was, by the committee, was that there were -- that campus climate and that lesbian, gay, bisexual, not transgender at the time, but that those issues affected the entire campus and that it was not the responsibility of a single office.  So I think by dividing these recommendations among different prime -- difference with large-scale divisions, they wanted to communicate that this was not something that a single office, particularly the Dean of Student’s Office, could solve, that it needed to be being addressed across the campus and particularly in the venues where students were the target of the service being provided.  And what they were trying to do was identify places where they had information from students that there were problems students encountered around being a lesbian, gay, bisexual person that these services were not responding to appropriately, either that students were feeling targeted.  They were feeling ignored.  Their needs and issues were not being addressed properly.  So for example, in health service, there was -- the staff sensitivity issue was around things like the discussion of sexually transmitted diseases and how that was handled with people who ‑‑ how there was recognition or no recognition of how that was different for different sexual orientations.  The one that came up all the time was lesbians in committed lesbian relationships being kind of pushed and pressured around birth control issues, and they felt this was inappropriate.
00:23:04
BB:  	Right.  And these came about because, was there sort of an investigation by the committee?  Did people come and testify, so to speak?
JS:  	Yes.  Actually, we had both -- we had open hearings, and then we also just sort of did interviews with students.  You know, we had several, the committee had open hearing times that, I can’t remember what they called them, speak outs or something, at the time, where they asked people, students and anyone, invited the community to come and talk about these issues and what did they feel the committee needed to be addressing.
BB:  	And there was a good turnout?
JS:  	You know, those sorts of things generally, particularly on a fairly sensitive issue like this, there was a turnout.  It wasn’t, you know, huge numbers, but we had people come and speak.  So, yes, there was a turnout.  I think we were very satisfied with the response.
BB:  	Was it for this report or the later report that there was the surveys and those sorts of things?
JS:  	Surveys was for the second report.  Well, wait a minute, I take that back.  This report also had surveys.  This report had extensive surveys.  It took many years to, a year and a half.  That was one of the reasons the report took a long time to produce is because they did also do surveys.  These surveys were distributed, I know, at the Ten Percent Dances.  I can’t remember how else, but I’m certain at the Ten Percent Dances, the surveys were distributed.  These surveys were primarily to students.  The next set of surveys, in the ’97 report, were to both students, staff, and faculty.
BB:  So the report then dealt mainly with students.  And was it with undergraduates and graduates?
JS:  	Undergraduates and graduates, and it dealt with students and student life out of classroom life because the report was to the Dean of Students, and her areas of responsibility are out of classroom life.  And it didn’t make sense to give a curriculum report to the Dean of Students, since she is not responsible for curriculum.
BB:  	Right.  So that’s why most of the issues do focus on those health and residential life and those sorts of things, although there was some about the encouraging Gay and Lesbian Studies on campus.  But that was a relatively minor part of the entire issue.
JS:  	Right.  This really was a student life and comfort report about students and student services and how they were acting because those are the areas that the Dean of Students can respond to.
00:25:39
BB:  	So the report’s then published -- how would you classify the reaction of the report?
JS:  	I think the reaction was very positive.  We were very careful in the release of the report.  I think we released at least two versions before the final report, that intentionally, we circulated it widely to all of the offices and departments that we felt were connected to these issues and would want to know about these issues, to get their feedback.  We really solicited feedback and response prior to the final report being put together, and I think that was very effective.  I think the reaction was positive all the way around.  People were glad it had been written, were very pleased.  It was, as far as I know, it was the first major report on these issues in the system. After ours was completed, there were a number that were rapidly also, or either had been in process or were then started and completed at other schools, at Milwaukee, at Whitewater, at Green Bay.  But ours was the first in the system, I believe.
BB:  	How would you rate the effectiveness of the report?  I guess maybe that’s something that can only be seen long term.  But I guess was there kind of an immediate effect?
JS:  	Well, I think it was a, you know, it’s always hard to know what leads to what, and I certainly don’t think the report led, was a direct, that had there not been a report, some of these other things didn’t happen.  But I think all of the things were coming together at once, that looking back, you can see clearly how many things were happening at once.  And I think the report helped focus and support the things that came, that followed, that maybe those things would have happened anyway, but I think that it really did help give institutional recognition and institutional attention that then allowed the next steps to be easier for everybody else.  I think that what was happening at that time, that there were lots of people across the campus all trying to go toward the same direction.  And I think the visibility of the report, the focused attention of the report, the fact that it was in writing and it could be handed to people, all of that really helped, so that at the same time that the report was really being finalized, the campus Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Campus Center, the student-run Student Finance Center was finally approved and begun the Gay and Bisexual Alumni Council through the Wisconsin Alumni Center, was begun.  There were several new classes begun.  There were a lot of student groups getting more active, graduate student groups.  So, I mean, it really felt like a time when everything was coming together.  So, you know, I wouldn’t attribute it to the report, but I think the report helped move everything else along.  And I think since the report, I think the fact that all those things were happening concurrently can be related to that time, when there was so much attention and devoted.
