 I'm Tangren Alexander, or Jean Tangren Alexander, and I taught at SOU, kind of off and on and in various ways from 1974 until 2006. So I guess I'll just take your questions in order. Like a good student, I made a lot of notes. But the campus was like when I started. So we're talking 1974. John, my husband at the time, we had both gone to graduate school together, and he had gotten a job in San Fernando, San Fernando State, and we had lived there for a couple of years and we're just delighted when suddenly they need a professor back here. And Art Christman, our families knew each other a little bit, from Unitarians actually. And we had told him after a year down in the LA area that, you know, we'd be happy and they'll please let us know if a job ever opened up. So I think it was September when the person suddenly left or died, or I've forgotten what it was. But anyway, suddenly they needed a philosophy professor, so John took the job. And I'd sort of been on the mommy track, I almost got my PhD and had a child. So a daughter, she was four when we moved to Ashland then, that would be right. And we first lived elsewhere, but we moved into that house next door to Beverly and Betty Lou. So what was the campus like? So my first job actually, at the time there had been a philosophy department of one and a half people, and John took the one job. And the other half was taught by a nun actually, who for some reason was teaching there. And she left after a couple of years and we pointed out that I also had a philosophy degree and I was working on my PhD at the time, I'd done everything but the dissertation. So I took this half-time job and I can remember how nervous I was, I just, I thought they'll know I'm not a teacher, you know, they'll, but it did all work. I know I remember I stood up there and smoked cigarette after cigarette, which at the time was, you know, it was allowed in classes, it was something people did, but it got me through my first thing, and at first I kind of did just an imitation of what my philosophy teachers had done, and after a couple of years I thought there's got to be something better than this, and especially in teaching ethics, there were beginning to be this movement of teaching relevant ethics instead of what is the meaning of the word good and stuff like that. That was starting to happen in philosophy department, so I thought I could probably get away with it, but plus we had this incredible freedom because the department was just John and me, there was not anybody else, so it's like if it was okay with John and it was okay with me, there was like nobody else like really overseeing us, and it gave me really a wonderful freedom to invent courses and ways of doing courses and subject matter and things like that. So after a while, you know, when John and I started out, it was just, it was the late 60s, and it was just kind of the end of this time when education had been growing and growing, and we thought well we'll probably end up as like in a department of four people or something like that, you know, we'll build a department, and instead of that our whole time we were fighting not to disappear, and what the university got for splitting one job to two people, of course they got two people that worked almost full time, you know, and so they got a lot of good work for that. And we actually didn't always go 50-50, I took time off to build this house and do some other building projects for one, and I took two years off at different times to try to work on a historical novel about Queen Christina that I was working on, so, but it was really nice that way. They were kind of open to that, to just being flexible. We had seen before that, we had some friends, the Anks who were faculty members here, and they got hit with a nepotism charge when they were both teaching here, and you know, they just really wouldn't give her a job because they thought it would be nepotism, and you know, there just wasn't, things have changed 180 degrees I think nowadays, hopefully. But anyway, so we felt lucky that the school was as open as they were to doing that. At Helen's job, the job, the half-time job that I took over after a couple of years disappeared, and so we asked Dr. Christman, who was the head of humanities at the time, if we could do two jobs, if we could split one job, and they were kind of open to it. They said they didn't want to give two tenures for one job, so like John kept a tenure and I sort of said to him, well, fine, you do the committees and interface with the bureaucracy and I'll teach half the load and I'll be happy with that. So anyway, it did leave me free to experiment, and I soon started working with ways to give my students more voice and to, I know the first year John and I went to a party, I think it was at Lawson and Otters, and somebody there said, oh, I learned so much from my students and, and John and I both kind of went, you do, it's like we had no concept of that from our own experience as students that, that was what, you know, you could do, but, but, you know, I learned from my students for the rest of my career by finding ways to, to empower them, but it was an exhausting way to teach. I have written an article about what I did with my ethics classes. It's the one in, in the teaching philosophy journal that I wrote back in the 80s and I'm about to put it up online. That's one of the things that's just about, that is ready really. So, but I actually ended up for one adopting the technique of sitting in a circle and from what things that I'd seen in the women's community and how they worked on issues and all was a matter of passing something around a circle and when it came to you, you, it was like your turn to address whatever issue that was within the realm from your point of view. And what I liked about it is it didn't have to fit on to what the last person said, you know, it's like coming at it from whatever you would like to most take your time with, we ended up passing around in orange and what you would most like your, to take your time to say. And usually, oftentimes it was people telling stories from their lives or things like that and ethics went from using a textbook and some of these questions that I never really could get behind that were more theoretical