Oral history interview with Sarah "Sally" M. Robinson, 1990

WL: The following is an interview with Sally Robinson, in her office at UNCG, on October 11 1990. My name is William Link. I'd like to start just by going back to your first exposure to Woman's College [of the University of North Carolina]. Some early impressions you might have had when you first arrived, what brought you here the first time, how did you first arrive, what set of circumstances landed you in Greensboro, North Carolina?

SR: Yeah. That's a fun story. I won't labor it, but two things: outreach from the campus drew me to the campus or I would never have known it was here. One was in the days before intercollegiate athletics. The department of physical education had a sports day that they sponsored for girls throughout the state 00:01:00who had an all-day affair. And the undergraduate students of the department of physical education ran a special kind of mini-Olympic day, you know, combined teams from the different regions so that if a young person came and they were from Winston-Salem, they would be on teams with girls from Charlotte and from Fayetteville and from Wilmington and so on. And a large number of high schools came to this activity. And it was called the Girls Athletic Association Sports Day, or possibly, Field Day, Play Day, probably, at the Woman's College. And when I came to that event, Coleman Gym[nasium] was new. And so it was done with a kind of showing off of the Coleman Gym and of the leadership skills of the undergraduate majors in physical education, many of whom had already - who, in the next year, would go out and student teach in these same high schools. So the 00:02:00activity was for the juniors to do this sports day, and the next year when they were seniors, they would student teach in these various places.

WL: Kind of a preliminary to their -

SR: Preliminary, and a big organization. A lot of effort was put into teaching the students the skills they needed to run a day like that rather than the faculty running it and the students just being go-fers. So there was a big - I'm going to use that as a metaphor of the student development idea that was here when I was a student. Other people participating in that probably were in what we called the Recreation Association, which was - the president of Recreation Association was a major student government office. It was a - I'm going to use the phrase "big deal" - to be on the board of the Student Recreation Association because all the time for athletics and campus recreation outside of instructional time and research time - we already had master's students doing significant research here - was organized and run by the students, advised by 00:03:00the faculty. And the TAs [teaching assistants] then were the building supervisors at night because they were allowed to have keys and so on. But it was a very - assumed to be a community activity that students knew what to plan for other students. And we had this end of the campus busy all the time, Rosenthal [Gymnasium] and Coleman [Gymnasium] and the fields and the pool. The life guarding selection, for example, was run by the students with the advisement of Rosemary McGee [Department of Kinesiology faculty, became acting dean of the School of Health and Human Performance] helping you to do that. There was a big ethic - and I just used my department as an example of [the] very important ethic that students were capable of organizing and running things and evaluating them and that students participated in the advisement process for that. Students solicited all of the names, for example, for Golden Chain [honor society] selection and made their own choices who would be the new members of Golden Chain with the consent of their faculty advisor and the help of their 00:04:00faculty advisor. But it was - there was a great centering on the notion of student responsibility was an obligation, and it was emphasized in that - you know, today we have the guidelines for student handbook. The student handbook then was edited by students with the approval, I'm sure, of student affairs. And students were expected to know what was in there and to go by those boundaries. And one of the things had to do with this notion of responsible freedom. It was one of Miss [Harriet] Elliott's [dean of students] phrases. And so all of student government and much of the co-curricular activity of the departments was centered around this ethic, which people more or less accepted, that we were being trained to be responsible citizens at the same time by being given real rules - I mean, real roles, and living within our own rules, which were very 00:05:00largely administered and carried out by students. I think that when we've talked, I've said to people by the end of the first week here, I knew the Robert's Rules of Order enough to go to other student government activities. And that example of the PE. [physical education] students doing the Sports Day for the high school young people was a lot of work for the faculty. No doubt about it. It might have been more work to teach students to do it than simply to do it, but it was a wonderful outreach into the community. It brought, I think, a lot of women here who wouldn't necessarily do sports or physical education. But brought women here to see the campus, which at the time was a pretty campus for its size. Ninety-five percent of the people lived on campus. There was plenty of parking because no students had cars, except student teaching. And it was basically a pedestrian campus with very, you know, island of liberal notions and 00:06:00student - encouragement of student development. In a world that many of the women had come from - was much more restrictive. So [they] came here and discovered self government.

WL: So, in a sense, a great deal more freedom on campus?

SR: Yes, yes. At the same time, that for those of us who had lived in other places in the world, a quaint assumptions about what women could and couldn't do either for themselves or by themselves because, you see, up to that time I had lived on and around with my parents' military establishments and big cities and other parts of the country where some of the assumptions about fainting female behavior was funny to me at times. The girl school graces notions that were here that were not necessarily generalizable [sic] to other geographic areas in the 00:07:00US. And much less restrictive than the other schools in the neighborhood. Woman's College people were assumed to have a lot more freedom than people from some of the other woman's colleges in the region.

WL: Such as Greensboro College, perhaps?

