UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #246
PETERSON, MARTHA

PETERSON, Martha (1916- )
Dean of Women
At UW: 1956-1967

First Interview
Interviewed: 1982	
Interviewer: Donna Hartshorne
Length: 2 hours, 23 minutes
Transcriptionist: Bill Meier (5/22/08)

[Transcripts reflects only Tapes 1 & 2 of the First Interview Session. See Index for Key Words]

First Interview Session (1982): Tape 1-3
Tape 1, Side 1
00:00:00
[Audio file begins with a clip from a different interview]
00:00:19
DH: 	First off, I think what I’d like to know is a little bit about your background, your family background, and your early education, if you could start there.
MP: 	Right.  I was born in Kansas on my grandfather’s homestead—a farm that he homesteaded.  In fact, in a few days’ time I am to receive the deed to that farm, and the deed will show that it was granted by Rutherford B. Hayes to my grandfather.  My mother had life ownership, or life management, of it; but the deed was never made out to her.  And now since she has died recently the deed will be transferred to me.  And so it is going to be a deed that has Rutherford B. Hayes to Nicholas Markrench [?] to Martha Peterson.  And he homesteaded that in the 1860s in Kansas.  I was born on that homestead; lived there until I was about twelve.  I went to a little country school, District 65; it no longer exists.  My grandfather mostly taught me to read and write and do arithmetic, so I was a terrible pain in the neck to the people in that little District 65.  I knew more than the teacher was ready to teach in a given grade, but that was all right.  Then we moved to town and I went to the Jamestown Public Schools through the eighth grade.  Then my mother and father were divorced and we moved to Salina, and part of the reason for choosing Salina was that my mother thought the schools there were very, very good.  So I graduated from Salina High School and went directly to the University of Kansas and majored in mathematics and German and Latin.  Then taught for five years in full Kansas high schools: Ellenwood and Stockton—Stockton first, then Ellenwood.  I came back to the university during the war years and taught Army, Navy, all that kind of people, and did my master’s degree and was through my coursework for my PhD in mathematics when Deane Malott who was then chancellor at the university, persuaded me to go into administration.  After I had been in administration a while I thought I better know something about how people operate, so I finally did my PhD at Kansas with some supplementary work at Northwestern University in education psychology and counseling.
DH: 	Now I want to back up a little bit to the point where you said you were majoring in math and Latin and German.  Why these choices?
MP: 	Oh, I’m not sure.  I liked everything and I went through a phase where I was going to be a social worker—that was my sophomore year; then I tried sociology and found it a great waste of time.  But in that period I took Spanish.  I had taken German in high school.  I had taken three or four years of Latin in high school because a very splendid teacher—probably the best teacher I ever had—was my high school Latin teacher.  Mathematics I liked; it was just very easy for me to do and I was excited about it.  It came my junior year and I had to declare a major in something, and I had done all these things, and I knew at the time that it wasn’t going to be sociology.  So they said, “What are you going to major in?”  And I said, “Mathematics and physics.”  And then I had the German background and the Latin background.  They had a physics department, Mr. Strathan [?], didn’t think they needed a woman physics major.  He said that he thought women didn’t’—girls didn’t do very well in physics.  So I thought, “OK, if they don’t want me, I don’t want them.”  And I loved German, and German and mathematics go together, so I just did the German-mathematics major.  And then I taught mathematics and I taught Latin and I taught German in high school.  And I taught girls’ physical education and a few dozen other things, but I just never thought of doing anything but mathematics.
DH: 	Well the next question I have is, you said that you were talked into the administrative role.  What kind of talking was required?
MP: 	[Laughs.] Well, let me recite.  I was teaching, and that was the Army ASTP program and Navy B12 program, and even some Brooklyn boys who came out to be bakers; that was eighth grade arithmetic.  If you were in the math department at Kansas in the war years, sometimes I taught seven or eight classes a day.  If they found more teachers they only wanted you to do three, but, you know, you were teaching and it was for the war effort.  And I had to go down to the other end of the administration building to teach some of my classes and had to walk by the chancellor’s office.  And one day, just apropos, Malott popped out and said, “I’d like to have you go into the dean of women’s office one-third time.”  And I said, “I’m a mathematics teacher and I don’t believe I want to go into the dean of women’s office one-third time.”  Well that happened for quite a few days.  Every time I’d come from teaching this class and went by his office, if he weren’t busy he’d be out there talking to me, stopping me and saying, “Have you thought about this?”  And finally he said, “I want you to come in and talk to me seriously about this because I think you should go into administration.”  So one day I went in and sat down.  And one advantage of it from my practical point of view was the Army-Navy program was running out and I could teach fall and winter semester but nothing in summer.  And he said, “You could work at this in summer time.”  And I said I didn’t think I had any ability, but he thought I did.  Particularly what he wanted me to handle was the sorority situation and the rushing.  That’s a very, well it was then a very competitive sort of thing and freshmen women came in and went through rush week ten days before the university started.  Then sometimes when they didn’t make the sorority they wanted, and only about a half could be pledged, they’d pick up and go home.  And he thought it was a terrible situation and it was doing no good for the university.  He thought I could handle that.  So we talked rather seriously about it, but the big advantage was that I could work in the summer.  What he thought was that I could work full-time in the summer doing the assistant dean of women’s bit, and then in the winter time I could teach and then just really a couple days a week work on this business in the winter time; that was what his idea was.
DH: 	How did that work out?
MP: 	Well, it worked out that I was working practically full-time at two jobs.  That’s how it worked out.
DH: 	Yes, I would have thought the winter job would be more demanding than the summer job.
MP: 	Well it worked out that way, but he was very persuasive.  And most people who persuaded me to try something else by saying, you know, “This is an opportunity; if you don’t like it you can always back off.”  And I thought I wouldn’t be the kind of person that wasn’t willing to dare, so I took it on.  And then I became finally half-time Assistant Dean of Women and then Dean of Women at Kansas.  And the mathematics just got less and less and less.  I always tried to teach one class, and even that got to be kind of hard.  So when finally I was going seriously for my PhD in educational psychology and counseling I stopped teaching altogether.  That probably was in ’52 or ’53.
00:07:57
DH: 	Now your choice of PhD subject was guided by this dean-type activity?
MP: 	It was, and it was also the one area that I became convinced reflected what people were doing at Kansas that I could tie my mathematics in with it.  And I had to go the statistics route; that I could use what I knew as a mathematics kind of discipline in the kind of thing I wanted to do; that at least there was a little bit of a tie between those two things.  A lot of other areas I might have been interested in, such as languages and history, it was going to be awfully hard to bring the mathematics in in any way.  So I was a very big quantitative kind of psychologist and counselor.
DH: 	How did that work?
MP: 	Well, I probably did the most un-interesting dissertation in the world.
DH: 	What was the title?
MP: 	The title of it was, well it was, I don’t remember the title.  Predicted factors in selecting counselors.  And I did a great statistical study and had people who were counselors in the dormitory, you know, resident counselors, undergraduates and graduate, in the dormitory.  They took all kinds of tests, they had to jump over all kind of hurdles, have all kinds of interviews.  Oh, they did the Minnesota multi-phasing test and the strong vocational interest test and intelligence tests.  And we had their grades and we had everything.  And then I did the study to see which of these factors predicted the most success as a dormitory counselor.  It turned out that the factor that predicted their success most carefully, most closely, was whether or not they kept their appointments on time and got their work done on time.  If we asked them to come on Tuesday at 10 and they got there, they were more likely to succeed than the one who didn’t arrive until Friday at two o’clock.  But there was a lot of statistics and analysis and all that sort of thing; but it’s probably the dumbest dissertation anyone ever did.
DH:	 It could be fun to check up years later and find out it did succeed.
MP: 	Well, anyhow, that’s the way it went.
00:10:21
DH: 	Well then you came to the University of Wisconsin.  Tell me about how that was arranged. 
MP: 	I was finishing my dissertation—well, I was taking my orals at Kansas.  In January, I had taken the month of January off and was getting ready for my orals in February when Mr. Fred called and said they were hunting for a dean; did I know about that?  And I said no.  And he said, “A former math major from Kansas is the dean here, Louise Fleming.  She graduated in mathematics from Kansas in 1919 or something and she has been a splendid dean of women, and your name has been suggested.  We thought there was a sort of parallel in the background.”  And I said I couldn’t do anything about it, which is my reaction to almost anything anyone has asked me.  I couldn’t do anything about it because I was getting ready to take my orals.  And in typical E.B. Fred style he said, “Well now, look, you’ve got to study; but there is a train out of Lawrence, Kansas.  You can leave there at noon and you can get into Chicago at night and stay overnight at Chicago.  You can study all the way in.  Then there is a plane up to Madison very early on a Friday morning and you come up and you’ll have to be here all day Friday, and Friday night, and Saturday morning, but then you can go back to Chicago on Saturday afternoon and there’s a train back to Kansas on Saturday night.  And so you’ll lose out a couple days but you need a little break.  So why don’t you arrange to do this?”  And that seemed so ultimately sensible that I said fine without thinking much about anything else.  I really had not been out of Kansas and I certainly had no intention of leaving Kansas.  
00:11:59
	So I came up and I was interviewed on Friday and Saturday.  Splendid committee.  Katherine McLaren was on that committee, Ruth Wallerstein, Helen Laird, Karl Steiger, Julia—oh, Julia, she taught home economics—Julia Dalrymple, Fred Haberman.  Well anyhow—and Leroy Luberg was involved—and I met with the regents and all this sort of thing.  Ira Baldwin, E.B. Fred.  It was a very pleasant experience.  Then I went back to Kansas and went back to my studying and heard nothing at all for about two weeks.  But I was so busy I didn’t much care.  I was going to take my orals on a Monday morning for two days; you had to write for two days.  I was to report on Monday morning and write all day Monday and all day Tuesday.  So my mother and I took Sunday off and drove down to Nephoria and out in the country and came back in that evening sort of relaxed when Ira Baldwin called and said E.B. Fred had been [quieting] in the hospital.  And they hadn’t been able to do anything, but they did want me to be dean.  And would I be willing—they wanted to present my name to the regents I guess that Thursday or Friday—and would I be willing?  And I said, “Oh dear, I’m going to take my orals tomorrow and I won’t have any time to talk to Franklin Murphy, the chancellor, I won’t have any time at all.”  And he said, “Well, do you think you’ll take the job?”  And I said, “Yes, I will, but I just don’t have any time to worry about it tonight or tomorrow.” And he said, “Well, fine, we’ll call you back on Wednesday evening, and then if you’ll do it that will be fine.”  And so I talked to Franklin Murphy, who thought I should do it.  Everyone I talked to thought I should do it.  So I said yes I would.  And that’s the way that happened.
