 Good morning. This is the UC project for Ameritai professors. People have retired. I want to get their memories, their stories. Would you please introduce yourself? Okay, I'm Deb Meme. I was a professor of English writing and women's gender and sexuality studies for 35 years at UC. That's great. When did you come to UC and what brought you here? I came in 1984 specifically because UC was the only university that made an offer to me and my then husband. So we came. It was not what we considered the best offer for either of us, but it was the only one where we could try to keep the family together. Which lasted two years after we got here. Those things never work. Why did they let, why was it the only opportunity for you and your husband to work together? Well, it's very hard. Two career families are very very difficult in academia. He was in, he's retired also. He was in physics. I was in English. We were on a big old job search and people were interested in us, but not the same people. So he had a nice offer at, I can't remember, Iowa or something and I had a nice offer at Oregon State. But we didn't both have an offer at either of those places and only Cincinnati made an offer to both of us. Okay. So what was the hiring process like that you see? Well, it was, I ended up doing a big compromise as women in relationships often do. I took a job at the old University College. So I was hired through their people. I mean they they invited me in for an interview and I met the faculty and people of that. I mean, I met everybody. It was a normal hiring process, I would say. My husband at the time had already had already gotten an offer at physics. So I was highly motivated to agree to whatever they offered. It wasn't a great offer, but it was an offer which was better than zero. So that was a long time ago. That was 1984. Right. Do you feel like you were treated differently during the hiring process because you're a woman or anything like that? Or no? I would say no. I do remember I do remember somebody asking me in the interview, somebody from the search committee. I had answered some question and they said, well, how will your family feel about that? And I said, I don't think you're allowed to ask me that question. And they looked so upset. I mean, this was a long time ago and people, they were afraid I was going to sue them if I didn't get an offer or something. I don't know what it was. It's probably why they hired me. No, I don't know what. I wouldn't say it was a problem. I would say it was something that somebody asked because they were interested and it didn't occur to them that they couldn't ask that type of question. Right. So why did you want to teach, not just that you see, but just in general? That's a good question. I would say I never did want to teach much. I mean, when I was young, I hated school. You can't even imagine. I mean, I had my own chair in the principal's office in elementary school. And she was really a nice lady, but I was disruptive. And bang on the desk and doodle and things like this. And the teachers would get exasperated and send me out. And she was very nice. She let me keep a book there. But if I had told anybody at age eight that I would end up teaching, they would have just laughed me out of the room. It would have seemed so unlikely. I got the job here as a professor of English. I was a music major in college and music was my goal. And once I learned to my everlasting disappointment that I am simply not cut out for opera singing. I mean, I can sing very nicely, although not so nicely now at age 70, as I could when I was younger. But once it became clear to me that that was not going to be my career. I wasn't going to be Joan Sutherlander, you know, Kiriti Kanoa. So I thought, well, I'll go to graduate school in musicology. And so after my husband finished his PhD at Berkeley, we moved across the country to New York. And the only university within shouting distance was Stony Brook. So I went there. I went to the music department and discovered to my disappointment that they didn't have a PhD at all. And so, and this is really literally true, when I think about this, makes me laugh. I walked across campus to the humanities building and signed up to take some English classes. And I ended up getting the PhD in English. It was almost accidental, funny but true. Right. So why English? Because I had a minor in English, I really like Victorian literature. What that means, of course, is that I buy my books by the pound, you know, big Victorian novels. My children have always given me a hard time about being a novel nerd. But it's true. I mean, that's, so it wasn't that I didn't have any background. It's that that wasn't my first choice. Right. And I just showed up there on the same day. They told me they didn't have a PhD in musicology. So that's where I did my PhD in New York. All right. Boy, teach them with your degree. Well, if you have a PhD, that's what you do. Okay. Fair enough. I mean, not everybody does. I mean, there are opportunities for people to get jobs outside of academe. But if you want to stay in academe, then what you do is you you look for a job at a university, you teach and you do research. And that's what I did. So I mean, I just followed the career path. It's just that my career path was a little odd in that I started in University College, which was it's not here anymore. It was the embedded two year college on UC's main campus. And it was open admission, meaning if you had a high school degree or equivalent, you could go. And so you could start your college career