SR: Possibly, yeah. And I think of Greensboro College. I think of almost all of the religiously affiliated woman's colleges - everything from the hours, to the signing yourself out, to the getting yourself to and from where you needed to be.

WL: So, within the limits of this system of responsible freedom, things were quite open here, comparatively speaking, you felt?

SR: Comparatively speaking. And I think, in a lot of ways, students spoke up more for what they thought even if it was thought to be foolish by others than students do today. We weren't - I wouldn't say we were radicalized, but there 00:08:00were certainly the black stocking radical fringe, you know - the Jack Kerouac [Canadian-American novelist and poet of the Beat Generation] - if we could get you to see the scripts of the junior shows, which are a great, wonderful parody of our life here. They are an insight into the way we saw ourselves and the openness of communication, which I think was basically wholesome. The other public thing that got me here was that, in addition to playing sports and wanting to do physical education, I was a mildly-talented teenage concert band player of an instrument everybody needs - I played the bassoon. And so I was invited to some things, not music camp, per se, but invited to apply to this - be interested in UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro] by virtue of the music school here, which led my parents, even though they moved off to other parts of the world when I got ready to choose college, led my parents to 00:09:00think, "Well, if I didn't want to do physical education after I got into it, and I found that I didn't want to be as restricted as the - you know, the bachelor of music curriculum even then was very tightly controlled in the school of music. It still was a wonderful liberal arts place and I would find something I liked if I liked it." And of course, they were correct that this was a place that didn't trap me into - oh, say, in my discipline going to a teacher training program for physical education. In some other states would be very narrowly confining in the curriculum and the experiences.

WL: When you arrived here, what kind of curriculum as a freshman did you face?

SR: Well, everyone took the same undergraduate first two years, except the commercial students who only had a two-year curriculum. And that was basically a very - I want to say traditional and probably that's true - liberal studies 00:10:00curriculum of English and history and math and science and behavioral sciences and so on. And the physical education department chose the sciences. We all took two semesters of biology, two of chemistry, two of anatomy and physiology, a third one in physiology. It was very biologically-science oriented. A math. We had very few electives. I took all mine in history, as a matter of fact, with some wonderful people. We were allowed to - once you reached a certain academic level of - and of course, the four semesters of foreign language and the four semesters of history and four of English that were the freshman-sophomore core. Almost in some ways like, although not as imaginative as, the idea of 00:11:00residential college where the students take their, you know, sequenced work, why the history work was sequenced and the English work was sequenced.

WL: But you had this kind of common core curriculum that - ?

SR: Oh absolutely. And you weren't sent off to choose your section by who you were in class with otherwise. Except that - as not a whole lot of people took the emphasis in science that we took in pre-med and physical education and pre-physical therapy or the people going to be biology and chemistry majors. So that by the time we were into that fourth semester of natural science, it was down to a group of people with bachelor of science interests. We'd lost almost all the musicians along the way and a lot of the history majors and almost everybody in sociology and so on. So that even by the end of sophomore year, there were these little groupings, whether by major or not, by interest area, where those of us wanting to - and psychology was in that group - a group of people studying the biological sciences as the basis of their work included a 00:12:00kind of cadre of people, more so than, let's say, a cadre of people studying education all together. And I think that's still true today, frankly. I think the nursing students - the students in nursing program and the P. and the pre-physical therapy, - I mean, they find each other along the way, right, more than one might necessarily find all the people going to be secondary school teachers of anything.

WL: Once students finished the first two years, they then would go off to majors and would go their separate ways?

SR: Right. Let me put it this way. You were allowed to be undeclared through the first four semesters, and then it was assumed you would magically know what to major in. The people in music, what we now have, human environmental science - then it would have been home economics - physical education, probably art, 00:13:00possibly drama students began their work earlier. And the physical education, music and home ec[onomics] people began their major contact with their major department as early as the first semester of their freshman year, so that the period of socialization to a departmental faculty varied greatly. And for those of us with specific performance objectives - were brought in earlier and encouraged to start earlier. This put us in contact in our department, in physical education, with a marvelous cohort of master's students. The first MS in physical education students that we had here - almost all of them have gone on to do spectacular, nice things in their field. The MSPE [master of science in physical education] was very selective, and they took in twenty students a year. They graduated them all at the end of the next August and -

WL: A one-year program?

SR: A one-year program when it started. Thirty hours with a thesis. And we were in every one possible thesis, you see. Here is this college where you have to have performance activity - I mean, performance, whether physiological or psychological or instructional. Then one of the pools of people for subjects were the undergraduate students. And among that group were undergraduate physical education majors, and we were socialized right into that idea of research as a way of finding things out. First as subjects and then, quickly the next semester we were recruited, if you showed any talent at all, to be data gatherers or blood pressure collectors or timers. So you were really socialized early into the notion of empirical research and historical research being ways of advancing the field. So that one of the things that startled some of us when 00:15:00we got out into our first teaching is that everybody at undergraduate physical education didn't know that one of your goals was, in two or three years, to find the graduate school for you and that after that -

WL: So they really did push, promote graduate - ?

