Froggi VanRiper Oral History Interview, February 12, 2020

ESME BURNETT: Today is February 12, 2020. My name is Grace. I'm here with Froggi Ramona VanRiper and we are doing this interview as part of the women of OSU Oral History Project. Welcome, Froggi. Good afternoon.

FROGGI VANRIPER: Thank you.

EB: Just to get started with questions, what was it like for you to grow up in the Midwest and how did you get the name Froggi?

FV: I actually say I'm from the Midwest, but I actually grew up in northern Virginia until I was college age. No, serious, I say I'm from the Midwest. I got the name Froggi because I never did care for the name Ramona. I couldn't say it very well. My teeth were too big. I can't make the letter m with a smile on my face. When a friend started calling me frog because I was really interested in reptiles and amphibians and obsessed with squirmy things I just sort of ran with it. I went by Frog until I was almost 18, and then I changed it to Froggi and 00:01:00that's been my name ever since. Yeah, I mean from where I came from and the Midwest weren't too different. I was from northern Virginia, far enough outside of D.C. that it still felt like the country when I was a kid and we spent a lot of time in the forest and walking around and just basically any chance that I could get my hands on animals or play with animals or critters of some sort I was always obsessed with that. I didn't really have a very active social life in school, partly because when you live in sort of a suburban or rural environment and we live in such a car-based culture there's not really a lot of opportunities to interact with others without your parents driving you there, so instead I spent a whole lot of time outside and then by late middle school I started volunteering at a wildlife center so I could just take the bus there after school and my parents would pick me up. That's where I got my animal fix 00:02:00and that became my whole life as a teen.

EB: What was your formative education like? Elementary school, middle school and have you always had a passion for science and the environment? You spoke to that.

FV: I kind of did. So, yes. They say that I came out of the womb like this. Nobody really knows where it came from, my obsession with critters and plants and animals and being outdoors. I would say my elementary school experience was pretty favorable in terms of having teachers that really saw that in me and gave me outlets for it and my parents willingness to let me go and do things with my hands, let me join the science club in middle school. I had some teachers in particular who I'd say my first and third grade teachers left a real big mark on me in terms of supporting my weird idiosyncrasies. I hung out on the playground, 00:03:00that was back before our playgrounds had security and fences and stuff. You could pretty much disappear into the woods during recess and elementary school, which now is a terrifying concept. We would disappear me and a whole bunch of little boys in elementary school would run in the back and try to catch salamanders and frogs in the pond and come back all muddy at the end of recess. I had a lot of girlfriends who would actually play in the pond with me when I was really young. They fell away in middle school and I was more of a loner in middle school. I don't know if I got most of it from school. I think I got most it from extracurricular activities and I had a friend's dad who actually taught at a high school and I don't really know what motivated him to take us all hiking all the time and stuff like that, but that friend's dad was a big part of 00:04:00that. He gave me bug guides and he was a woodworker and he made me a little wire mesh bug catching thing, catching box and we'd go hiking down in the woods and he took us camping in the national parks and really like helped me to engage with the wildlife that I was obsessed with to begin with. Outside of school is where I got most of it. They say this is who I've been ever since I could walk and talk.

EB: What were your undergraduate years of college like and what were your aspirations at the time?

FV: I definitely wanted to do international work involving the environment.

I went to school with this plan to be a foreign languages and biology major and to somehow mix those two together. Anybody that tried to go through undergrad 00:05:00with a double major knows that certain things don't interface well with one another and those are things that have really specific scheduled times. Foreign languages obviously to progress you had to take things at very specific times and the way our biology program was the same. I ended up with a minor in language and majoring in biology, but the professors there had a little joke about me because I worked at the wildlife center clear up until I left for college. I continued to go back and work there all the time when I was in college and one of the things I noticed on my visiting weekend was that there was somebody in the biology department that practiced taxidermy and there was a specimens collection. That was really interesting and exciting to me and I was looking forward to learning that skill. But also the wildlife center we've had a huge freezer full of dead specimens, of hawks and owls and cool things that 00:06:00were, I mean, we discard a lot of carcasses, but the cool stuff that we couldn't bring ourselves to discard.

Apparently the first thing that this bio teacher ever heard from me upon being admitted to the department was, hey I'm going to be showing up in August do you want a bunch of dead birds? That became the joke that I showed up with coolers and coolers full of frozen hawks. That was how I started my undergrad experience. I came from a religious family that had views on high school biology curriculum. I didn't take biology in high school. I started academically behind a lot of my peers in terms of some of the fundaments of biology but then in terms of ecology and all of the things that I had spent a whole bunch of time reading and engaging with I started out maybe a little bit further ahead and so it all came out in the wash. I pursued a natural resources degree at a small 00:07:00college just outside of St. Louis, across the river from St. Louis. They had this program called biology block that every single student who was in the biology program would take one entire term, and that's back when we were on a trimester system, a lot like OSU is right now, and we'd spend the entire term, all three classes would belong to this block, so we were with the same people for all three classes and all of the professors of the classes coordinated and so that meant we could go on long trips. We went to the Smokey mountain national park for a whole week and we studied salamander diversity and we went down to southern Illinois and we participated in Banding Parula and Warblers. There was some remarkable things we got to do during that semester because we didn't have to balance it with other courses and that made me really happy. I look back on that very fondly.

EB: Backing up, I totally didn't say which college you went to.

FV: Principia College.

EB: You went to Principia College. Backing up as well, what was it like for you to be so interested in biology and want to pursue that and yet had a family that didn't quite believe in that?

FV: I will admit that the faith that my parents adhere to doesn't deny the fact that the physical sciences are valid. What they really wanted to keep me away from was the medical science and so they didn't really stand in my way on most of the things I was interested in, which were ecology related. They just kept me out of the high school biology curriculum because it was, they felt it was too medically focused. Obviously I have since had to fill in a lot of that for myself, but up until that point I didn't feel like they were hindering my passions in life. I mean I guess I came out fairly fortunate in that the 00:09:00religious view of my parents didn't actually keep me from pursuing my dreams in that point in time. I just hold him so he doesn't destroy your camera equipment.

