UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #517
GREENFIELD, LOIS

GREENFIELD, Lois (1924-2006)
Professor of General Engineering
At UW: 1956-69

Interviewed: 	1997	
Series: 	College of Engineering
Interviewer: 	Paul Morledge 
Length: 	1 hour, 24 minutes

Childhood; WWII; Berkeley; Move to Madison; Work with Robert Marshall; Kurt Wendt; Descriptive geometry; Committee on Engineering Education; Teaching evaluations; Teaching vs. research; SOAR program; Women and engineering; Gretchen Schoff; Retirement. 

First Interview Session (December 16, 1997): Digital File

Time	Keywords
00:00:00	[Begin Tape 1/Side 1] Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:00:31	LG grew up in Chicago and left home during WWII at age 19. The Curtiss-Wright Corporation recruited and educated female junior engineers to replace male engineers who were called to duty in the draft.  LG was sent to the University of Minnesota for her engineering education.

00:01:31	LG discusses a high school math teacher who influenced her.  This same math teacher also taught a student who subsequently became an associate dean at the UW COE.  This relationship later helped LG obtain a position in the UW COE.

00:02:45	LG skipped three grades in elementary school.  In her youth, she thought she was destined to become a doctor because her parents told her that "smart girls become doctors not nurses."  As she matured, she decided medicine was not in her future.

00:04:24	In 1943, LG was sent by the Curtiss-Wright Corporation to study aeronautical engineering at the University of Minnesota.  She earned 60 credit hours in ten months in a very intensive program aimed at training girls to replace men who left for the service.  Even though the factory men were never drafted, the girls were employed anyway.  However, LG thought her skills were being wasted, so she quit.

00:06:55	LG returned to the University of Chicago to obtain a degree in psychology.  She graduated from the University of Chicago in 1945.  She had earned some prior credit at a local junior college, which helped her earn her degree more expeditiously.

00:10:51	She worked as a research associate for Benjamin Bloom, a world renowned educational psychologist.  Together they studied problem-solving, addressing issues such as why smart students failed certain tests.

00:11:50	LG decided to stay at the University of Chicago to earn her master’s degree.  Between her undergraduate and graduate training, she taught psychology at Illinois Tech.

00:13:31	LG’s professors told her that if she wanted to be successful in psychology, she needed to obtain a Ph.D.  Heeding their advice, she applied to doctoral programs at UC-Berkeley and Stanford.  Berkeley accepted her first so she decided to enroll there.  She got her Ph.D. in educational psychology, with her dissertation again focusing on problem-solving.

00:15:00	LG worked as a teaching assistant at Berkeley where she led question and answer sessions with smaller sections made up from classes of up to 500 students.  As a result, she did not do much lecturing. 

00:16:52	LG married and moved to Portland, Oregon, where her husband worked at the University of Portland Medical School.  Her husband then got a job at UW and they both moved to Madison.  “In those days, women followed their husbands,” she says.

00:17:20	LG’s husband was also a Ph.D. in psychology from Berkeley.  They met in a “dynamic psychology” course at Berkeley.  LG had a connection in the UW COE, in that her high school math teacher was the former teacher of COE associate dean Robert Marshall.  Marshall had started a program designed to find Wisconsin’s brightest high-school students and then recruit them for the UW COE. LG’s role was to analyze the problem-solving abilities of these students and winnow down the list of potential COE students.

00:19:21	LG developed a checklist to differentiate between the successful and non-successful problem solvers among new students in the COE.  She then worked with the less successful students and tried to make them more adept at problem-solving.

00:21:24	LG began working at UW in 1956. She was hired as a project associate at the Engineering Experiment Station (EES) by its then director, Robert Marshall.  LG helped some of the COE professors develop better tests for students.

00:23:43	Kurt Wendt was dean when LG was hired.  She describes Wendt as “one of the most effective administrators I’ve ever run into.”  She also said Wendt allowed COE faculty to be innovative and that he would back all attempts the faculty made to be more effective educators.

00:24:42	LG thinks that Wendt’s successor as dean, Robert Marshall, did not keep tabs on his faculty as well as Wendt.  She thinks this might have been because Marshall’s interest lay in creating innovative programs, such as the junior-year foreign exchange program for engineering students.

00:25:59	LG said Dean Bollinger appears to be an effective dean, but that of all the deans she knew Wendt was the most effective.

00:26:50	Assistant Dean Shiels headed the engineering freshman office.  He employed LG to help counsel freshman students during their transition to college.  She also helped develop their problem-solving skills.

00:28:26	Some in the COE thought if LG had the title of assistant professor, she needed to be teaching.  In 1970 they asked her to teach engineering graphics under a ¼ appointment. What she did was sit in on a descriptive geometry class in the morning in order to learn the subject, then turn around and teach the same course in the afternoon. LG said she felt a little insecure having to teach under such circumstances but that, luckily, she had good “spatial sensibilities,” so she managed.  In 1976 she went to full time.

00:30:34	[End tape 1, side 1; begin side 2] LG defined general engineering as a “service” department to the other flagship engineering departments.  LG started to teach technical writing courses in addition to her descriptive drawing teaching load. 

00:33:00	Jim McNeary was teaching a logic circuit course in which he also taught logic.  LG served as a teaching assistant for McNeary’s logic course.  LG though this subject complemented her interest in problem-solving quite nicely.