at U College and then transfer to A&S or wherever else that you could get into. So because I was there, I was with a I mean, it was right here on campus, but it had a different set of faculty. And it wasn't until University College closed in some year, 2003, maybe, that I moved to the English department in Arts and Sciences. And I taught there for a few years. And then I was recruited out of there to be the department head in WIGS, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies. And so I moved over there and I finished my career there. What made you switch over? Well, I mean, this is sort of funny to say, but I really liked my colleagues in University College. They're still some of my closest friends. A&S English can be pretty toxic. Okay. Just say it. Yeah. If you've ever taken, no, no, no. No. So I mean, some of the people are really delightful. And I have friends, lifelong friends from that department. But the work atmosphere is, well, it's not really pleasant. And there is a huge percentage of that department that I would say is dead wood. They are, they got tenure and they're just not doing anything anymore. And I just didn't, I had always worked with what was first, when I arrived here, it was called the Center for Women's Studies. And I started teaching there right away, teaching women's literature at first. And then I started teaching lesbian and gay studies, sexuality studies. And finally, it became clear that I was going to, that was where my interest had morphed too. So I just asked to move over. And I moved halfway when we, when the college closed, when you college closed. And then I moved the rest of the way. When I became department head at Wigs, I said, I will do this on the condition that when I step down as department head, whenever that is, I will stay here. This will be my tenure, my home. And so I retired from there. That's a long, that's how to make a long story longer. How did you become department head? Well, how does anybody become department head? It's a no, how would you know, right? I had always said I didn't want to go into departmental administration. I certainly didn't want to in university college. And I had turned down the opportunity to do it at one point. Why is that? I think it felt like hurting cats to me. And spending a lot of time doing stuff, administrative stuff, rather than the things I felt I was hired for, which is to say teaching and research. So I wasn't interested in that job, even though it pays you something and so forth. But a series of events took place that precipitated my accepting the request to become a interim department head in Wigs in 2000 and some year, eight, I guess. The previous department head was having some difficulties, had gotten not very good reviews as department head. It was clear that she might not be reappointed. She was having some sort of mental health problems, crying in department meetings. There's no crying in department meetings. It was that kind of thing. So it was clear she needed to go. And if you looked around, there was me. I was the only one who was the logical person. I was senior. I was a full professor. I had been involved with women's studies, then women's gender and sexuality. The name changed while I was department head. And we were not a center anymore. We were a department. So I was the one left standing. I was the one there that seemed like if I was ever going to step up now was the time. So I agreed to do it. And we had plans to hire. I would take an interim for two years was our agreement. We had to hire in the second year and we would hire a department head. But this was right at the economic downturn. And while we found people who were interested in the job, nobody was actually willing to take it because people were hanging on to what they had at that time. If they had a good job, if they had a reasonable job, they were willing to take it rather than move. It seemed too risky to people. So our search failed. There I was. And somebody said, well, would you continue as department head? I said not as interim. I said, if you want me as department head, then I need a full five-year term where I'm the head. And there isn't much power that goes with being department head. But there is some influence. And I said, if I'm going to be department head, let me actually be department head. And the department agreed to that. And the dean did. And so I then did a five-year term which ended 2015 or 16. I can't remember. I retired in 18. So I had stepped down a couple years before. So that was the story. It wasn't anything very dramatic. I just then did an actual five-year slavery. Department head is a very hard job. Once you get to be the dean of a college or the president or the vice president, then you actually have some real power. I didn't want those jobs, but there is power there. But department head is sort of a thankless position because you're the one everybody grumps to and gets grouchy with. And they want impossible things that you can't provide. And you don't get very much budget to work with. So it's a very difficult task. But it was all right. I mean, somebody had to do it. And it was sort of my turn. So I did. Was there anything you enjoyed about it? Oh, sure. The department head gets, like, if you're going to invite somebody to speak in your department, the department head gets to meet them, have dinner with them, talk to them, chat with them. So I met all the people and got to know them. Not just the few that I made a point of doing, which you can always put yourself in the way to be there. But if your department