Oral history interview with Dr. Rebecca Adams, 2017

Lacey: All right, today is October the 3rd 2017. I'm here with Dr. Rebecca Adams. I'm interviewing her for the 125th anniversary of UNCG. We're just going to start at the beginning. Where were you born?

Dr. Rebecca A.: I was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1952. I just turned 65 right on September 21st.

Lacey: Happy birthday.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Thank you. I moved all over the country as a child or at least the eastern half of the country ending up in Connecticut for high school and then Trinity College in Hartford, and then I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago for my master's and PhD in sociology. Well, I had a bunch of jobs in the Chicago area doing part-time research and adjunct teaching at a 00:01:00whole bunch of different schools.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But UNCG was my first and only full-time adult job. I've been here since August of 1983. I went back to Chicago to get my PhD a couple of weeks after I started teaching here, so this is really my only adult job.

Lacey: Wow, that's a long time. What did you know about Greensboro before you came here?

Dr. Rebecca A.: I knew about the Klan Nazi shootout and the sit-ins, and I knew that a lot of famous African Americans had gone to A&T. I was a Jesse Jackson person while I was in Chicago, so I knew about A&T. I had one friend who was getting a PhD in geography who had grown up in Greensboro and had gotten his undergraduate geography degree at UNCG. When I came here his professors welcomed 00:02:00me, and he came down and visited and showed me the lay of the land and introduced me to some of his old friends.

Lacey: Oh, that's nice.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But other than that I knew nothing about the University, or the community or anything else.

Lacey: I'm going to step back really quickly. How did you hear about the job at UNCG?

Dr. Rebecca A.: It was just advertised through the American Sociological Association.

Lacey: Got it.

Dr. Rebecca A.: It's kind of interesting. My area when I went on the job market it was the sociology of aging. Now that I direct the gerontology program, it looks like I've been doing that my whole life, but that's kind of bookends. But sociology of aging was supposed to be a really hot field. In fact, when I applied, this was for the fall of '83, there were only six job announcements for 00:03:00the whole country. Three of the jobs ended up not hiring. The schools lost their funding. There were three of us who got jobs that year, and we were all interviewed all over the country.

Dr. Rebecca A.: There were about 100 people, I don't know what they did, who were on the job market with us for those slots. There weren't that many job openings even though they told us there would be.

Lacey: You then came down to UNCG from Chicago?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yes.

Lacey: From Chicago down to the interview?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yes, in April. I guess that would have been '83. It is kind of interesting because the person who headed the search committee was Paul Luebke who recently died. He ended up serving in the state legislature from Durham for many, many years. This was before he was elected the first time.

Lacey: That's interesting. You were interviewed by just administrators?

Dr. Rebecca A.: No, it was a committee of faculty. Paul Luebke was in the Sociology Department, and he chaired the committee. There was an outside member on the committee, Vira Kivett, who's now an emeritus professor from HDFS and lives in a rehab facility. She was the first and probably the most famous gerontologist to be at UNCG during my time there, and she still mentors me. I have an appointment to go see her later this month to discuss some things.

Dr. Rebecca A.: She mentored me on being an academic and on being a southerner as did Virginia Stephens, who's another emeritus faculty member who helped start the gerontology program when I got here. She chaired it for one year because they wanted to give me a little time to get my bearings.

Lacey: That's fair. What state was the Gerontology Department when you got here?

Dr. Rebecca A.: It didn't exist.

Lacey: It didn't exist.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I was hired to jump-start it.

Lacey: Got you. How did that feel coming in to that?

Dr. Rebecca A.: It was what I wanted to do, and I couldn't believe that I had gotten one of the three jobs.

Lacey: Definitely.

Dr. Rebecca A.: They actually offered the job to Linda Burton, an African American sociologist who went to Duke instead, or maybe she went some place else and then ended up at Duke, but she and I have shadowed each other our entire careers.

Lacey: That's so funny. You came in to start, but you weren't heading it when you first came here.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well, the first year we were planning the program and submitting the curriculum documents. I did do all of that. It's just that Virginia Stephens who was then ... I think she was in the Head of Social Work, was an accomplished 00:06:00administrator. She just agreed to head it for the very first year while I kind of got into my research program and that kind of stuff.

Lacey: You got into sort of your bearings here at UNCG.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Right. And then I chaired it until after I got tenure. I can't remember exactly when I stopped chairing it.

Lacey: Okay, so what was the process like for getting the program started?

Dr. Rebecca A.: It's the same thing it is now. You write a bunch of proposals and submit them through the curriculum committee, and they approve them. No details have changed. The only thing that was different, of course, is it was an interdisciplinary program. At the time we really acted as a faculty of gerontology. I'm actually trying to get us to do that again now because we're not doing it. But we did have a committee that ran the program, so it did 00:07:00require getting the cooperation of people in other departments and getting them to teach courses that were gerontology courses as opposed to whatever their disciplines were or their disciplines and aging.

Lacey: Would like intercept.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I got really good at asking for money because we didn't have much funding. Because it was in our disciplinary program that went across the whole University, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences didn't want to bear the whole cost for everything. I basically was given money by almost every dean during the time I was chair. I think the one exception was the dean of music who remains in my memory as a short-sighted holdout. You can put that in there. Dean Tollefson, short-sighted holdout. I don't mind if he's alive or his 00:08:00heirs knowing that because music and aging is such a hot topic, and I try to convince him it would be, and he just thought it was a waste of time.

Lacey: He's short-sighted then.

Dr. Rebecca A.: No, he's very short-sighted. That's a good thing about being old. You know when you made mistakes and when you were right on target.

Lacey: But you managed to intersect with all the other disciplines throughout the other schools. What were some of the classes that existed from that?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well, they're almost all still in the books because the program I started in '83 was an undergraduate minor and a second major, so it was an undergraduate program. We used to have these things called second majors that were kind of in between being a major and a minor, so you couldn't just be a gerontology major. You had to have a primary major. That's still the way I think it should be because you need to have a career focus. We had psychology of 00:09:00aging, sociology of aging, biology of aging all still on the books.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And then there were courses all over the place like counseling, theology although they didn't call it that. It was communication something back then. The whole department was in one department. Let me see what else. Nursing. This was before there was a nursing practitioners program. Kennedy-Malone started that very shortly after I started gerontology. Let me think. There were just courses all over the books. Public health had one, human development, family studies, social work. Most of these, as I said, are still being taught to the undergraduate minors.

Lacey: It makes sense. I just wanted to get the wide berth on the reporting.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I mean, the courses are still on the books all over, but now the students tend to come more from the allied health fields than they used to. I mean, there are still students from all over the place, but it's more concentrated in health now than it was.

Lacey: Okay, students would usually just come from all over the place.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well, the program was located in the College of Arts and Sciences since it was seen as a liberal arts program where we would teach about aging, and some people would apply their knowledge to research and teaching, and other people would apply it in a more professional way through professional disciplines. But the tide has shifted towards the professional since the time I've been here.

Lacey: Interesting.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And my interest too.

Lacey: Okay. When did you join the Faculty Senate?

Dr. Rebecca A.: When did I join the Faculty Senate? I remember it was not in '98. I have no idea. The dates they're all going to go. My department head, David Prado, was the Chair of the Senate at the time that I became I member of it. I do remember that. Chancellor Moran was still chancellor. In my department we were allowed to have one or two representatives. Maybe it was one at the time. I guess it was one person. If our person was the chair, we got another one, so I was on the senate at the same time my department head was on it.

Dr. Rebecca A.: He was an extremely controversial head of the senate because he 00:12:00was chair when they voted no-confidence in Chancellor Moran. That was my introduction to faculty politics. Now young faculty sometimes think the senate is ineffective or unimportant. When I got here, it was very important.

Lacey: A crucial time.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah, and Charles Tisdale, who later became Chair of the Senate, I had a long relationship with him in other professional roles, but he also was part of that no-confidence vote.

Lacey: Were you there when that was voted on?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yes.

Lacey: Can I ask you how you voted?

Dr. Rebecca A.: I think it was a unanimous vote, but I'll tell you the honest truth. I had misgivings about it at the time, and so I may have abstained. I honestly don't know. As you can imagine with my department head leading the 00:13:00effort, I don't know what I did. That's horrible.

Lacey: Those seem like reasonable options though just with the circumstances.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah.

Lacey: And you came in a controversial moment too, which is interesting.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Right, and I honestly forget what the real issues were. I mean, Chancellor Moran is still alive, and I see him all the time, and he's an extremely nice man. But he was pretty quiet, and he didn't interact much with people on campus. The paper ran this story about him as being aloof. I haven't found that at all in knowing him since then. I was young and did not know really what was going on at the time I was involved in that I think.

Lacey: Okay, that's fair. Do you remember when you became secretary?

Dr. Rebecca A.: That was probably after about six years of service. By that time, Charles Tisdale was the President of the Senate, so I served as his secretary. The role was a lot different then. We actually took minutes.

