JoAnne Myers

Marist College
Poughkeepsie, NY
Transcribed by Ann Sandri
For the Marist College Archives and Special Collections






















Myers, JoAnne






Transcript
–
JoAnne Myers
Interviewee:
JoAnne Myers
Interviewer:
Gus Nolan
Interview Date:
October 11
th
, 2017

Location:
Marist Archives and Special Collections
Topic:
Marist College History

Subject Headings:

Myers, JoAnne



Marist College History



Marist College (Poughkeepsie, New York)
Marist College Social Aspects
Marist College Faculty




Summary:
JoAnne Myers discusses her early life, her interest in politics and feminist issues, and
her time teaching political science at Marist.











Joanne Myers: 00:00
[Gus Nolan: …
Didn't take that.] [Laughter] Thank you.
Okay, let me not kick you. [Laughter]
Gus Nolan:
00:10
Today is Wednesday the 18
th
of October.
JAM:
00:14
No, the 11
th
.
GN:
00:15
Oh, it’s the
11
th
? We’re a week ahead of ourselves.
Next
week is the 18th
and we’ll have something else
. But
today is the 11
th
of October, and we have the
opportunity of
[…]
interviewing Dr. JoAnne Meyers,
Marist professor of political science. Good afternoon
JoAnne.
JAM:
00:38
Good afternoon Gus.
GN:
00:42
There's about five different major parts to this little
interview. An introduction about your early years. Did
you envision coming to Marist. Your experiences here.
Kind of looking into the crystal ball, where do you see us
going. Let's start at the beginning. Can you summarize
kind of in a short way your early years? Where were you
born and brought up, and early education, and interests
in studies of music or art or hobbies? Who are you?
JAM:
01:14
So
[…]
, it turns out that
[…]
I was almost an illegitimate
child. And, so, my parents had to quick get married a
month before I was born. But my parents were both
raised on either side of a hill in Chelsea, Massachusetts.
My father's side was German Jews and my mother's
side were Ukrainian Jews. And so, there was a little
[…]
,
a little class issue there. But my parents left Boston and
I was born in Miami Beach, Florida and we lived down
there for five years. I have a half-sister who was my
father
’
s [daughter] by his first wife who had been my
mother's best friend. So, there's a whole soap opera
involved in there. And then we moved back up to the
Boston area.
JAM:
02:19
[Pause for technical difficulties]. So, we moved back up
to the Boston area
[…]
and this was in 1960 and so I was
entering first grade. And it turns out that my parents
could not vote because they did not pay their poll tax,
which they should have paid in January of 1960. So,
when my father went to register to vote cause this was
that infamous Nixon/Kennedy election. My father
couldn't because they had not paid the poll tax in



January, but they hadn't been living there in January.
So, my parents basically got disenfranchised. But I
remember playing in the school yard and we actually
skipped rope to
[the tune] “
Kennedy in the White
House, Nixon in the Lighthouse. Kennedy dancing as a
groom, Nixon dancing with a broom.
”

JAM:
03:44
So
[…]
, I became very political basically early on. We in
second grade moved to Mamaroneck, New York. And I
did most of my public schooling in Mamaroneck. And I
was very lucky, in fifth grade, I was head of the LBJ
debate team. And a good friend of mine was head of
the Goldwater debate team. In fact, John kept on asking
my mother through the years whether or not I was
gonna run for president. But I became very much
enamored of our political system in fifth grade. And I
always thought that
“hmm
maybe I'll be a lawyer
[…]
maybe I will do that.
”
And then in high school was the
height of the Vietnam era, the height of the
[…]
beginning of the woman's movement. And I was very
lucky that one of my teacher
’s
best friend was William
Kunstler, who was the lawyer for Abbie Hoffman for the
Pentagon papers.
JAM:
04:57
So, all of these people came through my high school.
And so, I had a very politicized high school. I was also
very lucky that my favorite teacher in high school, Duke
Shermer, handed me Kate Millet's
Sexual Politics
. So, I
became a feminist early on. I sort of knew that I wanted
female role models and I didn't have them in our school
library. In elementary school, we only had a bio of
[…]
.
GN:
05:35
Washington and Lincoln? [Chuckle].
JAM:
05:36
No, mostly men. There was one of Joan of arc. There
was one of Florence Nightingale, and there was a very
simple one of Virginia Dare, the first woman born in the
United States. But nothing really [substantial].
[…]
I
went to the librarian and we found more books.
GN:
06:00
Well when you moved out of
[…]? This
is going through
high school and then going on to college?
JAM:
06:11
Actually I had been looking at schools. I
[…]
basically
was going to graduate a year earlier from high school.
But then I got caught up with a teacher who I was doing
some work with, so I spent another, an extra semester
[in high school]. And I, then, was interviewing [with]


