UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #1050
OLIVER, PAMELA

OLIVER, PAMELA (1949-)
Conway-Bascom Professor of Sociology
At UW: 1980-

Interviewed: 	2009 (3 sessions)
Interviewer: 	Robert Lange
Index by: 	Stephen A. Pierce
Length: 	7 hours, 24 minutes

Abstract: In her three September/November 2009 interviews with Bob Lange, Pamela Oliver talks about her education and career in sociology and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from the 1950s to the late 2000s.  She chronicles both positive and negative influences that guided her on her path to academia, discussing mentors, her parents, growing up in LA, her personality, and experiences at Stanford, UNC, and Louisville. She also details major currents in her scholarship and teaching in social movements, differential law enforcement, and ethnic studies. She then evaluates a number of personalities and campus units, offering her perspectives on the future of UW. This interview was conducted for inclusion into the UW-Madison Oral History Program.

Key Words: Los Angeles CA; race and class; the 1960s; Japanese-American internment; Vietnam protests; Stanford University; sociology; National Organization for Women (NOW); Francesca Cancian; feminism; University of North Carolina (UNC); Gerhard Lenski; Mancur Olson The Logic of Collective Action; James Wiggins; University of Louisville; Resource Mobilization Conference, Vanderbilt University; Gerald Marwell; Jane Allyn Piliavin; American Sociological Review (ASR); University of Wisconsin-Madison; committee service; Daniel Myers; Madison Police Chief Noble Wray; racism; differential law enforcement; teaching and pedagogy; Asian American Studies; spousal hires; merit raises; Gary Sandefur; Charles Hallaby; Donna Shalala; 

First Interview Session (September 9, 2009): Digital File

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

00:00:30	Question: Talk about your birthplace and parents. Answer: Oliver was born to James and Gertrude Oliver on Nov. 14, 1949 in Atascadero CA, but moved to the Los Angeles area early in her childhood. She discussed her father’s work as a radio announcer, which he enjoyed but didn’t make much money at, and then for Northrop. Follow up:  Northrop was a defense contractor? Answer: Yes; much of the industry at the time in southern CA was defense contracts—it was a working-class area.

00:04:12	[no question] She talked about her mother’s work as a fashion designer and then, after she was born, a homemaker. She recalled her mother encouraging her to have a career, her (and her father’s) love for the 3 children, and the marital difficulties that emerged as a result of her father’s expectation that her mother be a homemaker. She noted that the boundaries of her young life were quite narrow.

00:09:22	Question: Were your parents CA natives? Answer: She said her grandparents migrated to LA from the Midwest, where her parents grew up. 

00:10:33	Question: Were intellectual matters important? Answer: She recalled that both her parents were smart and well-read, and even insulted by their families for this, and that reading-while-walking was a normal part of her childhood, but intellectual life wasn’t engaged in a comfortable, organic kind of way. She explained her father’s intellectual interests and habits.

00:15:15	Follow up: So education was important? Answer: Yes; her father expected A’s and school came easily to her, though she wasn’t popular or a “teacher-pleaser” and her academic performance was off-putting to her siblings. She said the turning point for her was in 6th grade, when at her mother’s prompting she was given more advanced work to do (including taking HS algebra in 8th grade). She also recalled being able to get out of housework if she had schoolwork to do.

00:22:11	Follow up: Were you thinking of yourself as an intellectual? Answer: She was smart—her class’ valedictorian—but didn’t think she knew what an intellectual was. She described herself as in some ways “linear and boring,” not having the “artsiness” of many intellectuals and, due to gender limitations of the times, thinking she’d go into a career as a teacher.

00:24:14	Question: What subject interested you? Answer: During her first years of college, the social sciences interested her, but didn’t know why. She described the working-class nature of her HS, from which only 4 of her class of 600 went to 4-year colleges, and how the school was built like a prison. She remembered the relative freedoms scholarship kids were granted if they did their “job”—not “arouse the rabble.”

00:28:14	[no question] Continuing to talk about her HS, during which her major activity was speech and debate, she recounted how in the 1960s a (relatively conservative) campus newspaper appeared, editorialized a school play, and was (irrationally) cracked down on by the administration. She also recalled how her HS was secretively tracked, which she discovered when she was put into the wrong junior English class—this was a formative experience for her, seeing what her “general” peers were learning.

00:33:17	[no question] Oliver reflected on how class in her community influenced her parents’ relationship (her father wanted to moved to a higher-class neighborhood), and their education. Follow up: Were you treated well in that English class? Answer: They didn’t pick on her, but she said she was generally unpopular.

