Oral History Project - Current Faculty
Dr. Judith Preissle
Program Coordinator of Qualitative Research
Professor
Qualitative Research Program
Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy
(1976-present)
Interviewer: Kathy Roulston
Date: 5 September, 2007
Q: How did you come to work here at the University of Georgia.
A: Actually I’ve told this story before. It’s kind of a funky story, and I’ve got to start it by saying that I did my doctoral work at Indiana University, and that’s where I was when I applied for the job here. I was getting a doctoral degree in Social Studies Education, but I went to Indiana because they said, “We recognize that you have these strong interests in anthropology and that you did kind of a combination ed anthro degree at Minnesota, and if you want to do that here, that’s fine, we’ll work with you.” And I actually found an anthropologist and an educator and everything worked out pretty well there.
My research interests were cultural, but I love to teach, I worked in teacher education the four years that I was in Indiana, I had supervised beginning teachers when I was myself a public school teacher. I couldn’t, I didn’t really want to give up teaching. But I was thinking of myself as a spotted zebra or a striped leopard, you know? Because I had what I thought was competence in teacher education, and knowledge and I really liked working with young people learning to teach, and getting better. There was that. But my scholarly interests, what I wanted to research and hoped to write in, were the culture of schooling. I didn’t really want to go into schools and change social studies, improve social studies. I mean I hoped that it would, but that wasn’t my thrust.
So when I began looking for jobs, I just applied to social studies jobs. That was what the degree was in, and I hoped for the best. I went to the National Council for the Social Studies annual meeting, and was interviewed there by Marion Rice, and Ev Everett Keach, who were on the faculty here, in a very large social studies department. And then was invited to come to Athens to interview.
My Indiana faculty people, not so much the anthropologist, because she wasn’t that knowledgeable about Ed schools, but my education faculty at Indiana were just delighted that what they saw as one of the very strongest social studies units in the country, and definitely the strongest in the South, was going to interview me for an elementary social studies job. They also interviewed Ron Van Sickle who is [currently] Head of the Department of Elementary and Social Studies for a secondary position. Ron came down, interviewed, came back, said he had a great time, was offered the job, and took it.
I didn’t have that experience that Ron had. I knew when I came in that people were very interested in the anthropology background and in my qualitative research background. That had come up at the conference interview. And that made me interested. They were receptive, even though the job was teaching elementary and social studies methods to pre-service teachers, they were interested and supportive of these other kinds of things.So I came here, quite open and eager, and I had, according to some of the faculty members, the worst interview that they had ever witnessed. People were antagonistic. They basically grilled me. The first day we had a meeting with all the faculty and one of the faculty members asked me this string of questions, not one question, but four or five complex questions of the kind that you might write books about. And everybody else was jumping in, it was like it was a witch hunt! It was horrible! And it wasn’t just me that saw it! Because later on, the other folks [commented on] it too. I was just aghast. I mean I just did the best I could. And I saw some of the faculty members individually. Individually, they were fine, but boy, in a pack, they were like wolves. And at the end of the day, they said, “OK, you say you can do qualitative research, tomorrow morning at 8, bring us a syllabus for a course.”
So I went back to the Georgia Center, and just cried for about half an hour. And, that’s when I called my major professor, and said, “I’m gonna do the syllabus, you’ve got to read me the citations from the books that I need,” and she did. And the next morning, I brought this hand written syllabus for what became 8400, it got typed up, it got circulated around. OK. So the feedback that I got was, “Well, everybody thinks you’ll be a wonderful researcher, but some of the people have real concerns about whether or not you’ll be a good teacher.”
And again, I was just aghast, because if there was an area in which I felt competent it was my teaching. I thought I could teach anything to anybody, blindfolded, hands tied behind my back, that’s how I felt about my teaching. And I had good credentials. So Marion Rice, who was head of the department then said, “You’re gonna have to convince this person, this person and this person, that you know something about teaching.” So I went around, and did my best to convince these people I’d be OK. And they put me on a plane, that’s another little story.
On the flight down, I got into this plane to come over from Atlanta to Athens, and I looked out the window, and said, “Oh my word! Those are propellers!” I’d never been on a propeller-driven big plane.
I flew back up to Indianapolis and I just, I said, “OK that’s it. You know they’re not going to be interested in me. And I’m sure not interested in them!” So I got off the plane in Indianapolis, and my husband, I was married to Ted Goetz then, he met me, and he said, “Well, they called and offered you the job.”
