Section Three: 2003-2008–History of Pacific University
(Written by Nancy Meltzoff unless otherwise indicated)
I was on sabbatical, as was Mark Bailey in Forest Grove, for part of the 2002-2003 school year. During that time, Mark continued to serve on the Search Committee for the new Dean but I was completely out of touch with this entire event, so I cannot write much of it. One of the jokes from the Governance Committee had been that our test of policies was to be sure they would protect us from Skippy, the Evil Dean. We knew we couldn’t always be sure of a Dean who was as easy to work with as Willard had been.
During 2003-2004, Dean Ed Mills was hired to be the new Dean of the College of Education; subsequently, our stability as a COE was threatened. Faced with budget cuts from above, he came to the Eugene Campus and made sweeping changes. One day, he told our director, Vivian Moen, that she no longer had a job, effective immediately. He spent much of his time arranging plans for us to partner with a university in China, which never amounted to anything. He was given the ability to award grants to support faculty for good work, without any application process or any strings, and this was called the Tommy Thompson Award. He awarded this to me during the one year he was at the COE, but I didn’t feel that it meant much. I believe that, in the future, it did come to be more of an honor to receive that award. In February, 2004, I presented a paper entitled, Meaningful Mentoring: How NCATE Accredited Institutions Can Support New Applicants with Ed at the AILACTE Conference, Chicago, IL, so I got to know him much better during those few days. We had dinner together and I heard about his background and family history. Suffice it to say that Ed was not a good match for Pacific.
About half of the faculty did not support him and about half did. It turned out that he had not been happy at Pacific and that he’d started looking for other positions probably around January or February of his first, and only year. When we asked him to come to a meeting to discuss certain issues around May, he instead responded by notifying us of his resignation and imminent move to another university. Thus ended the period of great tension at the COE and the beginning of rebuilding.
Nancy Watt, who was in many ways our backbone, accepted the position as Interim Dean for what turned out to be two years, from 2004-06. She was dedicated to supporting us in every way.
When I returned from sabbatical, it was a very busy time, as we were all trying to regroup. Willard came to our first joint faculty meeting. Before the meeting, he told me (I was the COE Faculty Chair in 2004-05 and the Eugene Campus faculty chair), that it was my job to bring the faculty together. I asked Danielle Torres, who was a professor in the School Counseling Program, to help me figure out how to do that. Danielle was young, energetic, and very skilled. We planned activities for the first meeting of the academic year, which were intended to allow people to talk and to begin to heal and move forward. I initiated some new communication tools, some of which worked and some which did not. The PENN (Pacific Education Network News) was a spin-off of the PUNN (university-wide), and served as a place for us to communicate online. Of course, in the following years, many other and better methods for online communication came into being.
See Documents: Survey for Faculty.04; NM Statement to Faculty at Start of School Year.04; Cultural Competence Training at COE.04
Touch the Future
In 2003, what stands out is that we began the Touch the Future program. Diana Watkins writes:
I remember that Touch the Future was the first “project” undertaken by the newly founded Diversity Committee. It was inspired by the Future Teachers of Color program at Washington State University. We hosted the FTOC Director, Dr. Johnny Johnson, at one of our meetings. TTF was a joint effort between COE faculty on the Forest Grove and Eugene campuses and the COE Alumni Council. Our first event in October hosted 13 students from Forest Grove. We grew to some 175 attendees from the Forest Grove, Hillsboro, Beaverton, Salem, and Eugene area schools. We developed a five-year plan, established a TTF scholarship that has since endowed and is awarded to students annually, and saw the program adopted as a university initiative (in 20XX).
Starting in the fall of 2003, I (Nancy) served as the Lane County Coordinator for Touch the Future for events in 10/03, 10/04, 4/05, 10/05, 5/06). The spring TTF programs were held at the Eugene Campus, with Mark and Jesse leading activities with the students in the computer lab. We received money to bring up to two buses to Forest Grove, and we filled them with students from Springfield HS, Willamette HS, and other local schools. These were very exciting events, with mostly Latino students and a few of their teachers and advisors traveling from our area up to Forest Grove. For a few years, these were highly successful programs. When funding for the buses dried up, we had to stop participating. We tried a few times to go in rented vans, and to have small events in Eugene, some in cooperation with LCC, but nothing ever took hold with as much gusto as the first Touch the Future events did.
See Documents: TTF Event in Eugene.05; history of TTF starting in 03; 002 Grant to Start Touch the Future; Touch the Future Email from Mills.03
SPED
Around 2003-04, another local icon, Preston Wills, joined our faculty. We seemed to be able to bring in the best local people as they made their moves away from full-time public school work. Preston had been special education teacher and then director in the area. He organized the SPED program and served as an instructor and administrator for many years. The SPED program gave students a Master’s Degree and a SPED license. At that time, there was a shortage of SPED teachers. The courses were offered on nights and weekends. Preston finally had to tear himself away towards the end, as we did not want to let him go. But Preston wanted to have more time for his side career as a musician.
During 2004 and 2005, and then for many years after that, we were a host for We Are Neighbors and We are Family photo exhibits at Pacific University’s Eugene campus. These photo exhibits showed the diversity of the Eugene area. Also on our walls were artwork that Mark and Karren got from local schools. Later, this turned into Pacific becoming a gallery for the First Friday artwalks, under Mark’s leadership. But these photo exhibits gave our campus that first feeling of being members of the artistic community of downtown Eugene, which was trying to stage a comeback.