00:35:53	Question: Does your interest in disadvantaged communities come from your childhood? Answer: She didn’t think there was a direct correlation, but she couldn’t help but be aware of race and class from her neighborhood (which actively excluded blacks) and Stanford (which was obviously upper-class). She thought her experience of not fitting in and being ostracized in school made her keenly aware of the issues.

00:39:30	Follow up: Were you ostracized because you were smart? Answer: Her father thought if you were smart, people wouldn’t like you; and her siblings later observed that they looked different because her mother made their clothes. Follow up: Did you cross ethnic lines? Answer: It was more about class hierarchy. She recalled friends of hers who were Mexican-American, Chinese-American, and Jewish, but from the same class. She described the lessons these experiences taught her—including their openness about Protestant-Catholic-Jewish differences.

00:47:12	Question: Were you at all aware of the internment camps? Answer: Not in HS; she learned about it in college, though her parents living in a Japanese part of LA and many older siblings of her classmates were born in the camps. She related how she and some of her friends later talked to their parents about the camp experience.

00:50:53	Question: You knew you were going to college? Answer: No; she remembered vividly her mother explaining that, with limited family resources, her brother’s education came first, but by her graduation they were able to pay for her to attend college. Scholarships and her father’s improving salary allowed her to go to Stanford, though there was talk that she’d have to go to UCLA.

00:54:40	Question: Were you only looking at CA schools? Answer: Yes; her husband learned about out-of-state schools from a summer program, but she was also applying to private and women’s colleges, though only in CA. She described being admitted to Stanford, Pitzer College and elsewhere, and why she chose Stanford.

00:57:03	Follow up: Were you apprehensive? Answer: No; she noted that she was a very self-contained kind of person. Follow up: Describe that first year. Answer: She described the turmoil of that first year, 1967, including the anti-war movement, the assassina-tion of Martin Luther King, Jr., living in a co-ed dorm with very wealthy East Coast and also lower-income students, academic rigor, and a broad range of social activities. She mused about the liberation of getting a B on her transcript as a freshman.

01:01:52	Question: Were you more popular? Answer: She said she was still a loner, but it was less of a problem in college. She dated, but wasn’t concerned with relationships since she was already dating John (her future husband); and she engaged in a kind of “group social life” her freshman and sophomore years. During her junior and senior year, she spent every weekend with her husband.

01:05:16	[no question] Continuing to describe her life at Stanford, she related her academic interests. She majored in sociology because it had an honors major that had minimal requirements; she then became a research assistant and took graduate classes as a junior, which made her part of the social sphere of the graduate sociology students.

01:07:39	[no question] Continuing to describe Stanford, she recounted her involvement with NOW, which was primarily graduate students and faculty. 

01:09:25	Follow up: Significant influences? Answer: She observed that the entire department influenced her—it was unusual in that it stressed generalizing theory, abstracting specific processes from historical events, which are the product of many forces and require many theories to explain. She mentioned specific professors—Berger, Zelditch—and talked about her research work with Francesca Cancian.

01:14:17	[no question] She quipped that during the 1970 student strikes opposing the Cambodian incursion, she decided not to strike but Cancian did, and they debated whether she’d continue her research. Follow up: Were the protests exhilarating? Answer: She was on the fence—ideologically sympathetic to it, but not a radical. But the blatant protests forced one to constantly think about one’s assumptions.

01:18:25	Follow up: How important was feminism? Answer: It mattered to her because it allowed her to integrate and “exist as a human being.” She was conscious of being a girl, but thought others would have been more comfortable with her intellect had she been a boy. But feminist ideology allowed her to be who she was, as did dating a man who liked her intelligence. She recounted how she and John got married, which terrified her parents and made her scholarships more important than ever. She also reflected how being a “smart girl” didn’t exist as a comfortable social category; and how comforting it was to “settle into” being who she was.

01:24:22	Follow up: When did this happen? Answer: She didn’t recall exactly, but remembered the ways an Eleanor Maccoby lecture and Mirra Komarovsky’s Blue Collar Marriage provided intellectual tools for thinking about herself and her family. 