in ethics. And I had people in the school who thought, you know, Aristotle and Kant were it and so I was fighting all the time being dismissed because that was, I refused to do that. And what we did was we had a different topic every day of ethical questions. We often start with animal rights, for instance, and then focus on, I don't know, violence in the society. Oh, the other thing I did to try to give my students voice is that in the writing department, in reading and writing, I gave them a choice about what to read. So I had this complicated, like bibliography, and they had to go to the library and actually find, read 10 pages of something there and write something about that as well as about the topic of the day, whatever it is. They had to write three pages altogether. And my philosophy, which comes a lot from being a writer myself and from going to my writers group, is that people get better by writing more. They can become better writers by writing and whatever I could do to facilitate that. So like they could write a paragraph on one thing and, you know, another paragraph on something completely different was fine with me and I told them not to do stuff like tell me what you're going to tell me and then tell me and then tell me what you told me and I just, so I tried to get them to forget a lot of the stuff that they were taught in their other writing classes and to just write, which resulted in a humongous amount of reading for me. So I ended up between that and these complicated reading lists that it was like in the 80s, you remember, I don't know if you remember, but there were like people were compiling sets of readings for the students to read and at first it was rather lax illegally and then it got tighter and tighter about that. But so out of my own money I hired an assistant to do that for me. So I sent for all these permissions and work all that out and to help me read with this stack of readings so she read about half of it. And even with that the way I taught was so kind of monofocus, you know, just focused on teaching and doing that well. And I really ended up not having much of a life outside of teaching in many ways except for writer's group and occasional forest when I was teaching, but that I would take periods off and focus on other stuff. But then John and I ended up splitting up, this would be like 1976 or so when I actually moved out and pursued my own life. And at that time John had, we were just beginning this kind of splitting the job and John asked Christman if it would make any difference if we were divorced. And at first he said, oh yeah, then it wouldn't work. But it turned out that we kind of convinced him that it was an amicable split and we could easily get along in the career department. So he changed his mind and let us do it. And we each got paid like according to our rank. John got more than I did. And John became a full professor, which it took me to the end of my career to do, but I've got to admit my career was more spotty than John's. John kind of plugged away at it. When I came on board in 1974 and in those later years of the 70s, there was really, it was a dangerous time to be a lesbian. And those women that we talked about who are didn't want to come out in the 70s that I tried to talk to, you know, had very good reasons for that. It was, you know, you were not safe in your job. And I do remember once going to a lecture where Art Christman, sort of out of nowhere, felt free to say that he was against gay rights or homosexual rights. And he said something like, you can stick in a knot hole if you want, but that doesn't make it right. Just completely intolerant kind of thing. And you know, these were the people in power at the time. And the patriarchy was in full bloom as well. And so what I did for a long time was just lay low. And since I sort of had this umbrella of having my ex-husband interface with all that, I just, I really didn't want them to know me. And it was a lot that I was a lesbian, but there were other things too. I just didn't think very much like they did and wasn't necessarily in the same culture in lots of ways. So, and it became better as the years went on. And as women's studies became more real and we began to have a women's studies program cobbled together of one kind in another. And then there was kind of a heyday. I guess it was in the early 80s. I mean, I mean, looking back on it, it was a heyday. We just thought it was the beginning of whatever. But it was like we had women's history month. Every month we celebrated all month long. There were like cultural events happening in Ashland and around into Valley. You have all kinds of things. And my writers group would do readings for it. And you know, the women's center would feature women artists and well, just all kinds of, and the women's center was functioning really wonderfully. And Gwen Morris ran it for a while, who you know, she's Craig Morris' wife. And actually, she's about my best friend, certainly one of my very best friends now. So there was a lot of, and there was this, what was it called returning homemaker or something like that program. And it's just a lot of women energy going on. And during that time, I founded or started first one course, and then it became too big for one course and split into two. So in the end, it was a one on women and philosophy or feminism and philosophy. And that was one of the ones where I completely put together my own set of readings for it, because I came from my books that I had. And and looking at things like language and how language shapes our patriarchal perceptions and things. Well, anyway, and then it sort of gave birth to another course called Women and Ethics, where I used actually a lot of literary readings, but on a whole bunch of different ethical topics again. And, you know, I had all kinds of women writing. And it was a wonderful course. And it was a wonderful collection of readings. And I would do the same thing. The way I would do these kinds of classes was we would do the reading, and then say if it was an hour and a half class, I would talk for about 20 minutes. And I'd try to like bring up some issues and talk about some things that have occurred to me in thinking about the readings and and or autobiographical