Marisa Chappell Oral History Interview, February 25, 2021

LUNA WARREN: It is February 25, 2021. I'm Luna Warren conducting a remote Zoom interview from my dorm room. Would you like to introduce yourself?

MARISA CHAPPELL: Sure, I'm Marisa Chappell. I'm an Associate Professor of History at Oregon State University, and I am coming to you via Zoom from my home in Corvallis, Oregon.

LW: Nice. I'm going to pull up the verbal consent document real quick. I need to read it aloud. This interview is being video recorded as a component of classwork assigned for the course, "The Hidden History of Women at Oregon State University." Once completed the interview will be deposited into the permanent historical record at the OSU Libraries Special Collections and Archives Research Center. The interview will also be described with a biographical sketch, interview abstract, and detailed index and made freely available to the public through a dedicated web portal. During the Covid-19 era we are asking narrators to provide verbal consent rather than signing paper permission forms. Do you agree to allow this interview to be preserved, described, and made freely available online as indicated?

MC: I agree.

LW: Thank you. Alright, so to start with: do you want to give a short spiel about where you grew up?

MC: Sure. My father was an officer in the U.S. Air Force and so I don't have a hometown because we moved around. I was born in Madrid, Spain. I lived most of my first year in Brooklyn, New York, with my mother's family while my dad was in Vietnam. I spent parts of my childhood in Hampton, Virginia; Montgomery, Alabama; Lakenheath in Suffolk, England; and then Warner Robins, Georgia, is where I went to what was then called junior high school and high school.

LW: Wow. That's a lot of places.

MC: Not as many as some military kids, but yeah.

LW: What were some of your interests, like passions of yours throughout childhood? Things that you considered maybe going into a career for or imagined you would go into a career for?

MC: My family has this great story of me wanting to be a waitress at the Holiday Inn when I was really little. Maybe it was the uniform. Something seemed glamorous to me at a Holiday Inn restaurant, but I remember I really liked to read. I read a lot as a child and I liked art very much. I remember reading a biography of Helen Keller and then a biography of Louis Braille, and so for a while I wanted to be a teacher for the blind. Then as I got older in high school I remember really thinking about journalism. I was involved in our yearbook and 00:03:00then early on in college I wrote for our college newspaper. I also acted and so I was thinking about broadcast journalism. Those were the main things I can think of.

LW: That's a pretty good mix of things.

MC: Yeah.

LW: Where did you go to college?

MC: I went to Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia.

LW: How did you choose the college?

MC: That's a good question. I went to high school at Warner Robins High School. It's a public high school. Both of my parents were college educated and my father has a master's degree. I grew up like always knowing I would go to 00:04:00college. There wasn't any option about it. My brother was two years older than I was and he went to Emory. That was the Emory connection. I didn't apply to a whole lot of schools. I applied to University of North Carolina, University of Georgia, and Emory. I think those were the only schools I applied to. At University of Georgia, they had a scholarship at the time to try to keep kids in-state. It was like the governor scholarship or something. I could have gotten a free ride at University of Georgia. I remember negotiating with my parents, like okay so if I go to University of Georgia and save you-because Emory University is ridiculously expensive-save you a lot of money, can I have a car? [Laughs]. My parents really, really wanted me to go to Emory. I think some of that had to do with a kind of elitist kind of idea of going to a private 00:05:00university. My mom, I remember my mom saying you're probably going to meet your husband at college [laughs]. Wanting me to go somewhere where I would meet high quality-that's kind of interesting. That's how I ended up at Emory.

LW: Wow. Did you meet your husband at Emory?

MC: I did, in fact, meet my husband at Emory [laughs]. Yes.

LW: She was right.

MC: She was right. It doesn't mean I wouldn't have met a wonderful husband at University of Georgia, either. My parents, my mom grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and my dad grew up in East Orange, New Jersey. They weren't southerners. I think that was part of it, too. It's just a different cultural milieu. They're 00:06:00thinking of University of Georgia and the Bulldogs and a very much like a football-it's a very good university, but it's got that reputation as a party school and all of that. I think that was part of it, too.

LW: What did you study in college?

MC: I was a History Major [laughs]. I did take a journalism class, I remember. I took, I remember, theater classes, but I did not major in that. I wasn't really interested in, other than acting, I wasn't that interested. I didn't want to take set design and all that stuff. I majored in history. I loved it. I loved all my history classes and that passion. I had a really good history teacher in 00:07:00high school for, I think we did world history with her and then AP U.S. History with her and she was wonderful. I think that's part of that kind of love of history that I have.

LW: A good teacher can do a lot.

MC: Mm-hmm.

LW: Where there any notable classes that you took in college? Any classes that you look back on or teachers that you remember that you think really, I assume you were already interested in history, but solidified that interest?

MC: Yeah, so Emory had two historians: James Roark and Dan Carter who were both historians of the South. James Roark taught old South and slavery and Dan Carter I remember taking the Civil War to Reconstruction with. They were just both, I 00:08:00mean they were kind of old-school classes with the lecture and the board and all of that. But I remember, I just loved that. I just ate that up. I remember two others: one was a class called The Making of Modern America with Mary Odem, which was just fantastic. I remember Robin D.G. Kelley who was kind of like a really big deal, he was a visiting professor at Emory when I was there and he taught a class on popular culture in American history. I remember that one pretty well. I remember the paper I wrote for it. Then it turns out he's an amazing scholar who I really look up to. It's neat that I can look back and I'm like I took his class.