head, everybody automatically goes through you for whatever is happening in the department, that's fun. I also got to be very good friends with the then dean, Valerie Hardcastle. I liked her a lot. And I wouldn't have had that opportunity, I guess, had I not been department head and yelling at her all the time. But, you know, there are benefits to being department head. You get to influence the direction of your department. And I think I did that. You sort of decide what you think are the top priorities. And then, of course, you have to persuade the rest of the department to go along. You're not Donald Trump. You don't get to write an executive order. You don't just win. But your ideas carry a lot of weight. And you can move the department in a direction you hope to do it. So that's the good part. That is good. What things you didn't like about it being like a thankless? Oh, it is. It's thankless. And it's an enormous amount of meetings. And not just department meetings, you have that many. You have one department meeting per, well, maybe two per semester. We were on quarters then when I took over. So one per quarter, maybe. So it's not as if there were tons and tons of meetings, but in the department. But there were loads outside. There was a monthly heads council. And then there were subcommittees of heads council. And, you know, you got, if you were at all an interesting person, you got put on those subcommittees because the dean wanted to hear your voice. Oh, I'm not good with meetings. I don't like them. I had a colleague in university college who always said he liked to sit behind me at faculty meetings because my ears would turn red like 10 seconds before I blew my top. And he said that was the advantage of having white friends. He was a dark-skinned black man. And he said, if my ears turned red, nobody would notice. But when your ears turned red, I can see it. And I know. And I'm watching. I'm going, now let's see. The fireworks are about to start. So I'm not a meeting kind of gal most of the time. I mean, it's so rare to have a really productive, interesting meeting. And when I have been at one, I've skipped out happily at the end because it's so rare. You mentioned previously that, as department head, you get to influence the department which way you want it to go. How do you think you influenced your department? Take what priorities did you set? Well, one of the things that we desperately need, I mean, we were, when I took over, we were in trouble. We had lost some faculty to departure and one thing or another. And we had this department head who was melting down. And we didn't have enough faculty. And we were trying to run both an undergraduate and a graduate program with too few faculty. So it devolved upon me to try to persuade the dean and the college to grant us some hires so that we could strengthen our department numbers-wise. And so we had two hires in, I guess, 2012. And then we also had a couple of people transfer to wigs from other departments in A&S, a person from psychology for instance, a person from Africana. We had people coming towards, so our department grew. And what this meant was that we were able to offer our students what they needed. I think the best thing, though, if there was something I did that was that strengthened the department. I led the charge to have our department plus Africana plus Judaic studies admitted as Taft departments. And I don't know how much you know about the Taft Center, but it's, well there's no reason why you would know, but the widow of Charles Phelps Taft established this fund. The Tafts are rich, you know they're rich and they've been around in Cincinnati since God was a girl. So they were, you know, you know I said that in class once and I had a student, he was a young man from Iran, I think, and he almost fell on the floor laughing. This was like 20 years ago and I still get emails from him from wherever he is, Pakistan or wherever he is, and he says, I just was thinking about your saying that and it made me laugh all over again. I mean it changed his life, you know, 20 years old, dies 40 years old and he's, you know, funny. But I wrote all the, I don't know whether you'd call it an application, but all the paperwork for all three departments, the thing that made those three departments different from the others that were already in Taft like English and the various foreign language departments or history is that we were interdisciplinary departments. We didn't just have literature or we didn't just have history or, you know, WIGS studies women and gender and sexuality from all angles. So we have people in our department who come out of literature as I do, who come out of psychology as Jiao Tran does, who come out of social sciences like Ashley Courier. I mean we have, that's what interdisciplinary is. You study the same topic from all kinds of angles and you don't restrict yourself to a single disciplinary lens, but those interdisciplinary departments had never been recognized by Taft and the advantage to being in Taft is money. You get travel money for conferences and things. The department gets money for a speaker each year. There are scholarships of various types for undergraduate and graduate students. It's a really cool deal. You want to be, you want your department to be in Taft and it was quite a production, but we were admitted, I mean we danced in the hall when we found out that the vote had been said. I mean I hollered out of my, out of my, I was just there and I got this email and that the board had met and we were admitted and