EB: Let me-

FV: No-[grabs cat and puts it in lap].

EB: Just taking a quick cat-related break.

FV: This is Sir Charles. I knew you'd get in the way [talking to cat].

EB: Alright, so, you spent four years teaching high school biology. How did that experience shape you?

FV: Oh my goodness. Okay, so I ended up getting that job at actually a high school that was affiliated with the college I graduated from. It was on the Missouri side of the river.

It was small private high school that even had a boarding component. Some of the 00:10:00students didn't even live with their families. They lived on campus with resident counselors from as early as like the age of 13, which was just incredible to me. Working with kids at their developmental ages. The kids that I taught were high school so the majority of them our biology curriculum was for 11th graders. But we also had high-performing freshman and seniors who transferred in from schools that didn't offer biology earlier than senior year. I had the full range of the high school students. Their different interests and the ways that they express themselves. I was very excited about, at the time, reading pedagogical magazines and learning about better techniques for using, playing to their strengths and their skills and I had a really, really great vice principal who encouraged differentiated learning styles. The arc of my, I 00:11:00think my ability to support students it was a steep, steep learning curve but also really impressive arc that by the second year I was a totally different person than I was the first year. By the time I left, I absolutely adored my job I was just excited to go and continue my studies on something else. I did some things that I really am glad that I had the chance to do, I'm glad that I had the support to do and those were to in recognize my students that maybe the traditional academic model of a knowledge-based model was not necessarily the best way to assess my students and the fact that biology curriculum is really something we can easily apply the know-understand-and-do paradigm to. I think about what do I want my students not just to know but what do I want them to understand more deeply and what do I want them to be able to perform. What 00:12:00actions do I want them to be able to-principles to be able to apply and physical things I want them to be able to master.

They were all around this age where they were thinking about getting their driver's license and I jokingly, because we had some decent microscopes in class and I wanted to make sure they were treated correctly, I jokingly had a test at the end of this that we called their microscope license driving test and then they'd earn a license. It was just supposed to be a little strip of paper, and then somebody was like is it like a driver's license, and I was like sure why not? Is it going to have my picture on it? I was like, I don't know why we couldn't do that, sure. They got so excited about this microscope license driving test and it got them really enthused about this, but also being a physical skill, which is usually downplayed in the academic model where the strongest in the academic system are those who perform very traditionally with 00:13:00knowledge and with book learning and with all of that. A lot of these students, I can't remember the scholar who talks about differentiated-not differentiated learning-multiple intelligences, but those who have intelligence, like expertise in other areas where they have really good spatial reasoning and all that, they are often not celebrated in this system. Those were the students a lot of them were my kids who played in the sports teams and were struggling on their traditional academics, stuff like that, just were really, really good with their hands, really good with their spatial reasoning and they passed with flying colors they first time they took the microscope driving test. Then some of the students who were traditionally accustomed to breezing through school had to put a little more effort into it than they were accustomed to. Walking out of that it helped everybody recognize one another's strengths and then appreciate their own strengths where they maybe had previously not been taught to appreciate them in an academic context. That was one of the examples of kind of learning experience that I took away from that that made me a totally different person 00:14:00and shapes the way I interact with my students today, too. I don't know. I think that's one of my favorite moments. I had a really fun relationship with the students there and I loved them all. It's fun to have a job where you're just paid to love and support people. It brings out the best in you. It brings out the best in me, at least.

EB: After you had this job you decided to go back to school, yes?

FV: I did.

EB: Why did you choose to do that in Sweden?

FV: Well, actually the topic that I went back to school for was sustainable development. It's hard I think for people today to remember back to the day when sustainability wasn't a word you heard almost in a daily conversation. It hadn't yet become a buzz word. It hadn't really lost its efficacy.

It turned into almost synonymous with green, which is sort of meaningless, right? The first time I heard the word sustainability describing a discipline, 00:15:00it just blew me away. It was like finally somebody came up with a word to describe what I've always wanted in my heart forever. This topic is me, it's me, it's who I am, it's what I want to study. Well, at that point in time, 2008, there were only I think there might have only been 2 graduate programs in the whole U.S. dealing with sustainability, or maybe just one. I applied to one in Eugene, Oregon, at the University of Oregon, but it was a very competitive program that only took 20 people a year and I had been out of school for a long time and I didn't really know how to present myself, and I didn't accepted to that school. But there were 6 schools in Sweden offering sustainability degrees. Since my partner at the time was Swedish and informed me that I could actually study there without paying tuition as part of our family benefits, I decided to apply there too. I got in. I got into a school in Linköping, which is in 00:16:00central Sweden. It was the most amazing program I could have ever taken, because it was a tuition-less program it was possible for a lot of people from all over the world to participate and they did a fairly good job of advertising to international communities and so I had classmates from Bangladesh and India and Nigeria and Ghana, Iran, China. We had these great groups and we had these great conversations. Talking about sustainable development with a whole bunch of people who share your background isn't nearly as impactful or as effective as talking about sustainable development with people who bring a wide variety of different perspectives. The why of why I went there was party because it was affordable and partly because it was all that was available, but the what I got out of it was way more than I ever could have known going in.

EB: How was your experience living abroad just in general, aside from education?