DH: 	So that brought you to the university.
00:14:04
MP: 	I learned in the meantime after I got up here and E.B. Fred talked to all kinds of people about me, even though he was in the hospital.  One of the people was Dr. Bennett.  She was his doctor and he was in the hospital [quieting?] over pneumonia or something.  And she came in one day and he said, “You’re from Nebraska.  We’re thinking of hiring this woman from Kansas.  Will you look over her papers and see if she looks like someone you’d like to have around?”  And so she stood by his bed and went over all my papers.  Person after person has told me.
DH: 	Oh, what fun!
MP: 	And along the way he would approach them and the comment he made to Louise Troxell—Louise, and Emily Chervenik, and Helen Kaiser—apparently after the interview in 1975.  One of the comments to Louise after he checked on what she had to say was, “You know, she didn’t seem the least bit spabbened [?] to me.”  Which spabbened is a good agricultural term for a horse that’s kind of broken down.  So he apparently was very busy, all kinds of people tell me all kinds of tales about it.  I must say on my end I didn’t do much checking.  I had reached a point that I could leave Kansas and this seemed like an opportunity.  And I suppose I’m a fairly ambitious person even though I haven’t ever charted my course.  When opportunities come along I’m willing.
DH: 	I’m supposing you knew enough about the University of Wisconsin.
MP: 	Oh yes.  And I had a great time here that day.  And the people I met, many of them turned out to be—just that committee—my closest friends in my years at the university.
DH: 	The people on the committee?
MP: 	Yes.
DH: 	How nice.
MP: 	Katherine McLaren still comes up to visit.  Mel Laird I got acquainted with through his mother.  He’s a good friend nowadays.
00:16:03
DH: 	Well I guess now specifically I’d like to talk about what you found when you arrived here as a Dean of Women; what the situation was like.
MP: 	Hmm, that’s a hard one.  After I’d accepted the job, and I guess before I’d accepted it, I had only one concern about Wisconsin, and that was the fact that Senator McCarthy was the senator.
DH: 	Oh yes.
MP: 	And while I wasn’t a raving liberal politically—I wasn’t a raving liberal at all; in fact I was probably more a Republican coming from Kansas rather than a Democrat.  You almost had to be a Republican in Kansas.  So my political affiliation was well-identified, but I certainly had some concerns about black folks.  We had taken black women into the dormitory at Kansas during the time that I was Dean and a lot of things of that kind that I stood up for.  We had made some changes in the sorority system and many people to kind of a socialist attitude and while I knew that I wasn’t this flaming liberal, I knew there were people who thought I was sort of way far out.
DH: 	What kind of changes are you thinking of?
MP: 	Well at Kansas where they had had sorority rushing in August before the students ever came on campus there was all this very unusual kind of activity.  During the years that I was there we delayed the pledge until the sophomore year so that the women came and lived in the dormitory one year without being members of sororities.  And national leaders in the sororities thought that was the sure demise of the sororities.  They were sure that anyone who did that, or approved of that, was trying to break up the sorority system altogether.  So it was that, you know.  And then, well, putting black girls into the dormitories was a big shock to Kansas.  The regents passed a regulation that all women had to live in the dormitories their first year at Kansas.  That was one of the things that came along with the sorority thing.  And so my colleague and I in the dean’s office decided that that meant all women.  So we didn’t go back and say, “Did you mean black women should be excluded?”  We simply began assigning them and did it very quietly.  We had only one reaction, and that was a reaction from a mother who said, “Which bathroom will they use, those girls that are living down the hall from my daughter?”  And the counselor happened to be well trained and we worked on this enough to say, “Well, I’m not sure; there’s a bathroom here, there’s a bathroom there.  It’s probably the one that they want to go to.”  But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of underground seething that we had taken black women.  Well, that sort of thing we had done at Kansas.   I was sure there were people who could make statements.  So I raised the question about Senator McCarthy and I was told not to worry about it; that people at the university, that he didn’t pick fights with them, and they didn’t think he would fight.
DH: 	That’s true.  He is a University of Wisconsin alum.
MP: 	And that they didn’t think he would pick a fight over me.  And when I told them all these “bad deeds” that I had done they said they didn’t think that would get me into any trouble in Wisconsin.  So I did raise that question; it was the only question I had.  
00:19:59
	But I came in—by the time I came—with tremendous respect for the academic freedom that stands at the University of Wisconsin, what it represented academically and so on, and its excellence.  And I really was prepared to be very much at home with the kind of ideas I had about what people did who were scholars, and how you treated students who were learners.  And I was pretty astounded at the rigidity of the regulations governing students and the attitudes and discipline toward students.  Kansas was much freer, much more liberal in terms of counting students in as a part of student government and in the number of regulations.  And yet Kansas was supposed to be the conservative state that didn’t see ahead.  And that was a great shock for me.
DH: 	It surprises me.
MP: 	There was, it seemed to me, a very rigid, authoritarian kind of way of running things in the dormitories and the discipline.  Students were involved, but it struck me as, well, I had a hard time understanding what it was because I believed that you could sit down with students and say—they didn’t decide things—but “Here are the list of things with which we’ll work.  Now let’s see what we can do.”  Or, if you have to say here is something that can’t go on, you say, “Here is something that can’t go on.  Now how can we handle it?”  That was my way of working.  And I found it was much more rigid.  I came to understand why later on more than I did in those first years.  I was young and idealistic, had finished a PhD in counseling and guidance.  I suppose that the people at Wisconsin felt some of these things weren’t important enough to worry about.  You know, make a rule to handle that; don’t go through all the soul-searching about whether the closing hours will be 10:30 or 11:00.  It’s easier to handle.  And I think in some ways I was fairly naïve.  But I think in other ways Wisconsin was pretty authoritarian for all their academic freedoms in certain areas; I think they were pretty authoritarian, and that was a big shock to me.
00:22:54
DH: 	Do you have any way of accounting for this attitude?
MP: 	Yes.  I think in some ways it was an easy way of handling things in a larger institution that had been challenged an awful lot by all kinds of people.  This was the easy way of handling it: you didn’t get the minutia in the way of doing the major things that the university stood for, which was a great deal of freedom, teaching, and learning, and that sort of thing.  Why let the peripheral things, you know, take major importance?  It was more important that they think clearly and be challenged—“sift and winnow,” for instance, in the classroom—than it was to worry about what time to eat meals or that sort of thing.  So I think it was just a matter of accommodation.  And then I think there is, in Wisconsin, a curious kind of authoritarianism, both in their politics and everything else.  It’s great freedom, but there is also a great deal of—even throughout the state—with the old German kind of approach to raising a family, it did very well with it.  
00:24:13
	But it was a surprise to me; such a surprise that I think—I’m not sure if it was the end of the second or the third year—that I went to see Ira Baldwin and said, “You know, I don’t think the way I operate fits quite with the university.  I just think I’m another kind of person, and I think you have pretty well established what you want to do here: your regulation of dormitories and fraternities, the way you handle discipline, and how you do things.  I think you’re pretty well set.  And I think I’m only going to upset the apple cart if I stay around, or be unhappy myself.  And Wisconsin was here long before I came, and I’ve been here a couple of years, and I just think maybe it would be smart.  I’m sort of a thorn in a good many people’s sides.  Maybe it would be smart if I moved out in a year or so.”  And his response was, “We knew what we were getting when we got you; we want you.  It won’t be easy on you always to fight these battles, but we think you’ll be good for the university to have a person with your kind of balance for some of the other forces.”  But I was ready at the end of a couple of years just to say there is no reason to change Wisconsin; if they believe in it and it’s working there is no reason to change it, but maybe I’m not the person.  He convinced me I should stay.
00:25:42
DH: 	What were some of these battles that seemed inevitable?
MP: 	Oh, I suppose the dormitories: just sort of hard and fast rules, and what you did when people broke the rules.  Newell Smith and I had many a battle.  By the time I left Wisconsin Newell Smith and I were just the best of friends, but we had many a battle.  The kind of feeling that Newell conveyed to me was you give them this line and you listen to this person, or in this situation you do what’s best for the learning of the student.  And he would admit this, you know; maybe it’s better and the student will learn more if you do this.  But you do that and you’ll have forty others that you’ll have to deal with.  We have all these dormitories and we’ve got to run them.  When we chose counselors, or no, resident, I forget what we called them, but they lived in each of the dormitories.  I was always looking for the person I thought would be more of a counselor than a disciplinarian.  We had head-on battles about that.  I was constantly pushing for the individual, the rights and freedom of the individual, as opposed to, “to make Elizabeth Waters run this is what we’ve got to do.”
00:27:15
	I would get in difficulties over, oh, such things as closing hours and what they did with students who violated closing hours and didn’t come in.  And particularly if they got caught—I always had this argument—it was better for them to understand it than to close your eyes when you knew the rule was being broken.  Either understand it and change the rule, but to just close your eyes…We battled over numerous things of that kind.  I kept nudging but usually lost.  And they kept running the dormitories the way there were running.  I had some problems over, I suppose, things like fraternities and sororities, closing your eyes, because they were fraternities and sororities, to drinking problems and some of the other problems that they had.  In my mind, I don’t think it’s a puritan attitude, but I just thought you recognized that if you were trying to teach people that you did something with them.  
00:28:23
	And well, anyhow, Ted Zillman and I did battle over any number of things: in cases where a student had been caught violating regulations and came before the disciplinary committee you could just about count on it that Ted Zillman and I were voting on the opposite side of what we should do, whether we should drop them.  That sort of thing.  It just came up all the way along the line.  It was a different approach.  Like I said, I think I was fairly naïve, but I think Wisconsin was a bit rigid and authoritarian.
DH: 	Well Ted Zillman was Dean of Men at this time, wasn’t he?
MP: 	Um-hm.
00:29:02
DH: 	I was going to ask because where lots of the disciplinary problems, certainly, concerned men and women simultaneously.  I’m wondering how you worked out this arrangement?
