 All right. Hello. Good morning. Could you give us your introduction? My introduction. Yeah, okay, my name is Laura Kroetschmer. Professor Emeritus of Audiology, that's AUD. I started at the University of Cincinnati in 1967 and retired in 2009. As Emeritus Professor. What brought you to UC? Well, I came, I was in graduate study at Columbia, and I took a job. I had been here before and it took a job because I wanted to come back to Cincinnati. I liked. I'm from I'm from the Midwest from Kansas. But I liked it here. What did you like about Cincinnati? Oh, I don't know. Just nice people. Unusual cultural experiences, reds, Cincinnati reds, just sports. Yeah, lots of stuff. Yeah, so how did you become interested in communication studies and disorders? Well, I went to University of Wichita to I went into a program in communication disorders. It was called Logopedics, which is doesn't mean anything, but I thought that I wanted to work with people who had communication disorders. It seemed like it was interesting area. And then when I was a senior, they had a lecture from Northwestern on hearing and that grabbed me and fascinated me. So then I went on to Northwestern and then to Columbia. So what do you hope students took away from your courses? Well, I hope that they took away that the client is the most important person, the focus of what they're trying to do and that they need to be trying to be client-centered rather than working on disorder, helping the person with a disorder. I think I got that accomplished pretty well. Were there any other core values that you wanted to instill in your students? Well, I was concerned that they had professional focus and that they belonged to professional associations and that they continued to study throughout their life, not just while they were in graduate school. I think I accomplished that too. What was the hiring process like that you see? In 1967 the hiring process was that you talk to whoever was offering the position and then you went into a an office with the dean of the college who was traditionally an old white guy and he sort of made your case and then they made you an offer which was sort of a take and or leave it, but I wanted to be here, so I took it. What was your relationship like among your colleagues? Well, over the years I had a lot of different colleagues. I had some people that I was very close to and very cooperative with and colleague or two that were jerks, but I sort of lived with that and found my own relationships as well. My husband started working here at the university a couple of years after I did, so at least, and he was in a different department, so at least I was friendly with the people that he worked with. You know, I found support. Did you face any challenges that you see? Yeah, I think that I think that there were a lot of challenges. Not necessarily with my job since I thought that I was free to pretty much run things the way I wanted to run them. What I thought was good educational experience, but I think there were challenges with salary and with advancement. But I made it through anyway. So how did you see respond to your needs? How did they respond to my needs? No, I don't think they cared about my needs very much. You know, I always had an office and resources were you know, they were there if needed in terms of media or in terms of materials. Until we had a faculty union, I don't think that they responded to anybody's needs very much, but after that it was better. Did you work with others in your department that felt the same way? It felt that they needed union support or it felt that they needed better support. Yeah, both. Yeah. Yeah, I think I was maybe not in step with other people in the in the department. I think I was the only one that really felt strongly about the union. But you know, these were people that I got along with and for the most part I respected them. What was your involvement with the union like? Well, I wasn't a screaming radical by any means, but I certainly got involved in the process of supporting negotiations. I did participate in both of the strikes that we had simply because I thought it was the right thing to do. Would you say like those were successful? Yeah, they were successful in the sense that brought the administration to the bargaining table and sort of set a precedent that bargaining was better than not having classes or having the idea of the strikeout in the community. For the most part, I think that it worked out until a little later in terms of the administration. At some point we did get an administration that was not interested in negotiation. Was there a particular administration that you could think of? That didn't support negotiations? Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't I don't, since this is for posterity, I don't care to name anybody particularly, but when Henry Winkler was president he understood the issues and supported negotiations. Nancy's info was somebody who more recently supported negotiations. In between there were a couple of people that didn't. Was there a particular administration that stood out to you at your time at UC? Well, I mentioned Henry Winkler and I thought he was the epitome of what a college president should be. He was an area diet and thoughtful and willing to respect the faculty. He was a pretty decent guy. And I thought although she came late in my tenure here, I thought Nancy's imprinted a very nice job. Community didn't like it because she made sure to fire a basketball coach who needed firing, but she understood the process of bringing people together and cooperating, so I thought that was important. What are your thoughts on Warren Bannis? Yeah, he brought that up before. Well, you know, he was everybody's fair-haired boy, sort of. And I think he thought that he had sort of reinvented the process and made it all open to everybody. Yeah, I mean, he was okay. I didn't exactly see what the attraction was, but I liked some of his appointments. I liked his Dean of Education that he appointed and a couple of others that I thought were people that sort of saw broadly what the issues were and made a lot of effort to be innovative. He wasn't very high on my