stuff. And then I hand the orange around and people can just reflect from whatever they want to, again, either on the topic or on the readings. But the readings were really evocative. And so we did get a lot of interest. You said that the 70s were a dangerous time. What what did you mean by that? Well, when your boss feels completely free to make such a comment, or like I, for a few years, I taught the topic of homosexuality without coming out. I just that did not feel safe enough. And I in particular remember one time when in a smaller circle, this male student kind of confronted me about, well, what did I think about lesbian teachers or something in this way like, I know your secret, you know, I just did a very threatening kind of way. And, you know, I just I did not want to lose my job. It was my way to live the life that I wanted to live. And and I wanted to be taken somewhat seriously, seriously enough to be free to do what I was doing as a teacher. And so do you think that was part, do you think Art Kreitzman's comment and the student's comment was part of a larger? Oh, certainly. Oh, certainly. I mean, this that was like the time of Anita Bryant. You know, that was just really, I mean, we're still in but, you know, this backlash that comes from people challenging these gender norms in various kinds of ways that are just so so ingrained as part of who people are think they are. So how did how did the Women's Center help some of this? Or how did that get started? What role did it play? I knew it best when my friend Gwen was running it, which she did for several years. But that must have been a light. It was. It was a place of refuge for a lot of women. And what Gwen, I know, did in particular, she connected people up. Women would come in, you know, who were feeling kind of lost on campus and especially older women and returning women students. And and there was a whole movement where women were going back to college. And so she she knew all kinds of ways to connect them up with what they needed to connect up with there. And there was just so much positive women energy. There were also things like for a while, I think it was the Women's Center. Maybe it was Women's Studies sponsored these things called noon lectures where brown bag things you'd go and, you know, people would eat lunch and somebody would give a present somebody from Women's Studies would give a presentation about something. I know I read a bit from the novel I was working on on Queen Christina for a while. And so there was all this kind of really good women energy that was happening in the late 70s and early 80s. So that helped me, you know, kind of steady me. And when I gradually got more involved with Women's Studies, it was not easy to get on the board at first. And it was like one from each discipline, like one from humanities, and they already had that slot. So but I convinced them to change it around because the women just really needed a support group of some kind at SOU. And there was also something in the fall that that happened for several years that was some kind of get together and they would have speakers. And I know I showed my Celine slide story there once, but they had all kinds of interesting and sometimes kind of famous women come and talk and the women faculty would get together for that. So there was some good stuff that would happen. I was really disappointed, especially at first at how little kind of sisterhood and support there was compared to what I was used to in the women's community that I was also a part of. But they helped me out in some tight spots, like when John retired in 1990, I think, he took early retirement. And then the question came up, what was going to happen to me? Because I had been faithfully teaching there and refining my skills and working so hard to prove that I was really a good teacher. And it turned out nobody had been watching all this time, I guess. And it was at first the guys that were in charge were just saying, well, we're just going to open it up to a national competition and may the best person win. And I don't know, it felt to me like I'd been working all those years for something that I was hoping to inherit John's position. And anyway, finally the Women's Studies Council got on a wrote a letter about this. And what happens when you get on the mommy track? And it's the husband who gets the main job and the wife who follows with whatever. And so I was, anyway, what saved me in the end, it looked like I was going down and I didn't know what I would do because I was not going to move away from here. I am so rooted in this community between my family and my women's community friends and my other friends that I would rather find some other line of work, but I didn't know what I would do. And I really wanted to go on teaching. And finally Sarah Hopkins Powell was the provost at the time. And she kind of intervened and said, wait, what's going on? This woman deserves some hearing about this. And so in the end I did get it and ended up getting the full-time job, which I then did from 93. It took them a long time to decide, but from 93 to 2003 I taught full-time. But then when it came to tenure it was the same problem. And partly it was that my work had been kind of hidden. There were aspects of my work I didn't want the school to know about, especially in the earlier days. And just as the community was kind of hidden, the women's community, the land, landite community, and it gave a kind of freedom because people didn't know about us and people dismissed us when they did. So it's something that seems to me people have less and less these days, that kind of privacy that comes from kind of being anonymous. Well anyway, Sarah Hopkins Powell stepped in and got me the full-time job or got me on a tenure track, which then there are all those decisions. And I ended up near the very end of my career. I thought, well I've really got enough to apply for a full professor. I'd made it up the various steps by then. And I applied and I came out with more of what I had published, but I guess it got dismissed or whatever the committee decided it wasn't up to snuff for me to get tenure. And it was unanimous, which I was really surprised at. And I think it was because it was in a lot of women's