I didn’t have any other job offers, and I was finishing, and I had me and a husband to support, because Ted wasn’t going to be finished for a couple of years. So I took it. And I think, you know, if I’d had any other option, I would not have taken this job, because the vibes were terrible. Every indication was that I was going to be badly treated. But there wasn’t any other job, and Ted was going to be finished in a couple of years, and he was going to go looking for a job, so, I took the job in Athens at the College of Ed thinking “This is temporary. They don’t much like me, I don’t like the way they treated me, it’s only for a couple years, it’s not a big deal, it’s a really good social studies program, I’ll get some experience, and then I’ll just go on about my business.”
Later, I knew some of this at the time but I didn’t really connect it. Later on I understood that what happened had nothing to do with me personally. This is 1975. In the early 1970s, the University of Georgia decided it wanted to be a Research I institution. And it put in place some administrators, one particular whose name I’ve completely forgotten, I think he was Head of the Graduate School, or Vice President, you know the Provost position. And it was his job to get rid of everybody untenured who wasn’t producing research.
Ron Van Sickle and I were hired to replace two people who’d been fired. Who’d been here, I don’t know how long they’d been here. They were not tenured, but the department knew they couldn’t tenure them, because they weren’t writing. They came in thinking they were getting a job at a teaching university. And then it changed kind of under their feet. So, the social studies faculty had gone through this trauma, this voting against people that they were friends with, that they’d partied with, that they cared about, and I think, my later sense of what happened is that, well OK, the first candidate comes in to take those jobs – these people were still here, they were still in the building when I was here interviewing, they didn’t leave until the end of the year. So Ron comes in and, you know, they get through that, and then I come in, and I really was kind of a scapegoat target because they viewed me as this hot shot researcher, because I had publications. Never mind that two of them were practitioner publications and only one of them was really a research publication. I think they just took out their frustration and anger, and I think I was just the target.
That’s what the other people, who were reflective about what happened, and who later talked about it said. It was very strange because the ill treatment never happened again to me. My husband and I came to look for a place to rent, later in the spring, everybody was charming. When I came in August, I had like 10 daddies. I mean people were very nurturing and supportive. But that was my initiation. It was definitely an initiation by fire. And I think, if there’s a lesson there, it’s that not everything is personal. I mean it certainly affected me, and hurt me, but I don’t think it had anything to do with me, it would have happened to anybody else. I know that other people coming in have aggressive interviews, but that’s certainly not something I’d want to put anybody through.
So I drove out of Bloomington, Indiana distributing my dissertation around to the professors, you know kind of throwing them up on people’s doorsteps. I came down here, like the first of August, moved in, prepared for the defense, went back, defended, and a couple of weeks later school started in September. So that was how I started here. My anthropology professor was very worried about my taking a job in Georgia. She said, “Oh they’re going to be burning crosses on your yard. And it’s going to be terrible.” But I had gone to high school in North Carolina and I knew that university communities were different then other places in the South. And the South had changed. Not as much as it has by now, but it had changed.
Athens was not Bloomington, but Athens was still very Southern. It was more Southern than I realized. The university was run like a plantation. Fred Davison was the President, and he was the Boss. The College was run by a guy named Joe Williams, who kind of built the College of Ed in its strength. He was very good for it. He collected expertise, and I was the ed anthro person that he collected. So there was this odd combination of … there was an environment that was very old-timey and conventional, this was a white man’s university. Women weren’t admitted until the late 19-teens, early ‘20s. When I came in ’75, it had only been desegregated for 15 years. The faculty were predominantly white men. There were more women in the College of Education than elsewhere. Most of them had been hired when the university was still pretty much a teaching university. So the generation that I was in, the people who came in the ‘70s and who stayed, had to be scholars. And although that was what I wanted to do, I wasn’t nearly as confident of, I had not built the competency in my scholarship that I had in my teaching. By the time I came here, I’d been teaching 10 years already. So, the irony of the interview is that they assumed I was going to be this hot-shot scholar and questioned my teaching, whereas I knew that the thing that they should be questioning was whether or not I could build a track record as a researcher. I had a lot of ambivalence about that fear. I think it’s common among assistant professors, you have seven years, up or out. And that was definitely the environment here. Taking a job to replace somebody who had been fired made it more intense. But let me go back to the university.