FV: It's a different kind of challenge. Your life isn't quite as easy. You don't know how to navigate the systems as well. You have to put a little more effort in. My experience obviously was very different from people who didn't, for example didn't have a native language that involved roman characters or have a little grasp on English because that's becoming increasingly useful across the world. I recognize I had it a lot easier than most, but it's also given me a lot of compassion for what it means to show up here without an understanding of what our system is like. I couldn't even find butter in the grocery store for a month because they package it differently. I was like I'm looking for sticks of butter and they just don't have sticks of butter. I ended up buying this huge chunk 00:18:00stick of butter like you can buy here for baking with and a friend the first friend I ever had in Sweden, we were subletting her boyfriend's apartment, so she met us when we arrived and she let me into the apartment and was like hey you need a friend. I'm going to show up and take you out and show you how to use the bus system. I'm so glad for her because it was really weird and hard. She was also hilarious because she never pulled her punches. She showed up and she's like why do you have cooking butter? What do you mean cooking butter? She's like that's not table butter, that's cooking butter. Table butter comes in a tub. It's like okay, cool. Everything from not being able to navigate the transportation system to not knowing all the simple stuff, like how to sign a lease in an apartment, the fact that apartments there are always first of the month to the last month regardless of whether you move in on the 15th. Of course having to work my way through the language so I could converse with people outside of the academic realm where English was commonly spoken. It was a wonderful growing experience. Outside of the challenges the growth and the fun 00:19:00and the climate I just loved the climate of Scandinavia and the cool wildlife and the fact that it's a culture both on a human cultural level they have strong relationship with nature but that is also reflected on the physical aspects of municipal development, because all cities are very dense and they're very clustered. I could bicycle from one side of the city to the other and it's a city of 150,000, or 180,000 people. I could bike from one side to the other because it didn't have sprawl, and it was designed around cycling. You had lots of smaller grocery stores so you could do regular grocery shopping that didn't require you to have a car full of huge bags, and so you just pick up a few groceries on the way home from work every day.

I didn't drive a car for 4 years the whole time I was there and never felt a 00:20:00lack. I could also go from my city to another city, take my bike on a high speed rail train, get off and still have a means of transportation when I got there, whereas I can't picture from here trying to get myself to another nearby city or a moderately far away city. It's like do I just take a lift everywhere when I get there or do I rent a car when I get there? It's like everything was just so navigable. I will never forget that, and it's my dream to someday teach a class on urban design and bring people there to see not just the transportation system, which, by the way they have what do you call them? Teeny tiny snow plows that are the size of golf carts that do the bicycle pads before they ever plow the roads because it's important that the bicyclists not be forced on the roads with the cars where they'll be in more danger. So, it's top priority to plow the 00:21:00bicycle paths knowing full well that the majority of people are bicycling, including pensioners and little children going to school and all of us. It's one of those places where it's not weird for your CEO to bike to work. If a CEO biked to work here it'd be like what kind of weird hippy are you, you know? There it's entirely normal. All places of employment have showers for you and it's just this huge expectation that everybody's going to be cycling or riding the bus potentially because why would you bother having a car? It's just cumbersome to have a car as opposed to why don't you have a car? You clearly can't afford a car. A very different way of looking at the world. I miss that a lot and I made wonderful friends while I was out there. I joined a knitting group and that's where I made a lot of my friends was a knitting group and then a gardening group and yeah. It was a great time.

EB: I got distracted.

FV: That's okay Charles is distracting!

EB: What was it like to move to Illinois after living abroad? What was that change like?

FV: It was a big change on a couple levels. One, I had after putting in a few years both getting my degree and also working in the academic realm and working on grant-funded projects and tried to publish papers, I was actually fed up with academia and I said I want something different. I want something where the fruits of my labor don't take five years to be published and be seen because we were working on a paper by all means should have been published but took five years to get off the ground. At the same time I also had a new partner and we 00:23:00were looking forward to making a life together, a future life together, and between both of our grasps on the Swedish language if we wanted to work anywhere outside of the university it wasn't going to be easy for us to stick around in Sweden. We made the decision to come to the States and to level the playing field, we thought we'll both work in a field we've never worked in before and so it'll sort of be an equal experience for both of us. Best laid plans of mice and frogs. But his visa didn't come in time but we'd both committed to working on a friend's farm. I put my first 7 months back in the U.S. straight from Sweden were working on a farm, so it was a huge transition not just location-wise and [phone rings], sorry I should've turned that off before this interview. Where is it? Pardon me. I don't even know where it is. [Ringing stops] There we go. 00:24:00Anyhow, silence. I went from an academic position, working at a desk, to working what ultimately became 16-hour days outdoors in the elements and I pushed my body really hard and I was very isolated because I was also living out in a rural environment in a little house on my own with a couple other people who worked on the farm. There was the cultural transition was somewhat moderated by the fact that I wasn't really assimilating in a big way into society. I was just sort of I went straight to this farm and living in this very isolated environment and then slowly re-assimilating from there toward the end of the farming season or on the occasional weekend I could go home.

I think if you talked to my partner, who of course made the transition as a first-timer to the U.S. it would be a very different story. But I will say that two big things I noticed, one I came back a very careful driver. Something about having been away and not having been in a car for so long, setting foot in a car for the first time, like a single passenger vehicle as opposed to a bus, something about it felt very vulnerable. I was a little freaked out as a passenger and I was extremely cautious as a driver for probably the first year or two after returning from just those four years of not driving a car. That was one very noticeable thing, I think. I think the other was that I really missed the grocery sort of store situation where I could just pop out for a fresh loaf 00:26:00of bread every day. It was something I missed every day. It was something I missed a lot. I had fresh vegetables on the farm.

EB: Buy sticks of butter.

FV: Buy big old sticks of butter, butter in tubs! [Laughs] Yeah. But the car thing that was noticeable. It was really meaningful. It was whew, wow, we take cars for granted here in such a way that it's assumed that the driving is a right and I understand why that is because we basically can't function in our society without driving. But the result of that, and I remember this because I had been away long enough because my driver's license expired and I had to actually go and take the test for a new license when I moved back to the states, and while I was there an old man was renewing his license and he looked into the vision tester thing and they're like read the letters from left to right. It was 00:27:00a, b, c, d, f. They're like what was that last one again? He was like, e? Like do you want try again? He said, b? They're like good job you get your license. I was like I'm so scared right now! But at the same time that was an act of compassion on their part because they didn't see this person capable of functioning in our society without access to a vehicle and I saw from my perspective as I have legitimate reason to be terrified when I'm on the road because it's not about how good of a driver I am. It's a systemic issue. It's not something where that individual person is, where the problem is not about that person. The problem is about our system, but it was a great illustration to me of how we navigate this very, very different world.

EB: Backing up a little bit, what was it like to go to Sweden and come home with 00:28:00a new partner?

FV: That was weird, especially since I left with a different partner! [Laughs].

EB: Yes, exactly.

