Stella Coakley Oral History Interview, May 20, 2019

CHRIS PETERSEN: Today is May 20, 2019 and we are in Strand Agricultural Hall with Stella Coakley, emeritus Dean in Ag[ricultural] Sciences.

STELLA COAKLEY: Associate Dean.

CP: Associate Dean. And faculty member in botany and plant pathology. And we'll talk to her a lot about her OSU experiences and the path that she took to OSU and we'll begin at the beginning and I'll ask you where were you born?

SC: I was born in Modesto, California, on September 1, 1947, which was quite ironically a Labor Day, a Monday. That made my arrival somewhat special in the midst of peach harvest season. I am the youngest of 4 daughters. My immediate next-older sister died when she was 5, and I would have been 4, of what now we believe to have been Reye's syndrome, so I grew up as the youngest of 3, but 00:01:00certainly her early death had a profound impact on my life in the longer view. It was a working farm, and I worked from the time I was old enough to do something useful, which would have probably been about 5. Earliest memories became boysenberries with my grandmother's assist, learning how to use both hands, not just one, and then grading peaches as I got older, and then my father being very innovative and creative moved into truck crops, deciding to grow tomatoes under semi-cover. Totally innovative. This would have been in the early '60s at a time when greenhouses and greenhouse production was pretty much non-existent in California. The San Joaquin Valley is still a variable 00:02:00agricultural production area, so I grew up with pretty intense agriculture around our farm. My father's moving into truck crops created a retail direct to public market about a mile from our house and that became my project and my responsibility starting about age 11, which in this day and age is hard to conceive of doing what we did at that point in time. We also marketed through what were called farmer's markets but were not really farmer's markets for the most part.

Up in Roseville, California, and then after I went off to college, they actually developed an honest-to-goodness farmer's market in Modesto, which he then was 00:03:00able to utilize, made it very convenient. But they moved the retail business, home-to-the-farm, when I went off to college, so it was sort of a transitional. Not surprisingly, being involved in the agriculture, I founded an interest in my father always as he was innovating was finding a host of questions and things that needed answers and got help from local extension service and in California they're a very developed system and UC Davis was not too far away. When I was at Modesto Junior College one of the requirements was that you take a six-weeks orientation class to figure out what you were good at or would be good at, and part of the six-week class was to find a future profession.

That led me to the library where the University of California had developed effectively a file cabinet full of majors and campuses that offered the majors. I started flipping through things. I took an introductory course in plant pathology at the junior college but I really found plant pathology in the file cabinet in the junior college library. At that point in time, the junior colleges had tracks that led either to the University of California system or to the what was then California State system depending on what your interests were. So, if you wanted to be a teacher you would probably go to a Cal State and if you wanted to go on and weren't sure what you were going to do in the longer 00:05:00term, then going to University of California campus was a choice.

My mother had gone to University of California Berkeley back in the '30s, so she had been a trailblazer herself in terms of women in education and had a lifetime credential for primary through secondary as a teaching, not something they offered all that many years later, but it's interesting that, having created the program, they honored the program. My father was effectively his family blown out of Oklahoma during the dust bowl years and ended up in California and he ended up staying, met my mother, they married. He and his mother stayed. His brother and their family went back to Oklahoma.

I grew up as the daughter of an Okie, which is an interesting experience in 00:06:00itself, probably not even vaguely understood when I was growing up. I grew up in a rural community. Primary activities, besides working on the farm, would've been school and attending the local church was an important piece of growing up. My mother's family had homesteaded what was in fact the farm I grew up on. At a point, it was probably a quarter of a homestead, so it was divided between my mother and her siblings, each getting 10 acres, but my parents purchased some additional acreage from the sister and I'm not quite sure, ended up with 22 ¼ acres. I'm surrounded by my mother's relatives on each side and across the 00:07:00street. Everyone was farming at that point in time.

So, the aunt immediately next door had four sons, three of whom had Ph.D.s and one of which had an M.D., so there was lots of education and doing this was not that unusual. My father's advice was to get as much education as I could get, which would increase the chances of my telling someone else what to do rather than them telling me what to do. My middle sister, who is an attorney, had a very different interpretation than I had of what he met by getting as much education as one can. I don't know, I doubt that my father, nor did I, have any 00:08:00concept of what in fact that would lead to, but from his perspective having me tied-into agricultural sciences and into science at UC Davis proved to be really, really helpful for the years ahead because he came up with some pretty unique kinds of questions and scientists love unique questions, and there was always someone to ask if help was needed. So that served us well. I finished the two years at Modesto knowing almost from the beginning that I would transfer to UC Davis.

CP: Can I ask you-you mentioned the experience of growing up with a father who was an Okie. How did that manifest? You said it was a unique experience in and of itself. Was there a social stigma associated with that?

SC: There probably was in an odd way. On the other hand, my mother was older, 00:09:00which in itself was different in that generation. She didn't marry nor have children until her 30s, which at that point in time was probably at least 10 years later than any of my friends' parents. My father, though, was also very much an activist in regards to, well, I suppose having been labeled or called a communist when he was... he became politically involved and served one term as a county supervisor, but he was not particularly popular with your traditional, old-school "this is how we do it."

He was definitely not short to point out activities that were not appropriate or, well, frankly illegal or inappropriate for elected officials or for the county to do. His life was threatened for his activities and he was scrupulously honest and not willing to look the other way when he could've gotten along just fine. He had many good friends but there were those that did not find his approach to things their approach. He served a single four-year term and then not surprisingly was voted out by a huge effort to get him out because he was way too, I suppose you could say, way too much a socialist, liberal to suit them.

My mother came out of a family of very conservative, typical republican 00:11:00backgrounds, but my father insisted, and as I was growing up, I worked both sides of the political table in terms of activities very common in rural areas to do: poll-watching and vote calling and get out the vote and campaigning for candidates, although I can't recall ever campaigning for a republican candidate. I certainly did lots of political assists on the... because my mother was registered as republican and my father didn't want her to change her registration. It was one of those things. You never understand these things necessarily. I think the gift of... I mean my father's gift to me as well as to many who knew him was all the things that I have described him, which an 00:12:00extremely hard-working individual but very appreciative of the opportunity to farm and to be able to work hard even though it was a hard, that's not an easy life let's just put it that way.

When I was in college my sisters being older were out and both at the time, well I was married as well, so that would've put me clear in graduate school, but the farm was really getting to a point where they were going to lose the farm if there wasn't help with covering some loans that were coming due. Fortunately, we were collectively in a position to effectively buy the farm for the price of the loans and give them life tenancy which allowed my father, he farmed up until he 00:13:00was 87 and grew his tomatoes until 87 and then passed away at 89. But my mother lived to be eight days past 100, and my sisters were successful in making it possible for her to stay at home or with them. A nice heritage. A nice family heritage there.