01:27:03	Question: Were you aware of the Sterling Hall bombing? Answer: She didn’t think so

01:27:23	Follow up: UW wasn’t on your radar? Answer: No; she discussed her consideration of graduate schools and her advisors’ advice, but this was before UW’s “meteoric rise.” Follow up: When did you realize you’d go to grad school? Answer: It evolved gradually, she thought. She thought her being a “scholar” gradually developed, not crystallizing until she was an assistant professor. She explained her uneasiness with the term “intellectual” as opposed to being a researcher as well as her uneasy political identity between radicalism and liberalism.

01:33:40	Question: Graduate school? Answer: She remembered getting accepted everywhere, though Stanford was a fight because (faculty knew) she was trying to figure out how to land where John was as well as go to grad school. When John’s job “disintegrated,” she chose to go to UNC “for all the wrong reasons.” 

01:38:25	Follow up: Where would you go now? Answer: She noted that it was hard to know—she was good “at being a student,” but was intellectually unformed. Her major academic project actually came from her Stanford advisors, though she might have ended up in a totally different area had she integrated into UNC.

01:40:59	Question: Talk about your senior honors thesis. Answer: She tested the hypothesis (derived from one of Cancian’s family sociology classes and currents in anthro-pology) that women would have more power in societies where they contributed to food production. She then described her research, how Mike Hannan became her thesis advisor, and how the research changed as she progressed.

01:45:27	Follow up: You had a good relationship with Hannan? Answer: Yes; they stayed in touch, and she talked about him and his wife.

01:46:20	Question: Anything more about Stanford? Answer: She realized now that she was interested even as an undergraduate in Africa and race relations.

01:47:20	Question: Did you cross social boundaries at Stanford? Answer: Yes; as a freshman in her co-ed dorm, the experiment was to mix classes, and the girls there formed a close clique. She described the “ugly gender dynamics” of the dorm that year.

01:50:19	Question: Were Stanford students from CA? Answer: She described the mix of international, East Coast rebels, and West Coast students who attended.

01:51:21	Question: MA at UNC? Answer: She related how she revised her senior thesis to be her masters’ thesis, and could have been published had someone pushed her to do so.

01:53:18	Question: Talk about the program. Answer: She observed that it was a bad fit for her —Blalock had left and she thought she intimidated the faculty as a talented woman sociology graduate student and potential trouble-maker and feminist. She regretted that she didn’t connect because she had a fellowship, had no department office, and didn’t establish relationships with other students.

01:58:10	Follow up: Why did you terrify the faculty? Answer: She suspected it had to do with her forward personality, which lacked “femininity,” and also thought that there was more latitude for weird personalities among academic men. She also noted that she didn’t bond well with faculty or find mentors.

02:01:17	Follow up: Significant faculty figures? Answer: She quipped that some of her relationships were “significantly bad,” (with Wilson and Heise, for example) but that she had a good relationship with Lenski (who nevertheless inaccurately categorized her work), Rockwell, Elder and others. 

02:05:49	[no question] She noted that the other important component of her UNC years was her activism in feminist politics with NOW and then a socialist-feminist collective. These were more positive and formative (theoretically) than her academic ones.

02:06:44	Question: Talk about your thesis. Answer: She said she exited the thesis with the problem of solidarity—does it make you act collectively?—for which there wasn’t a vocabulary in sociology yet. She pointed to Hannan’s suggestion of Olson’s Logic of Collective Action as the turning point for her theorizing her dissertation, which revolved around rewards, punishment and systems of incentives for groups rather than individuals.

02:11:05	[no question] She explained how implementing her theory of incentives experiment-tally was part of the problem of her dissertation. She observed that hers was an extremely small experiment for sociology and how she took 5 years to finish her PhD.

02:13:38	Follow up: The defense? Answer: She explained how Wiggins had gotten a reputation as a harasser, how Dave Heise had handed her off to Wiggins, how Wiggins failed to send letters out for her when she was looking for a job and refused to approve the dissertation, how several colleagues chewed him out, how she finally went around him to get her committee to approve the defense, and how the committee approved her without an oral defense. Later on, it became clear that Wiggins thought she had complained about him being a harasser and was responding passive-aggressively.

02:21:52	Follow up: Did you meet with the committee? Answer: Yes; she described the “subdued” oral defense she had with her committee, and leaving without a sense of whether the work was any good. She explained how this experience was formative for her—not to be isolated, the intervention of her female committee members, etc.

02:24:32	Follow up: I’m sorry that this happened! Answer: She noted that it was less traumatic for her than it sounded, partly because she was self-assured, had friends and a good marriage, was able to blame Wiggins for the offense (instead of internalizing it). She reflected on her personality, which she thought was hard to deal with, and her willingness to go to other people with details of the situation.