So the university was very much, and the college somewhat, hierarchical, very paternalistic, I was told that raises were assigned on the basis of “Well, this person’s single, he doesn’t need as much of a raise as this person who’s got children and married, and a wife to support.” The faculty meetings were organized so that everybody met at 9 o’clock or whatever. And then there was an informational part of the meeting, and the information was divvied out, and then all of the untenured people left. And all of the decisions that weren’t actually, that hadn’t already been made by the department head, were discussed by the tenured faculty. And that’s the way it worked, I think, from the President on down. At least that’s what I saw. We had no councils, no senates, faculty governance was limited to things like voting on tenure and promotion, voting on hires. Those kinds of things. So the atmosphere was very different. At the same time, it was very protective. I didn’t have all of the committee responsibilities that young faculty are kind of brought in to in this day and age. Quite the contrary. I had this group who kind of hovered over me, and they did not want to have to vote against someone. And so, I mean they were partly protecting themselves, but they were also genuinely caring.
There were 12 of us after I was hired. Two women. Mary Hepburn had a background in political science and she had been hired three or four years before I was hired. And she came in as the researcher. She was a very active social studies scholar. Very soon after I came here, she got appointed part time to the Carl Vinson Institute of Government, and so I did not have much contact with her. The first couple of years I think she was around, but eventually she moved entirely into that appointment. So, the other people were men, all white men. There were two other untenured people, Ron van Sickle and John Napier. So there were nine tenured faculty overall. I think Mary was just going up for tenure and promotion a year or two after I got here. So there were eight established white men. Marion Rice was Head of the Department of Social Studies until he resigned about 10 years later. And the other people in the department had come in, again, at a time when the university was a teaching, had a predominantly teaching emphasis, and I think it’s fair to say most of them wrote for practitioners. They did write, but they wrote textbooks, and they wrote articles for practitioner magazines, and so although some of them did some empirical research for example, it was a small part of what they did. Guy Larkins was the tenured person in the collection who did the most empirical research.
Certainly, other people were scholarly, but they were very practitioner oriented in what they did. And they hovered. And they worried. And they actually made me feel insecure because they were so worried that I wasn’t going to make it. They really tried to help. I had this group of daddies. And they would come by every day. Every day, they’d come by, you know, and they’d sit down, and they’d ask me how many things I’d written [since] the day before. And that just wasn’t as encouraging as I could have used. I did get some very explicit kinds of help from various people. Marion got me involved in editing a local journal that we placed one of my pieces in. So, I think I had as well-intentioned a group of supporters and facilitators as you can have. Ron and I had to report every quarter what we had done. Not just year by year the way we do now, but quarterly. And that made me feel inadequate. And yet later on, when I did go up for tenure and promotion, I was so grateful to have those reports, because it made putting the dossier together much easier.
So, the atmosphere was intense. We were housed in one of three brick buildings that had been put up as temporary units during World War II, and ours was called Dudley Hall. They were, you know where the Bio-Center is now across the street from Aderhold?
They were there in this wonderful grove of, what are those, Chinese Chestnut trees? So we were kind of removed from Aderhold when I was in the department. I just kept my head down and did what I thought I was supposed to do. And even that was a challenge. I got called on the carpet the second year I was here by the head of Elementary Education, because the students were complaining that my course was so much more demanding than other courses. It was just way too much for them. So I asked Marion, “Well, what should I do?” He said, “It’s gonna take less time for you to make your demands a little less, it’s going to be easier on you, and easier on them. And if you don’t do it, you could be out of a job.”
I mean, he didn’t quite put it like that, but, that was my job, teaching these courses. So, I just backed off, and that was that. In the meantime, I taught the first qual course in the spring of ’76, and that was what actually got me connected with other parts of the College. Well that’s not entirely true. Teaching Elementary Social Studies, and supervising preservice students who were spending some time out in schools. The subject area people had responsibility for visiting them in their school placements. And so, I got to know some of the faculty in Elementary Education. But I kind of lived in my little cave across the street, so, I didn’t, I really didn’t know the movers and shakers in the College, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t really want to know them. Because I had to do my research, and I had to get published, and that was what I was supposed to do.
Q: When you came in the ‘70s, how was the College organized?
A: I think that was when we had 27 departments, or 29, whatever that huge number was. The College was organized into academic departments, social studies, language arts, math, science, reading, special education, there was a little foundations department that was called history, philosophy and sociology of education, it had three people in it. [The COE] was like the Holy Roman Empire, with fiefdoms, that was presided over by Joe Williams, and he had a couple of associate deans. And it was huge. I mean, we were way too big for Aderhold. So they had us all over campus. That was another reason why it was really hard to get to know people.