BB:  	Was there a conscious effort made, when the report was being drafted, to make recommendations?  Like were there some recommendations that people thought were sort of best case scenarios, or, well, we’ll put this in here, but we really don’t think it’s going to happen? Or we think -- a kind of, was the report maybe optimistic, like here is what we would see in the best of all possible worlds?  Or was it a realistic, more realistic, pragmatic approach?  These are some realistic change that can be made relatively easy, relatively quickly?  Or was it a more sort of idealistic kind of --
JS:  	I’d say it was, it really did a beautiful job of being in the middle, of not -- I don’t think anybody set their goals very low.  I don’t think we felt this was sort of the minimum, and let’s just ask for what we’re sure we could get.  I don’t feel that was it at all.  I also don’t think that it, I think that it was really forged in order to be --
00:30:11	End of Tape 2, Side 1
Tape 2, Side 2
00:30:12
JS:	-- [unclear] so I think that it was a pragmatic report but not so pragmatic that we’re not asking for important issues or asking for things that they felt might take a little bit of work.  But I also don’t think, it wasn’t an idealistic report that was ridiculous and no way it could happen.
BB:  	The committee had a good sense of the sort of parameters within which they were operating.
JS:  	I think so.  I think that they felt that, you know, the biggest stretch was maybe addressing it to all these different offices, having a section addressed to the chancellor’s office.  I think they felt, saying chancellor should take some responsibility in these issues.  And I think the chancellor’s office did try to do some, and that this report really, I think it was achievable, and most of what was in here did happen.
00:31:03
BB:  	Now as a result of the report, or maybe, let me see the dates here.  The newsletter was begun several months after the report.
JS:  	Right.  And the newsletter was, again, one of these sort of confluences, I think.  The newsletter was an idea brought to me by Ken Chraca, who was heavily involved in the Gay and Lesbian Alumni Council, at the time called the Gay and Lesbian Alumni Council, now called the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Alumni Council. And Ken Chraca had been one of the people I had known ever since I started in the position in the Dean of Student’s Office because Ken had an, it wasn’t an organization, an informal group, almost entirely men, except for me, called Symposium, that was basically gay men on campus who met socially periodically during the semester.  And out of that group, and Ken basically kept that group going, and out of that group, Ken started this idea, working with Tammy Baldwin and Dick Wagner, of starting the Alumni Council.  And at one of these Alumni Council gatherings, which were very informal at that time, or maybe it was even in a phone call.  I think it was a phone call to me that Ken suggested, why don’t we do a newsletter?  There’s so much going on.  Let’s start a newsletter.  And I said I thought that made good sense, and so then I started it.  So it wasn’t a direct result of the report, but, again, it was because of the fact that the report was happening, the fact that the student center was starting.  I think there was just lots going on, and it tended to generate more ideas.  So the more that’s going on, the more that happens.
BB:  	And the first issue came about in November of 1992.  And the title, “We’re Everywhere,” how did you come up with that one?
JS:  	Again, I talked with lots of people, and it was an idea that came, and I can’t remember who.  It came from someone in the community, and it just seemed such a great title.  It was in fact the name of, I believe, a store in Chicago that sold gay tchochkes.  And I think that whoever suggested it did talk to the store owner.  And the store owner said, well, as long as you’re not really ever going to open a store or do anything, it’s okay with me if you use the name.  And it just seemed like such a great name.
BB:  	And it was designed then as a sort of campus wide, or was it geared towards students in particular?
JS:  	No.  I’d say it was campus-wide, it was definitely-- I think it was designed to try to let all these different pockets across the campus know what else was going on, that they weren’t alone, because that was really what was needed at the time, and that was really what the liaison’s role was, I felt, was really coordinate information sharing, that there was a lot going on, that people were really working hard in so many different locations, and in different kinds of locations, in a student services location and in a faculty location and in an administrative unit.  But they didn’t necessarily know that other people were, so they felt isolated. You know, they felt like they were really out on a limb, and they were willing to be out on the limb and take that risk, but it seemed like people could maybe feel not so risky and still be doing the same work if they were aware of one another a little bit more.  And I really think that is what the role of the newsletter served, and I think it served it really well.
00:34:55
BB:  	Maybe we should just briefly go back and talk a little bit about you -- you had started now the job as a liaison, and you were still only quarter time.  Maybe you could just talk a little bit about what your duties were or what your --
JS:  	Yeah.  Well, again, that changed over time.  Certainly, one of the big duties was this newsletter we did.  I guess it was only two years.  I guess it was a fall issue and a spring issue, but it did take a lot of time because I really worked hard to get articles from all the different corners of campus and people, so to get articles from the primary student organizations on campus and from the Alumni Council and from the student center and from faculty that were teaching.  So one was the newsletter.  I’d say that was a big responsibility. The other things that I began, and they sort of began over the period of being the liaison, as the role developed and people knew more, but we started a fall orientation, which continues to this day, so that every fall, we have a resource fair and orientation program.  I think the first year was primarily, well, maybe it’s always been both resources.  It’s just a get-together for people to welcome new students to the campus, to have some, during our orientation, to have visibility for LGBT issues for students, so that students come, to allow returning students and returning faculty and staff to network.  And I think, again, that’s been a real successful program, and we’ve had one every year since probably 1993 was probably the first one.  It started in ’92, and then the next fall was when we first had this orientation.  It’s advertised in the Wisconsin Welcome booklet.  It’s definitely an institutionalized part of the campus.  So that was one issue.