LW: That's really cool. So, you got your bachelor's degree as a general History major?

MC: Yep.

LW: Nice. Then, seemingly you went somewhere else for graduate school?

MC: Yeah, so not right away. I didn't really know what I wanted to do when I graduated from college and I still kind of had this fantasy about acting as a career. In Atlanta the Alliance Theater, which is the big repertory theater in Atlanta, had this internship program, an acting internship program, which was a two-year program. They would, I don't know, about a dozen people got into this program, maybe six a year, so they had a dozen at a time. You did acting classes and we understudied all the mainstage shows, and we did our own lunchtime shows and taught. There's a lot of stuff. It was night times and weekends, and it was unpaid. For the two years after college, I did that while working. The first 00:10:00year I worked at Kinko's. I don't know if Kinko's even still exists.

LW: I know of it.

MC: It started as a copy store and then this was 19-I graduated from college in '91. The acting intern program had this relationship with Kinko's where they would hire the interns. I got this job at the midtown Atlanta Kinko's which had fairly recently gotten personal computers that people could come and rent for an hour and sit and use the personal computers. I was the "lobby boss," which meant that I was in charge of all the self-service copiers and computers, and I didn't know very much about computers. I cleaned the computers every morning. I remember that. I had to help people as best I could [laughs] with that. Then I 00:11:00quit that job to, I'm trying to think-I can't remember the order. I cleaned houses for a while. Another intern and I started a housecleaning business. We cleaned houses for a while. I worked for a temp agency and worked at Nation's Bank Headquarters. I worked in their legal department and then later I worked in their Manager Development Department. I think that was training, just doing secretarial kind of work. Then I did have one paid acting job, which was the mainstage they did a version of Streetcar Named Desire. I got to play the nurse who had five lines. I think I got paid $250 a week.

LW: Wow.

MC: Yeah! To do this. It was fantastic. Those are all the jobs I did while every night and every weekend doing acting stuff. It was a very, very busy time. It 00:12:00took my years to not every evening kind of feel like I was supposed to be somewhere. Then my now husband and I applied to graduate programs. I decided, I was kind of bored and had started reading some feminist scholarship and other sorts of things and decided I wanted to go to graduate school in history. Pat wanted to go to grad school, well, I don't know if he wanted to [laughs]. I kind of nudged it along [laughs]. He wanted to study neuroscience. This was pre-internet. You couldn't just surf the web and learn about different programs.

I remember I sent away to a lot of different universities and I remember we had this box with all these glossy brochures from different grad programs. We ended up applying to a bunch of grad programs. We didn't get into any of the same 00:13:00programs. The choice came down to, I got into University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which had a great U.S. History graduate program. He got into Northwestern University's neuroscience program. We talked about it a lot. He really, he grew up in Atlanta and really wanted to get out of the south. I was waitlisted at Northwestern. I had some skills. I had worked temp. I knew I could make money. Then Northwestern had this Master's in Liberal Studies, which was a general program. I ended up, we went to Northwestern and I did that Master's program through which I could take graduate history courses and get to know graduate history faculty and then I got into the program the following year. I 00:14:00did my grad work at Northwestern.

LW: Nice. Did you also, again, do you graduate program for general history or was it a more specified?

MC: It was U.S. History. You had to specialize, was a regional kind of-a specialization. I did a minor field in African history and I did a certificate in Women-I think it was Women and Gender Studies, was what it was called.

LW: What made you choose specifically the African history and the Women and Gender studies?

MC: Those are good questions. I think the Women and Gender studies was the less surprising, because I had started, I remember reading The Beauty Myth by Naomi Klein [sic Wolf] and Backrush by Susan Faludi. There was a lot of stuff coming out while I was doing the acting internship. I was very interested. I didn't do 00:15:00any women's studies when I was an undergrad. I don't even know that I was aware that that was a thing. When I chose my advisor, Nancy MacLean, I decided to do-I initially thought I might do early U.S. history but I ended up deciding to do modern U.S. history. Nancy MacLean, my advisor, did women's history as part of what she did and so I just got more and more interested in that. I ended up doing that certificate. As far as the African history, I think it might have partly been faculty that I just knew and liked some of the faculty in African history. I thought also doing U.S. history, African would be good to have and to 00:16:00know given the slave trade, right? I was interested in racial politics, too. I think that that minor, I don't remember a whole lot. It's not, content-wise, but I think it shaped in certain ways it shaped some of my perspectives in how I do history.

LW: I was actually, the next question on my list, was actually tied to that. I saw your C.V. and some of your articles you've written and presentations you've done. You seem to very heavily focus on not just Civil Rights, but specifically poverty and, I know specifically a lot of things on welfare.

MC: Yeah.

LW: What draws you to that?