I don’t recall very many college-wide activities. There was a once-a-year faculty meeting where the new people were introduced, that as far as I know pre-dates me. But that was it. A lot of the socializing I understood was organized by the Faculty Wives’ group. And that wasn’t something that I had access to, or wanted access to for that matter. And so I didn’t know the ruling people. I knew Marion, and everything came through Marion. I only got to know other people very slowly. I can’t say much about the elementary ed department which was very large, because two or three years after I came here, the head dropped dead. He was running and he had a heart attack. Everyone was horrified because he was a very athletic person. And he had managed to protect his faculty from the kind of dismissals that other departments had gone through. When he died, people left in droves.
If I work really hard, I can kind of see people’s faces. I remember when George Stanic, who’s just retired from Elementary Education, came to interview because I was part of his interview team. But that whole generation of people just, many of them didn’t make it. And by the time people were coming in like George, who did make it, I was transitioning out of teaching elementary social studies methods into teaching more qual, because that was taking off. I did get to meet people through the qualitative courses. And that basically was how I built my network, I got to meet Paul Torrance, who was head of Ed Psych, who was just a giant in the area. The people in REMS, research, measurement, evaluation, and statistics, were always very kind and receptive to me. Carl Huberty was heading that, and then he later became Head of Ed Psych. We had an evaluation guy named Dave Payne here. Joe Wisenbaker. We would meet, we had a little kind of, it was supposed to be a Brown Bag on evaluation, but it ended up being pretty wide ranging.
So, the networking I did was mostly through that route, and only incidentally did I have much exposure to the power base. And that was partly deliberate. I mean, I just kept my head down, really. It wasn’t clear early on how long I was going to be here. As it turned out, Ted finished his degree, and decided he was more interested in clinical practice, and wanted to clinically practice here. So, all of a sudden, things really got serious, because he wanted to stay here, and that meant if I wanted an academic job, I really needed to get through tenure and promotion. It wasn’t any different than coming in, but it really was even more of a make or break, because I couldn’t just go somewhere else.
Q: Could you tell us more about the College’s shift to a research emphasis?
A: I came to replace people who’d probably been here six or seven years. So they came in maybe ’69, ’68, ’69, ’70, thinking that they were coming to a teaching university. And they couldn’t make tenure, because the transition occurred in the late 60s, early 70s. So by the time I got here, UGA was Research I. That had already happened, and there were lots of casualties. There were people who had gotten their tenure prior to this, and they were, as far as rising through the ranks, they were done. I was pretty close to an elementary and social studies educator named Michael Hawkins, he was just a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful teacher. He wrote, and he did research in social studies. But there was no question that he would ever get full professor. He just wasn’t sufficiently productive in empirical research. So, all over the university, all over the college, in my department, there were casualties of this transition.
I came from a doctoral program where I lived in this collection of brilliant women. For four years, I, my fellow students, and my two chairs, my anthropology and my ed chair, were very close. They were very productive people and I was accustomed to that kind of environment where there was a substantial collection of women scholars. And the women here were by and large teachers. I can’t think of any instance where any senior woman reached out to me. I didn’t much reach out to them either. But, you know, that’s because I had my daddies.
I did reach out to the other young women. And they’re all gone. Anthropology hired some, and you know I spent time with them, and at the end of the year, they’d be fired, or they’d run off, or they’d get pregnant. The university in the ‘70s was not serious about diversifying the faculty. [Although] there were particular people who were.
I think the great thing about Marion Rice was that he was always way ahead of his time. He hired the two women that were in the department. He organized a meeting over at the Georgia Center of local leaders in the African-American community to talk about how we could get more African-American students at the university. But he was really an exception. I’m not sure that at that time the leadership in the university even had that on its radar. Now that changed. Joe Williams retired, and the College went through a period of turmoil in leadership.
I think Williams retired in’81, and there were two or three years when the person who was hired to replace him was a woman named Kathryn Blake who’d been in Special Ed and was regarded as a very fine leader. And within two years she was forced to resign because there were fiscal problems. I don’t know the details, but the rumors were she way outspent her budget. Young professors who’d been hired then were basically sent home because the College couldn’t pay them. The President had to send somebody over to kind of clean up the mess. And then she actually died just a year or two later. So it was very unclear what was going on. We had Gerry Firth as our interim Dean after Kathryn resigned, and things stabilized a bit more when Al Buccino came as Dean.
Meanwhile, Fred Davison was having his own troubles because some of the ways that he ran things came under fire, particularly the way athletes were treated.
Q: What are your most memorable experiences during your career here?