MP: 	Personally it was a good relationship on the social level, or on the level where we didn’t come into areas of overlap.  You could just almost count on it that when it came to an area of discipline or making a decision, Ted and I would probably be on the opposite side.  We sort of came to accept that.  But apparently in that world Louise Troxell and Ted and everyone around the university kind of accepted that.  I think some attributed it to, you know, the softie in the dean of women’s office and the really strong dean of men’s office that kept the university together.
DH: 	Do you have any overall opinion about how these came up, these disagreements, in terms of what was done for the students?
MP: 	Yes.  On the whole I think we resolved our disagreements rather well and we did it because there were faculty members on the committee—all the committees: disciplinary committees, housing committees, Union committees.  Porter Butts and I didn’t see eye to eye on many things and we were often in arguments about what you were doing.  But there were always faculty members on the committees, or there were always staff members.  And when things got pretty head-on or it looked like crisis, you could usually count on someone to come in and kind of soften it and get it so you both could live with it.  I think of phone calls that I got from people.  Well, name some names. Willard Hurst [inaudible] from time to time.  Leroy Luberg, other people who come in and say, “Look, sometimes we think you’re right on this and we’re going to see what we can do.”  Chad Young was another—“we’re going to see what we can do to get Ted Zillman to change his opinion.  So we think you’re dead right on this.”  Other times they’d say, “You’re going to have to give a little.”  But I think we managed most of the way and not because we could
00:31:38	End of Tape 1, Side 1
Tape 1, Side 2
00:31:58
MP: 	—“we’re going to see what we can do to get Ted Zillman to change his opinion.  So we think you’re dead right on this.”  Other times they’d say, “You’re going to have to give a little.”  But I think we managed most of the way and not because we could do it face to face, but because there were a lot of people in the university who understood the issues more than just the personal part of it, and cared enough about the university and students.  And in most of that it came out very well for the students.  I don’t think they were mistreated in any way whatsoever.  I think they got a very fair shake.
00:32:35
[Sound from different interview on tape]
00:33:14
DH: 	I’m assuming that you were on all these committees you were just referring to?
MP: 	Yes, most of them.  You were automatically as Dean of Women—the ones where you came into any kinds of conflict, you were on.
00:33:27
DH: 	You mentioned Porter Butts and the Union.  What was your role in the Union?
MP: 	[Laughs.] I’m not sure.  Porter Butts ran his own show.  He certainly served on lots of the committees like Student Life and Interest Committee, and this is where he would go for his approval, and that’s usually where you made your compromises and argued about it.  But Porter was in charge of the Union and he ran a good Union, too.
DH: 	Well he had very firm notions, I’ve learned, about the use of students’ so-called leisure, at least out of class time—opportunities for education in other areas.
MP: 	He was a leader in developing that.
DH: 	And did you agree with him on this?
MP: 	I certainly agreed with him on what he was trying to do.  Again, I guess I felt he was a little too autocratic in his decisions of what was good and what wasn’t good.  But he ran a good show and the students who were over there—the ones, the leaders learned a great deal about leadership and caring responsibility.
DH: 	Which was I understand the primary objective.
MP: 	They were an elite group, and I suppose that offended me a little bit.  I didn’t think they ought to be quite that elite; all sorts of people ought to be able to participate.  But I guess when you’re responsible for the amount of money and the building and the program he’s responsible for you have to have people working with you that you can count on.
DH: 	Yes, I’m sure that’s true.  He didn’t seem himself, when I discussed this with him, to consider it an elite group.  He liked the notion that it was for everybody, but I suppose it may not have worked that way.  
00:35:25
	Well you were talking about sororities and fraternities—sororities principally.  How did they fit in with the dormitory regulations and things of that nature?
MP: 	Well Helen Kaiser in the Dean of Women’s Office was responsible for sororities and she had a long tradition of working with them.  And then when she retired Anne Rogers came in, and Ann came from the South and was not as schooled in the background of sororities as Helen was, particularly at Wisconsin.  But it was less of a problem at Wisconsin, the working relationship between sororities and the dormitories, much less of a problem than it was at Kansas.  At Kansas there were people who felt that they just were not socially acceptable unless they were in a sorority; your whole life was ruined, you weren’t going to marry the right man and all of this.  Wisconsin was much more flexible about it.  So the relationships and the result were not so tense.  And sororities sort of ran their own show down on Langdon.  There was some conflict between the sororities and the dormitories, but the dormitories also had so many good things going for them that they didn’t worry too much about the sororities and fraternities, or so it seemed to me.  So I did not sense in that area too much conflict.
DH: 	That worked out fairly well.
MP: 	Yeah, that worked out.  It was a different world on Langdon Street and in the dormitories.  Well the Union, people who worked in the Union, that was a different world.  But Wisconsin was big enough to have all these worlds without causing fighting and having the stamp put on that you were a nobody if you weren’t part of one or the other.  That didn’t happen too much at Wisconsin.
00:37:30
DH: 	You also had responsibility, I assume, for students’ personal problems.  Did you have a lot of personal problems, I mean a lot of different kinds?
MP: 	Oh sure.  They were readily referred to us, and this would be another area of conflict.  Some of the head residents, some of the people would refer them.  Some of the house mothers in sororities and fraternities would refer them.  Some of them would prefer not to wash their dirty linen in public for fear of reporting that such and such had happened in their housing unit.  And then there were all the privately owned dormitories and houses, too, and sometimes they didn’t want to report them for fear that this would be a black mark against them.  They run their own show and not do their dirty linen in public.  But that again, I don’t think, when push got to shove or some student was really having a tough time we regularly got it.  And we were the persons that called someone in the office, and we worked with the house mothers and counselors and the head residents and the owners in the dormitories and the faculty members and the academic deans’ offices and so on to try to work out these personal problems.  We had a good working relationship with Student Health; they were very good and very helpful.  And with the Division of Student Psychiatry.  I’m trying to think now of the name of the man who was there for so many years, then went from there to Duke, who was really very good.  We had a good working relationship.  Then the Counseling Bureau was very good for different kinds of problems.  So we had lots of backups.  We had a great many of them.  In fact, I think the office may have done more of that than is traditional in this kind of university.  We had lots of incoming students.
DH: 	Do you think you had more of this than, say, your predecessor, Louise Troxell?
MP: 	No, I think Louise had built this tradition.  I think probably though we had more of it here at Wisconsin, more referral, than you would at Minnesota or at Michigan or at some of the other places.  I think we were the office that did that kind of thing.  And people rather trusted us as students and faculty alike.  And they got to trust us, knew we could be trusted, and maybe we could even be helpful sometimes.  And parents.  We were on the spot prevention.
00:40:10
DH: 	Did you do a fair amount of work with parents?
MP: 	Yes.  And here again was a point where there were some differences of opinion in the university.  Some people felt parents, when they sent their sons and daughters to the university, they were grown up; that was that.  There were others who felt that any problem that involved a son or daughter should be reported to the parents by the university.  I sort of occupied the middle ground, and I think my standard statement to students whom I was dealing with was one of, “Now are you going to tell”—when I thought it was something that parents had to know, that this was going to interfere with the career of the student—“are you going to tell your father or mother, or am I?”  Sometimes they would say, “I’d like to think about that a half day, which one of us is going to do it.”  But my approach was sort of in that.  I didn’t very often call parents unless requested to do so by the student, but I did this other whip of “either you are or I am.”
DH: 	Probably on something they’d rather their parents weren’t told about.
MP: 	I also encouraged Dr. Flynn Ressler, and Dr. Ressler and some of the others in the Psychiatry Department to encourage them if possible the parents to call them, because I thought if it was that kind of a matter—or a counselor in the Counselor Bureau—rather than having an administrator; I could outline the problem to the parents, but I thought they ought to get in touch with the person who knew the most about it.  And as we developed a reputation for that we found parents calling us at times, and trusting us and asking us to look, when they knew; I didn’t think parents wanted the university to come between them and their son or daughter.  And if you tried to maintain that so that the communication stayed open there as much as you could, you found the students and you found the parents trusted you.  That seemed to me to increase in the years that I was there: the parents; maybe parents were more troubled.
DH: 	Well, who knows, but it does sound like a good development.
MP: 	That was one area where I thought that we developed some good working relationships.  But it was always on the basis of “we’re not going to tell them unless, if you can do it, we’d rather have you do it.”  And most of us that worked in the office had that policy.
00:42:58
DH: 	What parts of your job did you find the most difficult?
MP: 	In the long run the reason I decided to leave the Dean of Women’s Office, in the long run, it was doing the same thing year after year: having to get excited about orientation week, having to get excited about…Actually doing a sort of routine regulation sort of thing, it didn’t bother me to have to deal with a new problem that might come to my attention because someone was violating closing hours.  But just having to deal with the routine “they were twenty minutes late therefore they got so many late notices and so therefore they had to be campused,” and all of that kind of, I couldn’t work up my enthusiasm for it.  And I found myself going to mortarboard elections, for instance, and thinking we can take care of this in one evening if they just get busy and vote on it.  But they would take seventeen meetings, and I knew it wasn’t fair to the students.  I had no enthusiasm, I had been through it so often, that I knew wasn’t bringing the enthusiasm.  And yet this was the first time for them.  And it wasn’t like the classroom, although I suppose I stopped teaching calculus because I thought I don’t know what’s going to happen to calculus if I have to teach it fifty times over because it’s sort of limited in what you do, and the change factor as a student, but it’s still calculus.  I had the same feeling in the dean’s office, that I wasn’t bringing the enthusiasm to that routine kind of thing.  So when I went to Fred Harrington and said, “Look, I think maybe”—I guess I went to Mark Ingraham—“I want to go back and teach mathematics.”  And I said, “I think I can manage the administrative side, but some of these things the dean does I’ve lost enthusiasm for.  I could hire people who could do it and be so excited about it, but I can’t be excited every time over.”  So that’s a reason for that.  That was a part of it; not the dealing with individuals, but that part of it. 
[Other Voice]: Do you want me there?
00:45:32
DH: 	Yes, would you ask this question you suggested a few minutes ago about Porter Butts?
MP: 	Before I go for a walk.
OV: 	I overheard you saying that, what was it, the Union, Porter Butts had an elite group of students, and he did a very good job, which I had observed.  But I wondered how he got an elite group, and a similar question I found that women students were objecting to rules for the hours of coming back to dormitories, particularly because it was just after the war and there were a number of older women students who were out working and now being treated as less [inaudible].  They wanted me as a faculty member to get these rules changed by the faculty.  I said, well, look who made these rules [inaudible]. Yes but the officers elected inaudible effectively organized.  I had a feeling that a good many of them were people who, students who were attracted inaudible Louise Troxell as Dean, her personality, and admired her greatly, so they simply went along with her ideas.  But I didn’t know, how did that operate?