MC: I think what initially drew me to that, when I was trying to figure out a dissertation focus I really wanted something that was going to, I was interested in inequality and why we have such profound inequalities around axes of race and gender in particular. Welfare, I think a few things were going on. First of all, welfare was a subject of a lot of public and political discussion in the 1990s. In 1996 there was a big welfare reform bill that President Clinton, twice Bill Clinton vetoed it and then he signed the third bill, that essentially removed the kind of such as it was entitlement that single parents had some access to 00:18:00income support and really changed that. There was a lot of discussion of welfare at the time in the country. It seemed a really good topic for thinking about the intersections of racial inequality, gender inequality, and economic inequality. At the same time, my advisor was starting a book project on affirmative action and taught a seminar on state and society. It was also a time where U.S. historians were transforming political history from a history that was about legislation and about presidents that really thought about politics more broadly and looked at state building and the ways in which government policies really 00:19:00shape inequalities. I was in that context where a lot of this work was being done and that's what solidified that focus of my dissertation on debates around welfare in the later 20th century. There had been, there was a lot of work at the time on the construction of the American Welfare state in the first part of the 20th century and very little at that time on the later history of it.

LW: That's really cool. I saw that you've written two books involving welfare?

MC: Yep.

LW: Could you give a brief description of each book?

MC: Sure. One of them is my monograph that was adapted, rewritten from my dissertation. That books called, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America. It really looks at the war on welfare. It looks at the political debates around specifically the aid to families with dependent 00:20:00children program, which is what people think of when they think of welfare and more broadly around economic citizenship and economic justice. I look at debates around not only welfare policy but full employment policy and argue in a sense that ideas about what a proper family looks like, this family wage ideal or a male breadwinner, female homemaker kind of family model was really central in how racial liberals were thinking about achieving racial equality and transforming social policy in order to achieve racial equality. The ways in which that, their kind of lack of imagination, their being stuck in that model 00:21:00really didn't allow them to pursue policies that would have been less vulnerable perhaps to, liberals themselves helped construct the critique of welfare as causing family breakdown, etc. Anyway, I'm going on too long about that.

LW: That's fine. That's the point of this is to talk about your writing, talk about things you've done.

MC: Thanks [laughs]. The second book is a book I co-authored with two other historians of welfare-Premilla Nadasen and Jennifer Mittlestadt-and it's designed for undergraduate classrooms. It's called Welfare in the United States: A History with Documents. It's basically a history of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program and then it's got forty-some primary source documents from the early 20th century through the late 20th century in the back. It's 00:22:00designed to be used in classrooms, either women's history classrooms or other sorts of classrooms where students can really understand the history but then really dig in and analyze primary sources.

LW: That's really cool. I also saw a lot of awards and fellowships and there were many, but I'm wondering if there are any that you have that you are particularly proud of or if you have any particularly interesting stories surrounding?

MC: Yeah, I mean probably, [laughs] I always feel ambivalent about awards. I feel like we're a culture where we feel the need to constantly give awards and 00:23:00get awards, but I guess the most recent thing was the visiting scholar position at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, which is a foundation that has a long history. It nurtures mostly social science research, but I slipped in as a historian. Their visiting scholar program is basically you get to go for a year, if it works that way, you get to go for a year. You live in Manhattan. The foundation's on the Upper East Side, and you have an office and access to research support and all of this stuff. You go into the office every day and there's lunch everyday and you're supposed to stay and eat lunch with the other scholars and everybody gives a seminar. The idea is you're talking to each other because of the proximity and you sort of create these interdisciplinary 00:24:00conversations and things like that.

Honestly, I applied for the thing. I applied for a bunch of things because I got money from the College of Liberal Arts that included the requirement that you apply for things [laughs]. I didn't think there'd be any way that'd I'd be able to take a residential fellowship somewhere, because my husband has a lab. He's a faculty member in the Vet College here and has a lab and it just didn't seem practical. But I applied anyway and then I got this thing. Was really, really lucky in that the director of my school, the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion, worked with me to figure it out. I wasn't able to go for a whole year because I had already taken part of the sabbatical. The idea was that I was 00:25:00going to go from January through June of 2020.

LW: Oooo.

MC: Yeah. My husband was able to make that work and so my husband and my younger son and I went. We got two and a half months, then the pandemic started hitting and it hit New York very, very hard.

LW: Yeah.

MC: Super scary. The foundation closed its offices. There we were in this little one-bedroom apartment in New York City and decided that we had to get out of there. We flew back here to Corvallis. It's a huge bummer. I fully acknowledge that I'm privileged in many, many ways, but it was a real bummer to have that 00:26:00interrupted and not get to explore New York as we had wanted to and for me the sabbatical was certainly less productive when we were managing our way through a pandemic and trying to manage online schooling for a second grader and that kind of thing.

LW: How were the few months before that, though? I guess you were there for January and February, pre-Covid?

MC: Yes. It was very cool. I feel like we were just settling in and getting comfortable. That was the hard. I'll be honest, I was really nervous because I was the only historian in my cohort and the rest were all social scientists of various sorts. I, in general anyway, tend to have, I sometimes struggle with 00:27:00self-confidence in my work and so I was super nervous about the whole thing. The first couple weeks were really hard for me. I was very anxious, not sleeping. Then I got to know people and started knowing people as scholars and as human beings [laughs], right? That got easier and what was delightful, the other really interesting thing that happened is I was expected to be in the office every day, all day, working. The office was about two blocks from our apartment. My husband really kind of, for the first time, really, switched roles in a sense, where he was more primarily responsible for caregiving than I was. He 00:28:00would take my son to school and pick him up after school and do his homework with him after school and all of that. He was working from the apartment. He was doing Zoom before the rest of us were doing Zoom.