CP: Was science something that intrigued you at all as a girl?

SC: Clearly it did. My mother was very, and perhaps this had something to do with her nephews and as well as having gone to school herself, everyone was into I suppose you could say some version of science. So, yes, there were never any too novel insects or other things. When I went to UC Davis and took my first 00:14:00entomology course my mother was very aiding and abetting in helping me collect bugs for my collection.

CP: It sounds like there was an emphasis on education. Probably going to college was an understanding and Modesto Junior College was accessible, it was...?

SC: Correct. And well, affordable.

CP: Right.

SC: That was four miles away and tuition in those days were next to nothing and so there was never any question, nor was I really ready to go off from a relatively small high school to a very large university at that point in time.

CP: It was a fairly smooth transition, then?

SC: Yes. I missed the quality of teaching that I had had for the most part at 00:15:00the junior college because at that point in time the people who were teaching there, many of who had Ph.D.s had chosen to teach as opposed to do research and so that's why they were there, which means there was more emphasis on teaching than was the case in some of my large undergraduate classes at UC Davis. Clearly, transferring as a junior there weren't a lot, but there were a few that I needed to finish off and the interest in teaching by some of the folks that were more into research was discernable difference.

CP: You were a biology major at Modesto, is that correct?

SC: Correct.

CP: You chose that because?

SC: Because I was interested in biology. I was better in biology than I was in 00:16:00math and physics and chemistry, although I certainly had to do a fair smattering of those subjects. The biology was just of more interest. I was a work study student both at Modesto Junior College and UC Davis in order to pay bills and cover costs and I worked in a zoologist lab assistant copier. It's hard to describe what all, but enough to decide that I was less interested in animals than I was in plants and as I learned more about various areas of science, 00:17:00microbiology was interesting but I was not keen on spending all my time looking at things under microscopes. So, plant pathology, which has many dimensions of microbiology and a lot of other biological sciences, and it was an applied science in that it was pretty much all pathogens that can impact plants, so there are many dimensions. It fit perfectly with the farming challenges that my father was having, in the sense that I could see the connection, the value. That said, I had not even a wild imagination about what would in fact ultimately come from transferring, going to UC Davis, getting an undergraduate degree in plant 00:18:00sciences and then going on in plant pathology. Although that trajectory was defined pretty early on in my college career.

CP: How so?

SC: Because once I found plant pathology as an area and I completed my undergraduate, so what do you do with an undergraduate degree in plant sciences? You either go to work or you keep studying. I had an opportunity to go to work for the man I had been working with as a work study student, but I didn't think I had enough education to get where I might want to go someday, and instead I had an opportunity to go to graduate school on an NSF traineeship and I chose that over going to work as a technician. I could've gone to school part time as 00:19:00a technician and gotten a graduate degree. That was very common at UC Davis at the time to do that but I couldn't see... I guess that just didn't seem like something I wanted to hang around and do and so I decided that I would rather continue than to stop.

CP: That was the motivation then, to continue on to graduate school?

SC: That's a good way to describe it. Yeah, that was motivating.

CP: Tell me about that transition.

SC: UC Davis had probably about 40 graduate students at the time I was there. I was one of two women in the group of 40. I mention this because it was a very different time and place. I had a very major curriculum requirement for all of 00:20:00the graduate students and I had saved a lot of time by having been an undergraduate at Davis and by knowing what it was I was going to study at graduate school. Many of my classmates came from disparately different backgrounds where they had to fill in the basic plant sciences or the biochemistry or the advanced classes that I was able to take care of as an undergraduate. I really had only a year of coursework left of graduate courses that I needed to take when I started graduate school, so by the end of the first academic year I actually wouldn't have started graduate school until that fall 00:21:00and I worked that summer as a technician, that by the time I finished the courses I was ready to take an oral exam, which was required for master's students and depending on how you did on the exam the department decided whether you could go on for a Ph.D. or whether you needed to do a thesis and finish a master's. So, I passed my exam and I was already by that point had started my research project and I was very fortunate in having effectively a problem with a potential solution proposed handed to me. It was up to me to figure out whether in fact the conjectures about the disease, which was a post-harvest disease of lettuce, and whether one could establish what they thought might be the case 00:22:00really was the major thrust of my thesis. I got lucky and it worked out. I might not have been lucky and my thesis had actually two other dimensions as a fallback for, well, if it doesn't work out one needs to have a body of work about which one can create new knowledge.

CP: The solution that you proposed was in fact useful?

SC: Yes. I was able to demonstrate what caused the post-harvest disease that was showing up in iceberg lettuce after it got shipped to New York and sat for a while and turned out to be not edible. It was caused by a virus. It was caused by a late infection of a virus that was not evident in the fields. This was one more piece of a puzzle that had many other dimensions, so my major professor and 00:23:00others who had worked with lettuce mosaic virus in other expressions were suspicious that maybe this might be a post-harvest expression of a latent, of the virus. But they really had no way of... it's just, you know, it's how most sleuthing is done. This is true often with human diseases, too. You see things and you're not quite sure how to figure it out.

CP: This is a question I'll come back to multiple times over the course of the interview, but was the environment like for you as a woman, as a graduate student, as a Ph.D. candidate during this period of time?

SC: I think it falls into the category of when you take one personality which is actually, I'm pretty severely introverted and pretty no-nonsense. I really had no life outside of my studies. I would say it was perfectly no issue. I think 00:24:00that when you're really novel in a situation, you often skate under the radar of what might be issues for other people. I was fortunate in that regard. Many of my fellow graduate students were married and had children. They weren't all married, but many of them were. I was focusing on my studies and there was I suppose you could say no time to worry about anything. I did have my other graduate advisor question why I wanted to go on to graduate school, but he was 00:25:00fine with it.

He just, I suppose this is a good question to ask someone: Why are you planning to go on? Other than that, he never tried to discourage me from that. One becomes aware of things going on around you. That happened in a big way when I was at the junior college. I learned that there was a fair amount of I suppose you could say, best described as hanky-panky going on around the edges, but that was so far from the world in which I had grown up. Maybe what I learned out of that was professors I think I thought were individuals who had certainly always 00:26:00characters of the highest, whatever, don't ask me why I would think that. Retrospectively, I suppose it only reflects how very naïve I was as someone who had grown up in a very, in many regards, a very conservative environment.