different schools, different colleges. I interviewed at
Colgate, which was just going coed at that point. But I
basically stopped that interview because I don't think
that the dean who was interviewing me really wanted
women there. So, I got up and left the interview.
GN:
06:52
Early on
there’s a certain independence here
?
(laughter).
JAM:
06:55
Yes
[…]
I would say I was a strong-willed child. I would
go to
Beloit […]
or Williams College [as other options, as
opposed to Colgate].
JAM:
07:07
But then
[…] a friend[‘s]
, of my mother's, daughter was
going up to Skidmore. So, I went to visit it, and literally I
went up in November for an interview and they offered
me a scholarship. And I ended up there in January. I
basically left high school, like on one week, one Friday
in January and was up at Skidmore that Monday.
GN:
07:34
And that would be in the mid-sixties?
JAM:
07:37
No, this was actually in the early seventies. So, this was
‘
72. So, this was January
of ’72
.
GN:
07:45
Through college what did you do? What was your major
concentration or major?
JAM:
07:50
So, I was a double major. I majored in government and
philosophy, and I was actually interested in revolution. I
should go back and say that one of my favorite books
growing up was
Johnny Tremain
by
[…].
God, I just lost
her name.
GN:
08:08
Alright, and I can't pull it either.
JAM:
08:11
Anyway, so much so that I had
[…]
the elementary
school librarian, [realizes name of author] Esther
Forbes, get Esther Forbes
’
biography of
Paul Revere and
the World He Lived
In, and that was actually her
dissertation, her history dissertation, and I read that in
sixth grade. I was very much enamored of the American
revolution and how that came to be. And so my working
at Skidmore as a double major, I looked at revolution
[…]
, and basically you need insiders and outsiders to
actually have a revolution. And I, in fact, even today, I'm
very enamored of how change happens. And so at


Skidmore I was the managing editor of the Skidmore
newspaper. I also bartended my way through school. At
one point
[…]
I used to say that I was one of the only
white girls on scholarship there. I had a work study in a
nursery school.
GN:
09:16
You graduated from Skidmore. Where do you go?
JAM:
09:19
So, I graduated in May of
’
75, and I end up at RPI
[Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute] in their
communications program thinking that I was going to
be a writer. I did not want to go to law school. I had
gone to
[…]
some classes at Albany law and found them
very boring. And they wanted you to think a certain
way. And the minute you tell me I have to do something
a certain way, I don't want to do it, I am strong willed.
So, in communications I studied political
communications and public policy. I then started
TA’ing
in urban environmental studies for Paul Zuber and I
ended up going on for my PhD there. I was the first
woman to get my PhD through his program.
GN:
10:17
Moving on to your jobs now. When did you first begin
to get into the activity? I know eventually
you’re
in New
York City. How do you get there?
JAM:
10:31
So, all the way through my schooling, I was bar tending.
And then when I was at RPI, I started doing projects for
Rensselaer County. And at one point I turned to Zuber
and I said,
“
you know what? What I really need to do is I
really need to see how policy gets developed and
implemented.
” A
nd I said,
“
I think I want to go and work
in New York City.
”
And so, I got a job with Mayor Koch
in his office of community board affairs. And I basically
worked as a liaison between two agencies and the
community boards.
JAM:
11:23
I was the first woman to be part of the street cut
construction committee. And so, I got to implement my
first law there, which was a small little local law, which
said that citizens needed to be notified when a street
was going to be opened up. So they would know that
there was going to be a detour. But I also added to that,
that anybody who needed to make a street cut for that
street should be working at the same time. So you're
not opening the street and closing it and opening it and
closing it. And during a belt tightening, I was told since I
was the last hired, I would be the first fired. But, Koch


very nicely just said,
“y
ou could go to almost any
agency, which agency do you want to go to?
”