That was a liberating experience. Leaving in the morning and going to the office and getting to dig in all day and work, work, work, work, work. I really actually enjoyed that ability to focus. We did start to explore fun things in New York. We did a few really fun things. We were saving a lot of the touristy things for spring break, because my older son who's a college student in Oregon was going to come out. My dad was going to come out from Atlanta and we were going to do all these things in New York. That would have been the end of March. I think the moving there and the school there was hard on my son for a whole 00:29:00variety of reasons. He's not a big fan of New York City [laughs].

LW: That actually reminded me. I haven't asked this yet. How did you end up at Oregon State? You went to Emory and then Northwestern. How'd you end up at Oregon State?

MC: You know it's the vagaries of the academic job market. The academic job market for tenure-track jobs is dismal and highly, highly competitive. I had been on the academic job market for I think 4 years. I started when I-I didn't finish my dissertation in Chicago. My husband finished his Ph.D. well before I did and got a postdoctoral position at the Medical School at the University of 00:30:00California in San Diego. We moved to San Diego when I was just starting to write my dissertation and also had a one-year-old at the time. I started applying for jobs when I was about halfway done writing my dissertation and had interviews every year but had never gotten anything. Then when I finished my dissertation and I got my Ph.D. I didn't get a job that year but then I got this kind of last-minute offer to do a teaching postdoc at University of Georgia. My then five-year-old and I moved to Athens, Georgia. My husband stayed in San Diego for his postdoc, so we lived bicoastal for a year. Then I went back to San Diego and somebody at UCSD, a historian at UCSD, was on family leave and I filled in to 00:31:00teach U.S. Women's History there for a year.

That's the year on the job market that I got two job offers and one was at University of Georgia, interestingly, and one was at Oregon State University, and for a series of reasons, one of which was the Oregon State offer came in first. I was a second choice for a job for the University of Georgia, so it was later. Oregon State had some leeway in trying to work out a situation for my husband. I really liked the department. I did the interviews one right after the other, so I flew to Athens and did the interview there and then flew from there to Portland and did the interview in Corvallis. That department at UGA was really dysfunctional and had a lot of ugly politics going on and the department 00:32:00here was just like lovely and it just felt, things felt low-key and I just liked the feel. Then they were sort of able to figure something out for my husband. It took a number of years after we came here to find a resolution and something that really worked. Really, if you're on the academic job market you don't have a lot of control over where you end up. You'll apply for the jobs in your field that are out there and you hope against hope that you're going to get one of them.

LW: I never realized it was that chaotic.

MC: Yeah, it's even worse now.

LW: Just during Covid or generally it has gotten worse?

MC: Generally, it has gotten worse because public funding for higher ed has not 00:33:00gotten better. Particularly, I think in the humanities, the humanities are certainly considered expendable by a lot of people in the United States today. Higher ed has adopted these models of business management models. Understandably students are paying more and more and having to go into debt to get their degrees, and there's a [dog barking in background]-sorry.

LW: It's okay.

MC: You know, there's a sense that the degree is just a credential. You need that credential in order to get a decent job moving forward so there's no time to do things like philosophy or history or English, right? There's also been a 00:34:00long political project to undermine humanities because humanities teaches us to really think about people and about the implications of decisions and to be real critical thinkers and critical readers and listeners. That's been recognized since the '70s. Before that, but I think purposefully since the '70s as a place that has to be targeted because it's going to challenge certain ways that capitalism might work in society, etc. Anyway, I'm kind of spinning off here.

LW: It's really interesting. I did just have a question and it left me.

MC: Oh, sorry.

LW: Oh! I was going to ask, what did your husband end up doing for OSU? Or in the area?

MC: When we first got here, he had a position in what's now called Integrative Biology. At the time it was called Zoology. They gave him lab space, but he came with a big federal grant from the National Institutes of Health. He had to use that grant to pay his own salary. OSU wasn't paying him any salary and there was kind of a promise-ish that we'll try to get you an actual position. Then there was a budget crisis, as there is every few years. It wasn't happening. His grant was running out and we had bought a house here. We were thinking, what are we 00:36:00going to do? I went on the job market. He was on the job market. We didn't want to leave, but we didn't know what to do. Through a whole series of fortunate events, the College of Veterinary Medicine had just had a failed search. They were looking for someone to teach physiology. He ended up getting the position with the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. It's worked out in a lot of ways. He teaches vet students physiology and he has a lab and still has an active research agenda. We're very, very, very lucky. Something like 60% of academics are married to other academics or partnered to other academics.

LW: I was just thinking about that.

MC: Yeah, it's a real problem. It's a real problem that many institutions have 00:37:00tried to grapple with in a variety of ways.

LW: I'm just remembering last term I had a class taught by two married professors.

MC: Oh, yeah? Wow.

LW: To go back to what you're doing at OSU, I took at look through some of your courses you've taught. They all look really interesting. I also noticed-kind of a random question-but how do you choose the specific time periods for each history class? I wrote down here, "Women's History to 1870," and then "Women's History from 1870."

MC: Is that what it says on the catalog, 1870?

LW: Yeah.