MP: 	Well I think this elitism, I think it occurred in almost all the governing associations.  WSA, Wisconsin Student Association, wasn’t quite as rigid as AWS, the Associated Women Students that made the rules for women.  But in the Union, well, it was all organized in an authoritarian sort of way, sort of like the Army: you know, you win your brownie points, you do work at a certain level, and then you move up and apply for the next level.  And the people who make the choices are the ones who have been observing this.  In the Union, Porter Butts and his group, although the students weren’t in the selection, he was right there.  So you served your apprenticeship your freshman year, your sophomore year, and you’re winnowed out and you had your brownie points, and the one that eventually went into the presidency of the Union was one who had fit that fairy-tale pattern that I would say was more allied to promotion in the Army than election in a democratic procedure.  And I think the same thing happened in the Associated Women Students.  They worked up in the same kind of way.  And I never even thought about it until you asked this question, when I was trying to describe what shocked me at Wisconsin, I guess this was one of the things, that kind of rigid sorting out the elite who took the responsibility.  That, I guess, would be what I saw.  To me it ought to be all of them.  And I had to deal with these students all the time who would come in and say, “This is just crazy.”  And I’d agree with them, it’s just crazy what we’re doing; just crazy.  “Well then why don’t you get your dormitory officers to do differently?  You elected them.”  “Well, but we didn’t really elect them.  We had two choices, and these choices were approved by the organization that really was in charge.”  It was a very comfortable way of doing business; you got some superb people in some of those jobs who turned out unusually well.
OV: 	Controlled nominations.
MP: 	Yeah, it was really controlled nominations.
00:49:29
DH: 	Under these conditions, if you wanted to change some of these regulations, how did one work at it?
MP: 	Oh, I don’t know.  You sent signals by not always fitting in with what—students are pretty canny; they know the rules and they didn’t have time to spend all their hours, and the rule was just totally absurd.  Then you found ways of getting around it that didn’t get you into trouble.  And I guess when they saw people—and they saw not just the dean of women; you know, I wasn’t Don Quixote riding in.  There were a lot of faculty: of course there were the Ira Baldwins and all the others who thought we ought to loosen this up a bit and get more general participation.  When they saw this coming, that there were people that would support it, they began to ask more questions and to raise more questions, and I think to be freer and freer.  I didn’t, well, we were beginning in the early sixties to get to more sense of responsibility on the part of the officers, that they represented students as a whole and that they should be thinking about students as a whole, not what we wanted in order to make the university run smoothly.  Well, of course, then, you have to wonder, was that the reason the whole thing blew up?  And it isn’t, because it blew up all over the country.  But I’m sure there are people who worked in the old system who think that Wisconsin would have been highly in control if we hadn’t been relaxing things like closing hour rules, if we hadn’t been putting so much responsibility on students, and that if we had the old discipline we might not have fallen apart as much as we did.  I don’t think so.
DH: 	You’re now talking about the protest times.
MP: 	Yes, the protests in the late sixties.  I think that was a product of something quite different.  I think we were beginning to put more responsibility on the students to have wider discretion.
DH: 	Getting away from this old idea of in loco parentis kind of thing.
MP: 	Um-hm.
DH: 	Of course that was true of many institutions.
MP: 	Oh sure.
DH: 	My college had these kinds of regulations.
MP: 	My hunch is that we lost being in loco parentis—it took twenty years for it to take over—but we lost it, and Mr. Hartshorne was mentioning when we went to dinner, we lost the concept of ever being in loco parentis right after the war—World War II.  We had all the students back on campus: older, men who had been in the army.  We just sort of said, you know, “This is an aberration.”  But then came 1950 and ’52 they left, and we went right back.  And the way we managed it, the war years, I think in most places would not change the rules that much, but to make exceptions for these older guys and gals and sort of shut our eyes.  And then when we went back to being a younger campus again, we put all the same old rules, same old things, back in force.  And we held for a while.  That was a kind of a quiet generation; we held for a while.  But we had had a whole crew on campus who lived differently and who talked about, when they came back to the fraternities, they talked about when their sons and daughters had arrived, their concept—the myths about a college campus were the myths of the forties.  The tales that their dads and mothers had told.  And they just weren’t about to accept.  They had been brought up differently in their own homes, but they weren’t about to accept.  And the colleges had gone one way, back to the old in loco parentis; parents had gone another; and about in the sixties, early sixties, it just got so far apart.  And the one that had to give was the college campus, and had to say, you know, you’re pretty grown up when you come to college, which was a new view at that time.  Oh, heavens.  It was hard to have anyone do anything because you said so.  That didn’t happen.  They questioned, and that was good.  My hunch is that all started to fall away with World War II, and we on the college campus didn’t recognize the situation.
DH: 	It seemed a lot of this came up as I recall in the sixties with the notion of education is, “how relevant is what I’m studying?”  The stress on it seemed to me to start the thing.
MP: 	Yes, it did.
DH: 	It has gone on, but not fluidly.
MP: 	Maybe turning back a little bit now.
DH: 	Yes, I think it they aren’t noisy about it as we once were.
MP: 	A little bit more willing now to say that you may learn something you can’t use tomorrow, but it’s still worth learning.
00:55:02
DH: 	I’d like to know something about the mechanics for all of this.  You’re talking about house mothers; obviously these dormitories had to have somebody on site.
MP: 	Dormitories and sororities and fraternities.
DH: 	How were they selected?
MP: 	Well in the dormitories they were hired, of course, by the Director of Dormitories.  That was a whole hierarchy; Director of Housing was Newell Smith, and then there were people in charge of different units of it.  But the Dean of Women’s Office always participated in interviews, meet with the dean or an associate dean would serve on the committees doing interviews or bringing them in.  And while the Director of Housing made the final, did the hiring, it was always with the approval of the Dean of Women.  In the sororities almost the same system.  In the last years there were so few people available that the Dean of Women’s Office served a major function in identifying candidates.  So before they even got started they’d come in and say, “Do you have any applicants because we don’t know anyone?”  For a long time it was a job that there were plenty of people to fill; then there weren’t.  So we often were the ones that supplied all the names that they then went out and interviewed.  And then it was sort of cooperative after that.
DH: 	Why did this change—this shift from lots of people?
MP: 	Oh well, house mothers, how long have they had them?  I don’t know.  But certainly in the 1930s—the Depression years—this was a marvelous job.  And in the 1940s this was a marvelous job for a person who managed a home.  But then as the dormitories got bigger, as they wanted counselors, and did more business management, those jobs became positions that, well, now Wisconsin used to lobby from school teachers, people who taught school.  You needed more training and skill than you got than in just running a home and raising sons and daughters.  So the qualifications, the demands, went up.  Then also there were more jobs.  And being a house mother, while it might appeal to you for all you’ve done all your life to be in a home, this was sort of an extension of the home on a professional kind of way, it might appeal to you; a lot of women found it just terrible.  A twenty-four hour a day job: they had to order, they had to plan, they had to teach manners, they had to handle all these wild young ones, and they could get a job someplace else.  And there were more jobs and there were more demands.
DH: 	Yeah, I can see that.  I did note that at some point the workshops for house mothers.  Did you participate in any of these?
MP: 	Yes.  Many of them I organized.  It became apparent that people needed to know more than they knew.  They wanted to know more.  And there were some pretty good people around the country who could come in.  And so we had Ruth McCarren, who had been Dean of Women at Northwestern, and was very able, come in.  I remember we had a Lutheran minister, that was really a dramatic one, who was leading in the field of how to deal with death and sorrow and letting go.  And Ruth McCarren had suggested him, that he was very good and he would be very useful to house mothers on two points: that most of them had had to give up something in coming into the house mother positions; many of them came in out of some trauma and it would be useful to them personally.  But also they were dealing with students who were increasingly having divorces in their family or tragedies or something of that kind.
DH: 	Sometimes college students lose a parent.
MP: 	A parent.  There were all kinds of things happening to them.  And I remember that workshop very well.  We had Doris Seward, who ran a house for years, Doris Seward had run a house mother training institute.  We had a number of people across the country who were skilled in the area of working with people who weren’t exactly, who started different professional levels and who worked really professional training, but who were longing and needing more help.  So we did that.  It worked out pretty well.  Morale, learning, everything else.  Wisconsin was afraid of workshops, too.  I think some of it was they were being treated as other people were being treated at the university; that they were getting the same kind of opportunities that historians have who go off to learn how to do their business.  They were being recognized professionally.
DH: 	It was nice.
MP: 	Yeah, it was nice.  Those were happy occasions.
01:00:26
DH: 	Well I guess there is one issue, particularly, that I wanted to ask you about.  You mentioned having sort of integrated dormitories at Kansas, and there was a situation here, and in particular the one that I’ve noted is the one about a girl, I think, from Beloit, actually, the Delta Gamma girl situation of not getting into a sorority.  I heard something about this.  I’d like you to give me any details you recall about this situation because it created quite a furor.