02:28:10	Question: The job at Louisville? Answer: She recalled how she got a job at Louisville in a late round of interviewing and how she got a salary bump from a competitive offer. She described the university as a commuter campus with some good students but also weak junior college transfers and a small MA program.

02:31:41	[no question] She listed the important elements of her Louisville experience: 1) learning to work hard; 2) a factionalized department and 3) the Vanderbilt Conference. She outlined problems created by Louisville being “a school on the make” where senior non-research faculty weren’t getting raises, but junior faculty had research aspirations and were carrying the dean’s agenda. This worked itself out with bitter infighting in Sociology, but Oliver was able to maintain relationships with everyone in the department. 

02:36:05	[no question] She outlined the importance of the Resource Mobilization Conference at Vanderbilt University. Though she found out about the conference accidentally, she discovered at the conference “an intellectual home” where people were interested in what she was doing. This energized her and made her a figure in the theory of collective action.

02:40:15	Question: And this informs your research? Answer: Absolutely. She recounted doing a second experiment at Louisville, publications and conference papers, and how the Vanderbilt conference gave her the background to develop her theory work. She also noted that she was influenced by Anatol Rapoport’s visiting professorship.

02:42:23	[no question] Oliver detailed how she got her major theoretical paper published in American Journal of Sociology—from drafting it, revising it, finally getting some critical feedback which led to a second experiment including positive incentives, incorporating real-life examples that enlivened the paper, and resubmitting it as a much better paper to AJS. This paper led to her getting recruited to Wisconsin.

02:47:25	[no question] She observed that she “grew up” at Louisville, learning from her colleagues the difference between a real professional and an “aimless student” and that there are a lot of other smart people out there to whose ideas you should attend.

02:49:38	Question: Did you learn how to teach there? Answer: She observed that she taught at UNC, though she was just thrown in and never mentored. So she assessed herself as having done some good and some very bad teaching—at Louisville she taught 3 courses per semester plus a night school class (to avoid teaching summers). She felt comfortable (as a debater) in front of classes, and felt she taught methods very well, based on the Stanford model, but didn’t think she did lecturing very well. She spoke frankly about the difficult correlation between rigorous preparation and “winging it” and the success of lecturing.

02:56:52	Follow up: So Louisville was a useful step in your career? Answer: Yes; she said she wasn’t “ready for the big time” until she got mentored and learned to work at Louisville.

02:58:01	End of First Interview Session

Second Interview Session (September 23, 2009): Digital File

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

00:00:19	Question: Talk about coming to UW. Answer: Oliver reviewed writing the AJS article about rewards and punishments as incentives for collective action that prompted Gerald Marwell (an AJS reviewer and UW faculty) to meet with her at the American Sociology Assn conference, during which he asked her to apply to UW. 

00:04:05	[no question] She described the process of interviewing at UW, where the dept custom was to bring people in one at a time, not in bunches. She presented her work and interviewed with a number of people, but due to budget issues they could only offer her a visiting professorship, which she accepted.

00:07:05	Question: What did you know about UW’s dept? Answer: Only that it was a very good department, on the rise at the time. She cited her Louisville colleagues positive response to her getting the chance to “play in the big leagues.”

00:08:08	Follow up: So you understood the position was temporary? Answer: It was under-stood it would become permanent, with time on the tenure clock. The shortened ten-ure clock was an issue, and she talked about how the dept tried to help her with this.

00:10:14	Question: What would you teach? Answer: Early on, she team-taught a combined methods/ statistics class and “Women and Society.” Follow up: Was there orienta-tion? Answer: No, because she came initially as academic staff, though the dept treated her as faculty. She explained the “purifying” process of moving to Madison, living in University Housing, and working solitarily at first.

00:14:35	Question: Who were the heavyweights? Answer: Aage Sørensen; Robert Hauser; David Featherman; Halliman Winsborough; Bill Sewell; and others. But she said there was an egalitarian ethos in the dept, so her early treatment wasn’t stand-offishness but just ignorance that she was there. Follow up: What were the strengths? Answer: Demography, stratification, much the same as now.

00:17:17	Question: Your teaching load? Answer: 2-2; she was encouraged to keep up her research, since the tenure clock was ticking. Follow up: Did you have a mentor? Answer: Marwell was her “liaison,” and she discussed the department’s practice. Follow up: The undergraduates? Answer: Her big experience was that they were Northerners (less expressive) and that classes were larger.