SR: Graduate education - whether you were going to continue in public teaching or whether you were going to go on to a graduate degree beyond the master's. But I can remember, and she has just passed away, you know - Ethel Martus Lawther [first dean of the School of Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance]. Her assumption was that we should all get a job if we wanted one. You know, this is the era in which some were going to get married and not get a job right away, another outside-the-home job right away. Her assumption was that in two or three years, you were going to begin a master's program, and you should start looking now to where your talents lay. And that, for many, that would be the end of the final graduate work. But for - probably she expected, I think, about half of every class would go on beyond a master's. And this is partly because their 00:16:00master's program here at that time was fairly new [and] very well respected. They had been able to attract excellent students from literally all over the world. One of the students my freshman year that was collecting data in the swimming pool was from Australia and had been in the '56 Olympics. There was an interesting assumption here that we had an excellent program for women and, of course, that was in the day when professionally men's and women's physical education were going on parallel and sometimes divergent tracks.

WL: Oh really?

SR: Yeah.

WL: How were they divergent?

SR: Well, divergent because the men's program emphasized military fitness often and a strictly empirical physiology of exercise mode of investigating physical 00:17:00education. And the women's program was often geared - and especially here - toward the education of children, instructional development, measurement and evaluation, assessment techniques for the development of total programs, the concept of dance as a part of the physical education of people. The men's program often separated some of those things out. Separate - it was an interesting bifurcation of women's things and men's things that was just - once again, metaphorically typified by physical education.

WL: Were there differences on competitive approach toward competition?

SR: Oh absolutely. You see, we were still living in the day when a lot of women in physical education - and I think - I thought then wrongly, I think now wrongly - said women can't do those things, so they shouldn't. And what they really meant to say is, "We don't want women to do those things, so they shouldn't." And a lot of effort was put into proving that women couldn't do 00:18:00things, which we know perfectly well today women can do. And to the credit of people in this department, they were some of the ones doing research on women's functioning to dispel the myth.

WL: It seems to - everything I hear about the department here in that period seems to suggest it was a remarkable assemblage of people and talent and ingenuity and imagination.

SR: Oh yeah, very creative individuals.

WL: How did that happen? Do you - I mean, how did it all - ?

SR: Well, I think it goes all the way back to whoever brought Miss Coleman. Mary Channing Coleman [head of the physical education department] was an individual of remarkable courage, I think, and strong opinions. She came from a privileged family in southern Virginia, was teaching kinesiology - which is a, 00:19:00you know, the movement, biological background of physical education - at Columbia University. And someone recruited her away to come to the middle of North Carolina where there was nothing, no program, no tradition, no whatever. They just knew they thought this was a field that ought to be being developed. And she came and exacted from the staff she recruited a very high ideal of creativity and high level of academic performance. This is the time, of course, when - you'll want to check my facts exactly - but women who were married couldn't teach in the public schools of North Carolina. Okay, so the whole - there was a wonderful sorority of people here up through - who started with Miss Coleman and she recruited who she wanted around her. People of gumption, I would 00:20:00say, if you would to interview somebody like Marge Leonard, Marjorie Leonard, from the late thirties [physical education] faculty - just retired - on into the seventies. People with independent minds, ability to create and follow their own rules, high academic standards, some level of intellect, a willingness to be[have], behave appropriately in the milieu of, you know, what women need to be able to do, whether married or not, in a certain environment. Some leadership talent, some talent for not just repeating the old on and on and on, but of, you know, recognizing circumstances, moving in new directions. She recruited and promoted. I mean, there were a lot of people came and went from here, I think. I understand she was quite a terrifying individual - would be to our students today in a kind of authoritarian and confirmed judgment. And at times, somewhat 00:21:00- not necessarily gentle in this delivering of her messages. But she recruited and promoted and wanted to see - take leadership people with some originality, but who could work on a team. This didn't make, necessarily, for just everything being all sweetness and light. But people were civil and considerate and well educated. And there were - the standards of behavior at times, I think, were possibly a socialization pattern that was more than we would do now in the way of telling people how they may dress and where they may live and you know, what you will do -

WL: [unclear]

SR: Oh, absolutely. But I think Miss Coleman was very wise in recruiting people 00:22:00of the sheer intellect of Ethel Martus Lawther. Mrs. Lawther - we knew her as Miss Martus then - tremendous long-range view and a person of great gentleness and kindness, but a very centrally-firm core. And to balance - you know, the balancing of styles was something that they both valued. They recruited people who were capable of getting the job done. Some sense of energy and willingness to dedicate time to the project. Because they built up a very, very fine reputation for undergraduate women's physical education through the fifties, they were then ready when they started the master's program to take those standards of - I'm going to almost use perfectionism - into the ideals that they had for the master's program. And as an undergraduate student, I can remember 00:23:00master's people being here in the fall and not being here in the spring. I mean, they just didn't seem to need to promote the fortunes of people - some of it was rather cruel, I think - promote the fortunes of people who weren't making it. Now this was delivered, I think, in the kindest possible way, but I'm sure a crushing blow to the individuals involved.