Lacey: [crosstalk 00:14:28].

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah, we completely transcribed, well, up until my time as secretary. I was actually the first secretary to suggest that we don't to the entire transcription. I worked with the person who was paid to be, at the time called secretary, and that would be Staff Assistant of the Senate. I worked with her to develop a format. It was very hard on her because she had been used to transcribing everything in detail. She was very detail-oriented, and it was hard 00:15:00on her to let go of those total transcriptions.

Lacey: Do you think it was a generational shift?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Oh yeah, it was definitely. She used to make me do things like ... I adored her, but she used to make me sign my signature on the minutes three times, and then she would choose the best signature.

Lacey: That's interesting.

Dr. Rebecca A.: What was really funny is when she retired all the presidents gave her a sign. We signed our names really neatly.

Lacey: That's kind of cute.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah, but she worked all night in Mossman sometimes. She was completely dedicated and really kept track of things.

Lacey: That's very useful in a big environment as that. Anything else notable 00:16:00from being secretary?

Dr. Rebecca A.: I once wrote something about this that I could share with you when I looked over notes and things. I think that the most notable thing was that Charles Tisdale, who was chair, was very interested in staff. Most faculty weren't. He's the person who worked with the staff to start what now is Staff Senate. That was really a different approach.

Lacey: Very interesting. When did Staff Senate come about?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well, they were staff council in the beginning about that time.

Lacey: Okay, so in the '90s.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah, it was about that time. When I later became senate chair, 00:17:00I followed up on that and kind of insisted they be equally involved. We had a team in the undergraduate, you know, the SGA President, and the GSA President, and Scott Milman who was the chair of the staff group then and me. Whenever something happened, we all four tried to be there and be at the table. That was really new too because even though staff had a senate, they didn't have an office. They had nothing. I continued on with that much later than Charles started it to try to establish it.

Lacey: When he tried to establish it, was there resistant from the university at large?

Dr. Rebecca A.: You'd have to ask him about that, but I think that people just 00:18:00didn't understand that staff needed a voice. They were paid employees. They didn't have the security of tenure. I just don't think people thought about them in the way that I now think about staff as full partners in this enterprise.

Lacey: Right, that's an interesting shift though.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lacey: It really is. Then you became Chair of the Faculty Senate later on. We were just talking about that. 'Cause you had followed up further with the Staff Senate.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Right, and I can talk a little bit more about what happened while I was president, but I did want to go back to mention because something you said reminded me of this. Before I was on senate, I chaired College Council within the College of Arts and Sciences. At the time, College Council it might 00:19:00have been elected, or maybe it was partly appointed, but it wasn't really a representative body of any kind. It was advisory to the dean. Dean Creighton, who was dean at the time I was on College Council, kind of gave it as a gift to us that we actually had representation. That was really different.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Now, that all got overturned by Dean Beale who decided he just wanted to go back to having an advisory group, and they put in curriculum committees and kind of changed the process, but at the time I was Chair of College Council, we oversaw the curriculum too. The college was in charge of general education then. It wasn't a university program the way it is now. When I 00:20:00was chair of college council, we were implementing a new general education curriculum, and that was in the control of the college council. It was before we had the system that we do now.

Lacey: That's so different.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah, it was very different. But that's kind of what led to me being active in the senate was I started out at the college level.

Lacey: Okay, so how did you join the college council then? Were you recommended? Was someone in your department in there?

Dr. Rebecca A.: No, I think that Dean Creighton appointed me as dean's representative. There were people who were elected. She was a young woman, and I think she thought I had administrative tendencies, and so she got me involved in it.

Lacey: Got you.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I'm pretty sure that's how it happened. I haven't thought about that in a long time, but I'm pretty sure that was what happened.

Lacey: That seems likely. It was a revolutionary-ish process in terms of the way they were doing it as opposed to when it got taken over by Beale afterwards when he moved?

Dr. Rebecca A.: No, during the time I was Chair of College Council, I got to announce the change and how it was going to run.

Lacey: Shift back to advisory.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I worked with the dean on it. It was after that that it shifted back to being a little bit more like an advisory board. We had this kind of golden era of faculty governments.

Lacey: Representative governments, and then it shifted back to advisory. But that's still very interesting.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And I don't even know what the college does now because I haven't been in the college for a while.

Lacey: Sure. And then you were shifted to Faculty Senate where you were then a member and then secretary. And then were you president or chair?

Dr. Rebecca A.: A chair.

Lacey: A chair.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I can't remember if my service was continuous or if I had a break. Let me see. I became a full professor in 1998. I'm trying to remember the timing of being chair. It must have been right after that that I was chair.

Lacey: Like '99, 2000-ish.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Or maybe '98, '99.

Lacey: '98.

Dr. Rebecca A.: It's on my CV.

Lacey: Relatively close.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yes.

Lacey: Okay, and then what was notable about when you became chair? What changes did you oversee?

Dr. Rebecca A.: It was kind of a complicated period. I was Chair of the Senate. 00:23:00I think I had just finished up being Graduate Director in Sociology of the Master's Program, or I was still doing that. I became Chair of the Senate, and at the same time, the Provost asked me to oversee the strategic planning process for the University.

Lacey: You've got a couple balls in the air.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah, I had a lot of hats on. As a matter of fact, one day my graduate assistant ... Well, she wasn't my graduate assistant by then. She worked for me as my Strategic Planning Assistant, Brandy McCallick, who's one of our master's alums in sociology, once she made me hats to wear, two hats planning in the senate, because I would have to ask myself to present on the strategic plan while I was chairing senate, so I would say, "Rebecca, now it's 00:24:00your turn."

Lacey: You switched hats.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I'd switch hats.

Lacey: That's pretty funny.

Dr. Rebecca A.: That was her joke. It was really our first comprehensive strategic plan in the sense that it was the first plan where we actually did something and kept track of it. It might be our only plan. I don't know. I assumed Julia Jackson knew some asmatrix, and they're tied to goals and things. I don't know. But that was the whole point of the plan that I oversaw. The provost wanted it to be an inclusive process. I would have had a smaller committee, but he had me appoint a 70-person committee, so a lot of what I did was keep track of-

Lacey: 70 people.

Dr. Rebecca A.: ... all these different groups working on goals we did. We did a lot of ... Who introduced that? Jorge who's still there. Isn't Jorge still in 00:25:00Facilities? Actually, I haven't heard from him in a while, so he might not be. But Jorge, who was in charge of Facilities at that time and was on the main steering committee which was 10 people, got this idea for speed dating. We would have the tables in charge of each of the goals, and then the stakeholders would all move around the tables and work on what they could do to support the goal and all of that. That was Jorge's contribution.

Lacey: That's fascinating.

Dr. Rebecca A.: We had like a 10 person steering committee. At the same time that that strategic plan was going on, General Administration under Erskine Bowles was doing a general plan for the UNC system, and we also had to respond 00:26:00to those reports. Not only was I overseeing our strategic plan, I was overseeing our response and coordinating our response to UNC general administration, and I was chairing the Senate. It's kind of a blur.

Lacey: That whole couple of years.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah, and you only were Chair of the Senate for a year then. That's another thing that's changed. Now it's a three-year term. But you used to have a year as a chair and then a year as past chair.

Lacey: Okay, there's lots to discuss in all of that.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Oh, let me just say one other big thing that happened other than the strategic plan during my term. It's when the promotion and tenure guidelines integrated community engagement. That was huge. Emily Janke was a young staff 00:27:00member at that time and was working with Terri Shelton and me. Laurie Kennedy-Malone, who I already mentioned in another capacity, she followed me as Chair of the Senate, and I knew that was probably going to happen. I appointed her in charge of the P&T guidelines committee. She worked on that during my chairship and then continued working on it through hers.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Emily's actually written an article about that process. She says we had a few good women in the right place at the right time. We were all committed to community engaged scholarship, and we worked together to get that institutionalized.

Lacey: Oh, that's fascinating.

Dr. Rebecca A.: That was huge and probably more important than getting ... Even though that strategic plan ended in 2014, we're still working on that. The 00:28:00Chancellor's new plan is eerily similar. The Chancellor's new plan is simplified, and stiffer and easier to remember and in that sense a better plan. But in terms of the actual content, it's very similar.

Lacey: I'm glad you included that. I want that article later. Do you remember some of the names of the few women in good places? I feel like we might want to interview them.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well, Emily Janke who wrote the article, and will remember things better than the rest of us because she's also younger, and Laurie Kennedy-Malone and Terri Shelton. It's when Terri first came into an administrative position from being on the faculty.

Lacey: Got you. That sounds like something we need to record and get on.

Dr. Rebecca A.: That's huge because we have grown as a community engaged faculty. Now that's one of our big deals. We weren't even allowed to put it on our tenure documents.

Lacey: Really?

Dr. Rebecca A.: It would turn it against us.

Lacey: That's kind of ridiculous. [crosstalk 00:29:22].