JAM:
12:19
And so I interviewed at a whole bunch of agencies and I
always say that I got picked up by sanitation. And in the
Department of Sanitation there was the Office of
Resource Recovery and Waste Disposal Planning. And I
actually got to teach other municipalities how to
recover the methane that happens naturally as garbage
decomposes. And so, I walked on landfills from New
York City to LA.
GN:
12:51
Did you do that with some knowledge of chemistry or
how [did you educate these other municipalities]?
JAM:
12:55
So, there's another part of me is that I got involved with
Clearwater as an environmentalist when I was up at RPI.
So, I'm a pretty good quick study, so I learned how I
learned how garbage decomposes. And I knew that that
as somebody who's going to be implementing policies, I
don't need to know the exact how I'm going to do it, but
for garbage gas basically you can actually sink a pipe in,
form a vacuum and light a match, and
you’ll
have a flare
because the gas will go to where there's least
atmospheric pressure.
JAM:
13:36
So I had a group with Brooklyn Union Gas Company and
Getty Synthetic Fuels,
[…]
actually now does a project
on Fresh Kills, the world's largest landfill, and they
recover and purify the landfill gas there. And about
20,000 homes on Staten Island are fueled by
[…]
my
project. That project started in the early eighties, it's
still going, gung ho now. So, I got to teach other
municipalities how to recover their gas, how to use this
resource so it's not a hazard. I also was the person that
the Department of Sanitation brought out if there was
going to be any problems. Like, people didn't want to
mix their garbage and their sewerage. So, you know,
they bring me out there. I also implemented the New
York City Bottle Bill.
GN:
14:37
I have to move on because time is an issue, in the sense
[…]


JAM:
14:39
So anyways, so I then
[…]
told my commissioner,
“
I've
done everything here on the city level. It was now time
to move up
.”



GN:
14:47
So, you move up to Albany?
JAM:
14:49
So, I actually was on the train to Albany
[…]
to go see a
Talking Heads concert and to deliver my resume to
different commissioners and politicos that were
working in Albany. And I ended up sitting next to an
associate commissioner for Housing and Community
Development on the state level. And they had just
gotten chapter 403 of the laws of 1983,
[…]
passed that
June and this was August. And they were going to have
to implement and take rent control and rent
stabilization, which were two different programs, bring
them together under the state with no funding, but a
whole bunch of mandates.
JAM:
15:34
And so I was hired to implement that. I worked on that,
I left that to a deputy commissioner, and did housing
policy for a second. And then I was
[…].
Mario Cuomo,
who was governor then
[…]
had Fort Drum, Fort Drum
was just a National Guard facility. And the federal
government was looking for a place to house the 10th
Mountain Light Division, which is 10,400 troops strong,
in a place where they could actually do something new,
which was off base housing of families so that they
would really be a light division. They could keep on
training new people to come in to wherever the fort
was. So, I did it with Liz Ritter. We were the governor's
point people coordinating 48 towns, three counties, and
two countries in developing this Fort Drum.
GN:
16:36
The year range for this
would be when, in the late ‘70s?

JAM:
16:38
This was, no, this was actually in a
’
84
–

’
85, and it was
up and running in
‘
86.
GN:
16:49
Okay, cause you
’re
gonna soon come
to Marist now […]

JAM:
16:52
And so as soon as Fort Drum was, now, going to be a
reality. And what Liz and I had to do was we had to
figure out what the housing impact was going to be in
an area that had not seen any development since 1860.
And not only where there are 10,400 troops, there were
their 20,000 dependents and then all the other add-ons
that come, the hangers on that come. And so, it was
really going to change the greater Fort Drum area.
Landlords were saying, you know, instead of charging
$135 for a whole house, rent per month, they could


charge $735. That's what the federal government was
paying.
JAM:
17:39
And so there were little green dollar signs in their eyes.
So anyway,
[…]
we also put together a water authority.
We had to do a whole bunch of things to get this to
happen. But then I turned to Governor Cuomo, I said,
“
Good, I've done this now I think I'm ready to go back to
teach.
”
Unfortunately, this was in April, which is not
really the month that you go out on a job market for.
But he said,
“
good luck, okay.
”

[…]
You know, write
when you get work type of thing. And I actually
interviewed at Marist with Louis Zuccarello. And I
interviewed one day
there […]

GN:
18:18
How did you know about Marist?
JAM:
18:20
So, how
[…]
? Now in the background of all of my jobs,
I've
[…]
worked as a cook on the Clearwater, so I was
always sailing up and down here.
JAM:
18:31
And one of my good friends was actually working IT
here at Marist, Annie Wynn, and she said
“O
h, I think
there's an opening for political scientists.
”
And so,
Annie, who actually just retired from Amazon, was the
one who introduced me to Marist. I did my research
about Marist. And so, I interviewed here and I also
interviewed at the Shiva.
[…] T
he Shiva was very closed
minded in so much as that I was only going to be able to
teach certain courses, but they also didn't really know
what they wanted in a professor. So I actually said that
they had to figure out, you know, do they need
someone to teach political communication or what?
And so, until they figured it out, they shouldn't be
looking for someone. But I really liked Marist.
JAM:
19:33
I liked the values that I had read about, that Marist
brothers had taken in other faculty from other schools
that had been let go because they had protested, for
instance, the Vietnam War.
GN:
19:50
That's an interesting point. But at this time, Dennis is in
place now. Dennis has been here for five years or more.
JAM:
19:57
So Dennis came in
, what, ‘
79 and this is
‘
86
[…].