people came out of their offices and we were literally dancing in the hall. It was a big deal because I was already a Taft scholar because my degree was in English so I was already a humanities scholar who was eligible for Taft money, but the department wasn't and political science at the time was not part of Taft. There were certain departments that weren't part of Taft and so now all of a sudden they were. That was a big thing and what it did, not only did it help us individually and as a department, but it brought wigs in particular but interdisciplinary studies in general into the center of people's consciousness. The other Taft departments had no idea of what interdisciplinary meant. They thought it meant quite literally, I remember having to, having to have my ears turned red in a heads council meeting because they thought that what interdisciplinary was was let's have a faculty member from English and a faculty member from French co-teach a class on, well that's not, interdisciplinary means no disciplinary boundaries. You teach a subject like let's just say our basic course in wigs, intro to wigs, that's the first course you would take. Although many people take something else like human sexuality, maybe you took that class, that that's a class you could take that's kind of a gateway into wigs but the first sort of required class for the major is intro to wigs and it's not any of the disciplines, it deals with all of them and so it approaches subject matter differently from day to day or from hour to hour. You know you could be talking about a literary work but you could also be talking about the history of how people were treated in this sort of thing or the way, you know, is it true that women and men think differently and why, how do we know that and so therefore that comes from a different area and that's, you know, all those things become part of the same course so that trying to teach my department heads from chemistry and things like that, how to think that way was, I'm not sure I ever succeeded but I had, you know, a good person follow me in, that was good. It's amazing. Yeah, it's interesting. Why don't they let other departments like interdisciplinary and then also political science onto the Taft Center? Why weren't they not part of it, you think? Well, way back in the 1920s or 30s when the widow started up this scholarship, she specifically directed that it should be for the humanities because she said in this writing, the humanities don't have access to the kinds of grants and support that fields like chemistry and physics have. You know, it's really rare for a humanities person to get a big grant of any kind and so she wanted to support humanities research so that somebody in sociology or English or even math, math is in in there even though it's not exactly a humanities subject, there aren't a lot of grants for math. She wanted to support us in doing our research and she couldn't do it totally like they do. She couldn't be the National Institutes of Health or something like that that gives huge grants but she could give us a little more of an even playing field. She could give us support to go to the conferences we needed to meet colleagues and establish networks and present our work, share our work, that kind of thing. So it's a big deal and she was foresighted enough to see that we were going to need that help and we still do in the humanities. Here's the problem though, that because Taft is so generous, the college of arts and sciences, because Taft is an A&S benefit, not engineering or CCM or anything like that. Because they are so generous, A&S has simply decided they don't need to worry about us. The college has just stepped back, they don't support departments, Taft supports departments, which is part of the reason it was so important for us to be in Taft, but on a realistic level. But it's really not right for an outside donor to fund all college travel. That's really interesting. The college should fund it. The college should be part of what the college does, but it isn't. And that's not a good thing. And deans of the college, and I can think of two right off top of my head, maybe more, have tried to sneak their way into stealing Taft, making Taft a function of the college and bringing it, getting the college's greasy hands on Taft money. And it's always been refused. Good. The college should not get Taft money. If anything, Taft should get some college money. College money. College should be doing, should be funding travel and speakers and things like that. Right. So if the college doesn't spend its money on what it should be, what does it spend its money on? Well, the college has its own problems. You've probably heard something about this. We labor under this budget model, which I can almost not talk about it. It's so awful. It forces, well, it's based on the fact that growth is the only thing that gets you browning points. So if you're, well, let's take a macro. If you're a college, you have to grow to get funded, to get good money. If you don't, if you have fewer students, I mean they count by butts and seats, which is not necessarily the best way to do this. But if you don't grow, then your budget is cut. And if your budget is cut, that means class size, fewer faculty, class sizes grow. There are fewer classes offered. The student experience is not as good as budgets go. And A&S is the largest college. Most students take, even from all the other colleges, they take courses in A&S because they need to and they want to. And when those courses get to be giant and there aren't enough