WL: But that same sort of rigorous standards, very high standards [unclear] -

SR: Exactly. And she recruited people who had been to other places. I mean, it was a deliberate - there was a certain pattern of what in the middle sixties we called "inbreeding," you know, of hiring your own. But not all from the same generation, you know. And bringing people back who came from different cohort groups. So there has always been here that thread of alumni participation as a 00:24:00faculty member that sometimes is crippling, you know. The keeping yourself connected to the place. Yalies at Yale kind of, you know, behavior. At the same time, all of the faculty were mindful of having diversity, having different opinions, having people with different kinds of training. The expectation was that people would have areas of expertise and they would be very good at them. But when something else needed to be done, you just got yourself busy and figured out how to do it best within the framework, you know. It wasn't quite as narrowly specialized as we are today. But we didn't see the faculty as sort of interchangeable parts - like, you know, it didn't matter who taught golf or who taught swimming, who taught tennis. It did matter, and people were encouraged very much to follow their talents and to keep working on their - you know, to keep making their teaching better, their advising, as I say, a kind of perfectionistic [sic] standard. Rosemary McGee [Woman's College Class of 1959 00:25:00and member of the original graduate faculty in exercise and sport science; was acting dean of the School of Health and Human Performance for one year] once said to me that the standard of peer pressure was unspoken but was very high. These people had come from the best physical education master's and doctoral programs in the country and had wanted to join this faculty. And so the peer pressure to maintain high standards was very great. You know, the idea of - one just simply wouldn't let one's master's student go into their defense without being ready.

WL: This was an era when recruitment and faculty, what would today be called faculty development, was largely done through contacts?

SR: Exactly.

WL: Must have had people here who had contacts, people you felt had already - ?

SR: Oh absolutely. And we were at the receiving end of this. When I went to get my first job, I told Miss Martus I had - the exact high school will remain nameless, but it still functions here in Greensboro in the northwest part of the city. And I came back and said, "I don't think I made a very good choice. I 00:26:00can't do this for the rest of my life." And Miss Martus said to me, "Let's not be too hasty. I have here twelve jobs that I think you would be good to do." And she picked up a telegram from the top of her desk and she said, "This one is from Sheila O'Gara [associate professor of kinesiology and health education] at the University of Texas, and she has written me a message saying, "Send me another Martha Yates.'" She said, "I've already wired her back, but I thought I'd talk to you first." And I said, "Oh, yes." And she said, "I've wired her back, "I do not have another Martha Yates, but I have a Sally Robinson. I will have her write you.'" And in my class, more than half the people were placed. Miss Martus knew where she might send you before you went in her office for your interview about placement. She had a wonderful talent of where you might fit in 00:27:00and what your interests were and what your strengths were and what you could do, and had watched you teach and had paid attention to your vita and made sure that you wrote a resume that looked decent. And then she told me what to emphasize in this letter of application and that I was to not just type it on my little typewriter in my dorm. I was to type it up and bring it to her secretary who would type it. And she would read it, and then we would send it if I were really interested and explain more about that position. And that's what I mean about the mentoring of the undergraduates in ways that we today associate with working with our doctoral students. You know, the kind of, "This is the place for you. Why don't you look into it?" Or, "This is one of two or three places that I would hope you might be interested in. Maybe you'd want to look into them." Everyone in what's called the southern district of HPERD [Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance], which is about eleven or thirteen states of health and PE, knew who Ethel Martus was and most of her faculty. They all went to the meetings. Many of them made presentations of different kinds regularly. And she recruited nationally, and she placed nationally. Very often, I think 00:28:00people with whom we went to teach - for example, I did get that job at Texas. I loved it. It was a wonderful place for me as a young instructor to go and really learn how to teach adult physical education. And many of our ideas about who the next group of graduate students might be from among our students that we taught at Texas, you know, we made recommendations back. We made recommendations about colleagues on our faculty that we thought they might be interested in, either their work or their students in the future, or interviewing them as positions became available. Frankly, positions didn't become available particularly. I mean, it's a very long - if you look at the era that I was her - it's a very longstanding, very much a longstanding faculty, which they carefully tried not to have all the same age.

WL: But the core faculty was very stable and stationary?

SR: Right. Well known, and that, of course, I think, had a very great effect on everybody's first teaching. I mean as my classmates and I taught different places, we - Miss Martus once said to us, "Do not fail to ask me for a teaching recommendation for your first job." And we must have looked rather blank, and she said, "Because you won't get one without it." Oh! Now that was in the era when women - positions for female teachers of physical education were in great demand. There was probably eight jobs for each of us at the end of senior year, public and private and college and regular school. The men had not had that experience since the Second World War. There were probably eight people for every job in men's physical educational [sic] at that time period.