So, one is aware of out there if one were looking for trouble or interested in it, you could go find it. But I was very much, I have to say, treated with total and complete respect and acceptance. I learned subsequently from some of my classmates and who've remained friends forever, I was a highly motivating factor for them to study harder because they didn't really want to be outdone. I don't 00:27:00think it was outdone by a woman as much as outdone just, that. Probably very pivotal too is that my husband, who's an atmospheric scientist, I met him in my second year of graduate school. It would've been the fall I got my master's, so I started my graduate school in the fall of '69 and got my master's in '70 and then continued on for my Ph.D. He was at UC Berkeley in physics and happened to come to Davis for a preliminary orals party and his roommate had friends who were celebrating. That's where I met him. It helped that he was in a field 00:28:00completely different than my own and we were in no way ever going to compete in science. I don't think it mattered to him. That was a non-issue but I had actually gone to school with and been engaged to somebody who was also in plant pathology and although that individual went away to graduate school, and subsequently he was drafted into the Vietnam War, he was always competing. Unfortunately, I was a somewhat better student. So, that didn't work real well. It worked less well for him than for me.

Retrospectively it turned out to be a really good thing that it all ended because clearly it would not have been a good long-term situation. With my 00:29:00husband, who I met in the fall of '70 and married in the fall of '71, that year we were dating from a distance and then the last year we were in graduate school he was riding the bus from Davis to Berkeley. It was a great gift on his part. But he was a theoretical physicist. So, he did not have a lab, did not need to be in a laboratory situation, which I was both in the lab and in the fields, so it made sense to live in Davis. We were there in '71-'72. Then we moved to Colorado in the fall of '72 when he finished his Ph.D. and started a post-doc--a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. This will pop back up as we continue the story. I left Davis in the fall of '72.

CP: Before you finished your Ph.D.?

SC: Before I had finished writing my Ph.D. with a major professor who did not want me to go but with a department head who was also on my committee upon and it was sort of like my major professor said, well, talk to your committee and see what they say, and I can still so distinctly recall Ray Grogan saying to me, you've done plenty. Get it written up. This isn't going to be the most significant thing you do in your career." Which was certainly very good advice on his part. I left for Colorado. My major professor, Robert Campbell was his name, gave me a copy of Strunk and White, which is certainly the most useful 00:31:00little reference book on English writing that was ever produced, and I will hand it to this man for being extremely picky about English and writing because it's certainly turned me into a much better and precise science writer as a result.

The funny things you learn sometimes about your major professors after the fact, and he had finished relatively few graduate students and it was specifically because he was in fact such a picky person. I was so naïve that, he was very helpful to me. He provided me with assistance. He didn't hover, but if I needed help he helped me. I found out it was that I was actually his first Ph.D. 00:32:00student that finished. He was afraid that if I left that I wouldn't. I think maybe he had had an international student or two, but in general there was a reason for his worrying. But I only found that out way after the fact. Which is good. Sometimes it's best not to know.

CP: The move to Colorado was prompted by your husband's post-doc?

SC: Correct.

CP: You move with him, you are finishing your dissertation. What happens? Is there anything that happens simultaneous to that in terms of an appointment? Or is that your main focus?

SC: For the very first time in my life I had unsubscribed time. For fall and winter while I was writing my thesis on one hand I was busy doing all sorts of creative, volunteer things that I never, ever had a chance to do previously. I'd 00:33:00finished my thesis, was signed off on in March of '73, but meanwhile I was like what next? I thought, well, maybe I can teach, maybe get a job at a junior college or university or something as an instructor and buy some time. We only expected to be in Colorado for a year, so it wasn't very long. I sent out letters and interviewed in various places and met the department chair of biological sciences at the University of Denver who responded to my query and I went to meet him and he promptly hired me to teach part-time on a per-course basis. He had two orphaned courses that needed teaching spring term. So, he must 00:34:00have hired me probably in January, thereabouts, knowing that I was going to finish. Actually, I think the thesis was done, but the date is March of '73 because it had to be a quarter, so, it was finished I would guess towards the end of the year.

So, I taught spring term two courses from scratch. Well, the courses were on the books but effectively I was handed the topic of the course. These are non-majors. As a plant scientist, I really was worried that somebody would figure out that I as a plant pathologist that I had a total lack of comprehension of what a non-major having to take, these are students that had to take three natural sciences and they picked according to topics. So, I taught human physiology, which I had never taught, had never studied myself. I only 00:35:00made it halfway through the animal kingdom before I gave up on that side. That said, I was extremely well-trained at UC Davis and I had all the biochemistry. I had all the physiology. It's just applying it to a different system.

CP: Had you done any teaching at Davis?

SC: I was a teaching assistant for two quarters in the introductory plant pathology class which was a condition of my NSF traineeship. This was just sort of progressing. I hadn't done enough teaching to know whether I could teach or not. I had no clue. This was way before anybody was paying attention to training graduate students how to teach. You either learned by observing or doing and I've always said my teaching was built more off of the professors whose talents 00:36:00I did not appreciate then being able to actually emulate those who I did. It's much easier to take negative examples and do something different or better than it is to aspire to be the entertaining, joke-cracking, or otherwise brilliant professor. I got a lot of experience preparing courses because I taught that spring. I was hired to teach in the summer and then I was offered a year's appointment to replace someone going on sabbatical. I ended up teaching a total of, it would've been 7 courses in 6 quarters. So, I learned a lot about course 00:37:00preparation. I did a fair amount of advising. I taught majors, some majors as well, usually as part of a team-teaching prospect. Most of the majors at the University of Denver were headed off to med school and professional school and were seriously competing for and the school had a very good reputation for getting their students into various professional schools. But the non-majors were fun in many regards and I got enough...I think probably the most important thing that came out of my time at Denver was that the department chair who had come relatively recently out of a medical school was extremely encouraging and 00:38:00encouraged me I suppose you could say told me that I really needed to get some research going so that I would later on have a choice about what I did.

I have been forever indebted to Gordon Stone for both his kindness and his wisdom because he could have easily taken advantage of my reasonable abilities in the classroom to have just loaded me up with more teaching or something, and he didn't. My initial efforts to do research was to partner with someone from Colorado State to do some actual bench science, but I was in a building with no autoclave and it's really tough to do, make auger in a pressure cooker, which I actually did. But it was extremely slow and arduous to try to work in a lab 00:39:00situation under the circumstances. Meanwhile, we are living in Boulder and my husband is part of a fellowship program that had a senior fellow, Steven Schneider, who was one of the first individuals to take on the challenges of potential for climate change, which in the '70s was barely being whispered about anywhere. In the mid-'70s was when the supersonic transports were first flying and there was a great deal of concern about ozone layers and other things, and it's really when climate science was beginning to evolve as something different 00:40:00and separate from meteorology.