publications and it was women focused. And it wasn't in very many jury journals and that kind of thing. So anyway, at the very end, oh I finally I just decided I'd had it. I had been working so hard all my life for this and I was close to retirement and my accountant said, look you really can retire right now. And so I put in my three-year request I think at that point. Well I started going on the one third time at that point. But then at the last minute your husband actually, who was my boss at the time, stepped in and said that I should get full professor at that point. But since I was retiring anyway, I didn't actually ever get paid as a full professor but at least I got the shining honor of turning into a full professor. But so I don't know, it's been a rocky road. But I'm also really grateful for the freedom that I had to do it my way and to teach in my way. And I've got to say I've also I was thinking about how many of my dearest friends first began as students and they're just like there's quite a few I can name who I still know and love and I'm in touch with. And so that's another good thing about being rooted in one place is that you know those students who stick around anyway and even some of the ones who don't we stay in touch with each other. And because actually in my classes there's a way in which people start really to care about each other because they heard each other's stories and each other's perspectives on ethical questions or whatever it was. I was thinking about when I first started teaching women's studies and I was in one of those rooms in science that's kind of built sideways and you know it's got a desk with a fountain of sink in it and two doors in the back and we started in with on something with Adrienne Richer I think and I just found it felt so uncomfortable it was a circle of all women I think there were like eight or ten of them that were there. And so what we finally did was close the doors and it just felt like that's something we just had to do to really close the doors to talk about what we wanted to talk about and I know that first day was so empowering this one woman said she went home and told her boyfriend that they need to have a different arrangement then went to her job and told her boss that she needed a raise. So you know a lot of the stuff was kind of kind of life-changing and you know and people of course bonded over just talking and in ethics too in just general ethics talking over such deep stuff. But one of the things I should say is that because we were just a one-job department divided by two people we were so little that we had no leverage we got the absolutely worst classrooms always we were always fighting for our life and the way that we learned to survive was to teach huge classes because there was this way that it was figured what the worth of your classes were to the school that had something to do with how many students you had and so I taught classes of between 50 and 65 at the introductory level and every one of those people is generating three pages a day and and but one of the things that did is instead of one large circle we'd often do you know break up into a bunch of small circles then I'd bring a bunch of oranges and we'd pass them around and I gotta say I was thinking about how students had changed I found it harder and harder to convince the males who want to dominate the conversation that this orange was a good idea and but that's the thing about the orange is that everybody gets a turn and it gives a voice to like women who are not as used to being able to speak up in class and be heard but other people too that just have different perspectives than you'd expect and I think one thing we always learned was not to judge people by how they look or your first impressions of them or even you know further impressions because people would keep surprising you about what experiences they'd had or what they'd been through and that was a wonderful ethics lesson to learn I think. I want to say when I did finally get the job full time that Betty Leduc was the one person who a bit acted like a mentor I mean we just we didn't have such a thing as mentors in those days and especially when I was sort of in hiding I didn't but she took me out to dinner after it happened and the one bit of advice she gave me that I'll always remember is don't let the committees sink you down to the point where you lose track of your artistic whatever you're doing and sometimes they did anyway when I was doing my part to be on committees they were the very hardest part of the job I think okay what were the students like? I loved the students at SOU not all of them but I think I learned to teach in a way that took advantage of who the students were and what they brought to the situation and what was wonderful was that that was the older students was the returning students was the Vietnam vets who just had a perspective that the younger people really needed to hear and the nursing students I used to just love I think a lot because they were older women and in general the older students were trying harder and more serious about life and I would I refuse to take part in anything like these things that teach everybody when they're 19 or when they first came in I I wouldn't know how to draw wisdom from 19 year olds I'm not sure in some ways they're their full of opinions a lot but oh I shouldn't generalize but but the older students were just a treasure and the conversation between ages was really good and you know they're not going to listen to me for an hour but they do listen to each other in a way that that I think they just learned a lot from both from listening and speaking and I would tell them they were great at on listening as well as speaking so that listening was just as important and uh so anyway we all learned a lot and really had quite a bit of fun in that there were sometimes some really challenging males who were really challenged by just a woman having power in the class and then you know touching on that and they could make a class really hard and make it hard for us to do among ourselves what we want to do I mean there were females too but it was mostly males and and I don't know that was hard all through my career but the same time I often did