WL: Was there a general sort of explosion in the field or great expansion?

SR: Women dropped out of teaching, see, and there was this constant need to put in these new constant refreshment of the girl teachers of physical education.

WL: Under that system, it was so rigidly segregated -

SR: That's right, sex segregated that there were very - the men, the extra men, were not teaching women's physical education. Now that whole situation changed. And one of the interesting social pieces of women's athletics is that where, in that era, women taught and coached women, when money for athletics became generally accessible to girl participants and women sport athletes, the vacuum was taken - the need for coaches was taken by the men trained already to teach that activity. And we became very much less single sex, one-on-one kind of conscious - it's a problem, really, the idea that all coaching of all players 00:31:00will be by men. And it remains in this country a very big problem that all sport with very little - very, very few exceptions - most of whom have graduated from our college, by the way - are where sport administration is, of the top administration, is males, whether for males or female programs.

WL: Of athletic directors?

SR: Yes.

WL: What sorts of positions did the physical department - did physical educators occupy in campus activities? For example, the equivalent of intercollegiate or intracollegiate [sic] sports?

SR: Oh well, that's good. The Recreation Association president might or might not be a physical education person.

WL: Not always?

SR: Not always. It wasn't a given. But then when I was a freshman - this is a 00:32:00good example - when I was a freshman, the president of student government, the head officer of the judicial system, the vice president of student government, there's one more key role, something in the Carolinian, probably, were senior majors in physical education. They were active in the dormitories; they were presidents of the residence halls. And this is from a class there - a student body of, let's say, twenty-four hundred and a senior class of physical education majors of twelve. They were active, they were often outgoing, they took - just looking at the women around me, maybe even more than me, they really took this notion of responsible governance very seriously, and they tended to be gregarious kind of leader-type people, and they enjoyed doing these things. And were often - the curriculum was rigorous and you couldn't - sometimes the, you 00:33:00know, academic competence goes along with some of these other skills. By the time I was a senior, we had that same kind of - oh, probably the president of the Recreation Association was the other one I was thinking of. And by the time I was a senior, my classmates were doing this same thing and my - Carol Christopher was leader of the judicial system, and I was an associate editor of the Carolinian, and a classmate was chairman of the Recreation Association and somebody else was, you know, vice president, you know, running their dormitories and so on. It was an accepted idea that we would take the leadership roles. And of course, our time was not going to extramural athletics. So some of those ebullient energies of the active people looking for chances to be part of the community - which I think is one of the motives of sport participation for 00:34:00students sometimes - those roles were often directed more to the student government roles.

WL: I see. Did most students have to - outside physical education, take physical education courses? For example -

SR: Yes, oh yes.

WL: - you mentioned golf or [unclear].

SR: Part of this liberal curriculum of the first two years was that everyone also took four semesters of physical education activity. I think it was a half a credit a semester, which added up to two credits by the end of four semesters, which is how we have that one hundred and twenty two hours in the present curriculum. And it was taught both by the full-time and graduate faculty of physical education and by the graduate students. Many of the graduate students were older students than we sometimes think of just out of school and competent teachers of the sports skills and other activities for the undergraduates, so 00:35:00that people that you roused from your dorm to go over - You can't miss your eight o'clock folk dance class one more time, you know - might be being taught by someone who today has written textbooks in the dance area so that the - graduate student teaching, I think, was a - when I was here, exceptionally high quality.

WL: Was it a common sort of experience or did students go off to various activities? For example, did the requirement tend to have - was there a general physical education course?

SR: Oh, I see, basic PE kind of notion. No, everything was elective. You had to choose four things you wanted to do. Now we did some testing, fitness testing. And this was a period in physical education when we truly believed that you could test for a kind of general athletic ability and that there were some rough correlations between being good at certain of these tests and possibly doing 00:36:00well in certain kinds of activities. So there was this testing and some counseling. People who really did dreadfully on the softball throwing thing possibly were told that, "If you want to build up this skill, you will take volleyball and basketball and dadada [sic]. But you were better on the pursuit thing, so maybe you would prefer tennis or badminton or whatever." There was - it was in its infancy, but it was tried here. You know, can we do what they call today leisure activities counseling from a testing basis. And so they tested all the freshmen and tried to match it up with what we knew about success and attraction to activity. A lot of it was as it is on any campus. "What hour do I want to take my physical education class and what's being offered in that day?" But a full plate of activities was offered almost every instructional hour of the day and some into the evening, so the choices were really largely there. 00:37:00Someone really wanted golf with Ellen Griffin [Woman's College Class of 1940 and member of physical education faculty until 1968, when she founded The Farm, her golf teaching facility] - whom we even then knew was the premier person for taking golf - they could wait around --til the end of their time and really hope to get in. I think they probably allowed the people still needing the second semester credit to choose first and then next and then next, so you may have to have archery as a freshman your first term. People were urged not to put it off, you know, so that the classes didn't get clogged up by juniors and seniors crowding out the freshmen and sophomores. It was very fair. Every full-time faculty member participated, and graduate students, in this business of registering people for their physical education. So there was almost a little bit of counseling, you know.