MC: [Laughs]. Yeah. What a great question, right? Because history doesn't work that way. These designations were put in place long before I came here. At most 00:38:00institutions, U.S. history is broken into two. It's usually on a semester system, right? So you've got half, usually the Civil War Reconstruction is the break. I'm imagining that's what the women's history, whoever designed that, that's what they were imagining. Civil War Reconstruction is the break. Our U.S. History, because we're on a quarter system is in three parts and I think it's like to 1820 then to 1920, and then... but they're never... sometimes when I've taught History 363, which is the second half of U.S. Women's History, I've started in the late 19th century. Sometimes I've started around World War I. None of these things are clear cut. There's no way to, every time you start 00:39:00somewhere you realize you need to give background, context to what came before. It's always a challenge, that chronology.

LW: That sounds like it. Of the classes you've taught, what are some of your favorite classes to teach or ones that you most enjoy teaching?

MC: I actually do. I did until recently enjoy teaching just the third part of the U.S. History survey, because it's a class a bacc[aulaureate] core class and most of the students in there, it's such a variety of students who take that class. They're all the way from first years to fifth-year seniors. They're from all different majors across the university. It's a particular challenge to do 00:40:00that survey and to figure out what's going to be meaningful for students if this is the only history class they take in their college career? What's going to be meaningful? The other favorite I think is History 365, which is a course I designed and it's called the Civil Rights Movement in the Modern U.S. It's really a history of white supremacy and black freedom struggles in the 20th century into the modern, the recent times. I really enjoy that class because it's an opportunity to dig in. It's still, I feel like we don't have enough time. That's always the case, right? It's a chance to really dig into how has 00:41:00white supremacy been constructed over time and how have activists tried to dismantle it over time? I feel like students who take that class, it does fulfill DPD. Students who take that class, it's not always just history majors and they're interested. They come into that class eager for the material and eager to engage in the material and it's what I'm teaching this term. It's a really, really good experience teaching it.

LW: That actually sounds really cool. I still need my history credit, so maybe I'll take that.

MC: Right?

LW: You mentioned that's a class you designed yourself?

MC: Yeah.

LW: Are there any other-?

MC: We always design. So, that's a class I designed and what I mean by that is it wasn't a class before and I got it in the catalog. The classes that, History 00:42:00363 is in the catalog. It was in the catalog when I got here, but I still design the course when I teach it. There's no set you have to cover x, y, and z.

LW: Starting a class versus remaking a class? Or your own version of a class?

MC: Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, that's right. It's one of the real benefits and privileges of teaching at the college level is that at least, we're still at this point, faculty do have a lot of control over the curriculum and individually over what my individual class looks like: what kinds of book readings to I assign? What topics do I cover? How do I cover them? What assignments do I give? Other than that if it fulfills a bacc core you have to go 00:43:00through this assessment process and basically prove that you're fulfilling the bacc core learning outcomes. We do peer review of teaching and students get to evaluate your teaching, but nobody's like looking over my shoulder saying you should assign this book, not that book. That's part of academic freedom and that's part of what makes teaching at the college level a real joy, because we're always learning as scholars and so we bring new scholarship and the new things we're learning into the classroom.

LW: That sounds really cool. On the topic of the department, what are your opinions on history as a subject no longer being its own department? It's called something else now? It's part of a bigger department now?

MC: Yeah. Our history program is housed within the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion. Well, it's complicated. I was opposed to this when it was happening about ten years ago or so. This was a provost mandated reorganization. Honestly, in some ways-what?

LW: Provost mandated reorganization? What does that mean?

MC: That means that the provost at the time, Provost Randhawa, decided that the College of Liberal Arts should not have 14 or 16 departments anymore, but should have a handful of schools [gestures air quotes and shrugs]. There were multiple justifications given for this. One was it was going to save administratively. 00:45:00Rather than having 14 department chairs, you're going to have five or six school directors. We're going to be able to centralize and share administrative functions, so it's going to save money. It reduces layers of bureaucracy. None of that happens, right? The other justification, which is the only one that I will give any credence to, partly, is interdisciplinary work and collaboration. At least within the school, so what happened is our Dean said, "y'all figure out who goes with who [laughs]." We ended up melding the History and the Philosophy Departments into this school and we pulled out Religious Studies and now we have 00:46:00a Religious Studies major because that used to be a department and then it was cut. [Dog barking in background] Dog. Anyway, it did come to pass that we do have now more collaboration within our school. [Dog continues barking] He drives me crazy. He goes nuts when anybody walks by our house.

LW: I've got dogs, too, back at home. I know the feeling.

MC: [Laughs] I was opposed to this whole thing to start with because one of the things that has happened that we predicted would happen is when you have a department, the department elects a chair and that chair really represents the department and the interests of the department. When you have a school, you have 00:47:00a director who is not really elected, is selected by the Dean-hold on a second, sorry [stands up and walks away and returns].

Okay, so I was saying when you have a department you have an elected chair who represents the department. When you have a school, you have a director who's more of an administrator who basically has this weird role of representing the administration as well as the faculty. That change, I think, has been not ideal. I don't like that change. That change has also happened with a new budget model, which I think is problematic. I think the change has had some benefits for us in History and for our collaboration with Philosophy and Religious Studies. In 00:48:00another way, though, it's actually put up new barriers to collaboration with people outside of our school, especially now that the new budget model focuses on student credit hours. The administration says we went interdisciplinary teaching and interdisciplinary work, but when you are competing with other units for those student credit hours, you're not going to get that. If you have a program, you're not going to want your students to take classes in another unit because then you're losing those student credit hours. There are a lot of issues that interrelate with the reorganization and the creation of the school. There have been some positives and a lot of negatives, I think.