FV: It was very weird, especially weird in the small religious community that I previously affiliated with. It was uncomfortable. I had some people in my life who were very, very supportive and beautiful and some people in my life who had to adapt to this new idea of who I was and who I was with. I don't know how much I should say other than it was definitely, it was a sudden difference as opposed to people experience a gradual change like they normally would if their friends had a divorce and moved on and shaped their life differently while you were still around them. It was a little more abrupt I think than it would have been in terms of my friends adapting to it, my family adapting to it, than it 00:29:00would've been if it had happened here. Other than that, life is life, right?

EB: Alright, so what made you decide to go from Illinois to attending Oregon State to obtain your Ph.D.?

FV: So actually I ended up here basically by accident. I had a job in Illinois. I was working at Knox College as their director of sustainability initiatives. Then my partner got a job out here, here at a non-profit called Conservation Biology Institute, and so we relocated. I left the job and relocated and looked for something in the similar sector when I arrived here, but was not easy to find work in my sector, not because there's a lack of it here. There's probably more of it here than anywhere but the market's also somewhat saturated.

This region's full of people who are particularly into the topic of sustainability and that's admirable and exciting. After about six months of 00:30:00searching and being unsuccessful at landing a paying job, I thought well, I've always thought, I was far enough away of that jaded moment when I came back from academia and said, I'm never doing this again, I was far enough away of that, that I thought gee, maybe I'll just take this window of opportunity. Because I'm in a town biking distance from one of the U.S.'s top universities. We're a land grant, sea grant, and a space grant. Why don't I take advantage of it while I'm here. I applied to the Ph.D. program and I was accepted and started studying the second year after I arrived here. It's been a ride. It's been interesting.

EB: What are your feelings towards the environmental science graduate program at Oregon State University and what has it been like to be a student?

FV: I think, I mean I have some serious critiques of the way this program was 00:31:00developed. The concept of interdisciplinary education is not just interesting and exciting but essential I think to a healthy and ongoing, a future of academics that actually contribute and put out citizens who are able to make meaningful, positive change and constructive innovation. We need to be recognizing the interdisciplinary nature of everything. That said, it became a very sexy thing for schools to do, to implement an interdisciplinary program, but without there being a standard, a national standard, for what that meant and what it means to actually support a program. Universities are designed very much around the concept of insular departments. All of their sort of advancement 00:32:00mechanisms, all of the ways you measure the progress of faculty and award them for what they do, it's all based on things that are measured within a department and so things that start to cross departmental boundaries get very difficult to manage without a structure in place to do so.

EB: Just for context, the environmental science program does not have its own department?

FV: Correct.

EB: Is what you're saying?

FV: Yes. It's a program. So basically what happened is the school developed something called an interdisciplinary program without creating a structure to fund, you know, to effectively, when I say fund that program I mean have funds for hiring graduate employees so that people can study on assistantship, without having a structure in place where faculty are rewarded for advising students in 00:33:00that program, without any of these structures in place we're kind of flailing. Those of us who come into the program with outside funding and outside grants say from like the fisheries department or something or the EPA and then find an advisor who's willing to work with them because of course they're funded. They have a great time. Those of us who come in without that and have to scavenge each term for funding-I mean, I've TAed in the Environmental Sciences program, in the Biology program, currently in Geography and I go from term to term not actually knowing if I'm going to have a job next term and that makes grad school really stressful and really difficult. That said, there also was a window of time, I understand the director of the program left and was replaced with the interim director that the school appeared to not have any interest in actually hiring somebody for the long time. It was well, we have the program that's all 00:34:00we need to look good on paper. But it's also not a big money maker, so we'll put as little effort as possible into making sure this is a high quality program. I'm sorry, that's a very dark way of looking at it, but it seems to be the case right now. We're struggling in this department and I have a lot of colleagues, classmates, graduate employees, graduate students who are not employees who are all muddling through this the best way we know how and trying to leave it better than we found it. There was recently a big 10-year review of the program and I understand a lot hopefully came out of that that'll give us tools for moving forward and making the program better. Now, I've said that about the program. My individual advisors at present who are currently from public policy and geography are wonderful, amazing human persons who I adore.

I have a committee, including these individuals, somebody from U of O, somebody from the engineering department here at OSU and I absolutely love all of the 00:35:00faculty I've been working with in that capacity. The program has issues that definitely need resolution, but my personal experience here has warmed a great deal since I resolved some of my challenges and actually found a set of advisors and a committee that have been enormously supportive and wise and great humans.

EB: Do you feel that your resources that the university provides you as a graduate student have been lacking?

FV: Certainly, that's why we're bargaining right now, actually. I'm an active member of CGU, which is a coalition of graduate employees. They're our graduate union. On a four-year basis we renegotiate our 4-year contract. We also have an opportunity every 2 years to revisit that if there's major changes that need to be made. This is one of the full bargaining years, so we're renegotiating the entirety of a 4-year contract. It's heavily designed around the things that we 00:36:00do feel are lacking. Graduate employees are imperative parts of the school. In the biology department every single 100 and 200-level class, the lab class, the lab component is completely delivered by graduate employees. It's an intense job and that's what I was doing for the last two terms was teaching those labs, which I absolutely loved but the work is really quite difficult, obviously, and the compensation for that work plays us below a living wage and I was at bargaining today listening to people testify about the fact that they're rent in Corvallis has gone up by 30% while they get an annual raise of 2% to keep up with inflation. The school is currently constructing new housing that they're touting as affordable graduate housing where the projected rent is the higher 00:37:00than the salary they're paying the graduate employees. It does indicate a fundamental disconnect between what the school says we value and what the school says that we aspire to provide to our employees and our graduate students. A fundamental disconnect between that and the reality.

EB: Could you talk more about what bargaining is and how you participate in it?