WL: Going on there, too.

SR: Going on there. What kind of experiences have you had in high school? If you've been a basketball player forever, maybe you would want to do something else. You know, it was very much wanting - since all had to do it, and they wanted them to like it and they wanted them to be successful.

WL: Let's talk a little bit about the general atmosphere of the campus when you were a student. You've talked about some of these things already. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit more.

SR: Sure.

WL: I gather there were a number of activities that drew students together that served as sort of a common experience here as a student. Could you describe some of those?

SR: Sure. Some of them were well institutionalized. We never even thought about whether they were necessary. Since almost everyone lived in a dorm, at ten o'clock on Monday night there was a dorm meeting called a hall meeting. We didn't call the buildings "dorms." We called them residence hall - the strict meaning of dormitory meaning, "space you share with a lot of people in an attic," okay? [laughs] And so the residence hall and the residence hall counselor, who was a full-time member of the student life staff, or in the case 00:39:00of a lot of residence hall counselors, they were doing that and they were part-time graduate students in one department or another. Several of them were always in physical education. There were those also in art and in music and in education. At any rate, the residence hall evening, the Monday night dorm meeting, was a convention that followed the same, you know, meeting agenda, Robert's Rules of Order, dadadadadada - making presentations, announcements, discussions, a very - very much a polling of common ethos kind of notion of the campus.

WL: Who chaired it?

SR: President of the residence hall, who was elected by - the freshman residence hall presidents were elected by the junior class for the incoming freshmen at the end of their sophomore year. So there were people who knew when they went away at the end of sophomore year they were going - as juniors, they and their roommates were going to be the residence hall president and vice president for the freshman student halls. And the upper class dorms, they 00:40:00elected their house president at the end of the year, and it was almost always a senior from among the juniors who were going to stay in that hall. And so that was sort of important, I think, for those that wanted to do those roles that they be active in student government as freshmen and sophomores and among their classmates so that their leadership and academic competence - I mean, you just really couldn't, you really couldn't be a president of a residence hall and be a dummy, you know, and especially of a freshman hall. And so the students, I think, were very wise in almost all the choices they made, you know. People with the kind of style and ability to work with other young people that fostered leadership and that kept that ethos going on. No one could be denied the right 00:41:00to run and the right to be elected.

WL: What kinds of things would come up in these meetings, these Monday meetings?

SR: Oh, everything from just your kind of routine announcements to the social regulations the hall was going to live with, trying to impact the social regulations that the whole campus was going to live with, such as open and closing hours and visiting privileges of visitors.

WL: Did each hall determine its own rules?

SR: No. In my day, everybody did the same, and so there would be these factions in which some hall would get an idea they wanted to be more liberal and try to convince everybody else - or more conservative and try to convince everybody else to go along. Then from the halls and from other units on campus was the student government. So that -

WL: The student government represented halls, is that right?

SR: Yes, yes, and - undergraduate student government. There was no such thing 00:42:00as graduate student government. And the undergraduate student government really didn't worry about what was going to happen to the few graduate students that lived on campus. And they basically lived under a different set of rules if they weren't dorm counselors, under the direction of Miss [Katherine] Taylor, the student dean, dean of students, whatever the graduate students could negotiate with Miss Taylor and she would agree to and the chancellor would probably agree to. And so they had a much more grown-up life. We were busy sort of controlling noise and controlling each other and trying to live lives that allowed for academic activity - at the same time not feel so trapped that it was an unnatural life.

WL: Was there much subversion of the rules that took place?

SR: Oh, it was closely sanctioned at the level of what they call a section and 00:43:00an elaborate system of student judicial sanctions. The main subversion of the rules would probably be alcohol, which in those days was not - you weren't to come back to campus from drinking. If you were going to drink, you had to keep on going wherever it was you were going. [laughs] And you needed to sign out to that effect when you went out. The other - or go out for the weekend and what you did on that weekend was your own business, but you didn't return to campus Sunday afternoon, having been at a party at Hooray Harry's [bar], you see. And that was a fifty-mile radius of the campus. There was not very much, to my knowledge, although I was astoundingly naive about the ways of subverting the rules of importing illegal liquor into the dorms because it was strictly not permitted on campus, on the bounds of the campus. And there were faculty, such 00:44:00as Gail Hennis [also vice chancellor for graduate studies, then assistant dean of the graduate school], whom I can remember saying when we were seniors and were going off somewhere to dinner and somebody said, "Boy, would I really like a beer." And Miss Hennis said, "Not and go back to Aycock [Auditorium] with me." And they played that role, too, you know. Even if there was a concert on campus and you were on an - of an evening, the faculty abstained until after the concert. Went home and did their own business. I mean, it was very strongly modeled, very strongly modeled.