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well, it was a different period, you know.

Lacey: Okay, that's fair. What else do you remember about that since we're on that? You were no longer chair at this point.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well, I got the process started, the review. We started the whole thing while I was chair, but the guidelines weren't actually passed until Laurie was chair, so we kind of tag-teamed on it.

Lacey: You may not remember. Whose idea was it to come up with the that community engagement should be so crucial for faculty?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well, there was already a lot of discussion about it, and it's why Emily was hired. She was really the person who kept us on task.

Lacey: In terms of that.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah.

Lacey: So, you just kind of placed her in the right place in terms of that. That is amazing.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well, I don't remember exactly who said what, but we also had a community engaged goal and a jobs goal in the strategic plan. Since I was in that position-

Lacey: You were able to work on it in that sense.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Right.

Lacey: Well, that works. I think we can shift over to the strategic plan. What was your role in the strategic plan?

Dr. Rebecca A.: This past one?

Lacey: The one we're talking about now in the late '90s.

Dr. Rebecca A.: No, this is 2009.

Lacey: This is 2009.

Dr. Rebecca A.: 2014.

Lacey: Okay, 2009, 2014. What was your role in terms of that?

Dr. Rebecca A.: I oversaw the whole thing. I reported directly to the Provost. I started the planning process while I was senate chair and got ...

Dr. Rebecca A.: Planning process while I was senate chair and got release time to do it. By the way I was supposed to be on leave that fall and I banked that leave and it has followed me, I have never been able to take it. It's in the MOU I just signed that I still get to take that leave sometime. But I started that planning process, it's what became the 2009, 2014 plan. Got extended beyond that but that's what it was originally, but I started that while I was Chair of the Senate and then at the end of my senate term, they created a position for Associate Provost for Planning and Assessment and I applied for that job and got it. So I continued overseeing, not the implementation, Dean's Counsel oversaw the implementation, but I kept track of that, made sure the reports were 00:32:00collected at the same time. Maintained the website, led the different groups through meeting.

Lacey: What do you think were some of the different goals that came out of that strategic plan that were different, maybe more or less written down and for sure for this strategic plan?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Up until that point the strategic planning process had always been handled by what was then called the ITP, Information, Technology and Planning, now it's Services. It used to be Information, Technology and Planning and that was largely because Jim Clotfelter had been in a political scientist and Chancellor Moran asked him to do a plan in the same way the Provost asked me do it later.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And so the planning process had always been in the basically in the chancellor's... well, in the ITP office, which was in the chancellor's 00:33:00office. It had always included teaching, research, service and I don't know, I think administration or business, something about operations.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And that was what every plan of a university in the whole country had in it. So when I became Chair of Planning the big deal was, oh you were supposed to have a plan that distinguished you from other universities instead of having research, service and teaching, and this other keeping the university going goal, which we'd always had. We were supposed to have substitutive goals. And so that's where we came up, we had health across a live course, jobs, community engagement, access, and then let's see. There was one 00:34:00more, access. Can't remember what the fifth one was, it was teaching or something about teaching.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And then the other thing we did differently was we introduced values, inclusiveness, and one that was, I can't remember if it was inner-disciplinary, but there were several, there were five values in addition to the five goals.

Lacey: Got you.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And we did think that it distinguished us from other universities, but I'll tell you the honest truth, the other plans that came out from that era were being influenced by the same social forces, so they all talked about engagement and health and jobs. It didn't really distinguish us in 00:35:00the end, but I still think that it was an important conversation we had and provided us with a transition from an old approach to the academy to a newer approach and a lot of universities, those decisions were made top down.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And we really did, under the Provost direction, have a bottom up discussion and that made it really different.

Lacey: That does make a difference and it's also notable that even though in ancillary UNCG we kind of did this bottoms up approach with this service and community engagement and strategic plan it's still notable even if it was a part of a national trend happening with universities.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Right and it was also was, we started the.. I chaired a group that was called the Bridge Group, "Creating a Bridge from UNCG Today to UNCG Tomorrow." That was a brainchild of someone over in ITS who just called it that. 00:36:00Because the system was [inaudible 00:36:14] UNC tomorrow so it made sense, right?

Lacey: Sure.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I chaired a committee between the strategic planning process that we started to get feedback from people, the year I was doing, that I was Chair of the Senate and responded to the UNC system and planned that year and we were beginning to get ideas for our plan, but we didn't want to firm those ideas up because it was Chancellor Sullivan's last year and she wanted to allow Linda Brady the opportunity to shape the plan.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But by the time ... I submitted this report saying, "Okay here 00:37:00are the ways we think the plan should be different then the next time based on the feedback we've gotten and it was more about process and forum." But in fact we already knew what people were interested in seeing in the plan because we'd had all these open forums to respond to the UNC system. So when Chancellor Brady arrived we had this document for her and that's when I became Associate Provost and we just started... I received the document from myself and began to address what I had said in the document. What my committee and I had said. No, no, it was kind of funny, at this time I was really was the continuity in the process. But then off course Linda Brady was here and we had to rewrite our mission for example.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Sue Stinson who later began Dean of whatever they're calling themselves over there, Music, I think they were called Music, Theater and Dance when she was dean.

Lacey: Oh so like visual arts?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Whatever... it was the School of Music and Dance, and she was dean of that eventually. But at this point she was chairing the mission statement committee as a dance faculty member and I remember her listening to one of Linda Brady's speeches and saying something along the lines of "Well, she said everything that it's in our report and she just came up with the first draft of the mission statement, feeling the environment" and I remember they dis-invited me from the Mission Statement Committee, which was a subcommittee of the larger group because I had chaired all of the previous Mission Statement 00:39:00Committees since the '90s.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And they thought it was time someone else wrote the mission statement. I'd been on the Mission Statement Committee at least two or three times before that. There were a few of us who, Ben Ramsey in Religions Studies was another one, he was always on those committees. So I remember Sue saying, "No offense, it's time we had a mission statement that you didn't craft." So but she crafted it and we tried to have a separate vision but it ended up as part of the mission statement, I can't remember how that happened.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But that was one of the many committees, if you saw the diagram of the committees [crosstalk 00:39:54]

Lacey: There was just so many connections and overlapping, the circle of you and UNCG committees is just a singular circle, because there's so many overlaps perhaps?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah and there were, a lot of the faculty who were involved in that process stayed their whole careers and had time to fill many roles, and so.

Lacey: Sure.

Dr. Rebecca A.: It wasn't like we had to learn how to work with each other from scratch each time there was a new challenge.

Lacey: Sure. It was already comfortable, because you had already worked with them already.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah.

Lacey: Was it difficult to balance the career of being both a professor, as well as all these administrative positions?

Dr. Rebecca A.: I would say that not unwillingly in any way, but I pretty much sacrificed what I could have done as a researcher. Don't get me wrong I've published plenty, I was legitimately promoted to full professor and I've actually managed to keep publishing a couple of things a year throughout this 00:41:00entire process. More in the years when I didn't have as many responsibilities as others, but it what it did distract me from doing was having an ongoing integrated research plan, because every time I would get back into my research I would get pulled out of it to do something else.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But I pretty much have defined myself as an UNCG citizen and committed to our students and the kind of university we are, or at least the kind of university's we've been and I'm actually very heartened by Chancellor Gilliam's vision for the university. Because it's much closer to mine and what I've thought we should be doing since I got here.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I was not a fan of the, let's be like Chapel Hill approach, which was pretty much dominating for a long time. We never got there. But I 00:42:00always, the whole time I was on these committees was advocating for us as teacher scholars, as open to diversity and then I remember when I told Dave Perrin we had to worry about inclusiveness and he didn't know what it was. I had to educate him on that. We've got to stop counting numbers and actually start talking about culture.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So the idea of us being a really good regional university where the people in the classroom are also researchers, and research in teaching inform each other and we become a place where people who are first generation 00:43:00college students, like I was, can flourish. That's why I came to UNCG to begin with and why I didn't leave right away after I got here and the job market opened up. So I don't mind having been distracted.

Lacey: Sure.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Martha Taylor who is an emeritus faculty member once called people like us, she was including herself, "university nerds," people who put the University before their own well-being and I kind of feel like that was an apt description.

Lacey: It's a very unique place to be because there's just so many things to cover, but at the same time there's just so much earnest love for the University that it just all connects really well.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah we all know each other when we see each other, we have our little secret, we are the university. Everyone passes through, but we're still here, so.

Lacey: Okay, I need to get going to one of your other roles then, because I think that was... unless there's something else or more for that strategic plan that you didn't cover?

Dr. Rebecca A.: No I think that pretty much gets it, I wrote copious reports.

Lacey: They can look at that if they are even more curious. I think you said you had just gotten out of being the Director for the Master's Program, graduates for the master's program, did I write that note down correctly?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Sociology.

Lacey: So it's for sociology, yes. So what was that position like then?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well that's more, that one is more of a routine position, that's just a departmentally based-

Lacey: Okay so nothing as interested on that one [crosstalk 00:44:57]?