GN:
20:04
So, he's president, but it's really
Louis and […]. W
ho is
the dean then? Was it Andrew Molloy or Louis
Zuccarello?
JAM:
20:13
No.
[…]
there was a woman who actually interviewed
me and then Marc vanderHeyden actually was the one
who I signed my contract with. Okay, so, yeah, Mark
was just coming on board.
GN:
20:28
Okay. And then you're coming into this department, the
Political Science [department]. Who's in it at the time?
Who
’s
the chair?
JAM:
20:34
Louis Zuccarello was the chair. Vernon Vavrina was
there, Lee Miringoff
[…]

GN:
20:46
Miringoff was in political science?
JAM:
20:47
Yes.
GN:
20:48
Okay. Do you recall the conditions on campus though? I
mean, where was your office?
JAM:
20:55
My office was in the old Fontaine, which was
[…]
in the
back. Actually, I was in the center of the building
[…]

GN:
21:05
Did you have a Hudson view?
JAM:
21:06
No, I did not have a Hudson view until the last few years
in the old Fontaine that I moved across the hall.
GN:
21:15
Of course the old one has been replaced now by this
beautiful library. And the library in those days, that's
another story.
JAM:
21:21
The school was unique. I mean one of our storage
closets was actually an old shower that the brothers
used to use in Fontaine.
GN:
21:35
How did you find the students at the time when you
arrived on the scene here? You have had a vast
experience of other kinds of exposures to teaching.
How to define the Marist students?
JAM:
21:51
So, I’ve found that
the Marist students hadn't learned
yet that they like learning. They had been basically, and
I still see it now today, that most of them learn by rote.


They don't learn to think, they think that they just have
to sort of check off the boxes and go on. And
[…]
in the
very beginning, Marist, this was still mostly first-
generation students going off to college.
That’s
what we
got here at Marist. And so, the students really didn't
know what to expect because they didn't have that
heritage of learning. And it wasn't until their first or
second year in, when they were really in, that often
they realize that they like learning. That learning was
exciting, that playing with ideas was exciting.
GN:
22:42
How did you do that? How did you get them to take this
approach? Was it quite challenging in terms of
activities? Papers?
JAM:
22:49
It was a combination of things. I would tell them about,
you know, my life
. I would make them […]
they'd read,
they'd write, they
’d
do analysis. They would go out and
do internships. So, there was a whole combination of
things, but they had to learn that learning was not just
memorization. They had to use the knowledge.
GN:
23:17
In the first years did you find yourself being the
professor telling them, and that changed? Or from the
beginning, you were able to bring a kind of
[…]
you
wanted to know what they thought.
JAM:
23:28
Yeah. My background, because it's interdisciplinary
from [varied educational and professional experiences]
[…]
, I think that you bring in a whole bunch of different
things. And as a feminist, I also think that
[…]
I don't
know everything. I would actually believe that as
Socrates said, it's the wise man, he was very gendered,
it was the wise man who knows what he doesn't know
and goes and seeks out information, and it's the
ignorant man who thinks he knows it all. And I always
start off my classes saying that. So, I tell my students,
there's no such thing as a stupid question. Except for
“
if
it's going to be on the t
est,” t
hat's a stupid question.
But if they're not curious, then they have to learn to be
intellectually curious. You know, they have to challenge
things. And my whole life was always challenging
everything.
GN:
24:24
Was there any issue of problem solving? Did you say,
“here’s an issue, let me see what we can do about it”?



JAM:
24:19
Yeah. I would actually give them, you know, real life
issues. Like how, how would you do this? How should
we do this? I believe that
[…]
if we are in this modern
liberal democracy, the citizen, and all of them are
citizens, they are
‘
we the people
.’
I do now agree with
Rousseau that a republic is the wrong type of
government because a republic means I get to vote, and
then I send somebody off to Albany or Washington or
wherever and then I don't see them. I don't pay
attention to them until
they’re
up for reelection. And
this is sort of how we got where we are now. Where for
the last election, 56% of the registered voters, and
that's only 80% of 100%.
JAM:
25:12
You know, I always tell
them “
here's set theory, I've
never thought I was ever going to use that after learning
it in high school.
”
But set theory is that if there's 100%
of the population who could vote, that's everybody over
the age of 18 who are citizens, only 80% of those people
are registered to vote. And out of that 80% we get our
shorts up in a knot. If 56% go out to vote, that's 56% of
80%. That's not that much.
GN:
25:47
No, and then the whole US can just about get half. And
not even in this case, this past election. So, most of the
American people want this? No way [laughter].
JAM:
25:56
So, you know, I get them involved. In fact, I was just at a
conference up at Maxwell School and that was one of the
things they were talking about was that citizens are not
involved.
JAM:
26:06
If it's a local election, a mayoral election, 30% of the pie,
of that 80% come out to vote. And if it's a board of
education vote, it's even less. So, I tell them how much
impact that they can have. And I said,
“
and Jefferson,
who was a states' rights-er, he said that it's the
government closer to you that's actually delivering
services to you. You should be more involved there
.”