WL: And other students would inform on other students?

SR: Oh, it was a real - I mean, the honor policy then was, you were -

WL: You were violating the policy if you didn't do that.

SR: Yeah.

WL: And that was followed?

SR: Yeah. It was followed to a remarkable extent. There was a lot of agonizing over it. Good questions asked about the propriety of that, but it was the norm.

WL: Was - what - I gather there was a variance of penalties that were applied.

SR: Yes, from being confined almost like you think of the military academies, you know -

WL: In quarters?

SR: Yeah. Like limited travel, not being able to go certain places on campus, social places, like not - if a person wasn't - was supposed to be so called "campused," they were to go back and forth from their classes and the dining hall and their dormitory. They weren't to play in athletic events, go to the soda shop. You could go to the library, and we had even then laboratories for doing statistics, those old Friden calculators. You could go there, but that was it. And it would vary from days to months. I had a classmate who was campused for a semester. [laughs]

WL: What did she do?

SR: Well, this had to do with getting beer and bringing it to a place, a gathering place off campus that involved - but it was an academic -

WL: Within the fifty miles?

SR: Within the fifty miles and that was a group of classmates who would rather this whole thing not be elaborated too greatly in your notes. But close friends decided this was just not acceptable.

WL: I see. And so at that point she was reported?

SR: Oh yeah. And one of our classmates was head of judicial systems, so we said, "Okay, Chris, I think we got one, and we've got to figure out what to do." We were given wide latitude by the - it was an intersession. It was between terms, but it was an academic activity and we were given wide latitude by the faculty. And Dean Taylor took to operate as though it were a regular session, which we did. We convened a board, and we did all the things.

WL: Would many students be expelled? Not many, but was expulsion fairly unusual?

SR: Rare, but absolutely consistent.

SR: The student board couldn't expel. The most severe sanctions the student board didn't administer. Dean Taylor did or the chancellor. And these were in 00:47:00the things you can guess, you know, that had to do with repeatedly and just destroying the confidence of the community in that particular area of work. It could be either academic - you know, repeated violations of the honor policy for academic integrity, the personal conduct aspects that had to do with living in the dormitories in ways that the community could accept, sexual or drugs or alcohol.

WL: Cheating, presumably?

SR: Oh, cheating, yes. That's academic integrity.

WL: Yes. Would cheating be dealt with rather severely?

SR: Yeah. It always has been, promptly, and as I say, a lot of agonizing. But 00:48:00it was one of the things not sanctioned. I mean, not tolerated.

WL: Not tolerated.

SR: A high level of sanction, possibly more than social behavior. I mean, social behavior, too, but I mean, in the ethical trustworthiness realm, was probably - in my memory that the realm of trustworthiness as an academic or as a member of a close living community. Stealing.

WL: Right, something that violated trust?

SR: Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

WL: That sort of thing was dealt with [unclear]

SR: Yeah, yeah. I think we were possibly less worried about people keeping cars in Greensboro against the rules. You see what I mean?

WL: Yeah.

SR: Then, first of all, we probably wouldn't know if it wasn't in our little circle. And probably we had some kind of sliding idea about how important or how dangerous that was to the body politic, so to speak.

WL: What other sorts of activities - I gather a basic unit of organization was the hall.

SR: There was the residence hall, yeah, absolutely. The other would be what were alternately called mass meetings and chapel. I think the word chapel gradually went away and was probably once a month on a Tuesday or a Thursday. You know, this Tuesday, Thursday, 12:30 to 2:00 used to be sacrosanct. We didn't teach any classes. Faculty had their meetings then, and students had their mass meetings of the whole -

WL: The whole student body?

SR: Yes, the whole student body. And when I was here, you could get us all into Aycock Auditorium. You had a seat. You had to go. It was one of the transgressions of the social code or, you know, the academic code not to go to mass meeting and participate. And so you can see the seats were all numbered and you had a place. And there were monitors at the end of the row, and some monitors were more rigid about this than others, but it was just expected that 00:50:00you did this. And by the time I was a senior, the class - the campus was getting large enough that there wasn't really room for everyone, and so all freshmen and sophomores had to go and juniors, and then I think seniors could choose. And, of course, a lot of them were doing student teaching or other social work or other things. But you had to have a reason not be in Aycock with Miss [Louise] Alexander gave her speech or when Mrs. Kennedy, Jacqueline [wife of United States President John F. Kennedy], came. [laughs]

WL: That must have drawn a crowd.

SR: Oh yeah, yeah.

WL: I'm interested, what - was the term chapel still in use when you were still there?

SR: I think it was fading. And I don't know whether I remember it because people talked about it as though it were a term or whether we still used that term. I know at most it was once a month, although at least once a month one of the mass meetings - and I think there was a mass meeting every week, either a 00:51:00Tuesday or a Thursday - was around a more serious topic or a devotional kind of topic.

WL: So a mass meeting might be a chapel but a chapel might not necessarily be a mass meeting?