faculty, well, it's not a good model. But it also works on the micro level. It works at the department level. The colleges then become, they surveil the departments and they make sure, they want to make sure that your class sizes are big enough. And if they aren't, they get on your case. They want to make sure that you are teaching more students, that the average number of students in your classes is sufficiently large. Or else you lose budget. And I'm just not sure that's the best way to measure whether we're having success. The result of it has been, and I think you probably know this already, that UC is larger than it's ever been. We have, what, 45,000 students now? A large population. Should we have that many students? That's a good question. Do we have the resources and the, you know, do we have enough faculty? Do we have enough rooms? Do we have enough anything to teach 45,000 students? The answer is maybe. But that's the only way departments and colleges can get money from central administration is by growing. Well, that's just an issue. And if you ask any faculty member, they will tell you that this is not working very well. I'm really glad to be retired. I mean, I loved teaching and I loved my scholarship and I loved all my departments in different ways. But I do not miss worrying that whole departments are going to be shut down or that they're going to combine these three departments into one, which wouldn't make any sense. And I mean, they've already done some very odd things with a view toward always toward saving money. You know, you get people to do unpaid work rather than paying them. Really? Like what? Okay. I'll give you an example. Yeah. Are we running out of time? No. That we have these three departments that entered TAF together, Wigs and Judaic and Africana. Yeah. And we work pretty closely together and we are all on the third floor of French Hall right now. We've been, we moved there from different places, but for the last 10 years or so, we've been right there together working together. There was a big push to make us all one department. And the way that would have worked is that one person would have been chosen to be the department head and that person would have been paid. And then each department would have like a director and that person would not be paid. And so they would save money. They would, right now there are three department heads and there would be one. And so they'd save a few thousand dollars a year by, by doing it. That's what I mean by all these things have money implications. Even when they're quite small in actual dollars, it's one of the other bad things that this budget system has done. If you tell people that you have to teach more students, then you're going to attempt to teach everybody in your department. Like, I want you to take your entire major here. I don't need you to take women's history in the history department because that gives them the money, not us. I don't need you to take women's literature in English. I need you to take everything here. Okay, so that cuts down the experience for the students. And some colleges did really weird things to try to keep it in here. Engineering, for instance, hired a couple of part-time English professors to teach freshman comp to their students. Just for engineering? Just the engineers. Whereas the engineers always used to take it in English, right? But they don't anymore. They take it from, I'm not saying the teaching is bad or there's anything else, but they did that specifically to steal those students away from English. For the money. CCM, they didn't like it that their students had a history requirement. So they had to take a course over here in A&S in the history department. I'm doing this because here's CCM and here's, you know, I'm doing, I'm on a map, here's McMickin, here's CCM. So they have a course, for instance, that they call, you're going to love this, history of the Beatles. And that's just the music? And that's in CCM. And that counts for their history credit. So the CCM students don't have to hike over here to McMickin to take American history or world history. They can take history of the Beatles. And this is not the way a university is supposed to run. It's not. These are silos, right? And so that everybody's in their silo and they never get out of their silo. You know, here's psychology over here. And here's, you know, well, I guess psychology is way over there now. They're over in the neuroscience center. But, you know, all of this, the budget has made that silo tendency worse than ever. So that's my opinion about that. And it's why I'm glad to be retired. Yeah, it sounds complicated. I don't need to worry about it. It's not my problem, except that I get phone calls about once a month from the incoming department head in Wigs and says, okay, I need to talk to you about what's happening here. And so I don't necessarily know, but they're still having these problems. You mentioned you're glad to be retired. Has the university taken care of your salary correctly? Have they taken care of your needs as a retired member of the university? Sure. Sure, yeah. It was hard to retire, I have to say. And I don't mean hard, oh, I'm so emotional about this. It wasn't that. It was hard that I had to go to this office and that office and this office and that office and fill out this and fill out that and fill out this. And then they give you an insurance, but this insurance only lasts for one month until this insurance kicks in. And I mean, well, but that was I retired at the end of spring quarter 18. So I've been