GN:
26:32
It reminds me of, this solving things this way, even in
communications we have that kind of organization and
communications design. There's a veteran's hospital in
Chicago
, […] it must be
eight stories high, it was a whole
series of five elevators and
there’s an
actual story of a
patient being put on the elevator and going down and
something happened. And for the next 24 hours he rode
up and down on that elevator unattended. And so, the


question to the class
is “W
ell, what happened?
”
Well,
you can see them all kind of saying
“
when they got to
the bottom, the attendant got off, he met somebody,
the elevator door closed. So, he figured, the elevator
took it [the patient].
”
So, without his [patient], you
know, how can he correct it and then go to this whole
process of saying, you know, checking out, signing,
signing for delivery, signing for acceptance. I mean they
are doing the solvation
[…],
the solution to: here is an
issue,
“
what would you do with it?
”
Whereas when I
first started teaching, I was told,
“
you're the teacher,
you tell them. They don't know anything, you have to
tell them what
.”
I found out, that's not true [laughter].
JAM:
27:43
No, and actually that's a really interesting thing. So,
when I was in Grad School one of my side jobs was as a
substitute teacher
[…]
in the Troy high schools. And I
would get a call at five o'clock in the morning,
“
would I,
you know, do
Home ec?”
and I'
d say “
as long as I'm not
putting in Zippers.
”
And so, one day it was a math class
and it was a sweat hog math class. Now math is not my
long suit at all. Thank goodness I'm wearing sandals and
my fingers are here, I can count to 20 almost. And so, I
said,
“
well, I'm not sure about math.
”
And the guy sort
of talked me into it and he said,
“
oh, the teacher will
leave a ditto sheet, you know, just do it.
”

GN:
28:31
Keep them busy.

JAM:
28:32
And so I said,
“
okay
.” W
ell, I went in and I looked, I said,
“
oh look, they're 21 problems. Okay. And there are 18
of you.
”
I said,
“
so, here we'll do a problem together,
then we'll do another problem together. And then each
one of us will do a problem.
”
And we did the whole
sheet and then we started talking, and I ended up
subbing for this class for another month while the
teacher was out. And all of these kids, you know, pass
their [exams]. They had just been told they were the
sweat hogs, they knew nothing, they would never do
this. And I just, you know
[…]

GN:
29:10
Well, okay. Come back to Marist. Have you found the
students [have] changed in your 20 years, 30 years
here?


JAM:
29:20
So, the biggest change I think is that the students now
know that they have to go to college. You know, so, I
have a whole bunch of students that have to go to
college. You know, to get a job. It's become a big
marker for getting a job. And a lot of the students don't
read now.
JAM:
29:44
I think that our media has changed, where it used to be
that you had to pay attention to what shows everybody
was watching so you could be fluent in that currency.
Now the students are on their iPhones or
they’re
on
their social media and they don't read. And if you don't
read, you can't write well. So, I'm always pushing my
students to read. And so, that's one change is that the
students are not readers anymore. And the second
change, I think, that's really important is that we are
getting more students that have special educational
needs. That we might not have seen before because
Marist has always been very supportive of students with
dyslexia, for instance. And
[…]
my brother was a severe
dyslexic, so I learned how to deal with him. And he
actually went on and got his degree from NYU even
though he basically read on a fourth-grade level.
GN:
31:01
Well, I had a student like that and I inquired about how
to have him checked, and he was quite insulted that I
would bring this up.
But […], a
t the time [Nelson]
Rockefeller was governor, I
said “you know
the
governor of New York
[…]
has problems reading, getting
words mixed up, and so on.
” I
said,
“
so, it's not a
disgrace,
[…]
and maybe we can correct it
[…].”
Well, it
was a hard pill to swallow. But, if you recognize it, at
least you could maybe
[…] solve it.

JAM:
31:34
And that's what I tell my students. One of the good
things about Marist is that we have such great support
systems here. So, they can go to the writing center
, […]
and when they're out in the real world, then they know
that this is how they have to surround themselves. They
have to surround themselves with someone who's a
better writer or a good editor or whatever.
GN:
31:54
[I’m]
Turning a few pages here. Tell me now about your
take on the spirit of the faculty at Marist. What would
you say about that now and then? What was it like?
How do you see it now? Or is there a change?