FV: Yeah. It's true, the word bargaining doesn't actually say a lot, does it? Bargaining is the process of negotiating a new contract. There are representatives from the institution, from Oregon State's administrative team, and there are representatives from our union. They sit across the table from one another and it begins with our union bringing a proposal for the changes we'd like to see in our contract. They will often bring that change article by article. We'll talk at each session about a different article and why they 00:38:00propose these changes, and they could be changes to the compensation mechanism. They could be changes in terms of this year we're bargaining even for things like each workplace, each physical workplace, should have access to a gender-neutral restroom. We're including things like childcare. There are people who will 2 years ahead of enrolling in OSU they'll be calling to get on the waiting list for childcare because it's so limited. The students who don't know 2 years ahead of time that they're going to have a kid while going to grad school. How do they support themselves, so we heard some pretty heart-wrenching testimonies of the sacrifices people have made to care for their children while trying to achieve a graduate degree and simultaneously being an imperative member of the workforce that makes OSU function. Yeah, our current president's 00:39:00salary is 365 times ours. In other words, we will work for an entire year, I'm sorry, we work for entire month to make what he makes in a day. It's a lot. It's a lot higher than ours. And he's not even the highest paid member of staff. Our football coach makes over $2 million. The allocation of funds that we're seeing here right now, the school continues to cite fiscal responsibility whenever describing changes to the compensation of administrators, they cite competitiveness in the international market, they cite market forces.

It's you change the metric for evaluation depending on whose salary you're 00:40:00talking about and whose benefits you're talking about and that's quite problematic. Bargaining will involve us sitting at the table. It will involve us bringing these articles. Then it involves the schools' representatives coming back with counter proposals and back and forth until we come to an agreement on something that we can mutually accept. There's a period of time, there's a limited time during which this process has to take place. We have 10 bargaining sessions. After the end of the 10th session there's a period of time where they're able to give us a final offer. If it is not satisfactory to our collective membership and we don't vote to approve that then there is the legal potential for a strike after a cooling off period. That's really the-solidarity 00:41:00and the credible threat of strike are the only strength the underlings have in a large institution where the power comes from the top. It's obviously not something anybody ever wants to be forced to do but it's the one tool that a collective of workers at the lowest levels are able to wield to actually be recognized and to be compensated appropriately to the value they bring to the institution.

EB: Can you speak to the need for healthcare and housing among graduate employees?

FV: Absolutely. We do have a fairly comprehensive healthcare that we've bargained for in previous years and that OSU now honors. But it is lacking. If we did not have this healthcare in the first place, and keep in mind we have it not because of the goodness of the hearts of administrators but because of 00:42:00hard-won efforts of bargaining teams from years past. If we didn't have this, the number of individuals who could potentially lose all opportunity to complete their graduate degree would be high. Our union has had up to this point we currently are trying to figure out the funds to continued this endeavor. We have something called a hardship fund. Do you want to me to turn this on? Would that help? [Turns on lamp]

EB: Sure.

FV: Okay. It's getting dark out. Thank you Oregon. We had this thing called a hardship fund. The idea is we took a bunch of our membership dues and put them into an emergency fund for our colleagues, our classmates, who are experiencing life crisis. When you are paid at the level that a graduate employee is paid, you are at any given moment one bad month away from houselessness. We can't 00:43:00assume, if one has lived a life where they have the benefit of a support network and a loving family who has the resources to help them, or somebody who has a partner with health insurance that they can fall back on, then their experience might be different. But for a lot of our colleagues, they're struggling on their own. They're struggling to raise a family. They're trying to pay rent that's over the price of what they're making. They're taking out loans and living in debt. One major car expense, or one broken ankle can put them into a place where they can no longer pursue their studies, where paying of that debt it becomes necessary to drop out of school and take a different tact in life. We have been able to avert a number of those crises. There is an anonymous process by which 00:44:00our union accepts requests for money from this hardship fund and then a secret committee that rotates each term reads those anonymized requests and issues funds to people and they're not a loan. They're a grant to get them out of the hole and back where they don't have to panic about paying off a loan. After the fact people are encouraged, if something was able to help them, they're encouraged to share testimony of how it helped them or what their circumstances were and several people have come forward and expressed these were situations that were a make it or break it moment in their life. They had a medical emergency. They had major, somebody stole their car and wrecked it.

Different things like this where the debt that they incurred to get out of that 00:45:00situation were such that they were going to have to drop graduate school and give up on their dreams. This $500, $1000 dollars that we were able to give them changed their life completely. Just knowing that there's that many of us of our colleagues. There's a few thousand of us working here at the school and that so many-and we've never been able to issue all the funds that are requested, obviously, but we were able to help some people. Knowing that I'm really proud of us. I'm really proud of the solidarity we have as a group of graduate employees. But then when we look at the fiscal austerity measures that are being used to validate the so-called benefits, the benefits that are given to graduate employees and compensation they provide to the university it could very, very easily shift. If we just capped administrator salaries at the highest possible 00:46:00salary that a professor has ever made it would free up $8 million a year to put back into achieving equality of life of all people who help the school run. It could go back into keeping us from having to continue to raise tuition for all undergraduate and graduate students who are getting further and further strapped to achieve simple education. This is part of a petition that we've actually started this year to accompany our bargaining to cap those salaries where slightly above what the highest rate is that any professor has ever made and to free those funds up to make this a more equitable institution where nobody is one bad month away from houselessness.

EB: Have you known anybody who has become houseless?

FV: Yes, I have two friends who have at one point or another during their 00:47:00graduate experience been houseless and those are the people I know who have been open with their stories, it is possible I know more. One of them lived out of her car and availed herself of showers and friends house or places she was able to access at different points in time. Did all this while being an employee of the school, while teaching classes for OSU. And just to know that was her experience because she had expenses, she had expenses from moving here, she had to then also come up with not just this months rent, but first and last months deposit, it wasn't possible for her to find housing and that was the reality of 00:48:00her life and just to know when show up in class the instructor who is stepping in and giving you their all and being there for you, being there for all forty of you and delivering your material with a smile on your face and loving you and supporting you, that when they walk out of the classroom they don't have a roof over their head. I think its something that people don't recognize or realize that that is possible you know being houseless doesn't necessarily mean sitting outside the post office holding a sign. It can mean showing up to work everyday, clean and dressed, but the effort to get there was a hundred times what it is for you and I walking out of our apartment in the morning with a nice clean shower and warm breakfast in our stomach. And that she was able to stick it out and make it through that experience and now she does have a roof over her head but it will be quite a while before she can be in a situation to live a 00:49:00comfortable life. These are real people that I know and love and now also dedicate themselves to helping us collectively achieve a situation which no one else will have to have that experience themselves.