retired over a year now. And they finally all caught up with me. I have all my insurance. You know, I have what I need. It's fine. I get paid on time. It's okay. I mean, we're a lot in a lot better shape than a lot of people. And so I'm fine with it. I don't have. I'm not active with the emeriti thing. The one thing I hate is that, oh, look, I'll show you because this is it's easier to do it in a if you can actually see something. I want what I'm looking for is my UC ID. Okay, so here's my UC ID here. I'll hold it for the camera so the camera can see it. Okay, you'll notice that it says emeritus. Yeah. Emeritus is the male form of that word. Really? I don't like that. Yeah, you might have noticed that on my email, it says professor emerita. And by God, that's what I am. I'm not a professor emeritus. I did not change my sex when I retired. But and I even asked over at the retirement over the, you know, lock and key and ID office, whatever they call that place over in in what of that building is. But they couldn't change it on it's they have a standard template and it says emeritus and I was not pleased. Do you think they just don't know that there's different? I think they don't know. I think it's ignorance. So emeriti with an I is the plural of emeritus us, meaning boys, boy and boys. Okay. Emerita is feminine, female. And emeriti a e is plural women. Now the way languages work, English doesn't have gender, right? But many languages do. And all languages that have gender make the plural emeriti male. They include women under men. I had no idea. Yeah. Well, now you can fight that at every every chance you get. I went to a women's college. All right. So I am a member of the alumni a e association. Wow. And they would die before they would put the alumni with an I association because they would just croak. So, you know, I'm a tune to it and have been since college. So so much for Latin. Sorry, that was an aside, but that's a good thing. I know I had no idea. Yeah. Well, you know, there are so many things in our language that we don't pay any attention to. Our language is built in sexist. For instance, I'll give you one more for instance, and then I'll shut up. I mean, I'm giving you, I mean, you can see I'm switching into professor mode that if you study anthropology, what are you studying? People, people's past. People. Yeah. Okay. Anthropos is Greek. It means man. So anthropology is quite literally the study of man. And they mean it in the masculine way. But as you said, it's a study of people. But people means man in in the in the way language is put together. But what's the study of women? If you have anthropology, the study of women is gynecology. Oh yeah. Gine means woman. Gynecology means the study of women in the same way anthropology means the study of man. But think about that. Gynecology is the study of women's reproductive organs. Anthropology is a study of people. Bullshit. It's bullshit. Pardon my Swahili, but that's that's the way our language works. And it does it all the time. I've brainwashed generations of students. Sorry. That's fascinating. I never thought about that before. That's right. Why would you? Right. Why would we? Because those words are common words, except there's meaning behind that. Why were they chosen? By men. By men, obviously. Sure. Mankind. One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. Okay. All right. I'm done. All right. Let's change the topic. Why do you think the name was changed from women's studies to women's gender and sexuality? Were you there for that change? I was that change. Were that changed? I proposed it and we discussed it with all our stakeholders, our friends and women's studies, our faculty, our students. And in fact, we only had one person oppose the change. Really? Yes. An older faculty in history who said, you're making it not about women. No, it's still about women. But I'll tell you why we made the change. In actual fact, we were teaching not just women's studies, we were teaching sexuality studies, we were teaching about gender constantly. And those gender and sexuality were as much part of what we do as women were. So it seemed like it made sense to make our department name describe the work we actually did. And we had quite a bit of discussion about what we were going to call ourselves. Other departments nationwide have made different choices. We wanted to put the W first because that was where we came from. That was our history. And then gender and sexuality made sense. So we had, like I say, a nearly unanimous support for making the change. It's a cumbersome name, right? It's not like just saying chemistry, I mean the chemistry department. But still, it is descriptive and that's why we made that change. Because we don't just teach about women at all. In fact, after we made that change, and this is anecdotal, I'd have to get our graduate and undergraduate directors to go through the last ten years of students. But I believe we have had more men in our classes. We have made a point of teaching masculinities. This is gender, gender studies. We have had quite a few trans men in our, and at least two trans women in our graduate programs. And they changed the way we think and the way we teach. And if we just talked about, like there are departments that call themselves feminist studies, that's not bad. I mean anybody can be a feminist, right? And should be. But it advertises that it's all about women. And that's what we didn't want to do. And we have had many more men and trans people come into our department and take our classes and be part