MP: 	Yes.  Pattie Hamilton grew up in Madison.  Her family had always lived there and was well-respected.  Her older brother had gone to Beloit and was a member of a fraternity down there.  Pattie went to Beloit and was pledged by the Delta Gamma chapter there.  And I’ll now be speaking both of the Beloit information and the University of Wisconsin information because a lot of this, after I was President of Beloit I heard more about it.  Pattie was pledged.  Then sometime after, and I don’t know how much dealings went on here, sometime thereafter the national Delta Gamma withdrew the charter for the Delta Gamma chapter at Beloit.  They did it on the basis that the statements on the basis of the failure of the Delta Gamma chapter at Beloit, their failure to supply records and to conform with many of the requirements of the national organization for their local chapters.  I had the slightest doubt after being on the Beloit campus that this was probably true; Beloit is a very small college.  The fraternities and sororities are loosely organized and I suppose they saw no great deal in having to send in the things the people they were pledging the night they were pledged.  I don’t think, probably, they got around to paying their dues until they got around to paying their dues.  They were small; it was very informal kind of organization.  I would guess that national Delta Gamma could go down their records and cite case after case of this report was due November 10th, it came in January 13th; this money was due this date, it came in that date; this list of officers was due at this time, but we didn’t get it until a year later; we came out to visit and then everyone had gone home for winter terms and no one had told us.  I would assume
01:03:43	End of Tape 1, Side 2
Tape 2, Side 1
00:00:03
MP: 	The investigations went on and I don’t know, I can’t remember now how many months, years, weeks; charges and counter-charges.  But finally in September—I think it was September or October—in the faculty meeting a resolution was coming from the Faculty Committee on Fraternity and Sorority Regulations, I forget the proper name of that committee, that Wisconsin withdraw recognition of Delta Gamma because they obviously practiced segregation.  The Dean of Women’s Office got into it and was in it all the way along, although not all that much.  The local Delta Gamma chapter said as far as they knew there was no regulation and that they could pledge a black girl if they wanted to.  National simply said the chapter had been withdrawn from Beloit because they didn’t conform with national regulations, and that was a sort of impasse.  I went over to Beloit and talked to President Upton and visited with people over there.  It was apparent that most of the people at Beloit, and I could confirm this after I went back to be president of Beloit, believed that it was Pattie Hamilton’s pledging that led to this; if they hadn’t pledged Pattie Hamilton, that national would continue to work along with them and would have sent someone out, you know, to bring them into line.  The people at Beloit that I talked to were firmly convinced that Pattie Hamilton’s pledging—although the reasons were placed on other causes—Pattie Hamilton’s pledging was what led them to crack down on the Beloit chapter.
DH: 	I see.
MP: 	Well I came back and we were, I spent some time talking with a good many people.  I tried to talk with people in Delta Gamma and I must say that I was disappointed at their lack of forthcomingness.  The president was in and tried to talk to a lot of alumni, and the president literally sat with her mouth closed, saying, I can’t remember who was president of the chapter, but saying, “I can’t say anything.”  I think emotionally I was pretty disturbed by the whole thing, but probably the Faculty Committee was right and plenty upset that the local officers took the attitude of  “we’ve been told by national we can’t talk to the Dean of Women’s Office; we cannot confide in them.”
DH: 	Why not?
MP: 	Well they just had been told, and so this girl sat there.  And I was pretty upset about that because I thought we were there, and I was perfectly willing to take the role of defending the best interests of the students, and wasn’t really going to be swayed by the faculty or by national Delta Gamma.  Whatever we could work out that was best for the students was the position I thought I had to take.  But after some weeks of worrying about it I finally said to Mr. Harrington that I believed that the Faculty Committee was wrong; that I thought they were dealing with circumstantial evidence; that while I believe it was true that the charter was suspended and that I doubted that the Madison chapter could pledge a black girl—although I’d be interested in seeing them try—I doubted that they could; I didn’t think there was any rule in the constitution that forbade it; and that if the Madison chapter did it, they might be strong enough to get away with it.  I still felt that we would be in an awkward position—the faculty would—if they went on record to suspend the chapter on the basis of this kind of lack of clear-cut information.  And so I went before the faculty, and at that point I can remember, and I can still remember that afternoon—it was over in the auditorium, the business school or some place—and I can still remember the dress I had on, I can still remember everything.  I hadn’t been long at Wisconsin, but I got up and I had the feeling the whole faculty was going to vote to suspend on hearsay.  Mrs. Cohen and all the stalwarts of Delta Gamma, they had asked to come to the faculty meeting.  And Mr. Harrington asked me and I said let them come. 
00:04:27
	 I got up and made the statement; you have the statement.  I don’t even remember it, but I think it said some of the things I said now: while I didn’t doubt the accuracy, I thought this would be a most unwise move for the faculty and I recommend that they not vote in support of the resolution from the Faculty Committee.  And I sat myself down and I sat down, I remember, I don’t know whom I was sitting by, saying, “Look at me, Pattie Peterson from Jamestown, Kansas, up here sassing the University of Wisconsin faculty.”  I had the feeling…And then the vote was taken and the motion from the Faculty Committee was defeated, which was not too usual in the faculty.  And I was rather relieved because I thought we had taken, maybe not the noblest path, but we had taken the path that was justified and that probably led to the greatest future opportunity of developing some strong relationships.  So I was pretty relieved at that.  But what has always amazed me since is to hear from some of the women who were there that day, or Delta Gamma alumnae, that I was an enemy of sororities and that I did my best to get Delta Gamma off the Wisconsin campus.  And I’ve been told by the son of one of the women who was a Delta Gamma as he got to know me, and we’re awfully good friends, he said, “You don’t seem much to have horns to me.”  And I said, “What made you think”—he happens to be a trustee at Beloit, and voted to hire me down there—and I said, “What made you think I had horns?”  “Well, what you did to Delta Gamma.”  And of course I looked upon myself as the person that stopped the University of Wisconsin faculty from doing Delta Gamma in.  That was an interesting period.  And of course I think I have felt then, as I do, that in the long run this was going to be an issue twenty years from now that no one was going to worry much about.  It was going to go down the drain and the faculty were very ill-advised to pick a fight of that scale; it was something that was going to go out the window.
DH: 	Well how do you feel at the end, how many years later, what has developed?
MP: 	I think undoubtedly national Delta Gamma was not about to see a black girl pledged.  I have no qualms about that.  I think the Wisconsin faculty took the right move.
DH: 	How about today?
MP: 	I have not kept that much touch.  I do know that many fraternities and sororities have pledged black girls, they’ve pledged Chinese and oriental.  I’m not sure.  I hear every once in a while of a fraternity or sorority now, but I’m pleased with this, that a fraternity or sorority now who just come right out and say, “We want no one Caucasian.”  All right.  If they want to say that, then it’s up to the university to decide whether they want to admit them to be on the campus.  I happen to admire those that have come out and said firmly—I don’t agree with it—but said firmly, “This is our policy.”  I think that puts it back in the laps of the faculty and the university, and I would then vote to say no, you can’t be on our campus.  
DH: 	That’s a much-more clear-cut situation.
MP: 	Yes, that’s clear-cut.  It was a messy situation twenty, thirty years ago, when groups that were not connected with the college were making policies that affected what happened on the college.  It made much more sense at Wisconsin to be able to pledge black people, or people of other races, Jewish people and so on, it made much more sense at Wisconsin than maybe it would have at the University of Georgia.  And there were a lot of fraternities and sororities that said it has to be a policy that fits your campus.  I can live with that.  I can live with the ones that just say, “No, we won’t do it.”  Then I think Wisconsin doesn’t have them on the campus and maybe the University of Florida does—or the University of Georgia, if they want.  It was a rough, awkward time.  I guess I’m still amazed at the people who say to me, “You were anti-sorority and anti-Delta Gamma.”  And I always felt my relationship with the sororities and fraternities that I was trying to provide some leadership to make them fit into modern times so that they could exercise those things they did well, which was the smallness of group relationships.  I thought they made a contribution.  But when they became socially elite, excluding people because of money or race or creed, I thought they were making a mistake that they wouldn’t continue to thrive in the late eighties and the nineties.  And I think that’s partly true.
00:09:18
DH: 	While we’re still on the subject of sororities, I found myself wondering how your views with regard to these organizations differed from, or were the same, from those of Ted Silbman, who was a strong supporter.
MP: 	I suppose I was more relaxed.  I was not a member of a sorority.  I had worked in the system at Kansas that needed opening up, and the people who wanted me to open it up there, and who stood with me, were fraternity and sorority members who felt that it had become so dominating in the social life of the university that it was keeping people away from the university, interfering with the intellectual life.  Oh, they were all doing strange things at Kansas in the late forties, and well I suppose it was true in the thirties when I was a student there that if you belonged to one or two or three groups, then in both of these top three sororities and the top three fraternities, then if you were a pledge you had to get so many points for people you dated.  And if you dated people out of the top three groups you could get three points per date; if you were in the second three groups you got two; if you were in the lower groups you got one; and if you weren’t a fraternity or sorority member you got zero, which meant that pledges couldn’t date anyone because they couldn’t gather the points.  Well, it was a funny, rigid system; it was a system of pledging that was just chaotic and arch-, just all the bad things you can say.
00:11:08
	All right: people there cared about fraternities and sororities in the sense that they were a house in which forty or fifty people lived, where they learned to know faculty members when they weren’t with adults, where they had certain kinds of standards they lived, where they were well cared-for, where they were an adjunct to the university, providing housing, good housing.  There were a lot of things they did well.  There were people who saw that and wanted to preserve that.  But they knew if they went on the other route, they were just headed for, that they couldn’t be sustained.  I was perfectly willing to be a part of that.  When I came to Wisconsin that issue of elitism wasn’t so much important in fraternities and sororities, but the issue of discrimination was.  And again I think that was an issue that fraternities and sororities had to face.  And so as I look back on it, I think when they served the purposes they started to serve, when they provided those kinds of support, they were very good.  There were a lot of times they did very bad things.  And you could see things get started in houses.  I think the one campus I know very well where the amount of drinking you do and are able, how much you can cope with of liquor and how drunk you can get over the weekend is the pattern of fraternity membership, that’s very bad.  That’s terribly bad.  And the people, the administrators at that campus, are worried sick about it.  Those kinds of excesses can grow out of it depending on who you get.  But a good organization, well-organized with good people, with good alums who advise and help, and a good national, it can be a very real asset.  Ted was very loyal all the way: he thought the University of Wisconsin would be very bad without fraternities and sororities; I thought it could survive without them, but I was glad to see them there if they would do the things that they could do best that couldn’t be done in dormitories, I didn’t think, and certainly wasn’t done in a roomy house in town.  So we differed on it.
00:13:24
DH: 	There was, it seems to me, a time when, you suggested, when you were in college, when sororities and fraternities were very popular and very important in student life.  And it seems to me that there was something of a decline, and now my impression is that they’re gaining again in popularity.  How do you account for the decline?