LW: If you feel comfortable, would you like to go into more detail on the negatives on why you're unhappy with the position, not the department chair... what was the other?

MC: Director.

LW: Director, yeah.

MC: Yeah, I mean, this is not a knock on the individuals who have served as our director. We've had two and I think both have done a good job and done their best. It used to feel more like a democratic unit. That varies by unit. That's not the case for everyone. The way that OSU officially is organized is incredibly hierarchical, right? Some units, like ours, and ours still does, have 00:50:00aspects of democratic governance in it where people vote about various things. It just feels like when you have a chair, that chair is one of you. It's just taking turns. We'll take turns doing these little administrative duties. Now with the new budget model and the reorganization the director is like this administrator up there who is dealing with the budget and everything and making all the decisions. It's just a different model of how to operate. I think it is part and parcel of what some have called the corporatization of the university, the application of business models of administration and management to the university and seeing the university as a business and student as consumers. 00:51:00It's that way of thinking about the university that I think is deeply problematic and damaging. I think that's one manifestation, a small manifestation of it.

LW: I think that was probably a good segue into asking about your work with the union?

MC: Sure, yeah?

LW: And other things you've done for it?

MC: Yeah, and I have some people that need to be interviewed about this who have been around even longer. I guess there was some looking into whether there could be unionization among faculty here way back and it was determined at that time that it wouldn't go, that there weren't enough faculty interested. Then about, I 00:52:00wish-I'm a historian who's really terrible remembering dates. Maybe seven or eight years ago, after University of Oregon faculty unionized, OSU and OIT were the last public universities in Oregon that didn't have a unionized faculty. The American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors had this joint effort and they're the ones that helped faculty at the U of O unionize. We tried again, because we had an AAUP chapter here. We brought them back in here to look at and they have a whole process, right? That they do to determine is it worth trying here. Do we have enough? Do we think we have a faculty that's ready to do this? I think some of that reorganization and some of 00:53:00the ways in which the operations of the university had become subsumed into that business model, I think laid the foundations for more faculty to see themselves as employees and to see the need for us collectively to have a voice in how the institution is run and what are wages and working conditions are, etc.

We started really small. I remember chatting with an organizer who knocked on my door and having coffee with her and then she said, we're putting some committees together. Would you be interested? Which one would you be on? I was on this events committee and I remember we had a barbecue in my backyard and there were maybe 30 people there. Thirty faculty were starting to do this work and it just 00:54:00built and built and built. We formed an organizing committee. We created a mission statement that we got over 1,000 faculty signatures on. There's all these steps that have to do with really finding out what issues faculty are really concerned about and getting faculty to see that collectively working on these issues is the way to go. Then eventually we did an authorization campaign. In Oregon, Oregon has a pretty good labor law, no labor law is great, Oregon compared to a lot of states is pretty decent.

We were able to do a process called card check. Instead of having an actual election, we collected signatures on cards and if we got a majority of faculty who were in our bargaining unit, who were defined as within this group, to sign that card we bring that to the State Labor Board, they see we have a majority and that means we are unionized and the university administration has to recognize and has to bargain with us over wages and working conditions. We did it. Amazingly, we did it. Now United Academics of Oregon State University represents most academic faculty, not all academic faculty because of-this is so complicated, according to the state labor law, if you are a supervisor of another worker in the unit, you can't be in the same unit of the union. Anyway, 00:56:00faculty who are supervisors, so if you're a faculty member who has a postdoc or a faculty research assistant, then you're not in our bargaining unit while you have that other employee. It's complicated. I could explain it better, but it's probably inside baseball and not very interesting, but we represent most academic faculty at Oregon State University.

LW: What were some of the common faculty complaints that caused people to join the union and that the union now deals with?

MC: Great question. I think probably the number one issue was contingent labor, was non-tenure tracked positions and the lack of job security and low wages in those positions. Faculty not knowing if they were going to have a job next 00:57:00quarter. Classes don't fill up-sorry, you don't get a job. Those kinds of things, which are really hard on workers, which are hard on students, because students need to have faculty who are consistent and who are around to write them rec[commendation] letters, to get to know them, to mentor them. I think that was for me that was probably the number one issue and certainly for non-tenure track faculty that was the number one issue. Even for a lot-I'm tenured-even for a lot of tenured faculty, that was a very, very big issue and we were able to in our collective bargaining agreement we were able to address that in a series of ways.

We were able to get promotion pathways for non-tenure tracked faculty who had not had permission pathways before. We were able to get a provision that if 00:58:00you'd been promoted, that you get to go up for promotion after three years or whatever it is. You don't have to wait for your boss to say okay you can go up for promotion. Once you're promoted, it's two-year rolling contracts, so more job security, more predictability. We were able to put a floor under salary. We were able to include part-time faculty in our raise package. They had never been included in raises. That's one big issue. There's still work to do on that issue, but I'm pretty proud of what we were able to do there. Another big issue was that OSU had no paid family leave. I had been on the President's Commission for the Status of Women. I got on that commission right after I had my second 00:59:00child and we came hard and said it's ridiculous that OSU has no paid family leave. All that commission does is recommend things to the president. While we were organizing, the administration started paid family leave, a tiny bit of paid family leave. We got more. Not enough. We got more in our contract. That was another big issue. Then there are a lot of issues that relate to different sorts of faculty. There were issues around intellectual property when you teach on e-campus. Who owns that course? Who owns the lectures that you write and produce? That was an important issue for a lot of folks. I'm sure there's many 01:00:00others that I can't think of.