Actually Steven was a meteorologist not a climate scientist, meteorologist evolving into climate scientist. My husband had gone there because they were trying to add effectively as a center other, as a theoretical physicist he took his theory into studying the impact of clouds on climate and so we became friends with Steven Schneider and he started writing and talking about impact of, well, food security and food supplies and in the early '70s Russia had a winter off the charts in terms of cold and were down to about a month's worth of 00:41:00food supply kind of thing. In the courses of these conversations, and remember this is a meteorologist and not a biologist talking about this, I said, well, you know Steve, it's not just whether the crop freezes and whether the crop dries out and dies it's also the insects and the pathogens that impact the crops which when crops are stressed are more subject to this. We can cite the Irish potato famine as probably the best-known example of an impact of a sequence of very poor or very favorable weather conditions for the pathogen and very unfavorable for the people. Steve said, well, what's known about that? I said, well, primarily the focus in plant pathology is on weather, day-to-day weather, 00:42:00not on long-term weather, climate. And there lay in the opportunity and this seemed much more easy to study records than to make--cook up auger and autoclave in pressure cookers, so I started doing a literature search to try to sort out what might be there that would fit by which time NCAR had decided that they needed to add biologists to their fellows program. I applied for and was accepted as a fellow in 1975 which is the year our oldest daughter was born. I made the transition from University of Denver, I was seven months pregnant in June, the baby was born in August, and meanwhile Steve and I are conjuring up 00:43:00papers. He gets a speaking engagement for my annual plant pathology meeting which is in Texas, and I'm not going because I am in fact almost 9-months pregnant at this point in time and so Steve delivers the paper, but that's the beginning of the climate change research.

The tie to Oregon was happenchance [sic], because when I started looking for crops and diseases I wanted a crop that was important in the food supply, so that means wheat, corn, rice-not enough rice grown in the U.S., so wheat really. Then you have to have a disease that looks like it may have been in fact impacted by long-term change. Stripe rust on wheat in the Pacific Northwest fell out of my review of the literature and fortunately there were scientists. There 00:44:00was Robert Powelson at OSU who had long worked with stripe rust and he had a lot of records that were available for me and there were people and up at Washington State and also a, perhaps the most helpful was a USDA scientist who had long worked with stripe rust. One of Bob Powelson's students, Greg Shaner, who went on to Purdue after he graduated from OSU who had worked on stripe rust as a graduate student and then subsequently became a collaborator for my work on septoria. I'm spinning this around. When I worked on strip rust and climate change in Oregon I had actually only set foot once in Oregon at that point in time.

This was all done with data and data analysis from afar. My fellowship which I stretched over about 18 months then led to the first NSF successful grant with climate dynamics and there again somewhat unusual path because biologists being funded by atmospheric sciences director at NSF was a unique place and time. I worked part-time and as I added daughters number two and three, even more part time. I used the grant money primarily to support a research assistant who worked, did the computer computational bio-statistical side of the project. It 00:46:00worked out very well.

CP: Was your academic home still NCAR? Or did you move to the University of Denver at that point?

SC: No, I stayed at NCAR through my fellowship but it's not an academic institution. So, to be there as a longer-term visitor, which I became, I needed an academic home. I went back to the University of Denver initially as an adjunct, but Gordon Stone had envisioned, and not just because of me but he had seen the research professorial approach work at the medical school, so he thought it would be a good addition at the University of Denver which had a relatively small group of biologists. Because if you have people who can do research and get grants and bring in overhead, then you have additional expertise for training graduate students so it's a very nice model. I might say 00:47:00I brought that with me when I came here in terms of what can be done with research professors. As he had completed the process of creating the series, then I was appointed as an associate research professor, which is what my status was when I applied for the position at Oregon.

CP: You essentially had money that you needed to park somewhere. That's what it sounds like. You applied for this grant when you're at NCAR then you need to find a different academic home. You had the grant in hand. You had three little kids.

SC: I only actually one at that point, but...

CP: A highly unorthodox situation.

SC: Well, I've had a pretty a-traditional path, but it was more out of I didn't have a roadmap but I am an opportunist, I suppose, best described to see the 00:48:00opportunities given to me and then making the best out of them and the advantage of taking the path I took was that one can't help but learn a lot of lessons along the way, which have served me well I suppose you could say.

CP: Tell me more about this period of time. You said you had the funds to hire a graduate student who is doing computational statistics?

SC: I actually hired a bachelor's...

CP: Okay.

SC: I had several over the years I was there with the grants to do the, mainly, this is a time in which computer computation was done on Cray computers with card decks and printouts that were humongous, anyway. I studied enough, whatever, what it was written in, I wouldn't be able to tell you, but in the 00:49:00very early days of computing, that was definitely not my strong point anyway. So, I needed the expertise to compliment my own. When it came to statistics I could see big mistakes but not anywhere nearly knew enough to actually handle the analysis that needed to be done. So, I hired people who had that expertise. So, this would be bachelor-level.

CP: Is your connection to Oregon strengthening at this point? Or are you still just working with the data at UC ...

SC: I was working on stripe rust primarily but I was working entirely with stripe rust as a model disease. What we were really doing was developing the methodology for how you would take disease data and line it up with meteorological data and find signals among the noise. So, the project was really 00:50:00one of methodology development and that evolved with time. By the time the irony about my coming to Oregon State is that my husband was deciding that maybe he wanted to be at a university as opposed to staying at NCAR. He had a couple of graduate students but they were coming from other institutions to be at NCAR and to do research but he was thinking maybe it would be nice to be at a university. But there are very few universities that have land grants and atmospheric sciences. Oregon State University was one of the few that had both plant pathology and atmospheric sciences on the same campus. That was very limiting in 00:51:00where we might consider going, so when on a total fluke I found out the position was open for department head at Oregon State, which was the Botany and Plant Pathology Department, which was even then an unusual construct, on a long-shot I applied, which was definitely again pretty atypical.

CP: Let's talk a little bit about what your background was at this point. You were at Denver for 11 years, so is that 11 years spent mostly developing the methodology and moving that grant forward? You're not pursuing a typical tenure-track position through all that time.

SC: No, I'm doing research part-time down to, well it was half-time and then it was at third-time. My productivity is reflective of a part-time effort, which I 00:52:00always inserted into my C.V., because otherwise you might say, "What?" However, I was steadily publishing in the best of the places that I could publish with my co-authors and collaborators and I had a solid funding record with NSF and I had taught intensely for the seven quarters had demonstrated I could teach. I also had mentored students. I had not supervised any graduate students but I had run a lab and supervised people. I had accumulated an interesting set of skills. I was also involved, the Department of Biological Sciences had a variety of committees that I had participated in and one of them was set up to spend the 00:53:00money coming back from returned overhead, because at the University of Denver at that point in time most of the returned overhead money came back to the department and then it got used to seed more research, which is the way it should work. So I had done many of the things that one would need to do. What I hadn't done was to move up through the trajectory of a tenure-track position. But as it turned out that didn't matter in the end. But recall that my applying for this job was "let's see." I had never gone through an interview process before because my job at the University of Denver started out as part-time and evolved and that worked. I was one of five candidates. The only woman. There 00:54:00were no inside departmental candidates. The department was not in a very happy place at the time I came. I was so atypical that I had a traction for people that would probably not normally have been interested in atypical. I don't think I would want to know, but I suspect there were bets on how long I was going to last in the position. For good reason, I might say. But, I had learned a lot about faculty and their interactions and their issues.

