Oral History Project - Current Faculty
Dr. Cheri Hoy
Associate Dean for Faculty & Administrative Services
Professor of Special Education
(1982 to present)
Interviewer: Yan Shen
Date: 18 October, 2007
Q: How did you come to work here at the University of Georgia College of Education?
A: I finished my PhD work, and I was looking for jobs any place in the country. I had been in a couple of interviews and this one just seemed to work out.
Q: What was your first position here?
A: I was an assistant professor in Elementary Education. Because my background was in both Elementary Education and Special Education, the position to which I applied was in special education, but there was another person applying at the same time. They felt that the two of us working together would be particularly advantageous to start some clinical work here, so I was hired in the Elementary Education position and the other person was hired in the Special Education position. We were supposed to collaborate, bring the two departments together and start this clinical work.
Q: What kind of clinical work was it?
A: It involved assessments of children with special needs, particularly in the area of language learning disabilities. In fact, the dean at the time asked us to do an evaluation of someone in the community before our contract started, so they perceived this need. There had been a single faculty member who was doing some of that work but they wanted the work to be more systematized and more integrated with the class work.
Q: So how did the clinical work help you to bring the two departments together?
A: Well, actually it didn’t. It had nothing to do with bringing the two departments together. It had to do with the financial situation of the College at that particular point of time. The College was going through a difficult financial period. The first year that I was here, several assistant professors were a part of a reduction in force, and I was one of those professors. So we received letters in January that we would not be hired back. That was very stressful, because I had moved here from Illinois. I had spent all my money to move and I didn’t know if I would have enough money to move again. So several of us got these letters that we would not be renewed for the subsequent year, and all of us pretty much understood it was because of the financial circumstance of the College.
It was also at that period of time that many faculty members were under 12-month contracts, and they converted a lot of those faculty members to 9-month contracts. That was an additional effort to save money in the College. What happened to me then was, because Special Education was such a high need area that despite these financial difficulties, they had a position open because of a retirement. I applied for that position, and I was hired. So my first year was in Elementary Education and my second year was in Special Education.
Also during that time, the Department of Elementary Education was going through transition. I believe the father of the department head had become seriously ill. So the department head took a leave during my second year on campus and moved to a different state to take care of her ill father. So, Elementary Education had an interim head and had lost two faculty positions because of the financial challenges. They were struggling with many of those position issues, so their collaboration did not work as well. I focused mainly on the clinical work that I had been brought here to do.
Q: Tell me about when you changed from elementary education to special education.
A: When I started in Elementary Education I had hoped that we would have a stronger collaboration. I had been doing some team teaching with one person in Special Education and I was the Elementary person, and we team taught one class. Then I moved to Special Education. That particular class was no longer part of my workload, and I was redirected to graduate classes in the field of learning disabilities. While I was disappointed that the collaboration had not worked as well as we had initially planned, in retrospect, I understand why. I was a very young assistant professor, working with another very young assistant professor and while the leadership was eager to see the collaboration happen, there were leadership changes. The remaining senior faculty at that time were not as vested in seeing that collaboration happen.
And so, after the first year of attempting to make that happen, and the stress of losing that job in January, even though I could continue to work spring semester, and trying to find a different job either here or some place else… by the time I got my second job here in Special Education, I was relieved that things were settling down, that I didn’t need to move, that I was working in a department that was more consistent with my PhD work.
When I was in Elementary Education I was teaching exclusively undergraduate courses and in Special Education I was teaching exclusively graduate courses in my specialization area. And so I was very happy about that change. Then I started really working on the other half of my charge when I was hired which was to develop the clinical work. Another faculty member and I were working together on this clinic, and we started seeing college students who were struggling; we started seeing children from the community who were struggling. I started involving the students in the clinic and they would have observations. They had a certain amount of testing that they had to complete in the clinic. Doctoral students who had this particular interest could take an internship in the clinic. And we were very involved with them. So then for the next several years, I really focused on my own research, which was related to assessment, my clinical work and my graduate classes, and I really focused all my attention on that.