find a way to rise to the challenge that kind of surprised me and you know made it so we could go on or I would end up making friends with them or like I remember one student who was hard who years later I ran into jogging down here on the road and he he stopped and he asked me what I'd meant by something or other I'd said I have no idea what it was but he said he said you know after your class I really changed and he wanted to tell me that he'd really changed and you know so you don't always know what what you do with people you just so you see it's where you can how did you counter these attitudes personally, socially, academically, politically I was out as a lesbian to my students for more than a decade before I was out to the faculty and the administration I we sort of had this pact that what happened in the class stayed in the class and I don't know if it did or not but anyway I it was nothing official was said but then of course I couldn't talk about what I was doing publishing wise or any kind of thing and I certainly couldn't talk about my social life and what such as it was and at first I I hope I'm not repeating myself about this but I felt really like a like I had a double life like the three faces me kind of thing where actually like this person didn't know things this person knew and sometimes vice versa because being a college professor and sort of suiting up for that and going in and doing that and taking that power and that group of people but only taking a part of myself there because there were things I couldn't talk about or truths I knew I couldn't say and that was hard to transit back and forth especially like at the beginning of the year after it has summer off or something and I would just the lesbian culture the land women's culture really is so different in terms of the social rules and everything is just such a such it's so much better in some way so much freer but you know then I'd go back into that other one and think to the school culture and I like be afraid I'd commit some gaffer say something that didn't make sense or couldn't in their context or or whatever so it was kind of silencing but that's the thing is oh as gay rights began to surface and against all odds actually got a hearing and actually became the law of land in some ways after many decades of struggles around that it became more I became to be able to be more open about I became more able to integrate my two worlds I became more able to speak about it in the SOU world and and to to bring some of more and more of what I knew from this world into this world and that helped a lot I think to heal that kind of split that I felt for so many years so maybe that takes us to how and when did you find solace so I would say friends I would say the writers group my writers group above all that's like the most central community I have the Southern Oregon women writers group has been going since 1980 and been an institution sort of based on land dykes in the area but open to other women as well so and just the understanding of feminism that I got from them and some from books more from the culture really so that was part of it then a large part of it was journaling I kept journals I did that a lot I would sit down and just write about what my dreams were or what was going on or how teaching was going or various kinds of stuff like that so those that whole set of journals there what I generated during that time just kind of as a way to have my thoughts to myself to be able to be all the parts of me that existed and I've got to say the third factor was probably marijuana I was using marijuana all that time as a source of self knowledge and as a source of confidence for doing my classes and doing them imaginatively so it really did get I credit it for gave me through a lot but again that was a personality that I part of myself that I couldn't manifest uh in the SOU context by any means so that's been there's been progress on that front too and for me the biggest thing about legalization of marijuana is freedom of speech that I have now that I did not have for all those years can I ask a question you talk about uh the land women the land women uh-huh yes and the land yaks did you go to those communities during the summer no I didn't live there ever how did you how did I it was mainly connected through groups that I there was there was the southern Oregon women's writers group which went on for a long time and met every three weeks for since 1981 and meets anywhere from Ashland to Roseburg so in in little cabins off the road oftentimes and things so there was that there was the writing group but then at one time especially we really flourished when Tika Rinne was here she was an artist photographer writer uh that uh was super productive and very interested in getting our culture out to a larger audience it wasn't that it was also there was uh like a a painters group and a photographers group that also meant T was part of those as well so there were just and you know there were women putting on plays carol engage was here for a while and doing no-to-men theater and uh and uh you know the the land yaks would occasionally come down here and do presentations there was like women artists musicians coming through all the time concerts you know with people that we love the year and so there was just a culture for a while as well as the academic culture that knew about stuff like women's history and like I worked hard to incorporate women into all my classes which was not easy considering the available literature and like history of philosophy I would work that in and you know people it there was resistance to that because it wasn't the canon and by from my students and that was the 80s 80s 90s yeah even into 2000 yeah and then I don't know I mean now women's studies seems to have disappeared into gender studies and I don't know whatever happened to things like women women's history if that's still exists or you know like there is more attention being paid to some of the women philosophers than there used to be but uh I would pull together whatever scraps of information I could find and put them together into I have a piece on that that's also going to be in my web pretty soon about teaching history and philosophy uh of that period