EB: Do you believe there's a housing problem in Corvallis in general?

FV: I believe there's a house pricing problem in Corvallis. There was recently a study published on the major sources of income in Benton County and the majority of people in the upper income brackets in Benton County their money basically comes from investments in real estate. It implies that he majority of a resource that is essential for everybody to live is in the hands of a very powerful few who are standing to profit a great deal off of it. That's a values issue.

It's also I think on a practical level it's a social, even if you don't share a 00:50:00value system that says everybody deserves to wake up in the morning and not be stressed about the very, very basic things in their day, even if we don't share that, even from a strictly economic perspective for a very, very small number of people in this community to be benefiting on the hardship of a vast number isn't good for our community as a whole. It's not good for safety. It's not good for economic advancement. It's certainly not creating people who can patronize local businesses or have the peace of mind to be able to dedicate themselves to working on social projects. I do have a roof over my head and I have a partner who shares the expenses of living. I'm able to go to once a week to Habitat for Humanity and give of myself to my community. If I was struggling every single 00:51:00day in a way that a lot of my colleagues are, that wouldn't be an option for me. From a community perspective, even outside of a strictly moral lens, we have a problem.

EB: During bargaining has the university stated how they expect graduate students to pay for the housing they're building?

FV: I don't think that's been explicitly stated. No, there is certainly the implication that part of going through school is the expectation of taking out loans. If we didn't have such a terrifying and exploitative national situation around student loans, then that might be a realistic situation, but most of the people making these statements. Most people sitting at the bargaining table graduated from the university at a time when working part time as a sales staff 00:52:00at a retail store or a serving staff at a restaurant could actually put you through college without loans. It's a very different world today than the world that they're probably looking back on and remembering. But it's not that hard to look around them, see the facts, read the data, and recognize that it's different. I think that is the responsibility.

EB: What is it like to sit in that bargaining room and listen to people tell their stories?

FV: Listening to our colleagues, there are tears. There are tears around the room. It's powerful. A lot of them evoke a sense of helplessness. Some of them, especially those who are testifying about having been assisted by the hardship fund, fill you with a sense of solidarity and warmth and support and joy that we can at least stand up and look out for one another in some capacity. The hardest thing about listening to them testify is to look across the bargaining team 00:53:00representing the university whose entire job performance is predicated on how little they can give us and see how little it appears to move them. That's hard. It's hard.

EB: When I visited a CGA meeting I noticed a lot of humor being used to cope with the situation. Could you speak to that?

FV: Yeah, it's been a very interesting year. There's a lot on the table this year. Different members of CGE have come up with different strategies to fill the room with a sense of solidarity. Because sitting, like I described, sitting and listening to the hardships of your colleagues and then listening to the bargaining team across the table, dismiss those and dismiss their importance, 00:54:00dismiss their validity, dismiss us as individuals. It can be demoralizing. The strength of our union is in our solidarity. To help lift one another up and make it easier to sit in that room different people have come up with everything from bargaining bingo to different chants and songs and exercises we can do during caucusing moments to raise each other's spirits. Signs and actually at today's bargaining session everybody was provided with paper and markers and clipboards in case they wanted to make their immediate feelings known whenever something was said and so people were making their own little mini signs and holding them up and there was this constant flurry of people showing support for one another's testimony or showing the points the bargaining team was making, or expressing to the OSU bargaining team how their responses were making them feel.

Everything from I can't understand how you can be so heartless to I want a better OSU, why don't you? What you've just said makes me sad, causes me pain. These were the kinds of signs people were lifting up. It's good to feel when you're in that room to use some of these mechanisms, like the humor, to help one another not feel so crushed and not feel so heartless in a situation where the tables, it's not a level playing field. The word bargaining is a bit of a tricky words because it implies that there's two parties on equal footing achieving a mutually desirable outcome. But the reality of a union bargaining against an institution is that the institution has the power and really the only genuine 00:56:00power that we wield is the credible threat of strike. Its not the person with the best argument at the table who wins at the end of the day. It's those who can show that they have the solidarity to back up their requests. We're constantly working to build and maintain that solidarity among our colleagues. A union is a group. It's not a hierarchical organization. In fact, our hierarchy is the opposite of a typical hierarchical pyramid. We have staff who are accountable to all of us. We have executive council who accountable to the stewards, and the stewards who are accountable to the entire membership. Whenever there's a major decision to be made, it's not made by executive counsel, it's made by the membership as a whole. Everything that we do, we do on behalf of our colleagues as a whole. We operate as a body. We are individuals 00:57:00with individual needs, but when we come together to bargain and when we come together to create collective action we do it as a single body.

EB: Going back to something you said, could you describe bargaining bingo for me?

FV: Bargaining bingo was cute. It was your typical bingo board and it had spots for mention of different articles that we might be discussing during bargaining. It had spots for things that you'll typically see at different bargaining sessions, like the finger snapping to show support for one another or in cases there might have been some snarky mentions of common phrases that are used by members of the OSU bargaining team to diminish or to dismiss us. It was a chance for anybody sitting in the room and participating and watching this bargaining session unfold to joke around with one another to fill out this bingo card to potentially win a prize. It was just one little thing to add some fun to the 00:58:00room. I enjoyed it.

EB: You have held many leadership and community service positions in Corvallis. Looking at your resume I see that you are a vice chair for YouCAN Corvallis.

FV: Right up until very recently, yes.

EB: Yes. A team member of the Corvallis Sustainability Coalition?

FV: Waste Prevention Action Team, yeah.

EB: And a few other things. Would you like to talk about?