LW: This is I think going back a little bit, but I remember there was specifically some curiosity about a 28-hour negotiation with the union?

MC: Yeah.

LW: I think I mentioned this before this interview? What's the story behind that?

MC: Yeah, so what happens when your work forces unionizes is that you as an employer have to sit down at a bargaining table and work out a contract. It's called a collective bargaining agreement. You are required by law to negotiate over wages and working conditions. You're allowed to negotiate over a whole lot of other things. Because this was our first contract, we didn't have-usually you 01:01:00have your collective bargaining agreement and you want to change a few things. This time it's like we have to create the entire collective bargaining agreement from the ground. What we did from the union side is we had faculty working in different committees on different issues coming up with proposals. We had a couple really long sessions where we read through all the proposals, talked them through, etc. We had, I don't know, something like 60 proposals to bring to the university administration of here's things we want in our collective bargaining agreement. Then what you do is you meet for four hours sometimes, sometimes all day. You sit across the table, literally, until we had to move to Zoom. You sit across the table and you present a proposal and you talk through the proposal 01:02:00and then the other side takes the proposal and then they come back with a counter proposal and you go back and forth. That's how bargaining works. We had been doing that for a year and a half. We had a really frustrating start to that process. When the administration got a new lead negotiator for their side it started to go a little better, but before I forget to say this-we don't win things at the table just by sitting at the table, right? We had to fight to have bargaining open so that our members, so that faculty could come and sit and watch so that it was all transparent. That was super important to get faculty in the room. You're being watched, right? We sent out bargaining reports every 01:03:00time. We at one point had a petition campaign because they were stalling to try to put pressure on them. We had to engage political allies to put pressure on the administration. It's not just about sitting at the table. It's a much larger issue.

I had left the bargaining team when I went to New York. When I came back, even though I was still on sabbatical, I rejoined the bargaining team, partly because I couldn't stand not being at the table [laughs]. I had to know what was going on. We were bargaining over Zoom. We were closing in on agreement on finishing up. That was really hard because the pandemic hit and the administration then said y'all need to agree to salary cuts because we're going to have a financial 01:04:00hit. We said, well, we don't know anything. What does that financial, what does that look like? We don't really know yet. Well, why don't we finish this collective bargaining agreement and then we can sit down and talk about salary cuts. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. So we had to negotiate the salary cuts package. That made bargaining happen. It took longer. Apparently this is common. This was my first experience doing this. Apparently, when you're at the end and everybody wants to just get it done you just power through and get it done. At least we were on Zoom, so I had a bed I could lie down in or a couch I could lie down on. The way it works is you're not meeting with the other bargaining team the whole time. So, you'll meet and discuss things and then you'll go into caucus. It's called go into caucus. Then your team will meet separately and talk about things.

There were times we would finish stuff and then we could take a little break. It 01:05:00wasn't like we were on the screen for that many hours. I think I slept more than many of my teammates. I don't do well when I don't have sleep. It was, I remember Jan and Kelly, friends of mine who were on the bargaining team, had gone around and delivered a bottle of champagne to everybody's house hoping that we were going to actually come to agreement and we would be done so we would all have champagne when we finish. We did, in fact, finish [laughs].

LW: Wow. I remember you mentioning to me prior to starting this interview that there was a connection between the union and Covid-19 and to specifically ask you about it. Was this that or is there more to it regarding salary cuts?

MC: No, there's more to it. Yeah. As soon as we ratified-so, we agreed on the collective bargaining agreement then we had to bring that contract to our membership to vote on to ratify it. It took a little longer. We got overwhelming ratification. I think that ratification happened at the end of the week and then on Monday we filed a demand to bargain. Unions can also demand to bargain over anything that's going to dramatically affect or change working conditions. Covid, right? We immediately filed a demand to bargain over reopening. Would people be required to be on campus? What were the parameters of that? Would people have access to testing, etc.?

I was not on that bargaining team, but those negotiations went over the summer 01:07:00and into the fall and came up with a series of memoranda of understanding that said a number of things: we got some extra Covid leave for faculty who really needed extra leave for caregiving responsibilities, for illness, whatever it was; we got language about promotion-so, they had already started to say people can delay their tenure clock or things like that. This pandemic is dramatically affecting especially parents, especially women's ability to be productive. Nobody who is demonstrably able to do their work remotely will be required to be on campus until the pandemic's done, until there's widespread vaccination or whatever that marker is. Faculty would not be able to be disciplined for the way 01:08:00they do or do not enforce masks, social distancing, etc. We were really worried about that, because that puts a faculty member in a really difficult position, both health wise, like you need to enforce people wearing masks, but also we're in a really volatile political environment and we're open-carry state. Are we going to get in trouble for not enforcing it because you're afraid you might get shot or for enforcing it because somebody thinks their rights are being violated? Anyway, all of those things were discussed at the bargaining table and came up with some I think pretty good protections for faculty in the midst of all of this Covid. We're about to start bargaining again, believe it or not, 01:09:00because our collective bargaining agreement goes through 2024, but we couldn't negotiate salary all that way because of the uncertainty of the financial situation, right? We only negotiated salary for the first year and so we have to go back and negotiate salary for the rest of the time.