00:21:44	Question: Any service activity? Answer: Very little; the dept tried not to give service to assistant professors.

00:22:48	Question: Did having a baby make it difficult in the dept? Answer: For her personally it worked out really well. She remembered making a conscious decision to risk not getting tenure rather than risk not having children, though she was intent on trying to do both. She recalled how Marwell, who was viewed by some as a sexist, helped her by suggesting that she think about taking leave and prioritizing what was important. 

00:27:07	[no question] Continuing to talk about having her first child, she explained how she went about “piecing together” a leave and then took unpaid leave in the fall during the spring semester. She reviewed debates in the dept over how much production to expect of those taking different kinds of leave—she actually thought leave gave her intellectual space to get her work done and helped her get tenure. She recounted details of how they balanced childcare, work, and research time.

00:33:52	Question: So what were you working on during your leave? Answer: She thought the major work was writing a paper on “critical mass and collective action,” but then realized that was published beforehand. This work was then submitted to AJS, but they also produced another critical mass paper. She explained how AJS sat on the paper until Marwell intervened and forced their hand.

00:38:37	[no question] Continuing to talk about her scholarship after having her daughter, she discussed trying to establish herself as a sole author with empirical work on neighbor-hood association activism, which highlighted variables that prompted action in situations when no one else would do something. Once American Sociological Review accepted this without revision, her tenure case looked good. This was in addition to writing up her Louisville research and publication with Marwell.

00:44:43	Question: When did you get tenure? Answer: The case was assembled in 1984 and she got tenure in 1985.  She didn’t recall any controversy that was her problem, but mentioned how the stress of the time period caused her to get very ill. Follow up: Other issues? Answer: Other than that she was an asst professor for 9 years, no.

00:47:53	Follow up: How does tenure change your career? Answer: She said that the stress shifted from getting tenure to continuing with teaching and research and adding service assignments, which were generally expected of associate professors. Follow up: Did you have more freedom in teaching? Answer: Not really; teaching wasn’t assigned, but one taught what one expected to teach. She explained why she didn’t really want to teach “Women and Society” because it didn’t fit her interests.

00:52:27	Question: Graduate students? Answer: She began picking up students when she got tenure and her publications became prominent. Follow up: Any significant ones? Answer: She suspected that prominent students of her were “products of the late 1990s” and not known as “Oliver protégés.”

00:54:15	Question: How is your research evolving after tenure? Answer: She noted that the early 1990s were difficult, finishing up the “critical mass” projects and a book, having a second child in 1987, and her husband doing a lot of travel for his job. Her research thus slowed down significantly, as she tried to switch gears from working with Marwell to starting some different projects on media coverage of protests.

00:58:12	Question: Service during this period? Answer: She listed various committees on which she’d served. Follow up: How do you get on these committees? Answer: She thought the various units called—nominations didn’t come from the dept. She explained why she had to decline being on the Grad School research committee, and thought this only affected her indirectly by not allowing her to integrate into UW as well as she could have been. Thus, she later volunteered for service committees, which was undervalued work in the university.

01:03:07	Follow up: Is service not valued? Answer: She felt that some committee work was pointless, and viewed as such, though sociology was very streamlined and “service-light,” with the chair trusted with broad latitude. She thought committee work she’d done was important, and had the side benefit of meeting colleague outside the dept. She would encourage junior scholars to engage in service, both to ease the overall burden and to connect more widely with the university.

01:06:50	Question: How well did you know Gary Sandefur? Answer: She knew Sandefur, Charles Halaby and Martin Cadwallader, but didn’t think it necessarily affected her getting called to do service. She noted that it could be perceived, since she did a lot of community service, that she didn’t pull her weight at the university.

01:10:04	[no question] She talked about offers she’d gotten to be dean after she’d been dept chair. Follow up: Was that tempting? Answer: At first, it was an ego boost, but she realized she didn’t want to do that.

01:11:08	Question: Talk about your research in the 1990s. Answer: She recounted finishing work on collective action, some unfinished work she started in 1987 on Dutch protests, and, when her children were older, accepting four conference deadlines in one summer. She outlined getting a grant to research protest selection in Madison newspapers in 1994, which she worked on with Dan Myers.

01:17:21	[no question] Continuing to talk about her research in the late 1990s, she remembered getting funded with Dan Myers to look formally at the interplay of regimes of protest. She discussed the understanding between them, the grant process, and jump starting her publication career by accepting four deadlines. She reflected on different styles of academic publishing—some published every draft of an idea, where she tended to wait until an idea was well-formed and publish once.