00:36:58
	Probably a year or two, I think ’94 might have been the first year of this next event, and that’s a graduation reception so that every year, and again, that’s been ongoing ever since then, so I guess we’ve had seven maybe, or I think we’ve had eight now, to tell you the truth.  I’m pretty sure this last one was the eighth annual graduation reception.  We have it in conjunction with the student organization’s Out and About Week, which is always in April.  We did that initially because it is a graduation reception for graduating LGBT students. We had it earlier than graduation, during Out and About, initially because at that point, it was the case that many LGBT students, when they graduated with family, were not graduating as LGBT students, that they either weren’t out to their families, or their families were not accepting of them as LGBT students, so that it was really a graduation that couldn’t involve them in their whole person.  So we felt by having it during the semester, when family were not necessarily around, people could be acknowledged as their whole person and congratulated as a graduate.  I think that that’s changing, and whether we’ll decide to move it to the more traditional time of graduation receptions or not will be interesting to see.  At the last two graduation receptions, I believe all of the students that have been especially recognized, we generally invite students to speak and give them some awards.
00:38:39
I believe that the students who have received those awards have all had family attend the events.  But that’s been a change.  I think that was the first year we’ve ever really had students either want to invite their families or the families want to come.  I don’t know which it was, but we hadn’t had families.  And now it seems like we’re always getting families.  So that’s a wonderful change.  But it’s also always been terrific to have it as part of Out and About.  Out and About has helped us publicize it.  It’s been listed among the events in the Out and About Week, which is usually, you know, seven or eight different events.  So again, that’s been, I think, a nice collaboration between students’ activities and faculty and staff.  We’ve always had a good attendance by faculty and staff in support of students.  We usually have a couple of student speakers.  And this year, we didn’t have a faculty speaker.  Other years, we’ve always also had a faculty speaker.
BB:  	And that’s done through the Dean of Student’s Office.
JS:  	It’s a collaboration between our office and the Wisconsin Alumni Association and the Alumni Council.  It’s really an event of the council.  It’s paid for in large part by the council.  A lot of the administration and planning was through this office and then also the Alumni Association.
BB:  	Okay.  That’s what I was going to ask, if that was different.  I knew that there was an event where the alumni were brought in to speak.  Is that a different event, or is that the same?
JS:  	That’s a different event, and that’s also an Alumni Council event.  That is a brunch.  Part of the bylaws of the Alumni Council and the Wisconsin Alumni Association Organization is that there be an annual meeting.  So the annual meeting for the Gay and Lesbian Alumni Council is a summer event where we recognize distinguished alumni, and we have a brunch.  And so there are generally two distinguished alumni that we recognize come in and speak, and we give them an award.  We now also -- the Alumni Council now also has a scholarship award for gay and lesbian students, and that’s given out at the alumni brunch.  The alumni brunch is what’s known as the Magic Picnic Weekend in Madison, which is a weekend of events for the gay and lesbian community.  There is this magic picnic, which is a picnic with vendors and all kinds of just gathering.  And then there’s usually a pride march that weekend as well.  And then our alumni brunch is that weekend, so it’s kind of a full weekend of activities.  It’s usually mid-July.
00:41:15
BB:  	Since we’re talking a little bit about the Alumni Council, you had mentioned that that was one of these things that had started to coalesce around 1992, seems to be the magic date.  Well, maybe could you describe a little bit more in detail how that came about?
JS:  	Yes.  And that’s also had a very interesting development in history.  It started, again, really, Ken Chraca talking with Tammy Baldwin, who, at that point, was a representative, or an assembly member, sorry, she is now, or U.S. representative.  She was a Wisconsin assembly member.  And with Dick Wagner, who is a state employee, long-time state employee, and the three of them decided that the Alumni Council should start -- or the Wisconsin Alumni Group should start a special interest group for gay and lesbian people.  They had done such for Native Americans and for African Americans and for Chicanos, and we felt it was appropriate.  They approached Paula Bonner, who was an employee of the Alumni Association.  She is currently the executive director.  At that point, she was not.  I believe she was the associate director or assistant director.  And Paula was very supportive and said, sure, go for it.  Get together and set up bylaws.  So probably 10 or 12 people, and I was fortunate to be included, started meeting at people’s homes.  Dick Wagner is a wonderful host, as well known in Madison as having a beautiful home, and a wonderful host, and he would have us to his house and make these wonderful muffins and biscuits and lay out a beautiful spread on weekends.  And we started the Alumni Association.  We put together a mission and a set of bylaws.  The Alumni Association accepted us as an official organization.
BB:  	So there is a kind of technical process --
JS:  	There is a technical process.
BB:  	-- that any group has to go through to become an official, officially recognized part of the Alumni Association.
JS:  	That was, so there’s that first step, which makes you recognized but not yet official, and then we also went through the next step probably, it took about a year, year and a half, through the Alumni Association Board of Directors.  I’m not sure, I can’t remember what they’re called right now, where the governing structure for the entire board, or for the entire association, did recognize us as an official organization.  And that made us one of the very first and few in the country that were officially organized.  Many alumni associations have LGBT groups, but most are not official.  They’re just informal.  And ours is official.
BB:  	There were never any problems?  It was just --
JS:  	Never, never.  They were, the Alumni Association --
BB:  	Just a question of going through the process then.
JS:  	Yes.  The Alumni Association has been wonderfully supportive from the very beginning.  They would -- there was this alumni magazine that’s published periodically, and they would publish articles about the activities of the Gay and Lesbian Council.  They would publish pictures from the annual brunch.  They were always extremely supportive and never seemed at all shy about putting that information in the newsletter, which was a risk at that point, I think.
00:44:41
BB:  	Right.  Was there a big, I mean, how successful, I guess, is the Alumni Council?  Has it turned into a very large group?