Because the man who hired me became a very close personal as well as family 00:55:00friend I learned a lot about the underbelly side of academic departments than you normally would if you came up through the ranks of tenure track positions so I got a different perspective. But it again served me well in the long term. Even having interviewed, I wasn't sure I would be able to take the position, in part because it would mean my husband giving up a fairly long-term position to become a research professor himself. This is before dual-career hires were being done or offered in any sense. He was sufficiently good himself that the Dean of 00:56:00Science was keen on him coming even if I didn't.

But it didn't change the difficulty and the generosity of doing what he did, which was to come with and the first year he had substantial amount of research grants that he brought with him. These were NSF funded projects. So NCAR is funded by NSF but there was also additional funding associated with the work there from NASA and other places that he was able to then bring with him. In any case, the first year we were here our youngest daughter was in kindergarten and we were in the process of building a house because there was nothing available that fit our family. Oregon was just coming out of a recession in '88 so he 00:57:00spent that first year keeping tabs on house building, our kindergarten daughter, who was in kindergarten for less hours than she had been in preschool and making all the adjustments to making the move. That's how we ended up at Oregon State.

CP: What did you inherit? Tell me about your initial impressions and the tasks at hand.

SC: I was hired by the Dean of Science who had been here just a couple of years at that point, maybe three years, and a brand-new Dean of Ag Sciences and Experiment Station Director, Roy Arnold and Thayne Dutson came a year before I arrived so these were people who had been at the institution a relatively short time. They were both progressive in terms of and obviously they had just hired their first woman department head. I probably better appreciate that now than I 00:58:00did at the time. Again, I was applying the same thing I had done through my whole career, which was I was just being me and I never let how people responded to me be because of my gender. I say that because not surprisingly there were a fair number of unhappy women Ph.D.s at OSU in various positions that felt they had not gotten fair shakes for one reason or another, which probably very well had been the case. But that said, I came into a department that was huge: 32 tenure-track faculty, 5 of which were off-campus. Those 5 that were off-campus had just been in the process of being slumped into the on-campus units. So, there was a lot of changes going on that I was totally and completely oblivious 00:59:00to. Of those that were on campus the disciplinary spread in the department was very, very broad. All the way from field plant pathology to molecular plant pathology to plant physiology to cellular, molecular, more general to basic botanical taxonomy and botany. It was a wide range. Part of the department's troubled history had been because they had alternated in between having department heads that were all one thing to the exclusion of all else as opposed to having someone who could see the whole picture and I suppose you could say 01:00:00celebrate the diversity rather than attack it. There were some very excellent scientists of all ilks and sizes and at the time I came there were eight assistant professors all looking for positions. There were two associate professors and all the rest were full professors.

That said, the diversity of the department and the disciplinary and the sheer size was an asset not a detriment. It may sound odd, but the reason being is that these all being very reasonable, logical people would take the subject at hand and then figure out where they were as opposed to had there been a smaller number you might have had people line up on two sides of the fence and set out to undermine my somewhat different leadership style. But as it was that never 01:01:00happened in part because there were too many of them and even though there were many allegiances among them, as there always are with faculty, that line always kept moving, and then with the assistant professors they just wanted to be in a department that could embrace and actually appreciate what they had to offer and I have proven to be fairly good at the positive reinforcement side of things and I could do that for everybody, not just the junior faculty.

I think the other aspect is that I have no problems with apologizing and doing better and I try never to make the same mistake twice. I wasn't running on ego that was offended when something I did upset someone. It was just back the 01:02:00drawing board, we'll do this again kind of thing. Five years turned into ten years turned into 15 by which time I was really, I suppose you could say, exhausted more than anything else, but then the opportunity to move to the Dean's Office came up. I had been invited previously to move, I mean to apply and to move but I hadn't had any interest in doing so and then I reached a point in part because the lead was there and the people there were people that I thought I knew I could work with because I had been working with and Roy Arnold had come back from being provost to being our Executive Associate Dean for a few years and Thayne Dutson was still department head and Fred Horne had just moved 01:03:00out of being Dean in Science about the time I was in the process of making my transition. I spent 8 months in Washington, D.C. when my husband wanted to spend time at NASA Greenbelt and I spent quite a bit of time at what is now the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and made a lot of connections there and realized that there were things that I could, and ultimately was able to take into the Dean's Office that was very handy for the college more broadly. Backing up to the department, I think those were all, it was, I enjoyed my job.

CP: I'm curious to know how you organized your thinking and established goals. It's such a big leap to have gone from this very unorthodox background that you had into an administrative position for the first time and inheriting a large department that has all these different needs and interests. How did you develop goals for what was to come?

SC: I think a large part was listening to the people talk about what it was they needed. At the time I came, the department had relatively little structure or written down rules or regulations for anything. This was consistent across the university, so this was not atypical. What the department did have and did very well and have done very well is committing to and mentoring young faculty.

We changed how we did it but they were very committed and the caliber of the faculty of the department and the caliber of the faculty who had been hired were excellent so there was very good material to work from. Then it was a matter of finding out what it was the faculty thought was needed and figuring out how to organize it and move it forward, and selecting, having a process by which an advisory committee was elected by the faculty but then it had representation from the senior faculty, from the associate faculty, from the junior faculty, and then from the instructors. We had several instructors in the department that were long-term instructors, two of which were tenured. You just figure out the representation and then you start working on the issues that needed to be worked on and you let the faculty figure out the committees, the structure, and the graduate training. There were some things that were working very well and other 01:06:00things that needed to be worked on and I suppose you could say do a lot of listening and lot of organizing, putting people in the right direction.

CP: Did you find that administration was something that you took to pretty quickly? That you enjoyed?