01:22:30	[no question] Oliver observed that she’d rather be working on repression, movements, and news coverage than “the prison stuff,” which was important and had gotten her published but was more of a public service project of making graphs of statistics.

01:24:14	Follow up: Do you enjoy that pressure? Answer: No. The different projects just unfolded, especially the prison project.

01:25:18	Follow up: How did you get into the prison project? Answer: From being an involved member of the community, which she saw as a human obligation. She recounted going back to church, getting involved in Madison urban ministry circles, and how she didn’t fit culturally with the socialists in town. Thus, she saw a flier for a “Money Education Prisons” conference at the same time she was developing a course on ethnic movements in the US, and got involved in planning forums on prisons and looking at statistics, which first led her to realize how bad Wisconsin was.

01:30:38	[no question] Continuing to talk about her prison research, she observed that initially, she got very little attention because people weren’t interested in the racial dimension of prisons. She then recounted how the project evolved into sociological research (which she thought would be fairly straightforward), how they got data from the Dept of Corrections that generated graphs for PowerPoint presentations, and how the visual presentation of the data made a huge difference in the impact of the project.

01:36:32	[no question] Continuing to talk about her prison work, she related the exhilaration of getting public attention for the issue. She’d done at least 80 presentations on the issue, often for free. Follow up: Does UW support it? Answer: Her colleagues treat her as if it is important. Follow up: Does this get you recognized? Answer: She thought so.

01:38:47	Question: Where is this data going to lead? Answer: The data had already made an impact by getting people to address the issue, and she liked to think she had impact as well. She discussed Noble Wray’s positive reaction to the data and conversations that had ensued about differential enforcement, poverty, and racism.

01:43:24	[no question] Continuing to talk about the impact of her research on prisons, she noted that from previous research she knew that the majority of crime in Madison was white and alcohol related, but didn’t result in prison sentencing because of pressure from the state. She also discussed work she’d done in Madison and Milwaukee trying to reveal data patterns that people actually already knew, but needed to see visually.

01:48:35	Follow up: Will you stick with this? Answer: For the time being—she’d signed a book contract for which she’d written a draft, and had learned that many of her early notions were naïve. She wanted to link incarceration to repression rather than poverty, but lacked some of the data to do so. 

01:50:44	Follow up: Are you surprised that you’re an expert on this subject? Answer: Not any more: initially she thought it would be easy, then realized how difficult it would be, and now had gotten used to it, though she’d gotten little professional recognition for studying it because she’d not published on it. She told people that this was what tenure was for, to pursue a project that wouldn’t build your career. She wanted to get back to more academic questions by integrating repression and group conflict into it, but saw her public activism continuing for the time being.

01:55:08	Question: Talk more about collective action. Answer: She mentioned that she was proud of the work she’d done on collective action, which had innovated and impacted succeeding scholarship by questioning the assumption that individual action could be aggregated to group situations—groups have different incentives. She outlined how this intervention resulted from Olson’s Logic of Collective Action and the content of the initial, most influential paper in the series she and Marwell published.

02:01:03	[no question] Continuing to talk about her collective action articles, she noted that though the “network paper” was published with a major error that made it less comprehensible and less influential, the others had major influence that led to much more and better work on collective action. Related to this, she talked about her reputation as a sociologist and about assigning her own work in her classes.

02:05:28	[no question] Continuing to talk about her influence in sociology, she talked about her graduate students’ important methodological work on newspapers. She quipped about working with a graduate student on Dam Movements in Brazil that led to her critical work on framing theory in social movements, though this was not her expertise.

02:10:46	Question: Teaching in the 1990s? Answer: Noting that she wasn’t very innovative in her courses, she talked about teaching research methods, which she felt she was good at because it was a “do-it” way of teaching it. Conversely, she struggled to teach her specialty (social movements) and struggled to lecture, because she found it difficult to distill her knowledge. 

02:15:00	[no question] She explained how she developed her “Ethnic Movements in the US” course during the period in which Ethnic Studies was being called for across UW’s campus. Based on Civil Rights movements and racial interaction, it had evolved over time to include a history of 4 groups, to include intensive journal writing and interaction between her and the students, and how this writing led the course to be formally turned into a “Comm B” (intensive writing) course.

02:20:23	[no question] Continuing to talk about teaching her “Ethnic Movements in the US” course, she explained how, with Brad Hughes of the writing program, they’d developed ways of teaching that allowed students to actively engage with and argue about issues (often in ungraded ways) and measured what they did in the course rather than how smart they were. She discussed a paper assignment that required students to argue for both sides of a critical issue, which allowed students to realize that both sides bring values to the table of an issue.