JS:  	I think it’s a very successful group.  It’s expanded.  It’s formalized itself.  As I said, it used to be that we met -- for the first probably two or three years, we met in people’s homes, which was lovely and informal.  But then when the Alumni Association got its new Below House, or Below House, I think it’s pronounced, the new building.  Since that building has been in existence, we now meet there, or the organization now meets there.  And the structure has been more formalized.  There is a real effort, and it’s been very successful in getting younger alumni in.  I would say that the group that started it, except for Tammy was probably the youngest of the group that started it, most of the members of the group that began, I would say, were in their late 40’s and 50’s.  And now I would say the group is primarily people who are in their 30’s and even 20’s.  There’s been a real effort to involve recent alums.  And I think that’s been very successful. The activities of the council have expanded.  When the council first began, the major event was this brunch, where we did, and the goal of the brunch was to recognize the very famous and outstanding alum who were gay and lesbian and who had then gone on and made major contributions in the world.  So the brunch was the first event.  Soon after the brunch began, there was a Homecoming event that began, and that also has continued.  At Homecoming, we would buy -- the Alumni Council would buy a block of tickets for the game that they would make available to council members, and there would also be usually often a very elegant -- all I’m think is tailback.  What are they called?
BB:  	Oh, tailgate.
JS:  	Tailgate, thank you, tailgate party, sometimes at alum houses and sometimes in a parking lot, like other tailgates, and with brats and beer and the whole thing.  In the very first years of that, also, sometimes Dick Wagner would have a more elegant event the night before.  That usually, that hasn’t continued now.  That happened probably four or five years, and now, as Dick is no longer as involved in the Alumni Council, it hasn’t continued.
BB:  	I suppose too as it gets bigger, if there’s only a handful or a dozen people involved really, then it can be much smaller.  But now it can be a much bigger affair, I suppose.
JS:  	I would say even at the very beginning, both the tailgate and the dinner before probably had 30 to 50 people.
BB:  	Oh, really?
JS:  	Yup.  And now, I think the tailgate still has around, you know, anywhere from 50 to 70 attend.
BB:  	Wow.
JS:  Y	eah, so it’s a well-attended event.  Then the Alumni Council also started off, or planning, usually, well, I guess that was also in, that was in collaboration.  That was part of the Homecoming event.  They would often bring in a speaker, some sort of major speaker, to give a lecture.  That was how that happened.  We would invite a major speaker to come in, give a lecture on LGBT issues.  That would be the afternoon before the Homecoming game.  Then that evening, that’s what Dick’s part was.  Dick’s party was sort of a reception for the speaker, and then the next day was the tailgate and the game.  And I’d say, in general, the speaking has -- inviting a speaker has also continued.
BB:  	And that would be an alum or just a -- 
JS:  	Not necessarily an alum, just a major speaker that was not necessarily an alum, just a major speaker doing some sort of research or important work on LGBT issues.  Then there, since then has also been added this scholarship that I talked about, which is a -- there are two now, scholarships, for LGBT students.  That’s in collaboration with the foundation.  The foundation has helped put the money together in the Alumni Association.  It’s a scholarship for a continuing student.  I believe you need to be a sophomore or a junior to be eligible.  So it’s not -- seniors are not eligible, and freshmen are not eligible.  And at this point, grad students are not eligible.  But the Alumni Association and Foundation are hoping to extend it to graduate students in the near future.
BB:  	I think I was looking at the website, and there are awards in addition to the scholarships for graduating seniors?
JS:  	That’s right.  There are also now awards for graduating seniors that are also given out at the brunch.  That’s right, so there’s two different sort of ways of acknowledging and recognizing LGBT students.  There’s the scholarship and an award.  And I believe there are two of each, actually.
00:49:59
BB:  	Okay.  Well, the newsletter is going.  There’s the liaison position.  All these things are happening.  But then there was a letter that you had written to the university committee, March 4, 1994, and perhaps you’d like to explain the genesis and maybe what the letter -- the purpose, I guess.
JS:  	Sure, sure.  So the Gay and Lesbian Issues Committee continues to function.  The report has been published.  The recommendations are taking effect, and people are seeing real positive change in the area of student life and the kinds of services and awareness of LGBT issues around a student’s activities on the campus.  What continues, or what then we start to notice is that the issues that aren’t getting attention are the ones that weren’t addressed in this report because it was a Dean of Student’s report.  And those were issues of curriculum and career and employment issues for faculty and staff.  And so Jim Steakley, who was chair of the committee, and I started talking and saying those aren’t areas that the dean of students can do anything about.  What do we need to do in order to get those areas attended to, to get attention there? So Jim and I went to Betsy Draine and Gary Sandefur, who, at the time, were associate vice chancellors, and we said, here’s where we think we need to be putting attention at campus.  How should we be doing that?  How might we establish a committee that could pay attention to curricular issues and career issues for faculty and staff, career employment issues? And what Betsy and Gary said was that they recommended not a taskforce, which the chancellor could appoint in a minute, but a standing university committee that would be ongoing and wouldn’t just dissolve once the report was published.
BB:  	Is that the difference between the two, basically?
JS:  	That’s the difference.  A taskforce is something that a chancellor or anybody can just pull together to work on issues, and then once they’ve done the assigned task, it dissolves.  A committee that’s part of governance continues.  It’s part of the structure of the university.
BB:  	So it establishes a kind of permanent presence then within the administrative hierarchy or network.
JS:  	The governing structure.