list, but, you know, he was a nice guy. So why do you think UC wasn't able to respond to your needs properly? Well, sort of responding to my needs would be, you know, do a fabulous job of upping everybody's income, including mine and providing a new building and doing all kinds of supportive faculty. And I think that what happened over the time that I was here was that the relationship with the state and the finances or lack of finances sort of created a problem with lack of support. The students started to get some of the things they deserve, but I never, I didn't think that the faculty was getting the things that they deserve. What steps did you particularly take to try to, you know, gain life a better salary? Well, there was an instance. I'm having a little trouble putting it in time perspective, but I believe it was in the late 70s when there were a number of women who were senior faculty that presented a case for improving salaries. Specifically for those women, and they were all in, which I wasn't that time, they were all in senior ranks associated or full professor, and so I participated in that arbitration. I don't recall that it got me anything. I think it did help one or two people who were really egregiously low in terms of their salaries. That was primary effort that I made. Would you say it was successful? For those one or two people, I thought it was, I think it was successful. I think they did get a little more appreciation from their various departments. I don't recall getting a huge jump in my salary, but I did get jumps when negotiations sort of panned out. I think the thing that was annoying to me is that I thought I was doing as well as my husband, and he actually came in a couple of years after I did, but we were at the same rank, and he was always making at least 10 to 20 thousand dollars more than I was. Yeah. Yeah, and you two worked on some research projects and books together too. Sure. Yeah, and the books that we published, a couple of books that we published were together, and my name was on as was his. It was not his fault, but I think that pretty well spoke to how things were. See, were there other events or incidents that were handled poorly by the university? Yeah, well, I did after the, this was 1970, after the shooting at Kent State, there was substantial unrest here on this campus as there was most of the Ohio school campuses. It required a lot of demonstration by students to get any response from the administration, and I didn't think the way they handled. Legitimate student complaints was really the best way to handle it, and I sort of didn't get, particularly in later years, how negotiations were handled. I'm pretty much told that the faculty representatives at one point, this was in 80s, I guess, late 80s, sort of take it or leave it in terms of we're not doing X or we're giving you Y, but that's it. And the administrators were not really involved in negotiations. They sent in a lawyer and said, this is how it's going to be. It's not really collective bargaining in anybody's mind. Did any faculty leave because of this? I'm sure that, I don't know about 1970, later I'm sure that there were faculty who weren't retained, or didn't, I don't mean they were fired, I mean they chose not to stay. I was, let's face it, we're a little, since that is a little bit sort of inward looking and conservative, and I think it's been a challenge for some faculty who come on and can't find a support system that they want. So they've fled usually for better salary, better working conditions. So are you familiar with the case with Colleen McTeague? She sued the university because she wasn't getting paid enough, like her salary was too low. And so she actually won that case. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. Was she in geology or what was her program? It doesn't ring a bell. Yes, geology. Professor in 2007. Okay, that was started more recently. There were actually a couple of names that are escaping me. There were a couple of similar cases before that. I'm not so good with names anymore. Yeah, I would hope that they would, I understand, and I'm sure that it happened, and I'm sure that she had a case, and I'm sure that she should have been reinstated and or gotten better salary. I'm sure of that. Gutsweiler, the person I was thinking of, Catherine Gutsweiler, who was, I think maybe she was classics, not sure, but she was denied tenure and there was a lot of negotiation going on. It was clear that she should have been granted tenure, and I think that case was resolved in her favor. I'm not sure of it. I would think it was probably the 80s. You'd have to look it up. Do you think this affects women faculty and how they are able to teach and interact with colleagues? Well, I think there's no question that if you put in the work, and that was certainly one of the things that happened with the, when I was involved in the complaint in the 70s, there were one or two people that, women who should have been advanced, put in the work, did as much or more than their male colleagues and weren't respected for that. I think there's no question that there are issues, and I think there could probably continue to be issues. This is not new for us or the university or for women in this context, I think it's probably pretty common to be honest. So how have you found your support system? How did I find my support system? Yes, you mentioned how throughout your years, you know, people that were like-minded and just kind of helped you with challenges. Sure. Well, I think you'd have to be willing to reach out and to seek people that are interested in the things that you're interested in, maybe outside of teaching, even. I would saw the faculty send out a couple of terms, although I didn't really think the faculty sent out much pull, but anyway, I did that a couple of terms. So the people that I found as a support system were people that liked other things besides teaching, not that they didn't like teaching, but other things in the community, theater or movies or good books or all those kind of things that you do to develop your cultural life. And so how should faculty go about finding their support system if they can't find