Q: Tell me about your memories of the people and events that happened here at that time.
A: At this transition, this dean who had originally hired me and then became ill and had to step down and the financial stresses of the College at that particular time when so many faculty were changed to these 9-month contracts That was a very stressful period. And shortly after that period, there was a major lawsuit against the University by Jan Kemp. She worked in academic assistance which at the time was called developmental studies. That unit offered remedial help to students who were struggling with either reading domains, the written language domains or the mathematics domains. And Dr. Kemp alleged that she had received pressure from her supervisor and from other university administrators to change grades for athletes, so they would remain eligible to participate in sports. She alleged that when she refused to do so that they took actions against her to force her retirement or resignation.
It was very interesting to watch that lawsuit because there were pockets of people on campus who were really saying, “I hope she wins.” I think that they thought that it would change the climate of the College or at the whole University. There were other people who were saying, “They are just going to pressure her, tie her up in courts until she runs out of money, and basically disgrace her.” Well, this went on and on and on. And she won. And her job was restored. She received a financial settlement. And to me, it was sort of like spring. When you first feel that one breath or you first see buds on the trees and you think something is changing, something will be different now.
And it really was different after that lawsuit. The president left shortly after the lawsuit, as well as one or two of the vice presidents. We had an interim president (Henry Stanford King) who came in for a while and then Dr. Knapp became president. There was a real sense of change in the university… people who were working directly with students could express their opinion more openly… and it was just like spring. It was exciting. There was a sense that there were new possibilities and new openness. So that I think was very important.
Q: Could you tell me more about the kind of possibilities and openness you felt at that time?
A: I was still a very young assistant professor. But when I first came, among the new assistant professors, there were a lot of fears about being connected to people who had authority or power, being that you didn’t want to cross people or make them angry with you because of your work. And some of the people were saying to me that, “You will never get promoted if you keep doing this clinical work.” And so I felt as a new faculty member that with this change in the university there was at least the possibility that I could pursue that clinical work and still get promoted, as long as I did my research. And I was very careful to tie my research to the clinical work. I worked very hard to do that.
And it turned out that it was correct. Now I don’t know how much of it was my fear because I was a very young, inexperienced assistant professor and how much of it was this change in climate at the university. I think it was probably a little bit of both, because of another thing that happened after that. We had one dean who left (Kathryn Blake). And then there was an interim dean (Gerald Firth). Then they hired another dean (Alphonse Buccino). And when the other dean was hired, there were some senior faculty members who didn’t like him. He had come from Washington, D.C., and had been working at an agency, but he had also worked at universities. He was making changes in the College, and some of the people who had spent their whole careers here were not very happy about some of those changes.
There were a lot of people who were kind of working behind the scenes against him. “Maybe we could get rid of this dean,” they said. So you know I was watching that because it was very similar to that sense that if you knew people who were well-connected you could advance your career even if you didn’t do good work. My sense was that the climate after the Jan Kemp trial was that if you did good work, you could get promoted even if you didn’t know people. And then I saw some of the senior faculty working very hard against this dean. Ultimately he prevailed. The senior faculties were not successful in getting rid of the dean. He had a different personality. He was used to working in Washington D.C., where you are very direct in telling people what you want; you map out grant plans and push people to do that. And the climate at that time was more polite, if someone has been here for a long time you overlook it if they are not working as hard. He was the type of dean that would not tolerate that, and the fact that he prevailed, despite all of this pressure was another sign that spring had come.
Q: What happened to you in the spring?
A: Well, that spring turned out to be a very difficult one for me. Because the department head at the time was one of the leaders in the movement to get rid of the dean. And that department head was told that he would no longer to be department head. I had been here now for five or six years and I had submitted my papers for promotion in the fall. It had been approved by the College and I was waiting to hear from the University and Board of Regents if I would be promoted. So there was a very short period of time, maybe even three or four days, when the faculty were to identify who would be acting department head under this new dean. And they elected me.