MP: 	I think some of those regulations that they put on, that the nationals were insisting were out of another generation, just weren’t acceptable to the students on the college campus.  And so it was a part of that.  And it could be related to discrimination and it could be related to how you dressed for dinner or how you entertained a national officer.  But there was a lot of kind of requirements there that didn’t fit the generation of students that were coming along, so they didn’t need that.  They didn’t need it, either, because the people on the college campus were more individuals; they weren’t so much of that.  We didn’t have much dormitory-ruled life in that period when they were rejecting sororities.  It was awful hard to get students in that period when they rejected them to be awfully loyal to a group.  They were striking out, doing their own thing, developing their own kind.  And they got their group satisfaction out of, sometimes, political causes or other issues that came up off campus, not on campus.  I think that that period of decline led to a lot of major adjustments on the part of fraternities and sororities.  Some of them had to give up their houses; they had to do some things differently.  They’re coming back now, I think, because there is a need, a resurgence, of interest in groups and belonging to groups and doing things with groups.  I hope some of the silly things that were there in fraternities are out of the picture.  If they are, if the sororities and fraternities nationally and as alum groups have become more flexible, I suspect it will go through another decline.  But I hope they adjust so they provide that support and that kind of relationship.  Then there are a lot of people who love the ritual, although I must say as I hear people describe the ritual of the sororities and fraternities now, “It’s changed considerably what it was thirty years ago.  You can miss a chapter meeting now; well, thirty years ago you missed a chapter meeting and you were off.”  So it’s a change.
DH: 	Just generally less rigid like a lot of other things.
MP: 	Yeah.  And it would be interesting to see.  They’re growing more, apparently, on smaller campuses and in the South than they are in the North.  I don’t know what has gone on at the Wisconsin campus; I really haven’t observed that.  But I hear there is added strength at Wisconsin.
DH: 	This is an impression I get—I’m not closely connected with them either, so I thought just how and why.
MP: 	Well I came out of Kansas and a situation that, right now, if you were to ask me, did I know so-and-so at Kansas, I would probably say, “Oh yes, he was a Sigma Xi, wasn’t he?”  That was the kind of thing; that was the way you categorized people, the house thing in Kansas.  And we have people come into the shop up here, and one of the first things they were saying was, you know, “I was a DU at Kansas.  You used to come over to dinner.”  That never happened at Wisconsin.  In fact, by the time I came to Wisconsin, you had to ask for times whether they were a member of a fraternity or sorority, and they didn’t wear their pins.  At Kansas it was a whole different kind of thing.
DH: 	Do you suppose that the size of the University of Wisconsin might have had something to do with that?
MP: 	Size and the progressive, that kind of spirit that permeates Wisconsin.  I think it does; the kind of spirit that recognizes a person for their ability and interests and honesty.  I won’t say Kansas was dishonest, but Kansas was a new state and there was very much absolute, very little social hierarchy there, and this provided it.  At Wisconsin there were other ways you claimed fame.
DH: 	Well I rather imagine that Kansas was representative of a number of states and colleges.
MP: 	Oh yes.
DH: 	And operated in its own way.
MP: 	And Kansas was a free state; people who didn’t like this—newspaper editors and so forth—they spoke out against it, and that was one of the reasons the university had to change.  There were just enough people, they speak pretty freely about Kansas.
00:18:50
DH: 	One thing I’m interested in is a conference that occurred in 1962 on the Continuing Education of Women.  This is a subject that interests me quite a bit.  I’d be interested in your reflections on that and on continuing education for women.
MP: 	Which one was this?
DH: 	It doesn’t matter which one; I just noted that there was one then, and I know there were others.  The idea of it, basically, is what I’m interested in.
MP: 	Well let me just briefly outline what we did in the Dean of Women’s Office, maybe; and I think that’s what led up to the conferences.  We talked a lot about what we should be doing, not so much for continuing education, but for older women in the community, for people who were seeking new ways of learning and that kind of thing, and jobs.  And one of the first things that we did was hire Ruth Doyle to come into the office, and her job was half-time, but it was to work with women who—we didn’t define them as older, but by our very rules they were older—women who lived out in town.  Not at home as much, but rented rooms out in town.  And you really had to be, I’ve forgotten what age now; twenty, it seems to me, or twenty-one before you could rent a room—unsupervised room—off campus housing.  And Ruth came in to work with that.  She came in to work with minority groups.  She really wrote her own ticket of what she wanted to work with, and where she felt she’d be comfortable.  She worked with Madison students, too; ones who lived at home.  And seemed just a real, real asset to me to find Ruth, and there were some things we needed to do in the office that we’d sort of been doing out of our side pocket.  And Ruth worked on those.  Then, finally, she became really interested in the talent of a lot of people; talents that she thought were being wasted.  Kay Clarenbach came back to Madison about that time and we talked about what we might do in this area.  And finally, after much, you know, taking on the whole world, decided it would be very interesting to do a survey of wives of faculty members.  And I think we did wives of lawyers and wives of doctors—groups that we could get a hold of easily, the mailing list, because we had no money; groups we could get a hold of easily and survey.  So then I went to Fred Harrington and said we wanted to do this, and we needed money to print up the questionnaire.  And we could mail it through the campus mails, but to the doctors’ wives and lawyers’ wives we’d have to have postage stamps.  So he gave me five hundred dollars.  And Ruth who was working, and Kay volunteered her efforts, and two or three other people worked on it, they put together a questionnaire and it was simply a survey of what jobs they’d had, what educational level they had, whether they were interested in employment, what they’d like to do that they weren’t doing, what were their plans for the next ten or fifteen years.  Brought in a lot of interesting information.  I think my first reaction when these people got it summarized was the talent there was out there, real talent that wasn’t being used at all: people with all kinds of abilities, and some of them were abilities that we were constantly having calls: “Do you have anyone who can do this kind of thing?  We have this job that needs to be done and we can’t find anyone to do it.”  So then I think we hired Kay; got a little money to hire Kay.
DH: 	Kay?
MP: 	Clarenbach.  And we began just doing the simple things that you could do: if somebody wanted this kind of a person to work for them and there were three women that met these qualifications, so calling that person and saying, “Why don’t you call these three women and see if you can work out anything.”  There was a group of them that wanted to upgrade their teaching degrees or certificates so they could teach.  And they were well-qualified, but they didn’t have a certificate in Wisconsin.  And so I remember when Lindley Stiles, and very shortly about twenty or thirty of them were enrolled in courses.  It took no doing; it just was a matter of getting it together.  So we did a lot of simple things.  Then the first conference came out of that, and where we had limited our survey to people we could get our hands no cheaply and easily, who were likely to be among the most qualified, the conference was thrown open.  And then began all kinds of stuff.  But some of the interesting things I remember happening, I remember discussions where there were people who wanted to work part-time, and the reaction was you can’t have part-time teachers; you have to have a full-time person.  And then some people in the school system began to say, “If we find two people who do this job each a half-day maybe we’re better off than if we insist on a full-time person.”  We went to Carnegie about that time, and about money for the E.B. Fred Fellows, and began to solicit those applications.  And Kay Clarenbach worked on that.  And a good many women who wanted to finish their PhDs in different areas were named E.B. Fred Fellows.  And this gave them enough money; the money could go to babysitting, it could go to housework.  It didn’t have to go just for their expenses in coming to the university.  But that program got started.  So my interest was at that level of trying to work with individuals in finding ways.  I think of a Helen White comment early on about students and about people—women particularly—of this kind.  Her statement was, “The University can meet almost all their needs if you will figure out a way to cut the red tape in their lives and in the university.”  So that was the level at which I always concentrated; I was not very much interested in organizing group attacks on prejudice, or so on.  I was more interested in trying to find a way that the resources of the university might be fitted with the needs of people and women, and the questions people had, and the talents they had.  So that was the way we worked all the time.
00:26:12
DH: 	Well it takes some imagination to see ways around existing situations.
MP: 	Helen White was excellently marvelous at this.  I heard her make this statement fairly early on: she said, “The University can do almost anything, but you have to learn to cut the red tape.”  And she said, “I spend most of my time as chairman of the English department cutting red tape so the person can do what’s sensible to do.”
DH: 	Well that’s a great attitude, it seems to me.
MP: 	Yeah.  I can remember calling her from time to time, and would say, “I’ve got this particular problem; it makes sense for this girl to do this.  What do you think makes sense?”  Then you figured out a way.
DH: 	How do we do it?
MP: 	How do we do it?  And you figured out people you could always count on.  You always knew there were some people, and I have no objection to these people, who absolutely were going to follow the letter of the law.  You never bothered to call them; you called someone else who didn’t worry about the letter of the law, who was perfectly willing.  That was the kind of approach I used in continuing education, that it wasn’t so much a prejudice, it was just figuring out a way to adjust rules that were made for another purpose so that people can do this.
00:27:18
DH: 	How did you feel about these governor’s conferences?  Were they effective or useful?
MP: 	I think so, yes.  My concern about that is that if you repeat them too often you get the same people coming and nothing ever happens; nothing productive is happening.  Conferences, show and tell sessions, seven hours starting may be all right to, well, raise consciousness; that’s a good role for it.  There’s nothing wrong with it, but you’ve got to do more in this business than raise consciousness, and you better be ready to take the next step.  And sometimes just raising the person’s consciousness doesn’t give them the tools that enable them to take the next step.  Sometimes what you do is just make them unhappy with what they’ve got without giving them any way to move.
00:28:15
DH: 	There were a couple of occasions—annual affairs, I gather—at the university that I would just like you to sort of briefly describe a little bit what goes on and what you think their value to the student body might be.  One is the annual Senior Swingout.
MP: 	Swingout during the periods I was at the university was an event in that curious position of having been very, very popular, very important, and still viewed with respect as a very fine tradition.  And yet each year there was always a question: is this passé?  Should we really be doing this?  First it was for women, honoring women; and secondly it was a kind of event that had gone a little out of style, you know, it didn’t swing, exactly, you know, it was Swingout, it wasn’t that kind of event.  It was an honors convocation in Wisconsin tradition.  And for women.  And Mortarboard was announced there, and all the women’s honors, and that sort of thing.  When I was there, I think with the exception of one year we were always able to have it on Bascom Hill, and that contributed to the beauty of it.  There was a form of what we did: we passed from the daisy chain kind of thing that I think they used to have with it to a fairly straightforward presentation of honors and comments.  I remember one year we had it in the Union.  Always when it was over there was a glow.  Not mobs of people came, but parents came, and students came, and faculty members came.  It was a Saturday afternoon, beautiful on Bascom Hill.  I remember some lovely days in early May when we did it.  And people were always pleased.  And then you went through the next months getting the Swingout chairman and getting people organized and everyone saying, “Oh, I’m not sure this fits with the 1960s,” or “I’m not sure this is the kind of thing we should be doing.”  But we continued to do it.  I don’t know whether they still do it or not.  But I knew it at the time that it was a little out of step with the times, and yet it was pretty well-respected.  I always enjoyed doing it and the students always liked it.  A lot of work.