BB:  	Right, the governing structure of the university, okay.
JS:  	Right, exactly.  And they strongly recommended that that was where we go, rather than ask for a taskforce.
BB:  	Now would this committee be different than the GLIC Committee, or would it serve similar functions as well?
JS:  	The GLIC Committee was an informal committee appointed by the dean to report to her to give her information.
BB:  	Oh, okay.  So that was a thing within the context of the Dean of Student’s office and not within the governmental structure of the university.
JS:  	Exactly.  It wasn’t university wide.  It reported to the dean.  It was appointed by the dean.
BB: 	 Right.  Was there a sense that the university committee then would take over these, the issues -- I guess would the university committee deal with the two issues you mentioned, the curriculum and the faculty and staff.  But then would it also deal with student issues?
JS:  	It certainly could address student issues.  I think there was the sense that the dean, at this point, was adequately addressing student issues.  Certainly, this committee would not ignore student issues.  They could bring a new perspective and provide that to the dean too.  I think the sense was that there needed to be a structure for getting those other two issues addressed, and also student issues.  So Betsy and Gary conferred with us and told us how they would recommend we proceed if that was our goal.  And what they said that we should do is that we needed to make a proposal to the university committee, that they recommended this be a committee of the university committee, and that the best way to approach the university committee would be to be able to demonstrate that we had support among faculty.  So Jim and I contacted a lot of people around campus.  We drafted a proposal as to what this committee would address, and the things that we primarily mentioned in that were career and employment issues and curriculum issues.  And we got 40 individuals to sign it.  I think they were primarily faculty because this was a -- we were taking it to the university committee, which is the governing body for the faculty Senate.  So we wanted to have clear demonstration of faculty support.  We did have staff on there as well, but we really tried to load it with faculty.  
00:55:07
And we presented it.  I believe we met with the university committee twice, I think initially to present the idea, and they said, yes, go ahead, sounds good to us, get this sort of support and bring it back to us.  We then met with them and presented to them our proposal and the petition supporting the proposal, signed by these 40 individuals.  And we were very excited and gratified that what the university committee decided to do was to not then say, fine, go and present it to the faculty Senate yourselves.  They decided they would take it on, and they would propose it, which is a significant difference.  So, you know, they can sort of say, okay, we’ll give you time.  Or they can say, we will make this our recommendation to the faculty Senate.  And they did the second.  So in May then -- so we presented the letter to them in March, and in May, at the last meeting of the faculty Senate for the year, the university committee took our proposal and presented it to the faculty Senate with their recommendation that it be accepted, which was huge, and it was accepted.  I believe there was almost no dissention. There may have been one or two people who stood up and said something mildly negative, but it was certainly not hugely controversial or negative, and it passed.  And there, so starting in the next academic year, the Faculty Senate Issues Committee was in place.  And Jim Steakley was the first chair of that committee.
BB:  	And then were you a part of that?  Or was that just for faculty, or were you part of that committee?
JS:  	No.  That was a university committee.  Faculty Senate committees involve students and academic staff as well.  They are composed primarily of faculty, but they also have representatives from academic staff and students, so, yes, I was a part of that committee as well.  I believe it initially had four or five faculty members and two academic staff and two students was, I think, the initial makeup.  So once that committee was in place, in order to sort of respond to your earlier question about what about GLIC, once we had that committee in place and it had five faculty members, it didn’t make sense to continue to set up the GLIC Committee with three faculty members and three staff, that it was just starting to draw on too many people.  So we changed the structure of GLIC to make it a more student-focused committee that could then get student feedback primarily.  And since I was on both committees, and that was always the sense that whoever was liaison would be on -- would be at least very connected or reporting to both committees, and we could get a committee that had strong faculty and staff representation and some student representation and then something through the Dean of Student’s Office that could be talking to a wider group of students and hearing from more students on a regular basis.  And that’s really what’s happened now, that the new full-time liaison has her own student-working group and regularly reports to the Faculty Senate Committee.
BB:  	So GLIC has sort of transformed into that student-working group, like you said.
JS:  	Yes.  GLIC has been through actually several transformations, and it is, and all of them were sort of to increase the student representation and the student voice as a way to get student information to the Dean of Student’s Office and also to the Faculty Senate Committee.
BB:  	So it’s become a kind of way for the dean to keep --
JS:  	In touch with students, which is the dean’s responsibility, so that makes sense, rather than the dean having to be getting information from faculty and staff.
BB:  	So now that the faculty committee is established, what did you see were the, I mean, what were the goals?  Or what, I mean, what next, I guess is the question.
JS:  	Yeah.  The first issue, I think, that the Faculty Senate Committee took on was a report.  And I think that really, the clear issue was what started our whole process of trying to get the committee together, was it was the curricular issue, is that there was a sense that the university was no longer cutting edge because there were many places around the country that had Gay and Lesbian Studies programs, where important research was being done and that that wasn’t happening on our campus, that we were hearing from scholars wanting to pursue that as young assistant professors, not having support to do that or wanting to leave in order to do it elsewhere, from graduate students wanting to pursue Gay and Lesbian Studies, dissertations, feeling they couldn’t do that here, from undergraduates wanting to write papers on Gay and Lesbian Studies, not knowing where they could do that.  So there was a clear sense from the very first meeting, I think, that a studies program or certificate program, somehow figuring out how do we infuse the curriculum better, was a high priority.