that within their department? Well, that's a good question. I think you have to be willing to try to survey across the university and find like-minded people. Sometimes it's in research. Like-minded people who are interested in teaching look for any resources in the university that might be involved in development. One of the things I did participate in that was helpful, although it didn't take me into administration, was a year-long program for women to develop their leadership abilities and to promote likelihood of their entering or getting a chance to enter administrative positions, which of course is a way to advance. And I did participate in that and found a mentor, but the mentor wasn't able to take me on. So I didn't get past that particular event in terms of doing administrative things, although I was a department head for several years. The program I had actually in the department. What did you do as a program head? Well, one of the things I did was to help develop our application for accreditation for the program from the American Speech Language Hearing Association, which was to put together a report and gather data on student success and so on. That was successful. We did get accreditation. This was in the 80s, I guess. And then I tried to help resolve some of the disputes between faculty and students. I had some success there and other things that were not so successful. What was the process like gaining that position? Well, we had a program head who had some issues, couldn't be, didn't need to be reappointed, shouldn't have been reappointed. He had some health challenges and we weren't really getting support from the administration to help him deal with those health challenges. They looked around and said, well, who can be program head? And there I was. I was an appropriate rank and really the only person with abilities and rank experience. So, well, I got to be program head. So depending on the circumstances, would you say communication is a challenge like, I guess, navigating different department dynamics? Yeah, I'm sure that that is critical. I wasn't particularly good at that. I tended to want to do things my way. I didn't warn people quite enough about some of the decisions that needed to be made. So I was moderately successful as a program head. I also wasn't willing to put up with inappropriate behavior from some of the faculty that were responsible. So I did tend to confront some of them and that didn't hurt me any high marks. So I would say that I did okay, but I wasn't the best negotiator. Let's put it that way. Do you think it's because people have different expectations? Oh, because I'm a woman, I mean, or just different expectations of, of, I guess, like the circumstances and potentially, you know, being a woman. Yeah. Oh, I don't think my gender was a problem. I think it was my attitude. So, you know, I was satisfied with some of the things that happened in our program, but there are other things that I didn't do the best job in the world at. If you could go back, what types, like, what kind of things would you have improved? Are you talking about in my whole tenure? Well, it's like the program, particularly. I had a couple of colleagues that had inappropriate behavior that I would have tried to have found some administrative support to help me reign in that behavior and get some censoring of those folks. That would have been useful because we could have saved ourselves some heart aches at some point. Yeah, I, the primary problem with colleagues who are doing inappropriate things is that you have to have administration who's willing to support you and calling those people out. And they were, I'm talking about men who were doing inappropriate things with students. And I didn't, I didn't feel that I ever got any, when I reported these things, I never got any support from administration. They weren't willing to call these folks out. This is well before me too. Yeah, yeah, so keeping the higher-ups accountable is very important. Yeah, well, they were certainly people that didn't want to deal with some of the obvious problems. And as a consequence, the problems didn't go away. They sort of persisted. Did you want to elaborate on any of those issues or rather not? No, I'd rather not. Okay, that's fine. So let's talk about how UC has expanded. Were there any difficulties and transitions from being a city to a state school? Well, I thought we were all excited about going to be a state-affiliated school. I think we had unrealistic expectations about what it was going to mean from a financial standpoint. We were a nice little city university, and we needed, we were able to take more students, and we needed new buildings and other kinds of resources, financial resources, and we thought that the state was going to give us those. And then we got a basketball arena, but that's pretty much it. Very quickly, resources got reduced, and then pretty soon we were state-affiliated, but not really reasonably funded. So I think that's the point at which we started to work hard at getting research dollars and doing other things to try to support the university. Did you witness any tension within the community as UC expanded? If there was some anxiety, then I'd try to point out how one stays safe in any city and then assure them that we'll take good care of their kids if they do reasonably smart things in terms of where they walk at night, why it could be, you know, things will be all right. At least in my experience, we didn't ever lose any students to violence or anything of that sort. A couple of car break-ins, but that's not a bad thing, that happens everywhere. They break into cars in suburbs too. Yeah. So what do you think of the implosion of Sander Hall? The implosion of Sander Hall? Well, I parked on the street to watch it. It's kind of an odd thing, but I suppose it was an easy way to get it down. I think that it had a lot of bad design features in the first place. I think probably they avoided having some people trapped on the upper floors. If the building got on fire, that could have been a real disaster from that standpoint. Other than the fact that it happened, I didn't really have any strong feeling about