DH: 	You sort of worked on it all year.
MP: 	There were committees and they worked on it all year.
DH: 	Well another thing, I haven’t checked, but I don’t think we’ve talked about it, was Annual Women’s Day.
MP: 	That had gone a bit by the board by the time I was there.  I think I --
00:31:29	End of Tape 2, Side 1
Tape 2, Side 2
00:31:32
MP: 	…one or two.  They at one time were meant for career planning, to stimulate women to think about careers and to bring in all sorts—I believe this is what the Annual Women’s Day was—and to stimulate the bringing in, we brought in distinguished women, they did.  By the time I was there at Wisconsin I think we did one or two and I think we tried it in several forms meeting every evening for a week.  But the interest had dropped off and I don’t believe we did over one or two or three, and then we would do just fairly simple events of an afternoon.  We’d have someone in and try to stimulate interest in students, but it was not much of an annual affair.
DH: 	That’s interesting because this was at a time, it seems to me, that women were getting more and more active in women’s rights movements, things of this sort.
MP: 	Yes, that’s true.  Meanwhile Women’s Day was going down the drain.
00:32:54
DH: 	Now I’d like to move on to several conferences or committees that I’ve discovered you were on that I’d like to know a little bit more about.  One was something described as a twelve-member Committee on International Exchange of Persons.  I’m curious to know what your responsibilities on that were.
MP: 	I think that was a three-year appointment in the American Council of Education.  Four national groups—the National Academy of Sciences, American Council of Learned Societies, American Council on Education, and one of the foreign scholarly exchange groups, and I’ve forgotten what one that one was—each had three representatives on this commission, and I was one of the American Council of Education representatives.  Our job was to appoint Fulbrights, select Fulbrights, for recommendation to the Board on Foreign Scholarships.  The Fulbright, those professors who applied to be a Fulbright professor, were first screened and then our committee of twelve twice a year I think we met, went over the applications at least twice a year, maybe three times a year.  We went over the applications that had been screened, we’d have a group, and tried to fit them with the needs of the countries.  If Australia wanted a geologist and seventeen geologists had applied, we tried to pick out the ones that would fit best in that exchange.  Then we would recommend them to the Board of Foreign Scholars and they confirmed the appointments—and rarely did they do anything but confirm.  But ours was the final selection for Fulbright.  I think I served on it three years.  Farrington Daniels was the representative of the National Academy of Sciences at the time I was on it; Farrington and I were on it the same time.
DH: 	Now is this a continuing arrangement?
MP: 	Yes, as far as I know.  Fulbright isn’t being funded as well as it was, but as far as I know that group still operates.  Very interesting appointment.
00:35:39
DH: 	Well, while I’m thinking about the Fulbright group, there was something known as the Annual Midwestern Conference of Fulbright Scholars and University Professors.  What was its function?
MP:	 Well, at the time that I was a member of that commission, I was asked to be chairman of the Midwest conference.  And every year the Washington office of this committee sponsored conferences across the country in different sections, usually in three areas, I think, for those people who had come from overseas—Japanese and Australians and Finnish and so on—who had been visiting scholars here and were going home.  And so before they went home they would have a conference for them on some campus or other college campus, bring them all together before they departed for home.  And one year we had the Midwest conference at the University of Wisconsin.  And that grew out of that other appointment; they asked me if I would chair it and if we would do it at Wisconsin, and we said we would and we did it.  But it was an annual affair that’s held at different places.  Very interesting: stayed at Lowell Hall, as I recall it, and had about a hundred people.  We tried to do things to get them to talk about their experience in the United States, and then we also tried to give them a last experience that they shared together on a college campus.  So the people from the University of Wisconsin that they might hear about when they got home, we made sure they met them.  We brought in people, I think, from the University of Chicago and other places that they had met through the year.  It was just a kind of, sort of final farewell.
DH: 	Nice sendoff.
MP: 	Yes, nice sendoff.  It was great fun.  I remember the evening that a kind of informal dinner: we asked people who were coming, we wrote them a note ahead of time and asked them that night if they would make a presentation of what they would like to have us most remember about their country when we thought about their country.  And they could bring pictures, they could bring art work, they could bring anything; they could just stand up and talk.  That was one of the most interesting evenings I’ve ever had.  I can remember one young man from Japan who was a chemist; he talked about Japanese food and he got some examples of Japanese food.  And this was what he longed for most from his country, and you could just almost see his mouth watering.  But it was experiences of that kind that they talked about their own country in terms of what they’d like to have those of us there remember about that country or think about that country.  It was interesting.  We had lots of fun.  Lots of people at Wisconsin worked awfully hard on it.  I can remember Karl Prill in the President’s Office at that time; we were going to have a picnic out at Fish Hatchery Farm with fried chicken, that sort of thing; a typical picnic.  And the people who were supposed to serve it didn’t have any people to work, so Karl Prill and Maxine Bennett and Joe Prouty and Chuck Ingman and a whole lot of people at the university actually went out and did the serving and the dishing and the working of it.  And some of these foreign scholars just couldn’t believe this.  I think the Union was to serve it, or someone was to serve it, and the students who were to do it just didn’t appear.  So they just pressed into labor the university officials.  We had a fine time doing it.  I can remember Karl Prill, in particular, because, once, one of the visiting scholars came up and said, “Isn’t that Mr. Prill who does all this work and is a dean in the graduate school,” or something; “Isn’t that him?  He’s serving mashed potatoes?”
DH: 	What a surprise!  Well, that’s educational in itself.  How we work on occasion!  
00:40:21
	Now, there’s one other thing, the Rennebohm Foundation Educational Development Project, known as RED, I gather, which seemed to have been, when I read about it, a five-year project involving schools around Wisconsin.
MP: 	I really don’t know much about that.  I’m not sure I was a part of that.  
DH: 	Well, somebody suggested you might have been.
MP: 	No, I don’t think so.  I think I vaguely remember what it did.  Wasn’t Bill Sewell a part of that?
DH: 	I think so.
MP: 	But I was not really involved in it.  I probably, someone probably mentioned it because one summer—and this was not part of the Rennebohm, although we might have been funded out Rennebohm project; I think we were—one summer we did an analysis of all the high schools in Wisconsin.  It was while I was assistant to the President, I think, after I had been Dean of Women.  We did an analysis of all the high schools in Wisconsin, number of graduates, number who went on to college, number who came to the University of Wisconsin, number who went to the centers—that kind of analysis of the high schools from records.  And we tried to get a picture of those schools that seemed regularly related to the university and the university system; those schools where they were underrepresented in higher education where there might need to be some work done where graduates were missing an opportunity.  Patterns of high school people going on to college.  There was some very interesting material that came out of it.  It was an interesting project because of the people who worked on it.  Computers were just starting to come in then, and Joan Wilke, who was a student at Wisconsin, and Mary Doyle, and Clarence Olmstead, and Mary was at Radcliffe and Clarence was at Stanford and he had gotten two computers a little bit; I think it was that way.  And then Jimmy Doyle didn’t work for us, but Jimmy had been learning about computers.  And these four were working on the project and maybe Dick Halverson was, too.  And they put in hours beyond measure, far beyond what they were paid for, because they were trying to design the information so it could be handled through the computer.  They were bright kids and they were interested in Wisconsin and they did a good piece of work.  Some of the things that I remember coming out of it were the fact that Forest County had a very small representation of people going on to college, and how poor they were in Forest County, and the need there.  But the people who went on to college usually turned out to be doctors or lawyers or something of that kind; they did something very outstanding.  Calumet County, this very rich county east of Winnebago, where there are a lot of very rich and able farmers, and it’s an area out of which we got such people as Louis Weeks and Harry Steenbock and people of that kind in earlier years, many of them were actually stopping with eighth grade educations because people were not believing that that was a good place.  Well, we did some of that in that project that summer, and it may have been funded from Rennebohm money; I don’t remember.  But we didn’t see it as anything except an analysis to try to see what was happening in high schools.  Well, the registrar’s office, the admissions office used it, and I think we used it in some planning in Extension of what we might be doing to bring in some of the counties that seemed to be underprivileged, underrelated, underrepresented.
DH: 	That does sound interesting.
MP: 	My pleasure of the summer, I remember some of the things we got out of it that were good, that we used, but my pleasure was seeing these three that were hired plus others they picked up, students just getting the greatest enthusiasm and doing a very excellent piece of work.
DH: 	That’s great.  Not knowing these people myself, I’m not surprised at what you say about them; it’s quite in character.
MP: 	Oh yes.  And they apparently met evenings at the Doyles and just had great arguments about how they were going to put this material together and how you would do it, and what you had to do and what step you had to take next, which was a marvelous experience for them.
DH: 	Oh yes, I would think so.  
00:45:34
	Well, let’s see; now there’s another activity of yours that I’d like to hear about; a project that went on for about a year, I guess, in which you visited all the Center campuses.  And I’d like to know how that originated, the plan for that, and what it’s purpose was—and what you got out of it.
MP: 	Yes, all right.  That was, my title, I guess, was University Dean of Students.  And Fred Harrington had in mind that we should be doing some of the same things on the Center campuses and on the other campuses that we were doing in Madison, mostly in financial aid, but it could be in any area: in financial aid, in student government, in their—what do you call them?—cultural programs, their speakers and lecturers, that kind of thing.  How we could add in that dimension to student life.  And to do that we thought someone from Madison ought to do this on these campuses.  So my schedule that year, as I recall it, was one week in Madison, one week at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, really, and then one week out to some of the centers.  So I’d be in Madison for a week and then I’d go over to Milwaukee.  Some days, some weeks, I didn’t spend a whole week in Milwaukee; two or three days.  But we were doing the union over there and trying to put it together.  We were developing a financial aid program over there.  We were beginning to talk about dormitories.  We were hiring people to do these jobs.  And at Milwaukee, mostly, I worked with Mr. Klatsche and Mr. Joe Beyer, and the rest of them there, in identifying people to bring in who could head a dormitory system, who could head a financial aid system and really get that going.  They were interested in counseling projects.