of our programs and write theses and so forth since we changed the name. That's great. So, you know, I think it was the right move. And I would have thought it was the right move even if we lost a few students and we lost a little bit on this PBB performance-based budgeting that we labor under. Even if we lost, I would have thought it was the right decision. But in fact, I think we gained students and we gained the right kind of students. That's great. How has faculty changed over time? You've been here quite a while. What have you seen? Well, okay. I'll sort of tell you a story to start because this will give you an idea of what was going on when I first came. I arrived in September 1984. And the very first thing that happened was we were all required to go to this workshop on racism because, I mean, the reason we were required, I mean, it was a good reason, that the previous spring before I was here, these idiot white fraternity boys had put a float in the homecoming parade that had a fake black man on it. They called him Martin Luther Kuhn. Oh, my God. Oh, God. Stupid. Somebody should have just said, we're not going to have fraternities and sororities, period at that. But nobody seems willing to do that. But they're pretty awful, I think. But anyway, that had happened in the spring. So I come in the fall. I don't have this background, but I'm here. And so we had, I remember this, I don't remember too much about it. It was 30, what, five years ago? I mean, it was a long time ago. But what I remember was they would, we were sitting, they would put us at little tables, a table of about six and then another table of six and six and six. And so these were your people that you talked with. And they had one facilitator at each table. And as I recall, the facilitators were white, which would have been good if they were really woke. But I would say they weren't. They were just a faculty member who agreed to do it. So we're here and in my group, I remember somebody saying, when you look out at your classroom, do you see race? And I just remember this guy, and I can't remember what his name was, but I remember him going on and on about, I don't see race at all. I just see young minds yearning to gather knowledge and blah, blah, blah. And I heard that again and again. And I don't see, I said, and it came to me and I said, I see race, I see race all the time. You know, why is it that our open access college has, is about a third African American where A and S is three percent? Why? Because our students are not considered to be capable of doing what A and S students are doing. And I said, I do see race. I see it as a, I see our college as a political construct that involves bringing, bringing students of color here because they're not able to do the work over there. And you know, everybody's looking at me like I just stepped off the bus from Mars. I mean, I was a brand new faculty person, right? The ink was still drying on my PhD. You know, it was, it was pretty new. But, but I remember, but I had also been, I'd been an activist in the civil rights movement before. In fact, I, I'm from Washington, D.C., and I went to Martin Luther King's, I have a dream. It's amazing. Speech. After being totally forbidden by my parents, although it turned out then my father went. He was somewhere else. I didn't see him. He was with my cousin because he didn't want her to go alone. And so he took her and I was somewhere over here with my friend who snuck away and went. So, you know, that was, that was then. But I, I had, I had a little different background as a white person. If you're from Washington, you know, you don't get to be a white person who doesn't know any black people. You just don't, you know, you aren't that person. That's not, you can't, you don't have that option. And it's good. I think it strengthens us. But anyway, I came at it from a whole different angle. And, but they were working on this issue, this, this race issue. I mean, your question was, how has the faculty changed? And this is one way. I think the university was trying to make us have some awareness of the fact that you can be in a racist space without thinking you're being racist with, you know, when you think you're really actually being not only racially sensitive, but anti-racist, you can be behaving in racist ways and perpetuating racist systems. And I'm not sure how many people got that, but my point of starting there is that that same conversation has played itself out time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again. And about 10 years ago or when Nancy Zimford was the president, they started this, what did they call it? Diversity Council. Names like that just give me a headache. But anyway, they asked me to be on it because I had this background of shooting my mouth off. And also of, I had, with a small group of people, we had worked very hard to have domestic partners covered on our insurance. We had one contract that would be refused. You know, we would propose it and then they would trade it for something else in the negotiations. And so it kept getting, so even our allies were trading us away. But finally, we got it. And I think they knew who I was because I'd been involved in that. But I ended up on that diversity council and they were reinventing the damn wheel. They were doing the same racist, anti-racist work that we had been doing in 1984. And anyway, I stayed on the committee for, I guess I was on it for two terms. And then I rotated off. I offered to be, they said we want some new blood. Are people willing to rotate off? And I