it. Yeah. So did you think maybe it was poorly designed because you see it was expanding too fast or? Well, maybe they picked the wrong architects. I don't know. I mean, I didn't really think of it in those terms. And the point of fact, there's been significant problems with housing, on-campus housing for a long time, I think is probably still going on a little bit. They opened a couple of dorms, so things are probably better. And then you can see all of the apartments that have sprung up around the university, which I think has been a help. Well, I mean, I think there were some bad decisions that didn't have to do with expanding, but the Crosley Tower has always been unbelievably ugly. So I understand it's coming down eventually. They put up some great buildings. So from that standpoint, I think the university architect has done some pretty good things. Yeah. So have you seen ways in which you see us connected with the community? Yeah. Well, we have—this isn't beside the point that's actually the point—we have a small clinic in our department for people with adults with hearing loss who want service and some children who have preschool children and so on. And we've tried to reach out to the community to provide that service, although there's plenty of services around the city. I think that the sort of consistently that day of help sorts of things around the city has been promoted. Athlete teams are typically going out to help clean up and help with playgrounds and that kind of thing. I think there's certainly been some effort to try to improve community relations through the on-campus police department. After the DeBose problem, they had a lot of meetings to try to take the community's opinions into account and to try to do more cooperative things. They describe themselves as—we describe ourselves as an urban university, so it's important to fit with urban settings and to try to do things to improve urban settings because so many people in the United States live in urban settings. Yes, it feels like there's a lot of effort to reach out to the community, involve the community, do things that are attractive to the community in terms of CCM performances and other kinds of events. How has the campus become more diverse over time? Well, I think there's been effort to invite different groups of students in, for example, the first-gen house and the students are there as one effort. They're not all people of color, but they certainly are. Now, students who—the family has never had anybody in college before, I think that's been a good effort. Most of the programs that I know have some familiarity with are working hard to recruit underrepresented students, nursing, for example. The College of Allied Health Sciences worked pretty hard to try to recruit underrepresented populations. I don't have any numbers on how that's working, but my assumption is that things are improving in terms of diversity. Do you have other data that suggests that it's not true? Oh, no. I was just curious to see how you've seen the campus become more diverse. Yeah, I think that's the case. It feels like it, and sort of, as I think back on rather large number of students that I've actually seen, it seems like it's more diverse. I hope that's happening, continues to happen. Yeah, does it surprise you that students come here just for co-op reasons? No, it doesn't surprise me a bit. DAP programs—some of the DAP programs are the best in the whole country, not just by rank, but by, in fact, by experience, and co-op attracts a lot of students as it should. It was an exceptionally good idea. It started here, and the idea of co-op started on the UC campus, and it makes sense that students would come here for that. CCM has several programs that are nationally ranked, so no, it doesn't surprise me when I meet a student who's come from California, or someplace else on the West Coast, or even other places on the East Coast, or internationally. So how has technology changed over time with your teaching at UC and everything? Well, I mean, the biggest obvious things are going from one overhead projector to multiple media things in the classroom, so that you're getting video, or movies, or internet, or anything that you want in the classroom. I think the biggest change has probably been student access to various kinds of media, so it used to be the case that maybe there'd be one or two people that would have a laptop in a class I'm talking about in the early 2000s. And then by the time I finished, everybody in the class had a laptop open. I thought they were a little bit more involved in laptop than they were in my very interesting lectures, but there you go. So, you know, it's the same explosion in the University of Media as it is in all of society, so everybody's got a phone, everybody's connected, which is okay. I spend a lot of time on my phone. Was technology ever like a distraction for students in your class? In every class, there are always some students that are distracted by the media, so that you know they're sitting away in the back of the classroom and they're surfing. And they're punching each other and laughing, pointing at the screen and so on. I usually just said, don't do that, because I'll call you out. A couple of times I did and then they quit. Yeah, I think on the other hand, sometimes if you don't have an answer, why somebody can go on Google the question and get an answer and contribute to the conversation. I used something called Blackboard, which is the online service that UC has for courses. That was very helpful, I thought, when we started to do that. This is early 2000s, I think. So, you could put all the lectures up, you could put all your materials up, you could put the assignments up, you could take quizzes and take exams and didn't have to do a lot of paper stuff. That was extremely helpful. I was very happy for that addition. And it facilitated off-campus online courses too, which I did teach some. How has technology impacted things like research? Well, I think it has made a large difference. I can remember when I was in graduate school in the sixties, if we wanted to search in the library, we had to go and go to the card file and open the card file and