02:27:15	[no question] She reviewed the everyday progress of her “Ethnic Movements in the US” course, in which she did fairly unstructured lectures and read journals and the TAs did the grading. She stressed the importance of journals, which could be over-whelming but allowed her to know what students were thinking. She also reflected on the pros and cons of the fact that the course met both the Ethnic Studies E and Comm B requirements, which made the course in high demand. She suspected that both her and the course content itself helped to generate healthy discussion among students.

02:36:24	End of Second Interview Session

Third Interview Session (January 23, 2009): Digital File

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

00:00:19	Question: Talk about your role with Asian-American studies. Answer: She described the small program on whose executive committee she’d served since the late 1990s. She noted that it had taught her (from a large dept) about the difficulties of running a small program, always dependent on larger units at UW. Follow up: How did you get on it? Answer: She recounted how she taught about Asian-Americans in her Ethnic Movements course, which over time led to it being cross-listed with AAS.

00:03:55	[no question] She talked about the evolution of Asian American studies, moving from studying identity among Americans of (primarily East) Asian descent to studying immigrant populations, many from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim.

00:06:18	Question: What’s the rationale for AAS? Answer: She thought it was the same as for Chicano/a or Native American studies: 1) to provide an identity/background home on campus for Asian-Americans; 2) to keep pace with the growing Asian American demographic in the US—though there was debate over whether these units should be combined into an Ethnic Studies department.

00:11:24	Question: What’s the future for AAS? Answer: It was continuing, though still strugg-ling a bit. But it had in its favor that the growing Asian population was highly edu-cated, and therefore the scholarship was growing. Currently, the program had a certificate program (but no major) and the impact of its having no full-time faculty was that it was hard to generate momentum and visibility for the program.

00:14:51	Question: Is there a course on Japanese American internment? Answer: While it was a growing scholarly field, she didn’t think there was an entire course dedicated to it. She went on to talk about growing scholarship on discrimination against well-educated Asians in college admissions as well as on Asians statistically and sociologically (especially as concerns ethnic identity). Follow up: You’ll stay with it? Answer: Yes—as an “ally;” she was interested in the issues, though her central identity was sociology.

00:21:19	Question: Talk about your chairpersonship. Answer: She observed that she was in some ways a “default candidate,” since Sandefur was actually elected (with her as assoc. chair) while he was running for dean of L&S. She surmised that many thought she wouldn’t make a good chair because she didn’t socialize in the dept enough. 

00:23:47	Follow up: So what issues did you face? Answer: First, to get oriented to the position quickly and find an assoc. chair quickly. This was important because the associate ran junior faculty searches and TA appts, while the chair did budget, personnel, staff issues, etc. She described the scrambling of the first month and the importance of appointing popular demographer Lincoln Quillian as associate.

00:28:18	[no question] She discussed the department’s struggle with losing quality newly-promoted faculty to other universities, since UW did a great job developing talent.

00:28:55	Follow up: Was UW still ranked #1 when you became chair? Answer: Yes; she talked about the quality of the faculty and staff and why it was easy to be chair, since the staff dealt with management issues very professionally. She recalled making a point of being present in the chair’s office and the course release and salary bump.

00:32:18	Question: How much time was spent on personnel issues? Answer: She noted that personnel issues were pretty much the job—hiring assistant professors, spousal issues, etc. Follow up: What do you think about spousal hires? Answer: She said they tried to “play ball,” noting that they’d also accepted “trailing spouses” if their work was good. She noted the serious and courteous tenor of requests and considerations at UW for spousal hires, which had just become part of the university landscape.

00:38:24	[no question] She related other personnel issues in sociology—interpersonal relation-ships were not usually an issue, though she did have to resolve some sensitive gossip issues. Follow up: Merit pay? Answer: She explained the “arcane way” sociology did it, with all tenured faculty anonymously voting on merit and the budget committee making the final determination. Even when she had to single-handedly do merit raises on very constrained principles handed down, faculty didn’t give her too much grief because there was a culture of trusting the chair.

00:45:08	[no question] She also discussed the Demography Center, which she tried to be considerate toward, but which would eventually have to move out of the dept due to outside considerations.