JAM:
32:11
There's been a big change in faculty. Not In values. I
think that one of the good things about Marist is that
we always have recruited people that really embrace
the values
[…]

GN:
32:31
Like learning more than money?
JAM:
32:33
Yeah, like learning more than money. I always tell my
students, I'm not a capitalist, I missed that lesson. And
that the people are really dedicated. My colleagues are
very dedicated, not only to their own intellectual life,
but the intellectual life of the institution. I have seen the
[…]
, and let me just go back for a second. So, one of the
problems with the fact that a lot of us are not capitalists
is that we haven't stood up for ourselves sometimes. So
for instance, we, during one contract negotiation under
Bill Olson, we got a really bad contract. And when
people went to complain about it, the board of
directors, board of trustees actually gave us even a
worse contract.
JAM:
33:32
And this is sort of when I lost a little respect for Dennis
Murray because one of my colleagues went to him and
he was told, you know, he's lucky that he even has a
job. So, at that I felt that the faculty was a little beaten
down
[…] a
nd that we didn't have a backbone. But I was
the one who was sitting up in a faculty meeting and
realized
[…]
how many people needed to have
nominated my name to get me elected to [the Faculty
Grievance Committee]. So, I became the first head of
the Faculty Grievance Committee, the first female head
of it.
GN:
34:14
Tell me what's the glue that kept you here for 30 years?
JAM:
34:22
So, what has kept me here is A.) the community. But
also, I think that while it would have been easier for me
to go to another school where there were more people
like me, I always say that I'm the other, other, other. I'm
not male, I'm not Catholic and I'm not heterosexual, but
I get to be that grain of sand that makes the Pearl.
JAM:
34:47
So, I have been here working
[…]
to make positive
changes, but also to get the students that we get, to get
them to think differently, to think more expansively.
GN:
35:06
Have you been accepted?


JAM:
35:08
I think so. I think I've been accepted, and I think that
there are some administrators that look at me and just
go
“o
i.
”
Or the Irish Catholic or the Italian Catholic,
those were the big divisions when I first came here,
whatever that version was.
GN:
35:25
But certainly you've had some very tender friends.
JAM:
35:28
I've had some wonderful friends. Jerry White was my
bestest, of bestest, of bestest friends. I spoke to him not
only here on campus, but we shared recipes, we shared
politics, we shared books. We shared
[…]

GN:
35:47
TV programs? [chuckles]
JAM:
35:48
Everything. LK [Linda Boyd Kavars] always says that I
have an extra three hours a day because I'm not talking
to him on the phone when I get home.
GN:
36:01
If you had a chance now to talk to the board, what
would you recommend to the board? Give me two or
three changes
[…]. O
r, one thing, what should be
maintained and what
’d
be a good thing if we change
this? Like, four and three teaching, or whatever.
JAM:
36:16
Well, it would be really nice if
[…]
and it's not just going
from a four class to a three class. For the faculty, and
this is what I was saying way back then, it's also what
our students are learning. We still treat our students,
unfortunately, as if they're in parochial school. They're
taking five classes, we mark off their hours. It's very
parochial. It doesn't allow them to be expansive
thinkers themselves. I mean I really like to push towards
more experiential learning and more flexible [learning],
but they should be doing a four, four level.
GN:
36:59
Do you have a model or a place that does it kind of in an
ideally [ideal?] way?
JAM:
37:04
Well there are a whole bunch of things. So, I would like
them not to have grades because I think our students
are grade grubbers and partly that's because you need a
GPA to get a job or you need a GPA to get into it a
school.
JAM:
37:18
But there are schools, such as Sarah Lawrence, where
the professors would say
“
Gus, you
’d
do a lot better if