A: Well I think that one outstanding issue had to do with women. When I came here, I tried to network with other women researchers, and very soon I got somewhat involved with the beginning of the Women’s Studies program. At that point, the daddies sat me down, and said, “You can study gender, you can study women, you can write on them, but we don’t want you to get involved in institution building, because you’re untenured.” And they were right. I mean, and that’s what I did. I developed a line of research in gender, and that was fine. I was in the network of the Women’s Studies folks, and I’ve been an associated faculty member since it started.
I got to know the first Chair, Maija Blaubergs. She was a couple of years ahead of me. She worked in Ed Psych and was a psycho-linguist. When she went up for tenure and promotion, she was denied. So she went up the following year and she was denied again. As a result of that, she sued the university. I was absolutely supportive of this, because I believed that the university had benefited from what she had done. And that she shouldn’t be denied tenure. She had publications. She probably didn’t have the number of refereed journal articles that other people in Ed Psych had. That was a very difficult time for all of us.
I think this was going on right before I was going up. So it was very scary for everybody. But the good thing that came from that is that around the College and finally around the university, the administrators started seeing that it’s not good for us to have all these failed women. It’s not good for us to have the newspapers full of lawsuits. People finally got serious about hiring women who wanted to be researchers and making sure that they had support. And the environment changed. It changed for all of us. It changed significantly for me.
Q: That was after this particular case?
A: Well, that brought it to a head. People started seeing that if we want to have more than just men faculty at this university, then we’re going to have to pay attention when we hire people, when we hire women. So yes, I think those things were associated. We hired the most wonderful women like in that ’79 to ’85 [period]… Donna Alvermann came, JoBeth Allen came, this whole generation of women who were hired right at the end of the ‘70s and early ‘80s that have really changed the College of Ed environment. And that happened in other places around the university too. But it certainly changed the College of Education. I don’t know how vivid or interesting that story is.
Q: Is the Blaubergs’ P&T case is written about in The History of the College of Education.
A: Yes it is.
Q: Since that became a national case, can you describe your perspective as a faculty member in a little more detail?
A: It did become a national case. It was frightening for an untenured faculty member to see that people could be dismissed as arbitrarily as this felt. I think it also became a national case because the judge asked people to reveal their vote, and the reading professor refused [Dr. James Dinnan]. It seemed to say that the Head of Women’s Studies, the woman who does research on women, is not going to be accorded the respect that other people and other research will be accorded. So it was very frightening, and it was very difficult for those of us who had a personal relationship with Maija, to find ways to support her, because we were untenured, and we had no say other than moral indignation. And in some respects, I think that moral indignation conveyed something, because the climate changed. Because department heads and deans started paying attention to who they were hiring, and started paying attention to the balance of men and women on their faculty. They started paying attention to what kind of a future they wanted to build.
I would say that happened 10 years later in the ‘90s when the university got serious about diversifying racially and ethnically. And that’s an ongoing battle. But we are no longer quite as white as we used to be. We are certainly, well, the College of Education particularly, is well integrated. That’s not so true of other places in the university.
Q: Looking back over the years, what advice do you have for graduate students and new professors at the College of Education here at UGA.
A: I think that it’s important for young folks coming in to know that this is a community. This is not just me doing my academic career. Of course it is you doing your academic career. And that’s important, because if you don’t do your academic career, then you can’t stay in this kind of environment.
But it’s also important to decide… is this the kind of community you want to be a part of, and I think to join with other people in making a vision of what kind of community you want this College to be. What is it supposed to represent? It took me a long time to feel (a) that I was a part of the community, and then (b) to see how important that common vision is.
This College is so different than it was when I came. It’s no longer a fiefdom. It’s much more community organized. We have a faculty governance system, that means that we have to work to be decision-makers in ways that people didn’t 30 years ago, but on the other hand, it makes the decisions we make more transparent, more accessible.
We are a community that represents the broader community in ways that I can’t begin to say. How wonderful it is to work in a place where you aren’t the only one of you. You’re not the only woman, you’re not the only African American, you’re not the only Latino – we have a ways to go there. And where people work together for common concerns. Whether it’s doing something about poverty in Athens, working on the policy center to help inform policy in the state, and so, my, what I would say to you, and other people, who are associates, is decide what kind of a place you want this to be. Because it’s not going to be that place if you don’t formulate it, and then work for it. It takes people who say, “We want a different environment,” and it takes those people saying, “This is important, and we’re going to do things to support this in order for that to happen.” So that’s my message.
Dr. Judith Preissle
Ed.D., Social Studies Education
Indiana University
Oral Histories
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