Now I had not yet received my promotion letters, so it was kind of surprising. When the results were announced the old department head came to me, brought me to his office and showed me three stacks of paper. He said, These are important, these you have to pay attention to right away, and these are about to blow up in your face, meaning they were well beyond urgent. He said good luck and left. So it was very difficult.
That was in May. Between May and December, three or four of the senior faculty in the department announced they would be retiring. So, my immediate concern was to try to find enough part-time faculty to offer all of our classes, and to get searches started to begin rebuilding the department. So the dean who had done this had me remain acting department head for two years, which was a very difficult two years because people kept expecting that somebody else might become department head. I kept expecting somebody else might become department head, too. So it was difficult because I didn’t know how many hard decisions to make, and whether I would remain department head or whether I was just supposed to help the department stay together while we did all this work. So it was tough, but we got through it. We hired some faculty and after the two-year period, the dean did appoint me to be department head. And I continued to be department head for another nine years.
Q: What were some critical events that happened during your 11 years as a department head?
A: Shortly after I became department head, it was discovered that Aderhold Hall had asbestos in it, which is a building material that had been found to have cancer-producing properties. It had been used as insulation around pipes and used in floor tile. The university decided to take the asbestos out of Aderhold Hall. So they identified some spaces in Athens, some properties downtown in which we could move our faculty, staff and students while work was being done on the building. They moved people two floors at a time into offices in downtown Athens. The workmen had all this plastic and airlocks, so there would be some kind of vacuum thing. They took up all the ceiling tiles, they stripped out all the asbestos, they took up floor tiles and sealed it in drums so that it wouldn’t get in the air and then they would carry it out of the building.
That was a period of great drama because faculty were saying, “How can we do this? How can we do our research, how can we teach if we are moved out of our offices.” And it happened. Even as people were saying, “I can’t leave, I can’t leave because of my work,” their offices were packed up and they were moved.
The building in which the Blue Bird Café is downtown, across from the Classic Center, was vacant at the time and they moved us into that building. They moved some people into offices above one of the art shops. There were some vacant department stores and they created classrooms in those. That would have been around 1988. I was the acting department head. I had just been promoted to associate professor. There were not many, some of the faculty had retired, we were trying to hire new faculty. Then we had to move into these temporary spaces. It was quite a long process – a little over a year. They would move two floors of faculty out. Then those people were moved back after their floor had been cleaned and they would move two more groups. We would stay up there at least six months, while they did the work on the floor.
So that was very disruptive, people were very concerned at that time that there were not enough safety measures to protect the occupants of the building that somehow the asbestos would be loose in the air and we would be at risk for cancer. There were also concerns about how to sustain our research and how to continue to offer good classes when many of our functions weren’t available. We had to move our clinic, up to this temporary spot. It was just a lot of logistics, a lot of difficult decisions and a lot of drama.
We also had accreditation during that 11-year period. There were two accreditation visits to the College and that is always a lot of difficult work. Then towards the end of that 11-year period, the university decided that they were going to move from the quarter system to a semester system. So we had a two-year period starting in 1995 or ‘96 during which we had to meet and think about how to change from three-quarter-a-year system to a two-semester-a-year system. There were also issues of how to revise the curriculum, how to help students transition from the quarter system to the semester system, so that students would not be disadvantaged, how to make sure that the credits all lined up and the students didn’t have a longer program of study. There was a great deal of curriculum work during that time.
Q: So how did that work out?
A: There were individual students who had problems, but for the most part we were able to solve those problems and the students were not disadvantaged. But it was a time in which you had to be patient. There were many difficult issues that we had to address. Students were fearful because they didn’t want to have to stay longer, so we had to meet with them frequently to help them understand the changes and to make sure that everything would go smoothly. Faculty were fearful. Faculty didn’t want to do all of the difficult work.
Another thing that happened in the early ‘90s, was that the dean who had originally appointed me as acting department head and then department head, decided that the College needed to be reorganized.