Dr. Rebecca A.: No, no.

Lacey: Okay you mentioned in the emails then the Dean of Continual Learning.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Right, I was an Assistant to the Dean. And that was when John Young was Dean of Continual Learning, he was a philosopher from Davidson College who became our Dean of Continual Learning. And that, in those days they did correspondence education, and continuing education credits, they ran all of our summer camps and I had asked Ed Uprichard, who was Provost as the time. I went through the Bridges Leadership Program which Chapel Hill runs at the Friday Center, they still do this. We used to send two or three people a year, I don't know what we do now, but it's a leadership program for women who have administrative tendencies.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And they said "Oh, well you have to do an internship." So I went 00:46:00to the Provost and said I wanted to do an internship and this was before, I guess this was before I was Chair of the Senate and did strategic planning. Yes it had to have been before that.

Dr. Rebecca A.: He asked me what I was interested in and I said I was either interested in working on diversity or online education. So I ended up working on online education because when he asked Dean's Counsel, John Young immediately said, "I'll take her." So he became my mentor, the reason he was willing to take me is because of this thing we skipped, my Grateful Dead project.

Lacey: We will get to it.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yes but just as background, the reason he was willing to take me on as an intern was because we had worked together on that project. He was the administrator who had sponsored my course and he considered me to have a great 00:47:00deal of integrity because I had to take 21 students into a drug-ridden culture and get them back home and he and I became very good friends that summer because I was on the phone with him a lot. He even flew to a concert in Wisconsin to hold my hand and make sure I was okay.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But anyhow that's why he was willing to work with me. I spent a year as Assistant to the Dean and I worked with the various offices on campus to develop the content for the first web interface for people to do business from outside of campus. I went around to all of the offices and said what information can you put out on the web and all this, and then they hired, at the end of my year, they hired Michelle Solare who worked with them in all sorts of capacities 00:48:00over the years.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And she actually developed the technical part, she was a marketing person at the time. I don't know what she calls herself now. But she came in as a marketing person. So it was called SOS. Let me see what did that stand for, something online, no, off campus students. Services for Off Campus Students or something like that. So that was one task.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And the other thing I was involved in was trying to get faculty used to the idea that they might have to teach some online, because faculty were very worried that all of a sudden their robot was going to teach their classes and that they as content experts would be dissed, which could still happen actually. But the viewers at the time were greatly exaggerated and I did focus 00:49:00groups with faculty who were for, against and in-between. And did a report that I dog and ponied showed around campus.

Dr. Rebecca A.: What's really interesting is many many years later, I don't know, like four or five years ago, Wade Mack he did the same research, found the same stuff. I told him, I said some things don't change. Anyhow those were my two big projects, were developing that interface and meeting with offices and telling them the bad news that everyone wasn't going to come to their office anymore.

Lacey: Right. Getting the campus used to online education as a thing that was going to happen and how to make the best use of the scenario.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Right, it is kind of interesting that I'm now working with the Office of Online Learning, which is what replaced DCL to put the Gerontology Program on campus and people keep saying, "Are you reluctant to do this?" And I 00:50:00thought, okay they don't know my history. I was like one of the big advocates for this from the beginning.

Lacey: You were the main one for UNCG [crosstalk 00:50:11].

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well back then, back then I was, but I mean here were others too.

Lacey: You did have the roll into it though, so that still makes a point.

Lacey: Okay what's the next... the next one I have on here is Intern Assistant to Vice Chancellor for Information, Technology and Planning, did we already cover that?

Dr. Rebecca A.: No, we didn't, I forgot all about that one.

Lacey: Okay, I have dates on here for 2004, 2005 so that helps.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah, that was... okay before I became Associate Provost for Planning and Assessment I had worked on these Mission Statement Committees a lot and Jim Clotfelter was the person in charge of planning. So he wanted to hire someone to be a planner and I applied for the job and I didn't get it, because 00:51:00at the last minute they decided they wanted to hire someone who also had all these technical skills to develop a data warehouse and that just wasn't... I was more of a campus planner kind of person.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But they hired someone and he quit after four months and Jim had this open line and no one in it and he called me and said, "I have all sorts of planning stuff you could do for a year, do you want to do this?" So I spent a year in this empty line and what I mainly did for Jim was develop his strategic planning process for ITS, which I think they became Called It about that time.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I also helped them develop a metrics for their plan. I helped 00:52:00with the idea of tickets, you know how call 6-Tech and they open a ticket for you?

Lacey: Yes.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I was involved in that project. I also went around and mete with all of the various departments, with Barbara Tocci who later became my assistant when I was Associate Provost, but we were assigned to work together. She worked for Jim and we went around and interviewed all the people in ITS to figure out what the organizational issues were in ITS and that's what led to them having Gloria Edwards and someone called Heath, there was three, all of a sudden there were three people instead of one person reporting to Jim. That was an outgrowth of what Barbara and I collected.

Lacey: Got you.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And the other thing that I was supposed to be doing is acting as some sort of liaison between ITS and the faculty because there were a lot of grumblings back and forth about how faculty were treating staff and the kind of supports faculty were getting. Because I think largely because I was married to a computer programmer and could speak to technical people in a way that they found acceptable, I was put in the middle of that as well.

Lacey: Got you.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So we did all these, and I also developed plans for a client survey, a one time a year client survey which I think was done once. So there were all sorts of little projects I did for Jim, just to move ITS forward. And then at the end of the year he repurposed the position and hired whatever he needed.

Lacey: But you did all that during 2004-2005?

Dr. Rebecca A.: It was similar to what I did in DCL where faculty were angry and so I was brought in as kind of a liaison type.

Lacey: Would you say that was one of your critical roles on campus, is faculty were angry and you were liaising?

Dr. Rebecca A.: I don't know that they were always angry, but I know that when I was first asked to oversee the accreditation process in 2000 it was because I was the only one that... this is what I was told, I was the only faculty member who had Ed Uprichard and Jim Clotfelter both agreed they could work with.

Lacey: You might just be a liaison between a variety of groups?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well I used up all of my idiosyncrasy credit as Associate Provost, I had to do stuff that faculty didn't want to do and I was under pressure by the administration to do it quickly and so I wouldn't be in that 00:55:00role today, at least not by the people who remember that part of my career. So, but yes, that was my role when I was younger.

Lacey: Okay. And then the next thing is Associate Provost for Planning and Assessments?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Okay well, as I said I started into that right after being Chair of the Senate.

Lacey: Right.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And being overseeing the strategic planning process. And I had also by then, let's see, had I already done two, 2000... I had already overseen the 2000 reaffirmation of accreditation as a faculty member. I worked with Anita Lawson who reported Ed Uprichard. So I had already been doing what was then 00:56:00called SACS visits. Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, now we call them Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Commission on Colleges, now we have to call them SACSCOC, actually we say SACS C-O-C, but SACSCOC, what an acronym.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But anyhow, I had already seen that in 2000... done that in 2000 and we were coming up on our reaffirmation again and so somehow I got asked if I'd be involved in that, but in any case the job opened, I applied for it and I got the job and they reorganized everything. So while I was Associate Provost, the Office of Institutional Research reported to me and the Office of Academic Planning and Assessment. And then I added a couple of staff members, Ken Zinc 00:57:00and Barbara Tocci to assist with the strategic planning and academic program planning part of my job.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And during that time we had to go, academic assessment was an issue because we were not compliant with the SACS standards and the person who was in charge of it, there had been two people in charge of it already, they had both used up their idiosyncrasy credit. It's just, it's not the people, they were both really good people, John Wilsey as a matter of fact is tenured in ERM now, full professor probably. And the person who came after him, Steve Zerr was also excellent. But when you ask people to do something and they don't see it's value and they're not doing it in a way that's meaningful, so there really is no 00:58:00value, it's extremely difficult to get people motivated.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So they had used up their credibility basically, so during my time as associate provost I hired Jodi Pettazzoni to replace Steve and she's done an excellent job, but she came in at the right time, Steve had already taken the hit. And I think I would have been fine in that role moving forward because I had a really good team supporting me, but the Provost decided that he wanted to... well and the Chancellor Brady, Provost Kurn and Chancellor Brady, decided they wanted to do academic program prioritization. Which was essentially order all the programs and cut a third. I was being told this is what we have to do to free up money and I was the one put in charge of the process.

Lacey: Wow.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And I was given very clear guidelines on how this was supposed to be done, because once again there was a national effort and there were a couple of people who were telling everyone how to do it and their books were popular and all the administrators had read them. So this responsibility got added on to my accreditation responsibilities and my strategic planning responsibilities in academic program planning responsibilities, because I was the one who was the liaison to GA for new programs and things and interface with her on campus planning process for that.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And that was going fine, I tried to talk the provost out of giving me this responsibility because I was afraid it would interfere with my effectiveness in the other areas and it did indeed do that. I mean, people 01:00:00associated me with the threats to their program. And it is ironic because during that time gerontology was on the chopping block and when I left that job, I went back to gerontology to try to save it, which I think I might have done, but we're two years from knowing for sure. But it's ironic, my program is ultimately the one and has been cut to shreds, but it's interesting that it's my program that's been cut and here people thought I was out to get theirs.