00:47:34
	In the centers, I worked with the people there, largely, and that had more to do with how we could enhance the library program, the lectures program, music program so that the students got that richness on the center campuses, that they were getting out of the four-year campuses.  I got to know the centers very well.  I remember spending time in Marinette, Marshfield, Kenosha, Racine.  I often was President Harrington’s representative at their Honors Day.  So not only did I go in and work with them and their programs, but I would come back for their celebrations and their occasions and banquets and present awards.  I learned a lot about Wisconsin.  I learned a lot about personalities in the centers, where there were people who were being under-utilized, and what we could do with them and how we could help them.  I learned where some of the sticking points were, and it was different at Racine from Marshfield what people were interested in.  And not too many people in the President’s Office—because Mr. Harrington was President of the whole University—not too many people knew too much about those.  And so I suppose the advantage to the university was that here was one person who had spent some time on all the campuses, who knew people there that if you needed to find out about something, knew someone well enough to call—everyone knew the heads of the center system but sometimes it wasn’t important enough to call the head if you wanted to find out something about what was going on or if this would work.  It also meant when decisions were being made in dean’s council and so on that people were reminded of the centers, and I was sometimes able to say, “Why don’t we do this,?”  I did a good deal of encouraging faculty from Madison to go out and do lectures and stay on the campus.  So it was the building of a relationship that brought knowledge of the centers to central administration, and brought the resources of Milwaukee, Madison, and so on to some of the center systems.  It was a very interesting experience for me, and I think very good at the time for the university.
00:50:08
DH: 	We haven’t talked about what you just referred to: the fact that your title changed, and I’m aware that you went from being Dean of Women to Special Assistant to the President for a brief time, and then Dean of Student Affairs.  Why this change?  How did this evolve?
MP: 	I think it evolved—what started it was my going to Mark Ingraham, I think, and saying, “I really don’t think I want to be Dean of Women.”  As I described yesterday, “there are parts of it that I just don’t think I’m doing well.  I think I can handle administration, I think I can hire people who I think will do the work and get a kick out of it where I’m not, and bring something to it.  I think I don’t want to do that.”  So I was going back to teaching math half-time; that was my idea.  And I started out in Dean Mark Ingraham’s classes.  Mark’s response was, “Why don’t you start teaching this fall?”  And I said I had been away from teaching so long that I needed to take some time, and so I was auditing a couple of Mark Ingraham’s classes that fall.  It went very well the first couple months through September and October, and then one day Mr. Harrington said to me, “I hear you don’t think you’ve got enough to do the Dean of Women’s Office.”  And he said, “I feel there is a need that we’re now trying to centralize the administration of all the campuses.  We’ve got people who work in the academic area, we’ve got people working in the financial area; we need someone working with the student kind of area and with student programs.  And would you be interested in doing that?”  And I said I might.  And he said his proposal would be that he bring me in as Special Assistant to the President for a while and let me find my way around and see what I thought could be done, and then if I wanted to make a recommendation on the job I could to him, or he would decide in the meantime.  So I started out as Special Assistant, and in that I just did troubleshooting.  Then I did start traveling, particularly to Milwaukee because there was a lot going on in Milwaukee.  And that year I spent more time at Milwaukee and dropped out of the classes and never thought of teaching mathematics since.  I had to go and tell Mark Ingraham that I wouldn’t be there anymore, so that ended that.  And I started doing the other thing.  And it just sort of evolved out of a need of the university at the time.  When I left, the position was not filled, but I don’t think it needed to be filled.  I don’t think it really made sense to have someone doing that in that area after this first exploratory period of finding out what should be done.
DH: 	And then you became Dean of Student Affairs.
MP: 	Yeah, well, the Special Assistant and then—
DH: 	You went right into that in less than a year, wasn’t it?
MP: 	Yeah, yeah.  And that was a position that wasn’t filled when I left.  But I was really dean for all the campuses and it had to be an administrative job.  It couldn’t be a job dealing with students because there were 55,000 students.
DH: 	And at all the other; oh, yes.
00:53:27
MP: 	But we tried to get some consistency in our programs so that we were doing the same thing.
DH: 	In other words, getting the different campuses…
MP: 	Um-hm—similar opportunities for students.
DH: 	Do you feel like this was a successful effort?
MP: 	I think it was a successful effort; I think it was needed at the time that they were moving from independent campuses to a centralized administration.  I think probably once we got personnel and an appreciation of what we needed to do in the different campuses in order, that they could handle most of it themselves.  They needed someone to refer to in Madison, but there always was someone.  I think it was needed at the time; I don’t think it was a position that was needed previously.
DH: 	I’ve been wondering what the relationship was between what you were then doing, as Dean of Student Affairs, and Joseph Kauffman, for instance, who was Dean of Students on the Madison campus.  How did these two jobs relate to one another?
MP: 	Well, Joe Kauffman was the person in charge, the administrator in charge, in Madison campus, just as—oh, goodness, I can’t say his name; he came from Emory to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, was in charge of the Milwaukee campus, the names are all gone—different ones on every one.  These were the deans of students.  Administratively, they were responsible, Joe was responsible, to Bob Fleming, and the man at Milwaukee to Joe Clatchey—they worked for them.  But also they were responsible to me.  Joe Kauffman’s appointment, for instance, I recommended Joe’s appointment to Bob Fleming: found him, met him, interviewed him.  Same thing at Milwaukee: they did the interviewing, too, but I recommended candidates.  Sort of the way it’s describing a house mother: they worked for somebody else, but you worked with getting the right person.  And certainly if Mr. Harrington wanted to know about the Dean of Students’ responsibilities and jobs and problems and things at Madison in reference to Milwaukee, I was the person he would turn to and say, “Let’s find out what’s happening in these areas.”  And I had to be very careful, making sure that the chancellor on the campus didn’t feel I was coming in and upsetting the apple cart.  But I worked very closely with Joe Kauffman and most of the policies that grew out, certainly, I had a part in them.  So his responsibility was to Mr. Fleming, but I was the Dean of Students that was coordinating all the groups on all the campuses.
00:56:32
DH: 	That’s how that worked.  However, I get the idea from what you said that the relationship with Harrington was an easy one.
MP: 	Um-hm.
DH: 	Is this the way, in fact, it was?
MP: 	Yes.  He is one of the very, very easy people I have ever worked with: a great deal of confidence, or at least he seemed to have a great deal of confidence in what I was doing, and he turned things over to me and he expected me to do them.  And I enjoyed very much working with him and the kind of support that he gave.
DH: 	In turning things over to you, did he give you somewhat of a free hand?
MP: 	Very much.  Financial support when you needed financial support.  I think that the only time I ever went to him with a request was for, oh, you know, those were the marvelous days when you dreamed up projects and would go to the Ford Foundation and get a couple hundred thousand dollars to do something.  And we had this marvelous project and we wanted to take it to the Ford Foundation.  I can’t even remember what it was.  And he said, “I think it would be wiser if you went back and spent five hundred dollars of your own money, time, and effort first to see if you can get this started.”  And he said, “I’ll give you five hundred thousand, two thousand dollars, to do a little work yourself to see if you can do these marvelous things.  Then we’ll go to Ford after we…”  The only time, I had the greatest confidence when he heard the proposal and he’s going to give me complete backing and, you know, we could go do it.  I remember to this day.  And I remember we went back—it may have been about careers or career studies or something of that kind—we went back and tried to do what we had asked for, and it just literally didn’t work.  You couldn’t get people to do the things that we thought we’d get them to do in order to do the project.  This was another one of those things that just went down the drain like that.  I didn’t have the feeling that I had carte blanche to make mistakes; if he saw there was going to be a mistake—if he knew this thing didn’t work—I knew he was going to raise road blocks and be helpful in that sense.  But if what you had to say, what I had to say, what I recommended in appointments or in programs or so on sounded sensible, he might say, “Here’s where you’re going to fail.”  And I might say, “Here’s the risk we run.”  We talked about that part of it.  But he was not afraid to run risks.  So it was a good relationship; it wasn’t just “everything you do is right.”  There was always that critical mind helping you shape and sharpen it, but also the willingness to say, “It’s yours, and you take it and do it.”
DH: 	Which makes for a good working relationship.
MP: 	I found him a very easy person to work with.  I liked working with him; he stimulated my mind.
00:59:36
DH: 	This may be going back a little bit, but you said something about counseling a minute ago, and I realized I hadn’t asked you how this function as Dean of Women and Dean of Students fit in with the activities of the Counseling Office, Counseling and Guidance.
MP: 	We had a good, friendly relationship: Ed Drake and Louise Leonard and Jane Moorman and all those folks; Larry Feinberg, Bill Thomas.  Knew them all.
DH: 	Emily Chervenik.
MP: 	Emily Chervenik, yes.  They recognized me as the person who was trained in the their field; respected me.  I knew what they were talking about, so it was an easy relationship we worked together.  I don’t think of myself as a counselor.  I have a PhD in that area and I understand what counseling is.  I guess I learned about what kinds of problems you couldn’t handle unless you pretty skilled, which were the dangerous problems, which, you know, make some judgments there.  But when you are an administrator, as I was, you’re pushed for time and you sometimes have to make decisions—as an administrator you don’t very often have the time to work with a person, to work through their problems the way you need to in a counseling situation.  I used counseling techniques in talking, sure, in getting them to talk and exchange.  But as far as taking on the responsibility of here is an individual, who has a problem to work through, and I’m going to be the counselor working through it, I didn’t ever try to do that.  And I don’t think I’m much of a counselor, really, by temperament.  I’m a teacher.  Teaching and counseling aren’t the same thing.  As a teacher I liked to lay out what it is a person needs to learn and then get busy teaching it one way or another; sometimes by direct authority, sometimes by inspiring them to find out more.  But I am a teacher more than a counselor, and I think if I hadn’t gone into administration, I would never have become a full-time counselor, even though I had ...
DH: 	Even though you studied.
MP: 	Studied and had it.  I’m sure I would have gone back to teaching.  I see myself as an administrator and as a teacher.  I had someone who worked for me at Barnard [?] say, or it came back to me that she said about me, “You go in and she tells you what she sees and needs to be done.  She gives you some clues on how to do it and she sends you away and just hopes to god you get it done.”  In a sense, that’s teaching; that’s the way you teach.  And I had to laugh when someone came back and told me she had said this.  And I thought I’ve never heard a better description of an administrator as a teacher, rather than what you think of as administration.  And I think I worked more as a teacher; I think that’s what I was.
DH: 	Well it sounds like it makes for effective administration, this method.
MP: 	Well, when you finally learn to accept it for yourself…
01:03:08	End of Tape 2, Side 2