FV: Yeah, when I first moved here and I wasn't yet a student and I wasn't yet employed, it was my goal to immediately feel like I had some connection to this community and to start to build a sense of community around myself. I stuck my 00:59:00neck out right away and the first organization that I got involved in was sustainability coalition that has a lot of action teams that are individuals that do different, they either work together or they perform individual volunteer activities to support sustainability across the community. With the Waste Prevention Action Team I'm a block captain, which just means that on a every few months' basis I'll distribute information to my neighbors, to a 100 different neighbors, on recycling and reuse and waste minimization endeavors and what tools we have available to us. With the Youth Climate Action Now group, which I've been involved in for a few years, it's a wonderful organization.

It's a subgroup of our children's trust, which seeks legal outcomes, or legal actions to promote a climate secure future and it's led entirely by children, or 01:00:00youth. Our local chapter was begun by a middle schooler who reached out to see if we could create a local chapter and then it has bulked out with a lot of high schoolers who are being very, very active. They have written a climate recovery ordinance and presented it to the city council. They are currently working on a business resource recovery ordinance that's going to mandate that the city provide recycling services to all businesses and composting services... mandate that any business producing organic waste operating a food business above a certain scale be required to compost their organic waste. They've done a ton of research looking into precedents in other communities, meeting people from different communities, learning how to draft legislation, sitting down with city representatives, attending council meetings and attending working group meetings 01:01:00for committees or working groups that operate in the city and it just absolutely blows my mind. My role as a support member of that group was really just to give these students the resources they need to achieve what they're basically doing on their own. They're doing an amazing job. I also work with Benton Habitat for Humanity, which I absolutely love. I go there, like I said, at least once a week. I work in the restore helping the restore to make money to build houses for local people. Actually they testified today too. One of the administers of Benton Habitat of Humanity testified in support of our housing initiative that we're bringing forward in bargaining. We have the support of some people who really know what they're talking about when it comes to housing affordability 01:02:00and housing access.

EB: Could you talk more about this housing initiative?

FV: Yes, I wasn't able to sit inside the bargaining session today because I was performing a different role. Our initiative is to achieve investment in housing for graduate students including stipends that assist them with actually achieving their housing goals but also if we're producing new structures, new housing structures that they be within the budget, that the expected going rate for those houses be within the budget of our employees, our graduate employees. Because the math is absurd to think that you would produce a structure knowing that your anticipated price is going to be above the pay you issue the people you expect to live there. A financial analyst would say at any point in your 01:03:00life your rent should be no more than 30% of your income. If your rent is more than 100% of your income and the institution is providing that, it's unconscionable.

EB: Sustainability is very important to you, as we've seen in this interview, what does the word sustainability mean to you personally and how do you incorporate that philosophy in different parts of your life?

FV: I am so glad you said that, because that was one of the big shockers when I first went to grad school to study sustainability. The big shocker to me was that we didn't all see that word the same way. That wouldn't be a shocker today because it's been appropriated and green washed, et cetera. The first time I heard the word what it meant to me then and what it still means to me today is 01:04:00the ability to create a circumstances in which we're not depleting the ability to the earth to continue its fundamental cycles in support of the existing biota on earth and that we're not systematically undermining one another's ability to live a fulfilling life. Actually I would say that if you were looking for a book definition, the way I interpret sustainability, I would go with Karl-Henrik Robért from the 1970s has a publication and a movement called The Natural Step. He says that any sustainable system. He has basically four system principles, a sustainable system doesn't systematically accumulate extracted materials from the earth's crust.

It doesn't systematically degrade ecosystems, systematically accumulate 01:05:00pollutants and it doesn't systematically affect our people's ability to meet their needs. These four system principles if they apply to a situation then you can call it sustainable. If they don't apply to the situation, it is not being sustainable. I like them because they're a binary measure. You can say it is or it isn't doing this. It stops being this, oh I don't know which way do I feel about this? What was interesting when I first sat down with a whole bunch of people who had signed up with me for a program in sustainable development I came to realize that both the word sustainable and the word development we even saw differently. Then I think about in music when you see a note that should be sustained, it just means extended for a period of time. It doesn't 01:06:00necessarily-that singer's clearly not going to sustain that note for the end of the time. Some people are able to interpret this in a way that's mechanisms for carrying us further forward as opposed to a absolutist view like I have that we shouldn't be doing anything that's going to cut off our ability to keep going at any point in time.

There is a philosophy called technological optimism that would say that it's okay for us to be planning for things that are going to simply reduce harm as opposed to achieve sustainability because probably we'll innovate some solution that's going to fix this at some point in time. I would say that even if we're just going with the Hardy-Weinberg principle, let's err on the side of nah let's just make sure we're not actually going to destroy the earth. Because hoping and 01:07:00expecting based on the way that innovations have taken place in the past and the rate at which innovations have taken place I don't think it pertains to innovations that are going to stop us from climate catastrophe or other ecological catastrophe, especially since at the moment and for as long as human society, at least as long as colonial society has dominated the globe, there is never a profit outcome in something that creates a collective good for the environment. If it doesn't enrich an individual, it tends not to be something that grows and then strengths itself with time. These are all things that come out of altruism and seeing us all as in the same boat together and I think you 01:08:00have to be very optimistic to believe that we're ever going to get to a place where capitalist principles and enterprises are going to solve collective issues around environmental challenges. I think that answers your question. I'm went on a huge, huge rant on a different direction there.

EB: In your day-to-day life, also, how do you incorporate sustainability?

FV: I try very hard on a personal level to minimize my impact. I minimize purchases. I use things as long as I can. But I think it's very, very common and it's especially popular actually even for corporate messaging to keep putting the onus of sustainability on the individual when a lot of the choices we make are constrained by the market we live in. I could choose "zero waste" lifestyle, 01:09:00but the impacts of my purchases go beyond the packaging they come in. The impacts of my transportation-if I choose to ride a bicycle everywhere, which I do as often as I can, obviously, it isn't going to solve the systemic problem that we have a whole society predicated on automobiles. When I say how do I do this in my daily life, I'm actively involved in dialogue outside of my home life about creating these systemic changes. I'm actively involved in organizations that work towards creating a different future and promoting different ideals and so I do, I eat a vegetarian diet. I bicycle as often as I can.