Dr. Rebecca A.: It was a very bad time on campus, faculty were protesting, leafleting, convocation, it was a very divisive time and ultimately, I decided 01:01:00to step down because I was losing traction and quite frankly I thought that if I stayed in the job that the Provost was going to lose traction too. And so I decided it was best for me to go back to the faculty and not be associated with the Provost anymore. Now what happened was I resigned and he accepted my resignation, I think he probably, he was probably kind of relieved, because I had really used up my traction with the faculty. And when I did that, he very quickly realized that I was doing a lot more for him then he realized and all of a sudden when people expected things to be done that I had been doing and I-

Dr. Rebecca A.: When people expected things to be done that I had been doing, and I wasn't there, it was like -- I don't even know if it was a few days or a few weeks or whatever -- but I was back on the provost payroll half-time.

Lacey: Wow.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So for the first year I went back, people thought I was full-time faculty, but I was in fact still working on preparing us for SACS compliance. I was just ghost writing and ghost working for people who were writing standards, responses. And I arranged for people to take my place in public and actually in the end to do some of the work, a lot of the work. Like Kelly Burke, who's now our Vice, whatever title is Vice Provost for Graduate Study, came to me and wanted to be involved in administration, and so she has a lot of good technical skills. So I asked her if she'd be willing to oversee the 01:03:00faculty credentialing process, and she did an excellent job of bringing that to where it needed to be.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But I was the person who initially serviced all of the problems and the need for someone to address those because we were out of compliance at the time. Same thing, I worked on 2.8, which is did we have sufficient faculty. We hadn't yet justified that, and it wasn't that we didn't have sufficient faculty, We didn't have the data set up in a way that we could demonstrate it, so I had to work with the registrar on that.

Lacey: Sure.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And then there were some strategic planning things where I had actually done the work so knew what had to be written up, and those got handed off the Sarah Carrigan but I was behind the scenes doing the reports we needed 01:04:00to do that we'd said we were going to do so we could stay in compliance until that review took place. So...

Lacey: And then when did that review take place?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Let's see, we would have been reaffirmed in.... I think, it was 20... Let's see. 2003, 2013... Must have been... See, I stepped down the spring of 2012. I think I was finished by the spring of 2013.

Lacey: Okay.

Dr. Rebecca A.: It must have been the spring of 2014, I would guess.

Lacey: Okay.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Someplace around there.

Lacey: Okay.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And then... Yeah, that's probably right, because I also had overseen the fifth year review that happened five years before that as a socio-provost, so... Yeah. I would say that's probably right. That fifth year 01:05:00was probably 2009. Some place around there.

Lacey: Okay. That sounds kind of right. And then the only other position I have on here... Well, do you want to talk about being the Gerontology Program Director? Or was that routine as well?

Dr. Rebecca A.: No. That wasn't routine. Well, I did it twice. I did it when I was young.

Lacey: Okay.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I was the Director of Gerontology from 1984 until maybe 1990 when gerontology was just getting organized on campus. Those dates will be on my CV. And then when I came to gerontology in the spring of 2012, I was going to be a full-time faculty member, work for the Provost for a year, and that was just ending, so that must have been the fall of 2013 when Jan Wassel stepped down as director and I became Director of Gerontology again. And basically because I 01:06:00know we're going over time here, we must be. What time is it?

Lacey: It's nearly 5:00.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I know you said 5:30, but...

Lacey: It's all good stuff.

Dr. Rebecca A.: When I came to gerontology I knew from having been associate provost that we had enrollment challenges, and we did. I think there were only two people admitted for the fall semester or something. And as part of the restructuring process, gerontology had been moved from the graduate school. Since I had been director in the beginning, it moved from the college to the graduate school, and by the time I'd rejoined it, it had moved to HHS. And in the process of the restructuring it had lost resources. Everybody did. It just happened.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And by restructuring I mean when health and human... I mean 01:07:00health... HES, whatever that was called. They've changed their name like ten times since I've been there. Heath and Environmental Sciences, what was that called? Well, it used to be HES and HP-something, and now they're both HHS together. They joined. And a few other departments came in. Like Conflict and Peace Studies moved from Continual Learning over to there. We moved from the graduate school. I think there was one other program, maybe Genetic Counseling, moved from the college. It might have been attached to Biology originally. It came from someplace. So we all moved into HHS, and we lost resources when gerontology moved there. By the time I'd got there we had lost a full-time AP 01:08:00faculty member, and Jan was the only full-time person left, and she was directing the program. And then we lost more adjunct support, and then when I become chair we had four courses per year that were being funded by the dean's office for adjuncts to teach. My first year as director of that got cut down to two.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Then we at some point lost our graduate assistantships. And then when Jan retired, we weren't allowed to use that line, and now we've hired someone in that line, but they're fully developed on developing the program, so they're still not teaching. And now we've moved to social work, and our budget has OTP -- other than personnel budget -- has gone from about $12,000 to I think 01:09:00I was told $1200. And the other thing the move does is we no longer have access to HHS awards or university awards that only allow one nomination per department because we're now in the huge department where our students are a tiny portion, and even if they fairly distributed these things, we wouldn't get them very frequently, right?

Lacey: Right.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So the history of gerontology more recently has been told to produce more and given less to do it. That's why right now I'm trying to reactivate the campus network of faculty. I mean, just as this happens the baby boomers are retiring, 10,000 a day. And all the young faculty are coming with 01:10:00specialties in aging. There's even one in the library who contacted me who does aging in library technology. They're all over campus, and they're coming to me and thinking I have resources to share, and they are my resource because I'm trying to get them all together to do collaborative work. But it's actually the first time since I came in the '80s that there's a lot of enthusiasm on campus for gerontology, and it's just as we get cut. And as much as I love my home in social work, we're hidden, and we're not a subset of social work because social workers mainly work on social justice and social disadvantage issues and public services, whereas the student's I've had up until now are more business and non-profit management oriented and want to develop services or advocate for 01:11:00policies or start business. So the timing of this move is a little weird in the cuts.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But that being said, we're moving online. The Office of Online Learning is putting a lot of money into course development. Social work is being a gracious and welcoming home, and because of things that I put in place in response to the last planning committee, we had an undergraduate minor in moving our post-bac certificate online, and some good marketing we had on the program last year. We actually have already turned around the enrollment issues, I think, even before the program is going online. So even though we've been through this kind of rough times, and I think inappropriate emphasis on one 01:12:00metric, i.e. enrollment, as opposed to the potential of the program to support the community and to prepare the students for what as far as I can tell is 100 percent job placement. All my NS students get jobs. We've had to struggle to keep it.

Dr. Rebecca A.: And I have to say once again there was a team of people in the right place. It's the second time this has happened in my career. Dean Hooper is a gerontologist. Thank goodness. She has written on aging and hearing, and Dean Weiner, who is the Dean of the Graduate School until recently, had an expertise in older readers and was also a gerontologist, and Jim Maddy, who is the Dean of the Office of Online Learning, had a gerontology minor at Penn State when he was 01:13:00in public health there. It's one of the best schools for that. So I had three high-level administrators working with me to figure out how can we keep this program even though enrollment and work load and all of the those things are the metrics that our university has to respond to from this system. I want them to use the metrics of job placement, community demand, not student enrollment because there is always going to be agism until we cure it, age. Until we cure aging and death. There's always going to be agism because people are always going to be afraid of their future selves, and students are just not going to come in at age eighteen saying "I want to work with older adults." They're 01:14:00always going to come in saying "I want to work with babies and kids." Maybe we will bring about social change. I have seen some openness to aging lately.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But that's what we were fighting against. And all gerontology programs in the country have this problem. It's in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It wasn't just here. We're actually one of the schools that was doing pretty well. We got interviewed by the Educational Advisory Board as an example of a successful program, and I thought "Oh, my gosh, and they're trying to shut me down!" Not anyone in particular but just the forces of the universe.

Lacey: Yeah, the circumstances around.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah, so. Yeah, so no. It hasn't been routine, and-

Lacey: I guess not!

Dr. Rebecca A.: In twenty-five years from now, someone will know whether this worked and whether we were able to save the gerontology program so that we can address what... Now people are saying "Oh, we shouldn't call it the 'Silver Tsunami' because it's so negative," but there are 10,000 people retiring per day. It is a Silver Tsunami, and we're not ready for it, and at least I can say probably when I retire, we'll still have a gerontology program. And since I came here in the first place to start one, that seems like a good thing.

Lacey: It's maintained and has stayed there, in this campus this entire time.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah. In different incarnations. It survived.

Lacey: Things grow and change. It has to fight different battles as you go.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah, so...