00:46:31	Question: Did it make your job harder that Sandefur became dean? Answer: She thought that was impossible to determine, and that Hallaby’s role as assoc. dean was a closer contact to the chair’s position anyway. She expressed the importance of being internally well-governed to maintaining a good relationship with the deans. Follow up: Did it help with retention offers? Answer: She sometimes thought the deans were “too cheap or too late,” but contextualized that with the resources private universities had to engage in bidding wars, it was almost impossible for UW to keep up.

00:51:35	[no question] Continuing to talk about losing faculty to outside offers, she discussed some specific examples. Follow up: What is your reaction to outside offers? Answer: She complained that chairs couldn’t get preemptive raises, which made it explicit to faculty that they had to play the game. She also opined on the dangers of playing the game, which forced one to lie to friends, both at the target school and at UW, and created the serious risk of moving, even if you didn’t start thinking that way.

00:59:06	[no question] She continued by discussing the risks to the department of not proactively implementing merit raises for talented young faculty. Follow up: Will that change? Answer: She didn’t know, partly because she didn’t know how other systems worked. She talked about salary differentials in public and private universities.

01:01:05	 Follow up: Other major issues? Answer: She mentioned having to write a “consensual relationship” document, a situation in which she’d tried to preserve everyone’s dignity but follow university procedures that protected both UW and the parties involved.

01:06:19	[no question] Continuing with other issues in the dept, she noted personnel issues and how her personality dealt with these issues better than some of her male colleagues. She detailed one conflict between students and how she dealt with it discretely. Question: Would you be chair again? Answer: Probably not; she didn’t hate being chair, but there were norms against it. 

01:10:49	Question: Faculty Senate? Answer: She quipped that her involvement was minimal, explaining her ambivalence about faculty governance and listing her committee service over the years. Follow up: Your thoughts on splitting the Grad School? Answer: She didn’t know enough about the issue to voice specific opinions, but wondered what the move would actually accomplish and expressed her skepticism as to whether it was the best solution.

01:16:26	[no question] Oliver offered perspective on how budgeting at UW was “just nutty,” though it had improved since the 1980s. The administration was good helping researchers get external funding, but actually budgeting money was complicated, which she thought was a Purchasing issue, not an administrative issue.

01:21:20	Question: Assess deans and chancellors. Answer: She reflected that she had a sense of them as people, though not as policy-makers; and that she had developed a sense that faculty didn’t want to know the nuts and bolts of how the university worked. This led her to discuss the importance of undergraduate education, since alumni tended to donate to their undergraduate (not graduate) institutions. She had a high opinion of administrators as people, but thought they could do more to educate faculty.

01:25:19	[no question] Continuing to talk about administration, she talked about the chronic problem of funding for Letters & Science, wondering if campus budgeting was structurally unfair to it since it was the educational workhorse of the university but didn’t get the allocation of the budget it needed. She attributed some of the difficulties to: a) not budgeting for fringe benefits in grant applications and b) the tendency of L&S to have too many faculty and depend on faculty being “off-budget” with external funding in order to be solvent. 

01:30:41	Follow up: Donna Shalala? Answer: She thought Shalala was a good leader, though her up-front style annoyed a lot of people. She thought her move to increase out-of-state tuition, raise standards and make UW a desirable option for out-of-state students was good, though it went too far. She also mentioned Shalala’s annoying attempt to bring in a notable sociologist without consulting the dept, which flopped.

01:34:13	Follow up: Ward and Wiley? Answer: Having served on committees with him, she had high regard for Wiley as dean of the Grad School and his commitment to diversity and efficiency. She gave examples of how Wiley weeded through administrative messes quickly and efficiently.

01:38:24	Question: How has UW changed? Answer: Observing that she was hired in a budget crisis, she said that student quality had increased despite “one long budget crisis” since the 1980s, providing mass education in many classes, and being the target of political hostility in WI. Follow up: Why is that? Answer: She thought UW was often used as a whipping boy in political battles largely unrelated to it; and observed that counter-factually, some thought it was harder for Wisconsinites to get accepted due to diversity policies. 

01:44:12	[no question] She reflected on concerns that Wisconsin wasn’t rich enough a state to afford a great university like UW. She didn’t feel competent to predict whether UW could remain a great university, and if it could go the path of Michigan, which introduced its own costs. She thought UW needed to decide what kind of school, with what social ethos, it wanted to be in the future.

01:48:54	Follow up: Evaluate your time here. Answer: She was professionally very happy, though she regretted raising her kids away from their grandparents.

01:50:08	End of Third Interview Session

End of Oral History #1050