SC: I think that by the time I got to OSU I recognized I had talents that could applied in ways that would be helpful. My motivating factor throughout my career has really been to try to make things, help people and make things work. In the research arena that's a little bit different, but still to a large degree in terms of collaborations and I've had many key collaborators because I needed the people who needed the data and the people who do the field experiments. I think 01:07:00that when I came the department wanted a scientist, somebody who could evaluate and obviously mentor and help develop the faculty. They also wanted someone that could do research and I did bench research after I came to OSU, picking a disease that was an increasing problem in Oregon, which were the septoria diseases. But partnering with collaborator Greg Shaner at Purdue and David Royle at Long Ashton Research Station in the United Kingdom, and the three of us worked as a team for several years. I was working also with my research 01:08:00assistant stayed at NCAR when I moved to Oregon but he continued to be involved in the research. We had several more-I can't tell you off the top of the head-but we still had papers and things that were published jointly after I moved to Oregon. In Oregon, Chris Mundt, who is a faculty member in Botany and Plant Pathology and Russ Karow who was then an extension specialist in Crop and Soil Science later became department head but Russ planted my field plots at Hyslop for me and we partnered there and then Chris and I partnered in the supervision of a graduate student as well as in sharing a lab. I knew as a department head that's why I was hired, was to be a department head, not to be a researcher. But I made it work long enough that by the time I completely gave up 01:09:00my research, which would have been probably in about year ten in the department and by the time I moved to the Dean's Office I was pretty much, I mean I was not doing any more new research.

That said, my involvement in the international climate change conversations and the global change efforts kept me on the lecture and meeting circuit up until 2011 when I decided that enough was enough and that I could not balance... it was too much effort and energy to try to stay scientifically relevant against the backdrop of my administrative responsibilities.

But I did hang on for a very long time. To a large part, that was motivation from various colleagues along the way who made it possible and without their collaboration and cooperation it wouldn't have been possible. I will note that they were all male. There were no women faculty at UC Davis. I had wonderful, very few wonderful women instructors as a student anyway, maybe two, one, two? So, I came up through an entirely male-dominated science world and have never felt in any way impinged upon by anyone. I have occasionally... I did meet a 01:11:00couple people at OSU that really didn't know what to make out of me just because I was so novel that somehow I suppose you could say I was so novel as to make them awkward, but that kind of thing has never bothered me. I appreciate...I think I'm pretty intuitive and I spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of things. I think I maybe more appreciate how everyone is a product of their environment, myself included, and that how we are can change if we pay attention and want to change.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who arrive where they are and they're comfortable and they never are inspired to look beyond where they've been and therefore their lives tend to be much narrower and simpler until they're not, 01:12:00but they can get away with that for forever. I look around at the environment that academia is in now back to the academia I was in as a student and you could almost not recognize the rules of the road, which is not bad but along the way there's a lot of collateral damage and sometimes unfortunate things have happened when you're moving so fast you can't really digest the move. I think OSU has been in many regards very fortunate in the leadership that it has had, and I was very fortunate in the people that I have been able to work with and the caliber of individuals. John Byrne was president when I was hired and then 01:13:00Roy was provost for more years than I can recall and he stayed on after John retired. But in addition to John and his pivotal role for the university in which we organized, reorganized and restructured, George Keller was vice president for research and he was a very key individual in my time here. Part of that has to do with an electron microscope facility that we housed for the university and George being in the research office had a vested interest in that.

CP: You were in charge of that facility, correct?

SC: Correct. Well, Al Soldner was the one who ran the facility. Our department was responsible for the facility. That fell into the category of all the things 01:14:00they didn't tell you. If they had told me that I would be crawling around under cabinets in the dead of night during a power outage in Cordley Hall looking for plugs for electrical equipment as part of the job I don't think it would've kept me from taking it, but it would certainly have put a different perspective of it. It's always best not to know some things. One of the things that pops out is the degree of activism and ultimate involvement I've had in campus-wide things but I became an activist for Cordley Hall practically from day one in part because of our unstable electrical supply but that's, I diverge, but I only mention that as a young department head I figured out really fast, that in order to represent the department's best interests, that I needed to look beyond the department.

In that regard, I brought in a very different way of looking at things. Again, I didn't have a traditional way, so I looked around and made acquaintances. There were three very important department heads that were department heads when I came with whom I bonded and we became a foursome that has lasted. There's only three of us left, but has lasted through the years. CJ Wiser, also known as "Bud" Weiser was in Horticulture. Sheldon Ladd was then Crop Science and later became Crop and Soil Science. Ralph Berry was in Entomology. The four of us hit it off and figured out very swiftly that we could individually and collectively do a lot of work on behalf of each other. We had a lot of fun doing it. To some 01:16:00degree I suppose you could say our collaborative interests of the departments was part of what helped evolve the College of Agricultural Sciences under Thayne Dutson's leadership into what is even now I think perhaps one of the most collaborative of colleges on campus in which collaboration is expected as opposed to competition.

The time I came to Oregon State University there was a lot of competition going on between the colleges as well as within the colleges, within the academic units, which was more of a historical but to evolve a group takes time and it took a long time. But it was fun to be a part of. One of the nice things about Oregon State University, which had 12,000 students roughly, it went up, it went 01:17:00down, those early years before it started exploding in numbers after, well, it started increasing with Paul Risser but then really soared with Ed, that it was relatively easy to advocate for and get things done. This is not an institution bound by process. I had a lot of advantages of being here versus... I had a colleague who was department head at Texas A&M overlapping with my being department head here, so I could compare stories. There the college was an entity unto itself and a department head wouldn't think of doing anything beyond 01:18:00the entity of the college, whereas here, and in part I suppose because I was in two colleges and actually had a faculty member also in Forestry so that made three colleges that I had experience with and then with the electron microscope facility, we had several other user colleges so I got to see an angle of the university that very people would've gotten to see.

I didn't become involved in Faculty Senate until many years into my time here and in fact I was accidentally elected to Faculty Senate and I was in College of Sciences. You could choose, but I had come in under the College of Science. I had stayed there. The Dean had a policy of giving you an X number of days to 01:19:00take your name off the ballot before they voted. I was probably gone. I think I was gone, and I failed to take my name off the ballot and I ended up getting elected. I tried to wiggle my way out of it. Fred's comment to me was, oh, it would be a good experience for you. Just don't sign up to any committees. Which it turned out to be, he's right, it turned out to be interesting, but then when it reached the point... I don't actually know how I ended up on the executive committee. It was all very vague at this point in time. I've displaced it with other things. But it was an interesting experience in education and in the 01:20:00process of doing it I learned a lot about the few colleges I didn't already know about it. Liberal Arts would be the prime one, because I had no cause to interface with that college up until the time I got into Faculty Senate leadership. In any case, and that happened to coincide with Ed Ray's coming to campus.