At that time, we had 19 departments, maybe even more – 20 or 21. All of the departments reported directly to the dean. And the dean felt that it was not possible to get his work done and so he wanted a different structure. So during time, about 1991 or ’92 we did this reorganization and the 19 departments were divided up into four schools. We had a School of Teacher Education, a School of Professional Studies, a School of Health and Human Performance, and a School of Leadership and Lifelong Education.
So we had the new dean, the revolt of the faculty. The new dean’s survival of the revolt. The reorganization of the college into four schools. And in between, we had two moves out of the building because of the asbestos. Then we had two NCATE visits and a conversion to the semester system. It was a very, very busy time. And people often don’t like change, so during all those changes, there were many fears about getting all of our work done.
Q: So how did you get to your present position, representing the whole College?
A: Well, there were several steps. I had worked with the faculty to do the conversion to semester system. We now had another new dean who had created new positions that he called the Faculty Administrator system. There was one in research, one in service and outreach, and one for faculty. They were supposed to be three-year positions. At that particular time I had been promoted again and I was now a professor. It was a lot of work and I felt like I needed to learn something new and have a different view for a while. So I applied for the faculty administrator for faculty. That position was just supposed to be for working on promotion and tenure, working with graduate faculty and those types of things. But we were still encouraged to continue working on our research and to mentor our doctoral students. So I was successful in getting that position and I worked for three years in that position. And that was a fairly quiet time, just doing that kind of work. My three-year period ended around 2000 and the position of School Director for Professional Studies became available because the person who had been the school director had been appointed as Associate Dean. I applied for the position as school director and got it, serving as school director for two years before the College began another reorganization and the decision had been made to eliminate the school structure. And so my position was eliminated. During the transition, I applied to be an associate dean and I got that job.
Q: Can you tell me more about the first reorganization of the college.
A: The one in the early ‘90s moved the 19 departments into four schools. And then over the next 10 years, each of the four schools developed their own little culture. The money for the College was distributed through the four schools, so the school directors really had a lot of authority over that money. The College was very decentralized. And at the national level, we were starting to get more and more and more requests for information about the College, for reports for the Board of Regents, reports to national organizations. It was very difficult to collect the data in this decentralized structure. The faculty were also somewhat unhappy with the school structure because if they wanted to talk to the dean they had to go through school director. There were more layers of administration.
Starting in 2000, the university went through a series of significant budget cuts. So that was one problem. It was becoming more and more difficult to get information that we needed because of the decentralized nature of the four schools. Even though the school directors were very helpful, it took more time to go to the school office and then go to the faculty. So we needed to think about a different structure. There were some town hall meetings in which the dean met with the faculty in all four schools and talked about the need to have a different organizational structure. Then we had a committee of faculty and staff, who developed nine models that might be used to replace the school model. So over about a two-year period, the faculty and the College worked together to decide on the best model. We worked from 2003 until about 2005 and ultimately passed a new structure in which we have only have nine departments. And they report directly to the Deans’ Office.
Q: Do you think the new model is more efficient than the previous one?
A: I think so. And I say that because I was in the model when it involved 19 departments. I was in the model when we had schools. And I am now in the model where we have the nine departments. And I think it is good that departments interact directly with the Dean’s Office. And I think the Dean’s Office has a better understanding of the challenges within each of the departments. I think there is greater unity. It is always difficult for people to leave their department and work with people in another department. I learned that the first year I was here. I think that now without the schools, there is more awareness that we need to be interacting, and that people are coming together for certain initiatives. We are building a policy center, that’s one area. We have a center for Latino Education – that’s another area. We are using the centers to bring people in from various departments and have conversations about important issues. So I think the communication is better.
Q: Do you have any advice for graduate students, pre-service teachers and new faculties who are working or studying here?
A: Oh yes, for the graduate students. I am going to Dr. Roulston’s class tomorrow to talk about how you get a job in the academy. For students, education is a very exciting career, but it is also a frustrating career. It’s exciting because you get to work with students of all ages and you can see the new learning occur. There’s nothing better. Except maybe being a doctor and curing somebody with a terrible illness. But to see a student who doesn’t know something and struggles to know something new and then may suddenly understand, there is a joy in that that is indescribable.