01:00:35	End of Tape 2, Side 2
Tape 3, Side 1
00:00:01
BB:  	You mentioned that Madison had -- there was a sense that Madison, being a progressive research institution and had all these firsts in the area of LGB issues, and yet, there was no academic department, no certificate, no major.  And I wondered if you could speculate perhaps on why that was the case.
JS:  	LGBT studies programs were definitely new around the country.  It wasn’t that this was something easy.  And I believe almost all of them were at private colleges and universities.  However, there was a sense that we should be a lot closer than we were.  And as you mentioned, Milwaukee did have a certificate program.  It had just been started.  And it was actually able to start -- there were some -- it had a difficult birth, and it was able to be birthed because the process was campus based.  There was some question initially whether it could be started without the involvement of the Board of Regents, and it appeared that if the Board of Regents would need to be involved, it wouldn’t have passed.  But in reviewing the process, there was no need for the Board of Regents to review it, and therefore, the campus could begin the certificate program.  So when the Faculty Senate Committee began, I think that on the table right away was this question of Milwaukee has a certificate program.  At minimum, we should have a certificate program and that let’s look into it and decide whether we want a certificate program, and maybe that’s all we want, or do we want a real department?
BB:  	And this had been one of the original recommendations of the GLIC group board too, that the chancellor’s office -- I don’t know whether it stated specifically a department or a certificate, but I know it said to encourage area studies, so to speak, and that obviously, there was some feeling that this hadn’t -- much headway hadn’t been gained in that area.
JS:  	That’s right.  And yet, this was something that the Asian-American Studies Program had begun only about three or four years before this.  The Chicano Studies was old.  The Native‑American Studies was much older than that.  But there were new studies programs being proposed.  The Puerto Rican Studies Program, which is still not in place but has been being discussed for many years, was being discussed at that point as well.  So there was the sense that let’s start something and look at it.  By this point, the Women’s Studies had become a department rather than just a certificate and a studies program.  So I don’t think I can give a why as to why it hadn’t happened, but the sense was -- but there was a strong sense that it hadn’t happened, and we really needed to be moving on that.  So the first task of the Faculty Senate Committee was to begin to do some research, some comparative research, to see what was happening around the company, where were the programs, how had they started, and to begin talking to people on this campus to see how far were we from being able to put one in place.  What was being done? 
00:03:25
	So one of the -- the first year, one of the major projects was to work with the secretary at the faculty’s office to do a survey through them of all instructional faculty and staff to ask them what was being taught on these areas.  And so we did that.  We heard back from 100 faculty, that they had either a -- that they had some portion of a course they taught devoted to LGBT issues.  And that was very encouraging to us.  It said that we did have enough of a base to go forward, that probably all that was needed was a structure, some sort of introductory-level course.  There didn’t seem to be any kind of general overall introductory course, which would make sense if there’s no certificate, that we needed to get approval to get a course like that in place, and then put together these other disparate courses around the campus to make a certificate.  And that’s what’s happened over the last, I guess, four or five years now, so that last year, in the 1999-2000 season, actually it was in spring.  In spring of 2000, we, for the first time, began the LGBT certificate program with an introductory LGBT Studies 101 course.
BB:  	Oh, so there is a certificate program now in place?
JS:  	There are a lot of different steps, and I haven’t been intimately involved with that.  There is definitely the 101 course in place, and I think it is all but the final steps to get this actual certificate program in place.  So, yes, I believe so.  There may be one or two final things to cross or dot.  And I think there’s no question that it will be in place.
BB:  	Okay.  And then the other impetus perhaps for the faculty committee was, in addition to the curriculum, was you said faculty and staff.
JS:  	Right.  And that relates to the domestic partnership issue we’ve already talked about is how do we get the campus to move on domestic partnership?  Our campus, the problem is not a campus-based problem.  It’s a state problem because our statutes define who gets health benefits.  And the statutes define who gets health benefits as spouse independents.  And at this point, domestic partners are not spouses or dependents.  So this is a larger issue, but there was a strong sense that the campus needed a body to be connected to the work that was going on around the state on that issue.
00:06:02
BB:  	You had mentioned earlier about graduate students and studies, coming here to study and support and all that.  And I wonder where do the graduate students fit into this, in a sense that the dean of students handles, by and large, undergraduate concerns, I think, although -- and in some sense, the graduate concerns are more closely related to faculty concerns, and I think issues of curriculum.  And then domestic partner benefits would tend to be more of interest to graduate students perhaps.  So I wondered maybe if you could just discuss that.
JS:  	Yeah.  Well, one of the other things, as liaison, that I did from the very beginning is I worked with the, at that point, it was called the Affirmative Action Office, now called the Equity and Diversity Resource Center.  They provide -- at the request of the Teaching Assistants Association, that probably started in ’89 or ’90, they offer to all teaching assistants and research assistants an opportunity to get training on diversity issues.  And at the request of the Teaching Assistants Association, this training -- a teaching assistant who went through the training would get an increase in their pay.  So the training is provided at the beginning of each semester to teaching assistants and research assistants.  It used to be, I believe, a six-hour training.  Maybe it used to be an eight-hour training, and now it’s a six‑hour training.  It was two sessions, four hours each. And part of my role as liaison was that I worked with that office to incorporate sexual orientation diversity training.  And that was one of -- I think they were very pleased to expand the program in that way.  I think it was well received and an important part of the training.  So I’d say that’s one of the ways that we work with graduate students, both as students who are teaching and also -- so both as staff who are providing information to our students and how should they be relating to and what kinds of information needs to be provided, and also as students who are in a supervisory role with their own advisors and may have some questions about discriminatory issues.  So that was, I’d say, through the Equity and Diversity Resource Center and this training program, I’d say, was one of the major ways we worked with grad students on LGBT issues.