Lacey: Okay. So then the last position I have on here is accreditation.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Okay. And that has kind of run throughout the entire thing.

Lacey: Right. So were there some main points we haven't hit yet?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well, it's just that when I first started working on 01:16:00accreditation, I honestly can't remember why it was that the Provost or Jim Clotfelter would have recommended me. I must have already gone through Bridges, so they must have known I, yes, they must have known I was administratively inclined. But I got a call from Anita Lawson, who was a brand new administrator on campus. She worked in the Provost Office, and she asked me if I'd be interested in working with this on her, and I became a SACS reviewer. I went to other schools to learn how to review the documents. And when I started in getting -- this was a couple years before our process actually began, she wanted me trained, so I was ready -- when I started doing those reviews, universities had to respond to 492 prompts for their review. It was massive. It was called 01:17:00"The Criteria." Then we morphed to something called "The Principles" that was a more reasonable document, and now we're getting a revision of that that everyone will vote on this year.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But the process then involved an administrator and a faculty member working together, and I oversaw the faculty committees and kind of kept them on track, and there's this document that I'm sure in the archive where... It was a literate document. It was well-written and coherent. There's this whole history of the purpose of the University following it over time. That was my main contribution to the writing, and by the way, Charles Tisdale, for whom I had been secretary when I chaired senate, became my secretary, and we used to 01:18:00say he edited for beauty and I edited for truth because he's a poet. So Anita and Charles... so this is the second... no, wait a minute. This is the first time I went through it, and a woman from the Registrars' Office, Silvia Idem, who used to maintain all the bulletins, we were the team. A graduate student I just ran into the other day, Jenny Berrigan and George, what's George's last name? We had two graduate assistants from sociology help us, and we produced that document with a massive team of people.

Dr. Rebecca A.: We... I can't remember, but we didn't get many recommendations. There were tiny one or two little recommendations. We got commended for 01:19:00something Alan Boyette had done, something about employing or hiring or something. But it went well. And five years after that I was already Associate Provost and I oversaw our fifth year review. And then I helped get this last review set up before I stepped down. I developed all the committees and populated them and got everyone trained on how to write standards, and then when I stepped down from being associate provost, Jody Pedizone took over as SACS liaison. And the odd thing was that Chancellor Martin from A&T and I had become friends through SACS by me going to these meetings.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So anyhow, and then I became Chair of the Senate, was on UNC assembly, and go to know him because he was vice president, so I got to know him 01:20:00in another role. The day I met him, just as a funny little anecdote, he told me when I asked him what he did, he said he was between jobs, and I thought "Oh, poor man. He's unemployed." He was between being provost at A&T and being chancellor at Winston-Salem State. I'm just saying he was a modest man. But anyhow I later figured out who he was. But anyhow, we became friends later when I was on Faculty Assembly. So here's the odd thing is, he nominated me to be on the SACSCOC Board of Trustees just as I was getting ready to step down from being Associate Provost, and I still remember I told Linda Brady he was going to do it, and she says "Well, I have to nominate you too. It looks weird having a chancellor from another university nominate you." So she nominated me too, but it was really Chancellor Martin who asked me if I wanted to do it and wrote a letter.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So just as I stop being our SACSCOC liaison, I started a term on the Board of Trustees, and I just re-upped. So I'm on the Board of Trustees now through December of 2018. So I have nothing to do with the process on campus, and I have to recuse myself from anything that goes on in North Carolina or any other place I have ties, but I'm still part of the process. There's no way that when I agreed to do this in 2000 I thought it would be a part of my career.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But here's the thing, most faculty see accreditation as an intrusive process and outsiders telling us what to do. I see it as a way that protects students because it requires integrity of the institutions that are 01:22:00accredited, and most of the standards are designed to protect students. So faculty may complain because they have to be credentialed to teach their courses, but a lot of times when I've done external review of institutions there have been faculty who should not have been teaching courses. And that's not fair to the students. It isn't fair to the students when we publish programs we don't offer. It's not fair to the students when we don't adhere to truth in advertising. I mean, there are all sorts of things that are for the students' protection. Even the student learn outcomes, which I had to oversee us developing, are so students know what they're supposed to learn, and guess what, if they know what they're supposed to learn, they're more likely to learn it! And if they the faculty know what they're supposed to teach and can articulate 01:23:00it, they actually do a better job of teaching it!

Dr. Rebecca A.: So in the long run, even if though I hate doing those reports as much as everyone else -- and I just got an extension from my former direct report. I'm overdue on my report -- even though I have the same reaction to the work itself, I know that it's actually helped education. And in the southern United States where we had a lot of catching up to do, this regional accreditation has been very important, and quite frankly now, if I may slip into a little political, accreditation, the federal government is trying to centralize it and get rid of regional accreditation, and it could be that it wouldn't be a decision of pure bodies the way it is now, at least now the accreditation rules are voted on by representatives from other institutions, and 01:24:00we have a vote too. Jody has our vote and the Chancellor. Or maybe it's the Chancellor. I don't know who has it, but one person gets the vote. And it's much better to have a group of our peers in our regions who understand our institutions, figuring out how to make them as good as they can be, as opposed to having a federal government and being subject to all of its whims controlling education nationally. And that's why I've always done regional accreditation work. Even when faculty-

Lacey: Grumble.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Grumble, and even when Dave Perron would stand in front of people and say "Don't leave the room! We're going to talk about SACS," I wanted to go [inaudible 01:24:55] because what he should have been saying is what this provost says, which is "Look, this is why we're doing this, and it has to be 01:25:00done." She never suggests people should run out of the room.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So it's been worth it, and I think now that universities are so much under attack politically that people are beginning to see the value of accreditation.

Lacey: Yeah. I think so.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Things like not having Boards of Directors that are subjected to outside influences. Let me say no more. That's a standard.

Lacey: Oh, good.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Do you see what I mean?

Lacey: Yeah.

Dr. Rebecca A.: We need those standards and someone paying attention. Things like financial stability. Colleges could stay open without enough money to do a good job. We don't want that.

Lacey: Right. Yeah.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So there's a point to it.

Lacey: Okay. So are there any administrative positions that you've had that we 01:26:00haven't touched on that you wish we had at this point?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well, we haven't done them in order, so I am a little confused.

Lacey: I know. It's kind of... Yeah.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well, they're not in order on my CV because I think of them in very different pockets.

Lacey: Yeah. I did what I could.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah. Trying to think if I did anything else that was mildly important. I was an undergraduate adviser in sociology back when we actually met with every student, but that was a long time ago. I probably did that twice, actually. No. I think that's... I mean, I've chaired a lot of committees and things, but I think those are the biggies.

Lacey: Okay. So I think we're going to do Grateful Dead, some campus culture, and then our ending questions.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Oh, my gosh.

Lacey: So currently it's 5:15.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Okay.

Lacey: We'll see what we can do.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Okay.

Lacey: So how did the Grateful Dead Project begin?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Okay. When I came here, I think I told you, I studied older adult friendship, and I was interested in people who had moved and how relocation had affected their friendship patterns because I had lived in 13 places as a kid. I thought that had affected my friendship style, my opportunity to maintain friendships, all sorts of things, so I was interested in studying friendships across the life course. But because I got interested in that geographic mobility part, I thought that, and this was pre-internet, I was interested in people who became friends but didn't ever live in the same place. So I was thinking about academics who went to professional conferences and came 01:28:00together periodically or trade shows or book editors or people who would go to show at places. And I had mentioned that to Matt Russ, who is the person who owns most of Tate Street. He owns Tate Street Coffee Shop. He was at the time an undergraduate psychology/sociology double major, and he wasn't even a student in my class. He was one of my undergraduate advisees, so yes, I was undergraduate advisor another time!

Lacey: You got to it. You got back to it.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So I did do that earlier too.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Okay. So my husband at the time was working at Gilbarco, where he had a boss who was a Deadhead. And his boss invited him to go to a concert, and I thought "Oh, my husband's first corporate job. We're going to the symphony 01:29:00or something." No. We're driving to Hampton, Virginia, to go to a Grateful Dead show. And Matt Russ and a bunch of other UNCG students saw me at the Dead show, and on Monday, Matt was in my office, and he said, "You know that theoretical agenda about people who don't know each other and come together only periodically, you should study Deadheads. Much more interesting than book editors or academics." He said, "Student will be a lot more interested in this." Always the entrepreneur, Matt.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So he brought that up and then my colleague, Paul Luebke, the State Legislator I just mentioned who's passed away recently, was interred in the Green Party and doing research on the Green Party. He was a political sociologist, and Deadheads were Green, he thought. So, he was going to do this project with me where we study Deadheads, and I started talking about this as a 01:30:00project, and my department head, who studied American blues, decided he wanted Continual Learning to start something called "The Institute of American Popular Culture" and that he and I would both participate in it.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So he mentioned to John Young about my interest in this, and John offered to do this pair of classes. And I can't remember how we got to this point, but I wasn't going to teach two summer classes, field research methods, Applied Field Research Methods and Applied Social Theory for six credits total and to do their research, the students were going to go on the Grateful Dead summer tour, and DCL sponsored this course. They advertised it nationally. They 01:31:00recruited Emily Edwards, who was the brand-new film professor at the time to do a video on the tour, which ended up nationally syndicated on PBS, shown illegally for about a decade during their fundraisers. They stole the master tape from Chapel Hill. And that was the idea of Anthony Bolton, who was a staff member at DCL. He's the one who recruited Emily to go on the bus. And John Young also paid for a friend of mine from college who has since become a very famous photographer to go on the bus and take pictures, so I have like 1,200 amazing slides of this experience.