you open the book and write that down. Gus, you'd do
a lot better if you came to class,
”
and hand write these
notes out to them instead of giving them a grade. Cause
I think that you should be able to, you know, honors,
pass and fail [honors-pass-fail]. I think that it would
actually mean more if I'm writing it out and I've been
trying
[…], like
at midterms. That's exactly how
midterms should be,
[…]
to the student,
[…]
here's how
you should improve, not to just say [how you did]. And
one of the things I do with my students, because writing
is so important, is that they get to learn to rewrite.
JAM:
38:05
So, I hand them back a paper and they have a week to
rewrite to answer my concerns cause otherwise all they
do is look,
“
oh, I got a C from that bitch
,”
and throw the
paper away. And the next time they write a paper they
have the same mistakes. So, they get to rewrite. So,
doing away with grades, treating the students as if they
are 18-year olds and adults, okay, so that's one thing. I
also
[…]
think that this push for online classes is money
grubbing. Because if you're teaching a class for eight
weeks to an adult learner, there's too much life that
happens. I almost think that it shouldn't be an eight
week online that it needs to be a little bit more open
ended on that.
JAM:
38:57
But that's probably not in my purview. But what would I
tell the board? I would say that Marist is not meant to
be
[…]
, higher education is not meant to be a
moneymaker. It is not meant to be a business. It is in
the business of producing good citizens who can think,
who are critical thinkers. We need to get back to that
business, and I think that their focus is not there. I also
think that there needs to be a lot more turnover on the
board level. And I would love to see faculty, even if
they're not faculty members from Marist, faculty
members from another school. We have all business
people. They need to hear other voices.
GN:
39:54
What about social justice and things of that sort?
JAM:
39:56
Well, I've always been there on the ramparts for social
justice issues, environmental ones, women's issues.
Kate Millett
[…]
became when I came here
[…]
. And
another thing was that I got to meet Kate Millett.
Sexual
Politics
, I told you, was a book that was given to me
when I was in high school. I became very, very close
friends with Kate. In fact, her memorial is in a couple of


weeks. She just passed. I was supposed to be in Paris
with her next weekend.
GN:
40:30
Look into the crystal ball. Where are we going and how
are we going to get there?
JAM:
40:35
So, I think it's really interesting that replacing Dennis is
David Yellen. David is sort of the un-Dennis
[…] is
sort of
how I remember the Uncola, the un-Dennis. And I think
that it's a move back since he actually had started off as
an academic lawyer himself. That we're moving back,
and maybe we'll value academics a little bit more, that
intellectual life.
GN:
41:19
But come back to other things now, I mean, how about,
you mentioned online learning. How about online
learning [for] undergraduate [level-students]?
JAM:
41:26
So, I don't think that our students are disciplined
enough really to do online learning themselves. And I
think it could be a component of our system. I think
what we do best is we energize our students by having
[…]. S
o, I teach using the Socratic method
[…] a
lot.
Getting your
[the students’]
opinions, I can decenter
myself, I am not the landfill of all knowledge. Then I can
learn from them as much as they can learn from me.
GN:
42:07
If you had them on campus and you got them
interested in wanting to learn. And then they were out
and you're gave them a syllabus to complete,
“
do this
[…], read
these books and tell me about them when you
finish
.”

JAM:
42:27
I think that might be
, […]
that you need to have them
here and invigorate them and encourage them and
empower them, give them the tools. Right. And then,
because our students, as I said, they're late bloomers.
They haven't learned to learn yet. And I think that for
the past
[…]
20 years our elementary and high school
education system, our secondary education, has been
teaching to the test. And our students are really good
at,
“
I know this right now, then I can regurgitate it
,”
but
they don't know how to use it.
GN:
43:05
It's gone tomorrow.


JAM:
43:07
Yes. They don't know how to use that information, they
don't know how to critically think. And so they have to
learn that. And that's a skill that you learn sometimes
with your butt in the chair, sometimes with your hands
in the mix.
GN:
43:21
How do you feel about abroad programs?
JAM:
43:25
So, some of our abroad programs are absolutely,
rigorously wonderful. The Hansard program, for
instance, and some of them are just fluff. I think that
the good part about our students going abroad is that if
they get out of the Marist bubble or the American
bubble, and they mix it up
[…],
and travel on their own,
and they have new experiences. When they come back
to the United States their eyes are open. I have a big
problem with American exceptionalism when I teach
human rights, for instance, most of the time. And then
one of the reasons I don't use
Nicholas Kristof’s
book
Half the Sky
, it's because he says all the problems are
over there, wherever over there is, but we have the
same problems here. We have abject poverty. We have
people with
out […],
we have all of these things here,
but if we always think that we're so perfect
[…] we
won't solve our own problems. How can we impose our
problems?
GN:
44:38
You know Joseph Belanger? Well cause he would go
wild with this tourism. Just going to Europe and visiting
the countries. Well, even that has its merits as you said,
seeing other conditions, I imagine, really can change a
person. I travel [a] limited [amount]. I've been to Japan,
I've been to Australia, I
’ve been
to Iran so I have some
[…]. A
nd their way of thinking. I mean I could
n’t
get
over, [with] Reggie my brother in Japan, and going to a
coke machine and putting whatever the coin in and
“
do
you want a large or a small
?”
You say
“
the small.
”
Okay,
no change. It's your choice, the price is the same
whether you get the big or the small. Our thinking could
not understand that, bigger means you have to pay
more.
JAM:
45:36
Yeah, that totally changes things. And
[…]
what I tell my
students is that when you go,
[…]
when you're traveling
abroad and you're meeting someone, they're not going
to ask you about what TV show that you watched last
night. They're going to ask you about those things that