We continued to have excellent part-time instructors, including, in 2004-05, Aaron Kaufman, a master middle school social studies teacher from Roosevelt Middle School, who was very much loved at Pacific. Also, I remember speaking with Sandy Ludeman, who had been a teacher, administrator, and superintendent, and who was serving as a principal at the Village School, trying to convince her to come work at Pacific. Al Phillips, PE teacher extraordinaire, brought his knowledge to our elementary candidates as well as high school PE candidates. Bill Temple, an ex-student from years before, who had become a business teacher in high school, came back to work with our students. He was one of the first students to come back as an instructor. In 2005-06, Ron Lancaster, another great teacher from Roosevelt Middle School, brought his genial personality to our campus, supervising and teaching a little. He never failed to stop and greet everyone and bring a good story. By 2007-08, we had Marsha Cullop, a beloved elementary teacher from Eastside Elementary in Eugene, as well as Valerie King, Carolyn Knox, John Lenssen, Jose Luis Alonso, Valerie Nguyen, Cindy Parker, ex-student Gina Wilde, Rick Wilkes, and other fantastic instructors, each of whom had a loyal following of students. There was someone for everyone, not just the full-time faculty, but dedicated part-time instructors as well. It was this high quality of instructors that helped our reputation continue to grow during these years.
Perhaps one of the most important additions to our community was the 2005-06 addition of Kimberly Blazejewsky, a young, sharp, organized, take-charge woman who restructured the functioning of our office. That same year, star principal from Elmira, Mary Jo Simone came to campus to take charge of our undergraduate program. She was the penultimate coordinator, caring deeply about the students, skilled at all organizational tasks, and still eager to read and learn and grow, especially in the area of cultural competence. Around this time, the Holdens became supervisors. “Boy Lee” and “Girl Lee” had both been principals in the area. They were married, had the same last name, and, coincidentally, both were named Lee.
For a few years prior to 2005-06, our tech support person was the friendly Geoff Henderson. In 06-07, Jesse Everett came to do that job, recruited by Mark S., who had been his teacher in the MAT program a few years earlier in 2004. Jesse helped us grow into ourselves technologically and his good humor and patience became a backbone for our program. Eventually, he was given more and more responsibilities in this area, till he was in charge of some electronic resources for the entire College of Education.
In 2004-2005, the market for school counselors diminished, and so we has low enrollment in that program. We lost Danielle Torres to Lewis and Clark. Bonnie Witkin-Stuart was battling health issues and went back into private practice. Around 2005, another ex-student, Eric Freeman, came back to teach some Learning Communities courses to undergraduate students. Around 2006, Preston Wills was finally able retire when we hired Rebecca Schulte to coordinate the SPED program.
In 2005, the Teachers of Color Job Fair was initiated. Representatives from various school districts gathered and candidates of color from local teacher education programs were encouraged to attend for networking and leads to potential employment. See Document: 05 Teachers of Color Job Fair
In the spring of 2006, we received a short introductory card from an experienced teacher-educator named Cheryl Spaulding, who had attended Stanford, wondering if she might be able to serve as an adjunct for any courses. I remember offering to respond to her note, as Shelley was extraordinarily busy at that time. I met with Cheryl and was immediately convinced that we should offer her at least one course and hopefully more.
On May 2, she wrote,
Dear Nancy,
Thank you for taking time from your schedule to meet with me about a possible position in your teacher education program. I enjoyed the tour of your facilities. They were truly impressive (Those classrooms were “to die for.”) Your programs are obviously well supported and thoughtfully administered. I look forward to hearing from you or Shelley about the specifics of a position, part or full-time. The prospect of being involved in teacher education again is very exciting to me. Thank you again…
We were so lucky that Cheryl contacted us as she brought so much to our campus. At first, she taught a few courses and utterly impressed everyone, faculty and students alike. Soon she was offered a full-time contract. Cheryl brought a combination of fiercely fine thinking, academic rigor, and a belief in the power of community-building. During the years that Cheryl was with us, lunch hours became more fun for the faculty, as there was a daily informal lunch gathering with whoever could make it. Even if I couldn’t get there for lunch, for instance, I always liked to stop in for a chat towards the end of the lunch hour. Cheryl was given more and more responsibilities, and, famously, once when she wasn’t at a faculty meeting, we elected her faculty chair. From then on, there was a joke that if you didn’t show up, you might be assigned some big job.
In 2007-08, our office changed once again with the addition of Denise Courtright. Our office staff had a big impact on faculty and students alike. In those years, the front desk person/receptionist not only answered phones, but interacted with students and also made copies for faculty. A few years later, the whole notion of copying faded, as we were able to direct students to online readings, but back then Denise had large piles of copying to do each day.
In 2007, Mark Ankeny became the Dean of the COE. Mark was a trusted local administrator who knew how things worked in the state of Oregon and was a careful and transparent communicator. In many ways, he was just what we needed to help us all move forward. He always worked very hard and was utterly honest, transparent, and careful.
In 2008, some faculty and students from Pacific became very involved in starting a Pacific University student chapter of the National Association for Multicultural Education. For a few years, students attended conferences and served as assistants and gave poster presentations. Lockhart and Meltzoff served as faculty advisers for this work and there was a tremendous amount of excitement among the participating students and faculty. See Document: Pacific U. ORNAME members.2008; ORNAME Conference.08