Lacey: Wow.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So the class met here on campus five days a week, five hours a day, for three weeks, and then we went on tour, and then the students wrote their papers up after that. And I had to be trained on how to talk to the press 01:32:00because we were on every major television network, MTV, Entertainment Tonight. We were in German magazines, British magazines. It's [inaudible 01:32:20]. I was once told that I had -- other that the guy in economics who became very famous. I forget his name now -- but I had the most press citations of my day. And a lot of people weren't happy about it because they thought it was frivolous. I was written up in the Congregational Record, not me personally but the class, as a symbol of the decline of higher education. The Chancellor of the System had to defend me. Chancellor Moran one of the reasons I love that man, wrote basic letters about academic freedom. Faculty at Chapel Hill called me to tell me I 01:33:00was doing the right thing.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Mereb Mossman who the Mossman building is named after, was elderly at the time. I was teaching an Introductory Sociology class and one of our neighbors was in it and he brought me a note that said, "Do not stop talking to the press. -Mereb. You are doing what you're supposed to do. Don't let them get you down". So, it was right when popular culture was becoming a real subject and it wasn't a legitimate subject yet. So I took a lot of heat for the class, but the class went on tour. We all returned home. There were some questions about whether we would all get here, we had to stop at a hospital on the way back. But the class was really successful. That PBS video, by today's standards, 01:34:00it went viral.

Lacey: Sure.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Yeah. One of the students in the class had painting she had done while on tour hung in the North Carolina State Museum. One of the students won the best paper contest for North Carolina Sociology. Lots of other good things happened about the class. Now, the class still exists. They still talk to each other. They still meet with other... I've seen three of them in the last week. That experience of being scrutinized so carefully really pulled them together.

Lacey: Sure.

Dr. Rebecca A.: They also had a sense they were getting away with something because everyone else was so upset about what we were doing.

Lacey: Right.

Dr. Rebecca A.: This was the day before learning outcomes, but I had them in my 01:35:00head. I knew what I was trying to teach and I'm still real close to those students. That led to me doing research on The Dead because I realized I didn't really... I had done these independent studies the year before the class with four students. Oh, I got off that tab. The four students who... other than Matt Ross who got me involved in this, were on a social movements class that Paul Luebke was teaching and he allowed them to skip class to go to the concert where they saw me. So they ended up doing independent studies with me, which is what actually led to the class.

Lacey: Okay. Got you.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Two of those independent studies students are still my closest friends. They had blew up after all of this was over. What happened there is now 01:36:00a Grateful Dead caucus, it meets once a year. It's had maybe four or 500 academics go through it. It meets at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association that came about five years after I did the class.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So I've continued to write from the data that I collected that summer. I did a co-edited book with one of my two graduate assistants called, 'You Ain't Gonna Learn What You Don't Want To Know', which is a Grateful Dead lyric ... Deadhead Social Science. That was a collection of master's papers from all over the country that on Deadheads that I helped the students from their various places edit into shape to be published. That was the book really about what the benefits of collaborating with students as researchers. And how you weren't going to know what you didn't want to know if you didn't ask.

Lacey: Sure.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I have an unpublished book manuscript that I wrote that year that I just couldn't bring myself to finish at the time. Mainly because I wanted to be promoted to full professor and I was afraid if I published that book, I would never be promoted.

Lacey: Sure.

Dr. Rebecca A.: The minute I got promoted to full professor, I started all of these university roles, 1998, that was the end of my freedom as a researcher. So that book has been sitting there for all that time waiting for me to finish it. Now of course I have to completely change it because so much has happened since the last time I drafted it. What I have done since then though is, I've written things that I considered to be outside of the book. So I've actually written a lot about Deadheads but what it's turned out, the book was about Deadheads and 01:38:00how it was possible for a community to form without sharing permanent territory. Which once the internet came out was even more interesting, right?

Lacey: Yeah.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But this other book that I think I have all the pieces to already published and could put together in an edited volume is about music fans across the life course. I've acquired all of these co-authors, along the way on these pieces. So it includes a woman, Jane Rosen Grandon, who was first teaching in sociology when I was there as an adjunct. Her husband, Gary Grandon was Jim Clotfelter's right hand man until the reorganization of that unit. Amy Ernstes, who's currently an adjunct faculty member in sociology. Kelly Lucy, who was my undergraduate assistant like 15 years before we finished the publication. She 01:39:00had started to help me work on as an undergraduate and a new hire, Justin Harmon, who is in CTR. I don't know, five or 10 years ago, he called me out of the nowhere in the universe and asked me for advice on what graduate school to go to.

Lacey: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Rebecca A.: He went to Texas A&M and then they recruited him in CTR two years ago and his office is two doors from mine. I literally recruited him before he applied to graduate school. So I've co-authored with all of these people on these different topics as the Deadheads have aged. The most recent thing Justin and I have coming out is on Deadheads forming intentional retirement communities. I've written about Deadheads in mixed marriages having child rearing issues, about Deadheads trying to figure out what to do when Jerry 01:40:00Garcia died and they didn't have a tour anymore. I've written with Justin about, aging Deadheads and the accumulated problems that you have as a rock music fan when you get older and now about retirement community. So it forms... and that's not the book I was writing, that's the book I wasn't writing. So I still have the book that I'm writing and somehow between now and when I retire in five years. I'm going to take my bank leave and write the book that I was going to write right after I got tenure.

Lacey: I don't have any other questions about that. Honestly-

Dr. Rebecca A.: It's another bookend thing. Yeah. That archive piece just came out of nowhere. I had apparently submitted an article I had written at the time about teaching and research being joined together for some teaching ideas contests. As I told you, I've always been consistent about us being 01:41:00teacher-researchers. I've been on that since the beginning of time and apparently that's what I submitted. One of your historian colleagues came up with this thing and there it was. I can send you the link, you can see how it fits into what you've been talking-

Lacey: I'm curious. Yeah, definitely send me a link. I don't have any other Grateful Dead questions. Honestly. I think I decided you'd tell me about it and then honestly I don't have any further questions from that long thing. So going to h-

Dr. Rebecca A.: I can't believe how much you'd fit in here, but...

Lacey: We're just going to run through just some campus things. Some real quick administration thing and then our ending questions. Then I will let you go. Because we just hit 5:30. How would you describe campus culture at UNCG?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Okay. Well, I already described it. We don't know how much we lost. But on the recording, so let me just summarize that when I came here in 01:42:00the fall of 1983 as a sociology instructor used to teaching diverse classes in Chicago. I found a very homogeneous population, mainly Caucasians, 70% female. It made it extremely challenging to teach diversity, race, ethnicity, gender. Over the years I've been very pleased to see our campus become more and more diverse. We were under a federal decree to integrate when I first got here or they just ended one of the two.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But it was still being talked about to now where I feel like we really value diversity and inclusiveness along all sorts of dimensions. All of 01:43:00the recent stuff with HB2, I think and Black Lives Matter has only solidified feelings in solidarity. Building on what I think was already here. I've always just been very proud of how we proceeded and we tried, as I said on the other tape, to get a chief diversity officer. When conservatives in this state complained about that and let it known that that wasn't something they wanted. Well, we came back and got Chancellor Gilliam and so ha ha.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I feel like the only downside to becoming twice the size and more diverse is that it's harder to hold our community together. I do sometimes 01:44:00think that, since Erskine Bowles started emphasizing efficiency, that was a real turning point for the University that we've lost some of our compassion. We've lost a lot of faculty and staff who contributed way beyond what the expectations were. I think sometimes we forget to value people who are willing to work in a place where there are paid less because they believe in the mission. When you cease valuing the contributions of those people, you lose a lot of resources that you're not cutting from the budget that are going with the cuts you do make.

Lacey: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Rebecca A.: That's the only thing I'm concerned about that we won't... I'm 01:45:00hoping we'll find a balance and find out how to work efficiently and to be as effective on the various metrics that allow us to be funded adequately but still maintain a commitment to an inclusive and compassionate culture. I think we're at a turning point. We could go either way. We could become just another university that meets its enrollment targets and gets funded for doing what it needs to do. Or we could be a really special, inclusive, compassionate place where everyone wants to work and live. It'll depend a lot on how people handle this transition we're on right now, I think.