So, he came in 2003 and I was Faculty Senate President-Elect that year, although I was gone half the year because we were in D.C. and 2004 was the year I was president, which was the year I moved to the Dean's Office, and this is an odd university that actually allows administers to be on Faculty Senate and to be their Faculty Senate President. But I was also very fortunate because that is technically a half-time job and when I moved to the Dean's Office that first year I was only half-time as associate Dean so I wasn't trying to juggle a 01:21:00full-time job and do Faculty Senate. So that worked out nicely. Roy was still in the Dean's Office and there were two other Associate Deans at that time. I had a fewer number of things as I was making the transition. By virtue of being on Faculty Senate at that point then when I was past president I ended up on places like the committee that Sabah appointed to decide what to do about university space. That led ultimately to the university space committee, which then I was appointed as chair of. I also served on the search committee, for, well, actually for Sabah, it was a search for provost after Ed came. Then the campus planning committee I had been on for some years. I don't quite even... I don't 01:22:00really know exactly how I ended up there but I stayed on it clear up until about the time I retired. I always found a broader look on life more interesting. I think retrospectively I probably made my life much more complicated than I needed to. But on the other hand, it's who I am. It's fun and I like to fix things. I had lots of opportunity to fix things along the way.

CP: Were there memorable fixes that came out of this campus planning and space committee? Were you heavily involved with that?

SC: Unfortunately, the university space committee, which operated very well and very productively for about five years and then subsequently was disbanded by the provost. I'm not going to go into the why. However, it was a very critical period of time, particularly the work done by our subcommittee which was the 01:23:00university space classroom subcommittee. So, we inherited all the crises created by rapidly growing enrollment in which there were no classrooms to teach in. We were involved in developing a lot of quite useful policy, which may or may not be anywhere anymore but it allowed us to extricate a lot of assigned departmental and college space that was effectively sitting empty because it was being used by individuals and seemed to be owned by individuals. We did a lot of really good work that led to I think really good things. We were very key in Linus Pauling Building and the teaching and having the auditorium there. Getting teaching space into the INTO Building as part of the construction of INTO.

At that point, we were looking for space anywhere we could find it. We helped with the renovation, well, in the design, they were very pivotal in the design of the LINC Building, of the actions of making sure that classrooms were an integral part. There were renovations or other things. We did a lot of space reassignments. I was party to... we had for a very few years a really spectacular space planner by the name of Jean Duffett. Unfortunately, competency at Oregon State University does not always get rewarded, particularly at the administrative level. There was a period of years which I hope are now gone in which we had a lot of churn at the top where there were people in positions 01:25:00hired in from outside that looked to be good fits but weren't.

When you hire people from outside they often bring their helpers along into positions, again, that looked to be good fits but aren't and these are cases in which people have the wherewithal and authority to hire not necessarily checking as carefully as one should. On paper people look really good and they may even be able to interview well, but the truth is if you really checked to find out where they've been and what would be said if you in fact could talk to the people they had in fact supervised or whatever else you would discover that they were not good fits. What goes around comes around, and many of these people came 01:26:00and they are now gone but there was along the way collateral damage of having had people like that here. This space planner was absolutely phenomenal. Worked on behalf of the faculty and units. There was a space reassignment for Weniger Hall that involved 18 signatures. This was negotiated peaceably. It involved a couple other buildings as well. But, by golly, the space got rearranged.

Now, the space committee I think went away after a Dean or two whined excessively about their not getting what they wanted. There was a process but 01:27:00the problem is what they wanted didn't really fit with the larger institutional needs and they were not particularly good sports about understanding that or wanting that. So, with time and also with people changes it was too much trouble to maintain a process that in fact worked but those things do channel around. They circle. It's like when I came in the graduate students in the department were all extremely unhappy about everything and after a couple of years of activism of getting their issues addressed and life calms down then the graduate student organization just sort of disappears until two or three years later they discover that there's something that's not working and they need to get it fixed so they get active again. To some degree, I think institutions are like that. You do things because of a need. Campus planning committee has been an 01:28:00interesting, but I was a good representative for understanding the Ag dimensions of the situation.

CP: Were you in the midst of the capital campaign, the expansion, of all the building on campus? Was that a piece of what was happening with you as well?

SC: The capital campaign was in the silent phase and then Ed was just getting started on that. I certainly helped in the early stages with that. As an Associate Dean and, well, as a department head and even as an Associate Dean I've always considered my development activities to be more passive than active. Now, as retired Associate Dean emeritus and having worked for years with the 01:29:00College of Agricultural Sciences and a group called ER Jackman, worked for that organization for literally 30 years, which is really a friends and alumni major donor group. I have continued to interface with that group and I now sit as a volunteer on their board. I really like to see people put their generosity into things that they value and helping students is usually a pretty good feedback because the students tend to be very grateful and therefore they write nice thank-you letters and like to get to know their donors and the donors feel good about it. It's a natural connection kind of thing. I really enjoy that interface. As an alumni of administration here and my husband we both see the 01:30:00supporting of students as an important thing to do.

So, it's natural in that regard. The only other project since I retired that I've taken on has been my serving on the board of the Agricultural Research Foundation, which is a separate 503(c)(3) [sic] organization closely aligned with the university that serves as a conduit for commodity group money and atypical grants. More importantly we generate off of our endowments about $400-500,000 a year that we put out in small grants to primarily younger faculty through a competitive grants process. That's a fun, fun connection to maintain.

CP: Let's shift back to 2004 when you make the move into the Dean's Office. We talked briefly about it before but give me a sense of how that came about and the transition there.

SC: At that point in time there were three Associate Deans who were responsible for the units across the college. And an Executive Associate Dean and then Thayne Dutson was Dean and having worked with Roy Arnold and Thayne for years I knew I could work with them. Of the department heads, there were one that have moved in 2000, and as I said I had been recruited before to apply for that position and at that point Sheldon Ladd who was in Crop and Soil Science and 01:32:00myself I suppose you could say teamed up to convince one of our fellow department heads that they really needed to apply for the job. They did. That person moved into the college. Then with a pending retirement they decided to hire, they had, so another person retired, so they advertised again so I was convinced by the person retiring that I had to apply. It was just, sort of like, you got to. Along the lines you understand science, you have to apply. I had never really wanted to be an Associate Dean because my view of associate Deans of both colleges had not been particularly what I would call favorable in terms of the nature of the Deans and in part it's because of my atypical being in two 01:33:00colleges and working with two Deans and even though I worked with two Deans, you know, so the Associate Dean Rolf, was sort of like okay, what are these people for, trouble. When they're around.

So, I applied and as did one of my other colleagues who was the department head and so Thayne in his collaborative wisdom and vision decided to hire us both, knowing that I was going to be doing Faculty Senate the next year and he really wanted me, clearly wanted me in the Dean's Office, much more so than I suspect some of my colleagues, particularly my off-campus colleagues, perhaps did. So, I 01:34:00took the position and then we had almost immediately additional turn over. Bill Boggess came to the Dean's Office as the Associate Dean. One of the people retired and then one of the people left. We sort of shook our heads and went basically three is too many. Two is a better number. It made for very thin coverage. So, it ended up when Roy, who was doing the Executive Associate Dean on a half-time basis when he retired, Bill Boggess as an economist was perfectly fit to move into the Executive Associate Dean position and Larry Curtis came into the Dean's Office. Larry had half the units and I had the other half. We 01:35:00had an assistant Dean in the Academic Programs Office. These were different people through time. It was not like it was one single person. That got steadily more manageable. Let's just put it that way.