your mother probably told you that you can't talk
about: politics, sex, religion.
GN:
45:58
Yeah, okay.
JAM:
46:00
And
[…]
you learn to mix it up. You learn to have those
civil discussions. And you can still raise a glass of wine
with them. And we used to have that. We've lost that in
our political discourse in the past eight years.
GN:
46:19
Finally, is Marist worth the investment? Now,
investment is a complicated word. I'm talking about
money.
I’m
talking about time. I'm talking about
friendship. Leaving home
, […]
social things. For high
school, there's 10,000 students looking around here this
season
, 1,000 of which we’ll accept
for next year. Is
putting four years of their life [into a Marist education]
worth the investment?
JAM:
46:50
So, here's the issue, and I think that we have a few
issues here. One, most of the students who are coming
to Marist come onto Marist campus, look around and
go “oh
God, it's so beautiful.
”
Dennis did a wonderful
job and we are a beautiful campus. And they come here
because they liked the campus. It's convenient to
wherever they're living. They got a sports scholarship.
They're not really coming here for academics. They
might have heard about the Marist Poll. But they really
are not
[…]
, they don't know who's going to be teaching
them. No, they're more wowed by McCann Center, or
the new dorms or whatever. Yeah.
[…] It’s
not until later
that they learn
, that […]
they realize we have a
wonderful faculty that are invested in them. But I think
that that's sort of normal for the type of student that
we're getting
. […] T
he average
[…]
student who hasn't
realized
[…]
what they really want to be or could be.
GN:
48:09
And the other side of that is their parents are very much
concerned that they go someplace for the next four
years
[…]
and have that experience.
[…] You know more
stories about this than I do.
JAM:
48:23
And so, a lot of parents are say
ing “
well, if I'm going to
be investing
[…]
$40,000 a year,
”
or some portion of
that.
GN:
48:32
What job are we going to get out of it?


JAM:
48:33
Yeah. And so, the conference that was just up at the
Maxwell School. There was
[…]
one panel where this
consultant said he'd rather hire someone with a liberal
arts degree who knows how to problem solve then
someone
[…]
who has a technical [background], who
has either computer skills, or who has management
skills because you can learn some of that. But someone
who can look at an issue, and critically think about it
and problem solve. He said,
[…] and write well
. And so,
it’s
that writing well. And even a friend of mine who had
been the associate police chief up in Saratoga Springs,
one of the things he said, he always asked
[…],
when he
was interviewing the people who had passed the civil
service tests to write something. And he said, because if
they can't write, whatever ticket they're writing or
whatever report they
’re
writing, would not hold up in
court. You have to write well.
GN:
49:43
Well, very good. I'm pretty much finished. Will you tell
me, is there something we didn't touch that you think
should be recorded,
or […]
that would help us
understand what might best be going on. An insight into
Marist.
JAM:
50:02
So, there's one other point that
[…].
So, I've been
involved in faculty governance. I was an untenured AAC
[Academic Affairs Committee] for a second. Then I've
been on FAC [Faculty Affairs Committee], I've been on
Rank and Tenure [Rank and Tenure Committee], I've
done all of that. But one of the things that still upsets
me is, about a year and a half ago, a group of faculty
[members] got together and they wrote a [white paper
on] climate change. They said that we at Marist, we
have an environmental science and environmental
policy program. We have a lot of students who are
really interested. We're here on the Hudson River.
There's a lot of climate issues that we need to be
involved in. So, they wrote a white paper that the
faculty all endorsed and we sent it to the board of
trustees. The board of trustees has not officially
responded. To me, that is totally disrespectful, but
that's exactly how the faculty gets treated. Like if it
wasn't for our faculty, there wouldn't be a Marist
College.
GN:
51:11
Yeah. This is a point that I've often made.
“W
hat made
Marist happen
?”
And a lot of people will say, well, Linus
put the foundations in, but then Dennis came along and


we really built up what we have now, and this is the
image that we have, and so on. Which is fine, but I
never heard anybody come here for a course by Dennis,
you really come here for the school, even though you
don't know who your professor is going to be. But you
have friends that are here, for the most part, and
they're happy, so I'll be happy. So, that's it. Well, I want
to thank you for coming JoAnne. It's been a delightful
hour, or whatever it is, just talking to you and getting
your insight. And so,
[…]

JAM:
52:01
And I'm sure
[…]
there's so much more we could have
talked
[…]
about.