Lacey: Okay. So we're just going to hit our wrap up questions.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Okay.

Lacey: Is there anything you remember about the four chancellors you've had here at UNCG that you haven't mentioned already? You've talked a bit about Moran and a bit about Brady and about Gilliam. I don't think you've touched on Sullivan yet.

Dr. Rebecca A.: It's so weird because she was the one I knew the best. So, well I've already touched on Moran who... as I said I was there with the vote of no confidence, but I was also around long enough to see how he stood by the university after that. I will never forget his support of academic freedom. He was really excellent on it. He was so excellent on it that when Chancellor Sullivan came for an interview, the only question I asked in the open forum was about that. I don't remember what her answer was, but it wasn't very good and I 01:47:00was really worried about it. It was something we allowed people to protest or something and I thought, well, big deal. I remember the at the time worrying that she was... Because for me at that time, doing the Deadhead research, it was very important to me I had a chancellor who would protect me. But when once Chancellor Sullivan and got here, it turned out that I had nothing to worry about in that regard really.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But she became the chancellor of most of my career. She was here I think 13 years, so it was a pretty... she had the biggest run of any of the chancellors. I still remember my daughter meeting her for the first time at a Christmas party. My daughter had been eating chocolate covered strawberries and Chancellor Sullivan was wearing a winter white suit. When my daughter shook her 01:48:00hand, she just wiped her hands off and smiled. I thought, "Wow, what poise?"

Lacey: Yeah.

Dr. Rebecca A.: The following year my daughter informed her that she had licked them off beforehand when Chancellors Sullivan complimented her on being clean. It's one of those horrifying... But my daughter did grow up to room with her niece at camp, Carrison Sciences Camp derby. Chancellor Sullivan and her husband became good friends over the years. Whenever I was at a reception with my husband, he would talk to Charlie. The two of them would stand over in the corner and I don't... They once at a reception at the Brian House disappeared in the basement to look at the plumbing together. I had no idea of what they were up to.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So we did become good friends and after she retired, I continued to have lunch with her and she mentored me through the whole process of applying 01:49:00to be associate provost and mentored me on always looking ahead and thinking of the big picture and... she was just a wonderful woman. I love it that my daughter knew Chancellor Sullivan growing up, she went to the little north drive daycare center. I found it really interesting that after she graduated from Oberlin and started working for Patty Reggio and biochemistry, her office was right across from the daycare center and in the Sullivan building. It just seemed right.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I will say however, that when Linda Brady came here, I was also working closely with her and she had a very controversial chancellorship. She came in just when all of the instructions to chancellors were changing. Erskine Bowles was the UNC President and it was the beginning of big changes. Chancellor 01:50:00Brady took the heat for a lot of things that were outside of her control. She also took the heat for a lot of things that were actually Chancellors Sullivan's ideas and they just took a long time to come into fruition. So, I haven't gotten to know Chancellor Gilliam that much, but what I think is that every... The chancellors served in very different periods and had very different chancellors. I think we've been very lucky that we've actually gotten the right chancellor for each period.

Lacey: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Rebecca A.: We wouldn't be where we were if we hadn't. I do want to say a word about the provost because that's something that didn't even exist when I 01:51:00got here. When I came for my faculty interview; I was interviewed by Stanley Jones, who I think might have had the title, Vice President of Academic Affairs or something like that. But he was a real old school guy and he didn't even talk to me about my scholarship or anything. He just wanted to know if he liked me. We talked about protests at restaurants in Chicago that his daughter had been involved. That's all we talked.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Then Elizabeth Zinsser came in and she was more bureaucratically inclined. She was a nurse, so she paid a lot of attention to details and she made this big plan called Quovadmas that sat on a shelf and people did not like her very much. But for me as a young faculty member, she was extremely supportive of me and my administrative goals and my interest in gerontology. So 01:52:00I always really liked her. Then we had Ed Uprichard forever and I worked closely with him on accreditation. He decentralized everything and Dave Perron didn't really change too much and then we've now got someone who's centralizing a lot of stuff. So we've gone-

Lacey: Sure. Back and forth.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Back and forth. Right. But once again, the two positions have changed because I don't really know how Moran and Jones work together. But I do know that Chancellor Sullivan and Ed Uprichard were together all the time. I once... this is actually funny enough to tell this story. When I was on the mission committee, I was chairing the mission statement committee. We had a 01:53:00meeting and both the Chancellor and the Provost were there. There was a draft of the mission statement that included some language in it that wasn't straight forward English big words. I don't even remember what it was, but it was just a draft. One of the community members on the planning council complained about it and kind of came down hard on the committee. Well, I wasn't ruffled because I knew it was a draft.

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well chancellor Sullivan blasted me, blasted me. It was completely inappropriate. I left the room and I was so shaken I left my pocket book and I had to go back. When I got back there I heard Ed Uprichard saying, "You never talk to one of my faculty like that again. That was a draft. You should have been on her side instead of on the community members side. She's 01:54:00doing this, she's doing that." He totally defended me. Of course they never knew I heard this because I just left my pocket book there.

Lacey: What.

Dr. Rebecca A.: But I remember thinking they were bickering like they were husband and a wife. That's how I always thought of him after that, as an academic pair, even though they both had very good marriages. But then Linda Brady came in and I was on the search committee for Linda Brady and so I know what we could have had if we hadn't gotten Linda. So let me just say, without divulging anything about that search process, we came this close to a total disaster. I'm putting my fingers really close together and if it hadn't been for Dean Weeks and a couple of other people tag teaming on that committee. We could 01:55:00have ended up with somebody who would have ripped this place to shreds and there wouldn't have been anything for Gilliam to pickup and fix.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So, anyhow, I went back to the chancellor. Sorry about that but-

Lacey: It's okay.

Dr. Rebecca A.: ... tired after all this...

Lacey: It's useful. We are going to do our last two questions and then we are going to wrap up. Is there anything else that you wish to be talked about that we haven't talked about yet?

Dr. Rebecca A.: Well, we haven't really talked about the students, but I'm probably too tired to do that coherently.

Lacey: We did what we could. Okay.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I mean, except for the diversity aspect but...

Lacey: Okay. Should I ask him about the students?

Dr. Rebecca A.: No, that's okay.

Lacey: So we're just going do the last two questions. So these are just the reflective ones from the 125th. So tell me about how UNCG has affected your life and what it means to you?

Dr. Rebecca A.: It's been my only adult full time job. It is a huge part of my 01:56:00identity. When I was on Dean's Council as Associate Provost, one time Celia Hooper said something like, "Maybe we should get Minerva tattoos". Well, she was joking and at the time she didn't know I had a tattoo because I always covered it in those days before faculty started showing them. But I probably at that point in my career would have found it okay to get a Minerva tattoo because it is so much a part of my life. My daughter was raised on campus. She ended up working here, getting her MBA here after she went to graduate school at Duke.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I've lived near a campus, many of my best friends are people who were my students and grew up to be friendship candidates. I can't imagine a 01:57:00better way to have spent my life and associated with an institution that has a really special mission and a special place in the world. So when I said that thing earlier in the interview about those of us who are university nerds know each other, it's also those of us who've stayed here for as long as we have. Have a special connection and a special sense of being here over all of the changes.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I'm not sure if faculty who are coming up now will have that opportunity to forge those those lasting connections with their colleagues. Partly because service isn't as big a part of the faculty job anymore and it's 01:58:00service that used to get people out of their departments.

Lacey: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Rebecca A.: Now interdisciplinary collaboration might get people out of their departments. I certainly hope so. I've always been interdisciplinary and that was an issue in me getting tenured because I was supposed to be a sociologist, not a gerontologist. I got tenured obviously, but the issue was raised, right?

Lacey: Yeah.

Dr. Rebecca A.: So I don't know if other people in the future we'll have these strong institutional identity like I do. So it's important to me.

Lacey: Then our last question is, these interviews of the 125th anniversary, which is a good time for us to look back on where we came from, but also a good time to look forward and see where we're going to go. So what do you think is 01:59:00the future for UNCG? Where do you see UNCG going as an institution the next 25 to 50 years?

Dr. Rebecca A.: I would like to see us own who we've always been. Which is to be an institution where teaching and scholarship are one thing, meaning teaching and research and creative activity. An institution that embraces inclusively all sorts of people from all over the world and from all over the country and from different economic brackets and backgrounds. An institution that really takes care of the community that surrounds it and works with that community to improve the quality of life for everybody in the area.

Dr. Rebecca A.: I think that's what we should've been doing all along. I felt 02:00:00like being distracted by trying to become a junior Chapel Hill was unfortunate because if we had kept our eyes on what we were good at all along. I think we'd be further along in the process of getting where I think we should be.

Lacey: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Rebecca A.: This does not mean contributing less to the research enterprise. It just means doing it in a different way. Now the funding's been cut all over the place. We may have no choice but to be innovative and creative and it might not be a bad thing. It might not be a bad thing that we have to rethink how we're going to be effective? So we'll see.