LW: [Inaudible] in negotiations.

MC: Constant negotiations. Yeah.

LW: Wow. A little less on the union side and more on the personal side, what are your experiences teaching remotely?

MC: Yeah. First of all, I feel very lucky that I'm able to do my job remotely. I would prefer to be doing it in person, but not in these circumstances. It's been challenging in a variety of ways. We're in a really privileged position in that 01:10:00we're in a quarantine pod with four other families right in our neighborhood. We have ten children all together. Only one of them is mine. My other one's away at college. Only one of them's mine. We have four preschool-aged children and we have six elementary school-aged children. What we've done is we've hired a couple caregivers. We have one caregiver who, and in the basement of my neighbor's house we have a classroom. The kids do all their online classes, their Zoom meetings, their assignments down there and we have a caregiver who helps them, who monitors that and everything. We were in the spring when my husband and I were doing the online schooling with my then-second grader, it was 01:11:00horrible. The whole series of things. He was still in the New York school. They were way ahead in a lot of academic ways, so that was hard for him anyway and then he's a very extroverted kid and he couldn't play with any friends. Like, he didn't have any. He was everyday was crying and tantrums and it was just awful. Being able to have him with other kids who were, they're all friends, they all get along remarkably well, he has friends. It's someone else other than Mom or Dad who's enforcing that and then after school they come over here and in my back room the other caregiver has the four preschool kids and then she watches the other kids, too, after school. That has made such a difference in my life. I feel so deeply for people who do not have that because I don't know what my 01:12:00mental state would be if I didn't have that.

The noise is sometimes, as you heard. My office is right next to the bathroom, so there's kids using the bathroom all day. I hear the bathroom being used all day. It's just those kind of ordinary interruptions which everybody's pretty forgiving of these days because most of us are dealing with it. I don't love-the teaching online... I know you can't require students to have their cameras on. That's not fair. It's really hard having a bunch of little boxes and my classes are pretty interactive. I don't do a lot of lecturing, just talking-at. I really try to do it as a discussion and that can be very difficult to get students to engage in discussion in the Zoom format. It can be difficult in person, too, but 01:13:00I think it's different difficult on Zoom. One thing that I miss. I just had a conversation with a colleague who's office on campus is right next to mine, and we had a phone conversation because you're not running into people in the hallways and just catching up and, oh I saw this speaker that related to what you do and have you heard of so-and-so? How's your kid doing? That's I'm realizing a big piece of what work is like for faculty and I miss that. I like being able to wear sweatpants all the time. I don't know how I'm going to put real pants back on.

LW: I feel that. I got decently dressed up for the interview, but otherwise, 01:14:00robes all day [laughs].

MC: Right [laughs].

LW: Well, I had one more question that wasn't particularly related to Covid, but I'm sure it could be, depending. Just wanting you to reflect on any research that you've done? Specifically archival related?

MC: Yeah. Right now I'm working on a book about an organization called ACORN that organized, they organized working class communities to fight for various economic justice and neighborhood resources and stuff. They started in 1970 in Little Rock, Arkansas and they are still groups around. They sort of officially shut down in 2010, but there's still local groups going by other names. I have 01:15:00spent a lot of time in the last several years in the archives that the Wisconsin Historical Society, because they have this organization's papers, and it's a vast collection of papers that is not very well-organized. One interesting story I can tell you. ACORN was at the center of a couple of scandals, one of which was around the 2008 election. Barack Obama had done community organizing with the Gamaliel Foundation in Chicago and had some connections with ACORN. I think he did a training or a couple trainings with them. That community organizing world, everybody's connected. They know each other. This was one of the attacks. There were charges that ACORN was committing voter fraud, which were not accurate charges. It's complicated, but the simple answer is they were not. The 01:16:00McCain campaign said, you know, they were and they're linking Barack Obama to this.

Anyway, I tell you this because I was chatting with the head archivist at the Wisconsin Historical Society who told me that the last time that anybody went through the ACORN papers thoroughly like I was doing was around the 2008 election when they had a team. I don't know who, I don't know who hired thrum or what but there was a team of researchers in there combing through the ACORN archives looking for dirt, essentially. That's an interesting archive story. I miss archives. There are some I've been able to get some things scanned for me from some archival collections, but there's nothing like being in the archives.

LW: Scan for the book you're working on or for other things?

MC: For the book I'm working on, yeah. One of the early organizers in Arkansas gave his papers to the University of Arkansas Little Rock. They've scanned some stuff for me. I've been trying to get some papers from a library in New York that I suspect maybe they're completely shut down, because nobody even answers my emails. I'm lucky that I had done most of my archival research already before the pandemic so now I'm just processing and writing. If you're in the middle of a project and you can't go visit archives right now. Who knows, hopefully soon, but who knows when?

LW: Yeah. I mean it's a lot of wait and see right now.

MC: Yeah.

LW: Well, I think we're a little under 90 minutes but about there, we have 01:18:00recorded about that long. This was great. This was really informative. Thank you so much.

MC: Oh, good! Yeah this was fun. Thank you.