00:08:44
BB:  	Okay.  Well, so the faculty committee is in place.  And then in 1995, I guess, there was some budgetary cuts, and then your position was eliminated, correct?
JS:  	Right.  What happened, in 1995, there was a major budget cut to the whole university.  And the Dean of Student’s Office received a very severe cut.  The Dean of Student’s Office is a, you know, I’m not sure if it’s correct -- I guess we are a division, and there are a number of other units in addition to the main Dean of Student’s Office, where I worked.  The dean felt strongly that she did not want to, any more than she had to, pass along those cuts to the other units she supervised.  She made serious S&E budgetary cuts for all of the units in the division.
BB:  	S&E’s?
JS:  	I’m sorry, Supplies and Expense.  But she still needed to do some actual personnel cutting, that there just wasn’t enough, and the only way that they could see to make a big enough cut in the budget was my removing a salary, in other words, a personnel cut. And she decided that she needed to take that personnel cut in her own office area.  I was -- my title was Assistant to the Dean of Students.  And although I had been there for seven years, I was also the most junior member of the staff.  This is a very long-sustaining staff.  The next junior person probably had 10 years.  The next junior person had 15, and people after that were all in their 20 years in that office.  And so I was -- it wasn’t me, it was the position that I held, was the position that had to be cut.  I think what’s important though is that the dean recognized how important the liaison role was, and it wasn’t that the duties I had got cut.  What happened was there was a meeting amongst the staff, and we tried to reallocate the duties I had been fulfilling to other members of the staff so that one of the other assistant deans in the office took on as much as possible of the liaison role.  And what we did is we changed -- the title had been Gay and Lesbian, LGBT Liaison.  We changed the title to be LGBT Contact Person, and we did that intentionally because I had been doing a lot of programming.
00:11:28
As we were talking, I realized I didn’t mention a couple of the other things.  So in addition to the newsletter and the orientation reception and the graduation reception, I had also been doing a speaker series, where we had probably, I think we had five lunchtime, brown-bag sessions during the year, where either graduate students, another way we reached graduate students, or faculty on the campus who were doing LGBT research or had expertise in LGBT issues would give a brown bag on those issues.  That’s all program [unclear] took a lot of time and effort.  So when we transferred the duties of the liaison to the other staff members, we decided there just was no way that people who were already adding to the work that they had could take on a lot of programming.  We decided the most important role of the liaison was to be a visible presence on the campus, to be a name that could be given out to new students or continuing students or students who were coming out, faculty members dealing with students who were coming out, not just to say, go to that office, but go to a person, so that there was a personal connection. We decided that was really the most important role, the role that we couldn’t give up, that we couldn’t just cut because of budget cuts.  So Peggy Lewis, the assistant dean in the office, could become the new contact person, but it would probably be impossible for her to keep up all of the programming, so they decided they would drop the newsletter, drop the speaker series, continue the orientation reception in coordination with the Campus Center.  We now have the Campus Center.  So the two offices could work together to put on the orientation program, the Campus Center and the Dean of Student’s Office.
00:13:20
And for the graduation program, the Dean of Student’s Office and the Alumni Council could work together, and that we would give more of the organizational programming responsibilities for the graduation reception to the Alumni Council, for the orientation reception to the Campus Center.  And by cutting back in that way, the contact person could continue, and we could make it. So that’s what happened.  In ’95, Peggy Lewis became the LGBT contact person.  She then became the person to serve on the Faculty Senate Committee because the Dean of Student’s Office should be represented on that committee.  And that was the change that happened.
BB:  	Now this -- in talking with people, they had mentioned that this did not go over very well necessarily with the community on campus, particularly the students who felt as though, you know, this was being sort of phased out, just as you mentioned.  And I wondered if you had any comment about the reaction to this. Were people very angry or disappointed?  Or did they feel sort of that here, all this progress had been made, and all of these things were happening, and then suddenly, it sort of cut an especially vital link.  It sounds as though you, in that position, were a kind of liaison, I guess, between all of these different things that were going on.  And it sounds as though you had personally put a lot of energy and effort into it, maybe more than the quarter time that you were allotted, it sounds like.  And so without your presence in that position, there would be a kind of drop off, I guess, and I wondered if you had any --
JS:  	Well, we really tried to not have that be the sense.  I guess I never heard that, and maybe people weren’t telling me.  We tried to communicate as clearly as we could that this was not a cut back in our commitment in any way, that the cuts had not come -- I mean, these were huge, a major proportion of the entire Dean of Student’s budget cut.  And it just, it had to come from somewhere.  And we did everything we possibly could to maintain the duties.  Yes, the person was gone, but the duties, we tried to maintain as much as possible.  And so I don’t think in any sense it was a change in commitment or a change in focus.  It was a change in budget and trying to allocate the budget we had and keep the focus.  We tried to communicate that.  We did as best we could.  In the last newsletter, we tried to explain.  And I think we also felt that it wasn’t a completely inappropriate change because since ’92, a lot of things have been established.  The center was there, the student center.  The Alumni Council was in place, that there were the kind of organizations that the Dean of Student’s Office had been trying to carry the weight for, inappropriately.  I mean, the Dean of Students is not supposed to be serving alumni.  A student center, it makes sense for students to be serving.  The Faculty Senate Committee to be serving faculty and staff is more appropriate that the Dean of Student’s Office trying to serve faculty and staff.  So in some ways, these things were now in place.  It made sense to be spreading those duties among -- there were real structures in place that could take on those things.