said, me! Rotate me off. So I did, I rotated off. But I don't know if they're still having that, but they hired a woman. And she was at that time working with, I can't remember his name, that's really a good thing. He was a light-skinned black man who was dying to become president of the university. And there was no way they were going to make him president of the university. There was just no way. But he didn't see that, right? And he had this graduate assistant or whatever, her name was Bluzette Marshall. Do you know Bluzette? She's still here. She's, I think, maybe even a vice president now. But here's the deal. This guy, whose name I've forgotten, was trying to persuade her to get a doctorate, any kind of doctorate. He didn't care what it was a doctorate in, an easy doctorate, a quick doctorate, so that she had a terminal degree and could then move up in administration. And so she did, she got a EDD, which is a worthless doctorate. But it does, I mean she never had any intention of doing research or anything like that. But it's worked for her. She's moving up. Are you running out four minutes? You're good. And so she's still here trying to promote diversity, whatever that means. But nothing much has changed. That's the issue. The issue is what hasn't changed, rather than what has changed. It's a pretty much straight, white campus. And it has always been a straight, white campus. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of queer people here. Doesn't mean there aren't loads of people of color here. It's just that the power structures are straight and white, still after low these many years. And they take a person like Bluzette, and they carefully put her in a human relations or student-centered thing where she doesn't really make policy. You see, if you're really going to make policy, then you're going to be in the provost's office or something like that. But she's not. And I think that perpetuates the racist system, is elevating this gal, elevating this black woman. Okay, great. So she's having a successful career. But nothing is changing because she's not in policy. Right, no power. So I would say the story is that the university hasn't changed, rather than it has. We started doing that blasted thing in 1984. It still are. Yeah. So I read that you've published at least a couple of books, and you did so with your partner. Did you meet her here? I did. I was actually on her hiring committee, which is hilarious. People ask me, they say, well, how did you meet her? I said, I hired her. But yeah, I was on the committee that hired her. We have written short pieces, and then we've done several books together. The most interesting of them is this book called Finding Out, which is now the standard text for teaching LGBTQ studies. And it's had three editions so far. And we just turned down Sage wanting a fourth edition. We're just not prepared to do it yet. The third one just came out. It's not fair to students, I think, to have a new edition. So you have to buy a new book rather than having a chance to buy used. Yeah. I just don't think that's fair. I don't think we have so much new to add yet. Give us a—so I told the Gally Reuters email when I said, we're not doing it. You know, we might think about it next year, maybe. Talk to us in a year, and then give us a couple of years after that, and we might have enough to make it different. But right now, no. But that was very interesting. Michelle and I wrote that with our colleague Jonathan Alexander. And I have to tell you, if you ever get a chance to write with other people, it's—you can't describe it. It's both wonderful and insane at the same time. Not—you know, we would split off into three places and then—or I'd go to the library and come back with 30 books and teeter into the house and boom! And then, you know, we'd—it was all very—it was messy. It's a very messy process. But I think that particular book has changed the profession. For the first time, there was never a book. So if you were teaching intro to LGBT studies or LTB or whatever you want to call it, there was no textbook. You had to do it all by yourself. You had to figure everything out. Here's an article. Here's some literature. Okay? Okay, I was just saying that I am very interested and have been for since graduate school days in this Victorian writer named Eliza Lynn Linton, who—as I tried to say to you a minute ago—wrote her autobiography under a male pseudonym, which interested me. And so I've spent some time finding some of her books and editing them and writing introductions and bringing them back. So I now have a little shelf. I have four books of hers that are now back in print. She clearly—part of it is that she was interested in women and she married this man, but it seems probable that the marriage was never consummated. She supported him. If you were a Victorian woman, this didn't happen. Anyway, she was a very interesting person. That's really cool. So for me, I enjoyed—that was just fun. That was fun work. That's the kind of work you do after you get tenure. When nobody's looking over your shoulder and saying, what we really need is somebody to do this, then they say, well, you just do what you want. Okay, I will. All right, so there's nothing else you would like to talk about? I think not. Do you have any other questions? I mean, if there's anything else, I'll answer them. I'm sorry. I'm windy. Oh, no, you're good. This has been great. I don't have any other pertinent questions. Cool. Let's be done. Thank you so much. You are welcome. My pleasure. I'm glad to have met you both.