pick out what we wanted and then see if we could find it in paper copy. I haven't done that for 25 years because everything you want is online. All the library resources are online. Articles, you can borrow books from any place in the whole state if you need a book. It's facilitated research. I've got a question about particularly the and the date interpretation and writing. So that part has made a huge difference. So where do you see the future of UC going? The future of UC? Well, I think they have ensured that it will continue in some fashion. I'm not sure how I feel about the number of students that they want to cram into this place, but it certainly has programs that are cutting edge across the university. And I think it's established its place in terms of innovation and I'm assuming that there is a future. Do you think being a heavy like research college affects the way professors interact with students? Well, it is. It's an interesting change from people can be tenure faculty where the focus is on research and then there will be educators, clinical educators that will do teaching. Yeah, I think there's probably been some change. I know one of the things that we were kind of grumpy with Ohio State was that at least from undergraduate programs, I'm reflecting on students that come to us from undergraduate programs. The majority of courses were taught by graduate assistants or I guess they would be sort of clinical associates, which was too bad because I'm talking about speaking here in other programs. One of the things that we could say as a program in department was that the tenured faculty all taught and the student had an opportunity to deal with here from people who should be good at what they're doing. Just because you had tenure didn't mean you were a good teacher, but anyway. Yeah, I think that that research has kind of pulled people away from teaching, which is an important function to my way of thinking. What is your proudest moment that you see? Well, I guess there are two sort of proud moments. 20 years ago, 21 years ago, we went from being a program in arts and sciences to the College of Allied Health Science into our own department and they had two different celebrations for that department. One was a ten-year anniversary and I was named as one of the outstanding contributors to the College at the ten-year anniversary and at the 20-year anniversary, which just happened last year, I was named one of the 20 for 20 in terms of contributions to the College and I had already retired at that point, still doing some research things. So I was pretty proud of both of those accomplishments. Did you participate in any of the bicentennial celebrations? I did go to the bicentennial for the Alumni Association and one of our alums from the Department of Program and Audiology was named as an outstanding alum and received something called the Marion Spencer Award and he was a guy that I had had as a student and I had supported his development growth. He's not doing hearing things now. He was a lawyer and then an entrepreneur but we were quite happy to have had him in our program and I got invited, we got invited to something else in November for exactly what that is, dinner or something. So we're fairly active in giving some, I was one of the next, so we get invited to a lot of stuff. Do you still stay connected with students that have graduated? Yes, very connected. We have some excellent friends who are still here and even some that are a little further away that we're going with. Matter of fact, one of two different ones of our students helped plan our fiftieth wedding party, which was a Harry Potter party. It was cute. And they planned it with our funds and it was a great party so we were proud to know those people and we still keep in touch with them. Yeah, so I know you and your husband really like books. You guys like to donate it like a collection? We did donate a collection of Native American children's books to the education library and it's about 300 books in the collection right now and we'll be adding to that. These are books that we collected in the Southwest primarily when we were vacationing there. So we were very happy to make that endowment and it was the first one that the education library had received. What sort of impact do you hope that it has on the university or people that view the collection? Well, we're certainly hoping that it expands cultural awareness for the teachers and the students who get to see the books. Those books can be loaned out, they can be read there, but they can be loaned out for student teaching experiences and they're primarily Native American, some Alaskan and some other Native peoples and we know that's not a population that we have a lot of students here who are Native American, but we certainly hope that they'll be aware of what the history was here as well as what the history was in the United States. Is there anything else that you want to talk about? No, this time I didn't get the chance to mention that we love UC athletics and we're all involved in that. We have season tickets for everything, women's soccer, lacrosse, we go to all the games, women's basketball particularly, men's basketball and football too, but they like women's sports volleyball and we've been involved in contributing to the women's excellence fund which is a support fund for women's athletics particularly, so we're continuing to contribute to that fund and to support women's athletics. And part of that is because we've had some wonderful student athletes in our speech and hearing program, but additionally we like the coaches and we like the student athletes so we want to contribute there. That's awesome. That's just like another way to connect with students? It is another way to connect with students and in point of fact regards to what one reads, these ladies are athletes and students, students first in many cases, so we know that they're on their way to developing their lives and having an impact. We're happy about that. Yeah, that's awesome. Was there anything else? No, I think that's about it. Anything else from you? Nope. Okay, have you got your time? Yeah, I did. Okay. All right, thank you so much.