00:17:11
BB:  	Okay.  Well, the Faculty Committee was organized in ’94 and then produced this report, which came out about, oh, just about three years later.  Did you have any specific --
JS:  	I think the report was wonderful.  It was beautifully -- it was received just so positively across the campus.  The Faculty Senate passed it without a question.  The Academic Staff Assembly passed it.  The Student Government passed it.  The chancellor accepted it.  It was received unanimously with support.  And the recommendations have been instituted almost across the board.  I think that one of the big recommendations was the certificate program, which is now in place.  I think the other very major recommendation, especially from the viewpoint of students, was a full-time liaison.  And through the work of the Faculty Senate Committee and through the work of students across the campus and this office and the chancellor’s office and everybody talking and working and talking and not always being together initially but continuing to talk and continuing to think, in the 1998-99 academic year, it all came together.  And the chancellor’s office and this office agreed to approve budget for a full-time liaison, so that in September of ’99, during the summer of ’99, we did the search and screening process.  And in September of ’99, we hired, for the first time, a full-time LGBT student liaison.  Her name is Sara Hinkel.  She is housed in this office.  I supervise her, and she has done a wonderful job in the first year.  And I really do think that all of the work that we’ve been talking about in the last two and a half or however many hours really culminates in the appointment of Sara Hinkel as someone to be on the campus and to be devoting her entire work day to thinking about issues of LGBT students and sexual orientation and how do we continue to address this as an important member part of our campus.
BB:  	And her role is similar, maybe expanded from the same sorts of things that you did.  I mean, things like the speaker series and the brown bag, those have all been [unclear] or, you know, similar sorts of programs are in place now?
JS:  	Yes.  What Sara has been able to do is to really give support to the Student Center, which is a student-run, student-funded center.  Its strength is students and student energy.  Its weakness is lack of continuity.  And so by having a staff person, full-time staff person, able to be there, for Sara, before this, we’ve had to have volunteers advising those students, and it just doesn’t work.  They’re basically running a student service on their own.  They have all the kind of budgetary and personnel issues that any university office has, and they’re students.  They’re trying to be students.  They don’t have the experience.  They don’t have the knowledge.  It’s complicated.  By having Sara there to give them support, it’s just a huge advantage to everybody, and the students adore it.  Sara has also been able to begin other sorts of programming.  Like you mentioned, she had this year a, I believe it was a four-session career issues for LGBT students that was in collaboration, again, with the Campus Center, with our Career Advising Center, with the Student Organization Office, so again, collaborative effort of many student organizations.  She began this year, and will be continuing, a leadership training series, again in collaboration with the Multicultural Center, with the Student Organization Office, with the Health Services Division, with University Health Services.
00:21:05
	So she’s been able to exactly expand what the liaison could do before on a part-time basis.  She’s there full time.  She spends hours each week at the Campus Center.  The Campus Center Board has asked her to be an advisory member of the board.  The staff has asked her to be an advisory consultant to the staff.  She’s been able to do everything we hoped that position to do.  Just as an example, I think, of one of the things that a full-time person can do that was impossible before is that Sara -- the athletic department sent around a proposal for a ticket policy.  Sara was able to review that ticket policy, immediately recognized -- this had to do with changes in ticket policies because of the new call center -- immediately recognized that there was a place in the ticket policy where easily partner could be added to spouse.  Got in touch with the athletic department and the athletic board.  She gave them proposed language to make the easy change.  It was approved.  And now this ticket policy has what should have been there, but just someone else, straight people, didn’t necessarily see how to incorporate it or think of it.  It was not a huge change, but it was a very important change, much easier to make at the front end than to have to go back and retool.  I think that’s what someone like Sara can do, that having someone be there and present and thinking about these issues all the time smoothes everything out.
00:22:46
BB:  	Well, perhaps as a final question, I wondered if you would sort of speculate or talk a little bit about what maybe you see as the future of LGBT issues or presence on campus.  I mean, what sorts of things do you think will be done or should be done or maybe, I mean, I’m not asking you to predict the future, but where do you see things being in, say, 10 years or 20 years or even farther along?
JS:  	Well, I think there are two big issues that remain.  As I mentioned, students do now have, through our University Health Service, students have domestic partner coverage for their health benefits.  If they choose to get University Health Insurance, they can get domestic partner coverage.  That was a huge success, and that’s been in place probably almost three years now.  I think the two areas that remain, from my perspective, are domestic partner coverage for faculty and staff, and certainly something that lots of people are working on, and I think the other area is transgender issues.  Our state does not protect transgender students from harassment or discrimination.  As a campus, we need to be thinking about it.  Transgender people often -- they have a difficult time.  People don’t understand the issues.  The issues are still relatively hidden.  I think as a campus trying to serve all students and faculty and staff, we have to start thinking about it.  We will -- in fact, we have had already a faculty member in the process of a transsexual operation, who is a transsexual and will be having an operation soon.  We need to be making sure that there are processes and policies in place to address the kinds of issues that people face when they are undergoing a gender change.
BB:  	Okay.  Well, thank you very much.  End of interview.
00:24:56	End of Tape 3, End of Interview
[End of Oral History #101]