I make purchases mostly based on whether they were produced sustainably, whether 01:10:00people and the environment were exploited in the process, but all of my choices that I make within that realm are entirely kind of what we call the illusion of choice. It looks like I have choice but unless the system of capitalism and the system of product production for mass consumption changes and until the pricing schemes around environmental damage and the externalities that are permitted and the cheap price of goods are addressed, my personal choices at home are not what's going to fix the problem. I wouldn't use that as an excuse not to act ethically on those many, many parameters, but I also won't let myself live in the illusion that that's all I need to do.

EB: Recently OSU implemented paper straws. How do you feel about OSU's push 01:11:00towards sustainability? Do you feel they're operating sustainably?

FV: They're definitely not. That's, again, they exist as part of a larger system that's fundamentally flawed. Things like paper straws are a great example of something that is very noticeable and very sparkly and very binary. You can put your finger on it. Here's a thing we did. There's nothing wrong with that. I would never say that they shouldn't do that. But it should be part of a portfolio of activities that include much, much larger scale changes. For example, divesting all of our investments that the university holds. The university endowment, millions and millions of dollars, divesting that from any fossil fuels, divesting that from any weapons companies is one of the first 01:12:00places we should go, because they are taking the capitol that the institution has and that is directly contributing to the perpetuation of situations that are systematically undermining the future livelihoods, the future environment of the students we're supposedly trying to put out into a better future. We should be really revisiting some of these very major aspects of the institution's structure if we're talking about being a genuinely sustainable institution. Paper straws are a beautiful thing, but they are a grain of sand on the beach of what we need to do.

EB: On a lighter note, you have a wide range of hobbies. Which do you feel are 01:13:00important to your story?

FV: Oh gosh. I guess my story is I'm sort of a compulsive doer of things with my hands. All of my volunteer activities, I usually tend to fit them into a framework of something that allows me to work with my hands. I end up sitting at a desk a whole lot being a graduate student and even teaching. I do spend a lot of time at a desk. I really, really love to renovate homes and do construction work. I like to knit. I love rewiring and building custom lamps and lighting. I love the sew and to quilt. They're all just little pieces of who I am and just I like to make and produce objects and like to give them away to people. I don't know. I mean it's definitely it's a part of who I am. I don't know how everything interfaces with one another. I am a weird little village. We all are. 01:14:00I don't know what roles those play. I actually haven't ever sat down to investigate or evaluate how those interplay with one another. It's an interesting question for me to take home and think about.

EB: It sounds like you enjoy a lot of domestic activities. How do you feel about gender?

FV: Thank you for asking that. I'm obviously a feminist and a devout one. I also have a friend who taught me a great deal. She's actually one of my knitting mentors whose lifelong dream was to be a mother and to homeschool her child. She was unfortunately in an academic realm.

She achieved a master's degree but had a professor who asked everybody why they 01:15:00were here pursuing their degrees and she said because I want to someday be a mother. I'd like to be able to homeschool my children and support their education. She said oh, so you're just here to waste all of our time, then. This friend pointed out, she said the whole point of feminism is we should be able to make these choices with agency and they shouldn't be made for us. I have a great deal of respect for women who want to perform a domestic role in what would be considered in line with traditional history of the American, colonial-American gender roles. In exactly the same way that there should be men and nonbinary people who have the same aspiration and should be equally able to make that choice with their partner. I personally don't have a desire to raise a family. I 01:16:00have a desire to have a bunch of annoying animals around me and to spend my time working with other people's children through the educational field. Without gender equity that wouldn't be my choice to make. So, I'm a radical feminist in believing that we all should have the same agency, that we should all be compensated equally for our work. Just because somebody does or doesn't have a uterus or the capacity or likelihood of bearing young shouldn't affect how we are compensated or valued at our institutions. I think also the phenomenon of what's called situated expertise is that those of us living in different bodies and different outwards presentations achieve a very, very different, I mean we experience a very different life experience and therefore we bring to the table 01:17:00very different perspectives and without all those perspectives at a decision-making table the decisions are going to fail some segments of society or some segments of the academic institution. So, we need equal representation across the board of the different spectrum of sexes and genders. This is my very, very powerful belief about the world and that's where I, I see that obviously we all, feminism should be the default. You shouldn't have to say I'm a feminist. You should just say I'm a person or I'm a bad person, you know?

EB: Have you ever felt that you're limited by your gender or that, have you ever felt discriminated against?

FV: Oh yes. I'm sure anybody in a female-presenting body has a story about that. It could go all the way back to high school where I was the first woman in 10 01:18:00years to take the automotive technology class because it sounded really interesting and we had this trade program at the school and I thought this sounds like a skill I could really use and what's so interesting, though, to me while it was a super hostile environment for me to be in, how little I gave that stock at the time and how little I read that as something that was shaping my personal experience and how many years it took me after high school to realize how different my learning experience would have been if I didn't have to walk in there every day to prove myself with this huge chip on my shoulder. I used to tell stories about the time that somebody pulled in an old vehicle and they said let's put this up on the lift and let's look at it, and one of these guys went sauntering up to it, saw that it was a stick shift, realized he couldn't drive stick shift, and went let's see the girl do it! To deflect it from himself.

I was fortunately able to drive stick shift but that was sort of the shape of my experience. Every day was having to prove to them that I was worthy of being in that space. That's probably one of the more aggressive and overt versions of this, but I've definitely working in the natural resources field and working in technology and engineering or infrastructure, even renovating my own houses and spending an awful lot of time in hardware stores, there's sort of a perpetual and very passive and sometimes active undercurrent of you're not in a space that's made for you. The space was not designed to be your space. You either have to carve your place out in this space or you have to be fight to be recognized as a valid occupant of this space. That's shaped me in a big way and 01:20:00I mean I'm happy with who I am, where I am. I would hope that future generations of women and female-presenting people don't have to have that same experience.

EB: Finally, is there anything else you wish I would have asked or would like to add to this interview?

FV: I don't know. I'm happy that I'm here and I'm really glad you did this. This was really fun. It's fun to know you. I'm glad that you picked me. I can't think anything I desperately want to tell people about myself. I don't think that's my place to decide.

EB: Well, thank you so much.

FV: Thank you.

EB: We can end here.