00:34:28	LG preferred her freshman orientation class, General Engineering 100, mostly because she could play the role of educational psychologist.

00:36:13	One of the functions of GE 100 was to help freshmen decide if they wanted to be an engineer, and, if so, what kind.  LG invited practicing engineers to present guest lectures and answer students’ questions about what a career in engineering was like.

00:38:41	LG made it clear to her GE 100 students that it would not be held against them if they decided to transfer out of the engineering school.  She estimates that around 50% of the students who took GE 100 ended up transferring out of the COE.  Engineering students needed 156 credits to graduate, and students in letters and science only needed 120.

00:40:20	LG worked closely with freshmen advisors such as former associate deans Kenneth Shiels and Fred Lidell.

00:40:53	LG became chairperson for the Committee on Engineering Education and she tried to set up programs to help engineering faculty develop their teaching skills.  Attendance was voluntary.  At present, Sandy Porter runs these teaching workshops and attendance is mandatory for all engineering teaching assistants and faculty.

00:43:30	LG tried to initiate a study to identify where the best engineering students came from.   She lacked the resources to complete the study, however.

00:44:40	LG says many of the engineering faculty thought their teaching skills were sufficient.  She had a difficult time convincing them otherwise. LG claims some UW depar-tments in other colleges, such as economics, had strong programs aimed at improving the teaching effectiveness of teaching assistants.  Many engineering teaching assistants were “non-native” and had difficulty expressing themselves in English. English as a Second Language programs did not yet exist, so LG tried to guide these foreign TAs to local resources where they could obtain help with their English.

00:48:45	LG believes that as soon as UW began requiring all teachers to attend teaching workshops, the quality of teaching at UW improved substantially.

00:51:24	LG helped establish teacher evaluation forms in the COE.  At first the faculty did not take the evaluations seriously.  This changed when the evaluations became a factor in determining tenure.

00:54:07	Initially, COE departments had their own mandatory freshmen orientation activities and programs.  LG was disappointed when these departmental orientation sessions were replaced by large voluntary orientation sessions for the entire college.

00:55:25	During LG’s tenure she thought most COE faculty were more interested in research than teaching.  The ones that wanted to improve their teaching were unique.  LG claims most of the general engineering faculty only taught and few conducted research.  In other departments, she notes, research took precedence. LG says Wendt held only a bachelor’s degree but still managed to become an excellent teacher and an effective dean.  She also claims he was a first-rate researcher.

00:58:58	LG thought her service on the campus-wide Undergraduate Education Committee was most meaningful, though she is unsure of the Committee’s impact.	LG does not recall all issues she dealt with while serving on the Faculty Senate, on which she served for a couple of terms.  She does remember the discussions about grading options.

01:01:28	[End tape 1; begin tape 2] LG says her intimate involvement with the UW’s Summer Orientation and Registration program (SOAR) was very satisfying because she could help engineering freshmen with their curriculum decisions. LG compares the content and structure of the old SOAR program to the content and structure of the new SOAR

01:04:43	LG was a member of many groups, and she was most active in the American Engineering Education Society.  It was there she found some “kindred souls,” that is engineers who had advanced degrees in education. Those people were equally interested in doing things to improve teaching across the colleges.

01:06:06	LG established a summer program to help recruit young women into the COE.  She also toured high schools and helped educate high school teachers about engineering in an attempt to make it a more attractive alternative for college freshmen of both sexes.  LG says that through her female recruitment efforts the percentage of females in the COE student body increased from 1 percent to 18 percent during her tenure in office.  She doesn’t hold herself wholly responsible for this dramatic change, but she believes she at least helped provide the impetus.

01:10:15	In 1977, LG and Linda Remus designed another program, called “Why not engineering,” for high school counselors, science teachers and their female students that was to channel gifted female science students into engineering.  LG said this program was probably not successful because it was ahead of its time-- female students still felt that engineering was basically for men.

01:11:16	LG believes engineering should be taught the same way to both males and females.  She thinks the best way to reach prospective female engineering students is to arrange for them to meet dynamic female engineers. LG never observed significant dif-ferences in problem-solving strategies between male and female engineering students.

01:15:02	LG saw only one other female gain tenure on the COE faculty while she was there.  This person, Gretchen Schoff, was a general engineering professor who was “a magnificent teacher.”  Unfortunately, she died quite young. There have recently been tenured female professors in specific departments, but only in the last ten years.

01:15:57	LG did a survey of the bathrooms in the COE.  She realized there was a woeful lack of women’s restrooms.  As a result of her survey, the COE administration created an equal number of men’s and women’s bathrooms.

01:17:54	LG says the UW undergraduate chapter of Society for Women Engineers acted as a “support group” for the female students.

01:19:24	LG says that Purdue University successfully recruited women well before most other engineering schools.  They had several full time people working on programs for women, whereas the UW only had LG in her spare time.

01:20:31	LG retired in 1969 because she was “old enough” and because she started having symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.  She managed to work part-time in the COE’s freshmen counseling office for a while following her retirement.

01:21:52	LG also worked on the advisory board for programs, one for 7-8th grade girls called Expanding Your Horizons, and one aimed at “retooling” older career women for new careers in engineering and science.

01:24:16	End of First Interview Session
 
End of Interview #517