So to the students, the pre-service teachers, hang on to that joy. Because the other side of education is that because everybody in the United States goes to school, everybody thinks they are experts on how schooling should take place. Politicians, business people, the person on the street – they all have an opinion about what should happen in schools. And it’s difficult to live in that environment because everyone is always looking over your shoulder and has an opinion about how you should do your job, even if they don’t have training in it.
Since it is publicly funded, people feel they should have a say in what goes on, because it’s their tax dollars which are supporting it. Sometimes what they have to say is really valuable because we get used to doing things one way, and someone with a different perspective may have a good idea about how to do something differently. But it’s very hard to sort out when there is a good suggestion that we need to follow, and when it is just looking over my shoulder, telling me how to do my job. And that’s frustrating.
It’s also frustrating because the information in newspapers and television is often about the problems in education. And there are not as many stories about all the successes in education, and there are equally as many successes if not more. So for pre-service teachers, it takes a lot to be able to balance those two perspectives and still get your job done. And it’s hard job.
For graduate students, move into the research area in a way that pre-service teachers don’t. I started as a classroom teacher and I became a graduate student because there were things happening in my classroom that I didn’t understand and I wanted to know more. There were children who were very, very smart – I could tell by talking with them – and they could not learn to read. That helped me move into my interest in learning disabilities.
And then I saw situations in my own classroom where children in second grade scored very well on second grade achievement tests. They moved on to third grade and looked like they had lost all their knowledge. Because of that experience as a classroom teacher I started asking questions about what happens between second and third grade that creates this result. And what I learned was that there were changes in the test that there was a test for kindergarten, first and second. And there was a very different kind of test for third, fourth and fifth graders. And so that level change in the test helped me start thinking more seriously about assessment issues and how that affects how we communicate assessment results.
So I was a classroom teacher. And because I was going to graduate school, I was asking questions about that thing that I noticed, about the test in my classroom. I noticed that there were students who continued to struggle and what were ways to help them better learn. So that’s why I went to graduate school—to answer those questions. Then after I finished graduate school I was a teacher for a while but I wanted to have a bigger impact and I thought the way to do that would be to be in a position to train the next generation of teachers and that’s why I went for my advanced graduate training.
Q: Do you have any advice for young faculty in our college?
A: I work with a lot of young faculty in our College. One suggestion is to be sure to enjoy what you are doing. Because doing it for 20 or 30 years is a long time. And if you don’t like what you are doing, you need to change what you are doing. We are here for students, so, while yes we have to do our research to get promoted – researching and teaching become inextricably linked because students in our classes raise good questions that research can solve. Our research results raise interesting, unexpected findings, that then help us teach new things to our students, so it’s very important to always remember that the two are linked. And if you spend too much time on teaching, you are not getting that new knowledge you need to do a good job in teaching. If you are spending too much time on research, you are not getting those good questions from students that will enrich your research. So keep that in mind that the two are linked and that you need to focus on both.
Finally, you have to have balance. That’s the hardest thing in an academic career because there is always the research article or the grant to write. There are always students who have questions about their paper or questions about the content. And then you have a personal life of family, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews and husbands… and so you have to pay attention to all three, because if you spend too much time on one, you are going to lose the others. There is a quote from Leonard DaVinci, “Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work, your judgment will be surer. Since to remain at work, constantly at work, will cause you to lose your power of judgment, go some distance away, because then the work appears small and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.”
I kept it at my computer because I think when I am struggling with a problem at work, I should not make a decision that day. I need to sleep on it; I need to read a good book; I need to go for a walk; I need to play with my dogs. Because then suddenly when I walking my dog and looking at the work, an idea comes to solve the problem. If I had stay at my desk working, I will not have thought of that idea.
Dr. Cheri Hoy
Ph.D. Special Education
Northwestern University
Oral Histories
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