SR: Exactly. And mass meeting was often for legislative purposes, much as we think a faculty council could be if the faculty came to it. It would be like the parallel between academic cabinet and faculty council. For the student body, it was mass meeting and SGA [Student Government Association] senate.

WL: I see. Was it run according to parliamentary procedure?

SR: Oh absolutely. And there was a parliamentarian who had to pass a test in order to stand for election. And people jumped up and followed the rules and spoke for points of personal privilege and for points of order from all around the hall. And there was a great exercise in - it was almost, as I watch the 00:52:00students in the summer - Girls State [annual summer nonpartisan program held in each state sponsored by American Legion Auxiliary that teaches good citizenship in a democracy] - on another level. Okay? Although by the time even I was a junior or a senior, the idea of creating events so they could be debated was quickly - I mean, we knew the difference between busywork and things that occupied or that ought to occupy our time.

WL: But that kind of experience must have been invaluable -

SR: Oh absolutely.

WL: - just in terms of understanding rules of order and understanding the dynamics of a meeting. And that sort of thing you could use in all -

SR: Yes. And indeed, because you went beginning freshman, sophomore, junior, you had an idea of who you wanted to stand up there and listen to as student body president by the time, [it] came to elect the student body president, you know. When they made their speeches, clear notion of who probably could handle this raucous mob, and who had - you know, what's the level of intellect? It 00:53:00sounds real snobby, but there was an elitist function there of speaking well and of knowing the issues and of being able to work with other people. And you know, people that rose through student government here have gone on, many of them, to be capable women politicians. Becky Smothers, Becky Rhodes Smothers, I think of, who has been the mayor of High Point, was a classmate.

WL: There were also - what about the eating hall? [unclear]

SR: Oh yeah. The dining hall, I would say, is a mass experience of group - it was much uglier than it is today. It was like registration and going to the bookstore and paying at the cashier's office. One of those experiences of standing in lines and learning to be patient with the way that stuff is delivered up to you. Way out of - we had more practice at this than we really needed. But because the dining hall was too small for the campus by the time I 00:54:00came - and a few years ahead of me it was mass seating, sit-down meals.

WL: That were served to you?

SR: Served, yeah. And people took turns serving. Okay. And of family-style dinners. By the time I came, everything was cafeteria style and just ghastly lines. And we went and filled up a table. It was still nice. There was still linen on the table, and people cleared it nicely after themselves and the dining hall - the gals that worked in the dining hall, who were also fellow students, made sure that it was nice between sittings, you know, as people came and went from the cafeteria style. But Sunday chicken was not my favorite activity at UNCG. One of the other socializing effects of that, of course, was there was a dress code that was probably - and a no-smoking code outdoors - that was rigidly 00:55:00followed. And to have to get dressed up to go to the dining hall for breakfast, I mean, dressed. You know, hose and flats and skirt and dada [sic]. There were places on campus you could wear jeans and Bermudas and tank tops and dadadada [sic]. And it was in the general area from where the new plaza is in the whole dormitory area and over here in the gyms. Okay. And anything - and let's draw a line to everything else on the other side of that line from the plaza over to the Aycock Auditorium and the new art center and that whole wedge, the academic buildings, was called "front campus," and you had to wear a skirt when you went to front campus. Now there were elaborate subterfuges on this. People wore raincoats on the most outlandishly hot days, okay, to cover Bermuda shorts underneath. But one didn't - in the photography lab was okay and on weekends in 00:56:00certain other places like the Music Building. But Monday through Saturday - classes went --til noon on Saturday - Monday through Saturday and all kinds of other events, evening and daytime, out of the dormitory living, your living room area, you were in a skirt.

WL: The front campus - the implication was this was facing the world, that the girls were to be properly attired when facing the world. Was this true when you went out in public, went outside the confines of campus?

SR: Oh absolutely. And we weren't - unless you were going to a particular kind of event, and this was probably detailed in the student handbook - like to Piney Lake. A lot of people wanted to go to Piney Lake because it was one of the few jeans and Bermuda places that you could go dressed up for the activity.

WL: Was Piney Lake protected? Was it in a - ?

SR: Well, there was much less housing development than there is there now. It 00:57:00was still the same size, about forty-four acres, fenced.

WL: Same place, essentially?

SR: Same place. The housing was a little - I mean, there was a manor house there that was nice to use as a kind of a conference center house that has other purposes now. And Marjorie Leonard lived on the other side of the lake as the caretaker and manager of Piney Lake. It was bought with student money, much as a student bond, and paid back out of student fees and administered by a student committee with the guidance of faculty and was our special place. Not - and that wasn't just the physical education voices talking. That was student government activity related too. And trying to find ways to get back and forth, you know. You had to make networks of friendships among the graduate students and the faculty to get your group - to get transport for your group, or among the town students to get transport to your group out to Piney Lake.

WL: And that was all done by students also?

SR: Yeah.