Then a new Assistant Dean for Extension, for Agricultural Sciences Extension, a new individual there. That came fairly late in my time in the Dean's Office. But Larry and Bill and I worked with Thayne up until 2008 when he retired and then Bill Boggess was interim Dean for a year while we did the search for Sonny Ramaswamy. I was on that search committee. Sonny was unfortunately with us for 01:36:00less than three years before he went off to become director of what became the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which he did a really great job with. I'm glad that he did it. I was really bummed that he left because he had been here such a short time. Fortunately, Sabah chose to appoint Dan Arp as Dean with basically he appointed Dan Arp as Dean, which worked really well for me in that I had hired Dan originally into Botany and Plant Pathology in 1990 so I knew this man and knew him well, and he had been Dean of the Honors College for some number of years. Let's see eight, twelve, four years. Anyway, and he did very well. He moved into and the four of us worked very well together and then I 01:37:00decided I'd had enough and retired in 2015.

CP: Give me a sense of your portfolio during this time period as Associate Dean and some of the standout accomplishments during this time period.

SC: Oh, wow.

CP: It was broad.

SC: One that stands out would be the Marine Mammal Institute which when I came into the Dean's Office and in fact it was one of my first assignments from the Dean. It would've been in 2005. That was not, so the Marine Mammal Institute evolved out of the Marine Mammal Program that was within the coastal Oregon 01:38:00Marine Experiment Station, which is unique in the country, I might say. Bruce Mate wanted a freer standing, more visible institute and he has a substantial donor base that was very interested and they had very substantial, in fact one of the most substantial endowments at the university at that time. So, I was given the charge of figuring out how to do this. So, I had gotten to know Bruce and Mary Lou very well. We've become treasured friends. But the evolution of the creation of the Marine Mammal Institute, which is an institute within the College of Agricultural Sciences because at that point in time the research office wasn't creating new institutes and in fact it's been better off within 01:39:00the college because the college cares about it. The evolution of that and it was really Bruce's pushing for more space and new building that I suppose you could say was an incentive and jump start for what ultimately has become the marine studies initiative, but Ed Ray getting behind the creation of a building at the coast that was to accommodate academic programs in addition to the marine program. When one of the Associate Deans retired in '05 then I inherited a lot of things that person had had, which were all the marine-related fisheries and wildlife programs.

Perhaps the most peculiar achievement was success in getting a federally legislated bill to get the Hermiston Research and Extension Center, get it off of the federal, to get the reverter clause taken off of the station that said if the station is ever not used for research it reverts to the federal government. Now, this might sound like a pretty straightforward thing to do, particularly since the individuals within the federal government all thought this was a perfectly great idea. But the mechanics of doing this proved to be, I think I've 01:41:00lost how many years, but it was probably close to a 7-year effort to successfully do this and to have Greg Walden sign off on the bill with an OSU pen, which Ed Ray thought was really very funny since Greg is really more of a duck than a beaver but he was a good sport about all this and to have the reverter clause removed, so that the station 10, 15, 20 years down the road when it's surrounded by Hermiston could actually sell the land and relocate to a more agriculturally appropriate location. That was the thinking behind wanting to get this off. Assisting the still now director for that station, Phil Hamm, was perhaps one of the most interesting long sagas, got a great deal of help from 01:42:00our current federal relations person to make this happen. She had just come to campus at the time when this needed attention.

I've been involved in so many things. It's hard to say what was from the time of coming to the college because there's also then all the university activities I was engaged with simultaneously. The Food Innovation Center is something that stands out for the College of Agricultural Sciences. Our grantsmanship stands out as well. I spent a lot of my time facilitating research for the younger faculty, in particular, but all faculty. A lot of new hires. With my retirement, 01:43:00I spent the next year and a half developing orientation and mentoring processes at the college level for our new hires, which was something that we knew needed had to be done but nobody had time to do, so that was a good thing to be involved with. It was a fun thing. We joined partnership with extension and extended campus outreach and engagement to partner with a leadership development program for mid-career faculty that's done on an annual, yearly basis. That was a fun project. That was done at the end of my time, sort of as I was phasing out. Spent a lot of time in Washington D.C. with agencies and hill visits and 01:44:00those were things that weren't really popular for folks to go back and do. That was easy for me after 2010 when my middle daughter moved back there to go to law school with her two young children and I started going more regularly and spending longer blocks of time back there but that allowed me to very economically spend time in the city, which proved to be very valuable for the college and for the university.

CP: Tell me about working with Roy Arnold. He's an important figure in the history of this institution.

SC: Yes, he is. So, when I was interviewed to become department head/chair person, since it was different in the two colleges. Roy was Dean. I would've met 01:45:00with him I think probably individually but I also met with him with Thayne Dutson, and probably also the extension director. Probably all three of us were in the room. At some point Roy said to me, and he had come from Nebraska relatively recently but he knew my colleagues, my plant pathology colleagues there, and he offered their names as people I should contact to find out what it would be like to work with him, which blew me away, because that's not usually how people hiring you tend to approach the process with you being interviewed. 01:46:00It certainly was different then the approach by the then-director of extension and the questions that he asked. In any case, that was very memorable. He was always approachable and available and honest and very nice, wry sense of humor. He simply is an extraordinary human being and dispensed a lot of calm in the midst of a lot of chaos often. When he moved to be provost, that was almost immediately, we're talking within two years of when I came-'91, so maybe 01:47:00'93-then there was, again, through an organization I had mentioned before and if you haven't read John Byrne's book it's captured well. It brought back lots of memories when I plowed through that because I served on a fair number of committees that were involved. I think if there was one downside to being the only woman in two colleges as an administrator is that I got asked to do a lot of things that I might have been spared. I recall being placed on a search committee in which I did not think I needed to be on the search committee. It was one more thing kind of thing, but somebody thought that there had to be a woman on the search committee. Back to Roy: just an amazing man who set a really 01:48:00good example as an administrator. I obviously have always enjoyed working with, and I would consider Roy one of my close friends. When he retired, really retired, when he retired from the college he was definitely missed.

CP: I believe it. How did the connection with hosting women agricultural scientists from Africa develop?

SC: Whoa. So, the College of Agricultural Sciences at one point in time had a lot of funded international agriculture projects, but as U.S aid money moved 01:49:00away, so did the opportunities for those kinds of connections and I'm sorry, I can't actually tell you what precipitated. I wrote the grant. I applied for it. I oversaw the program, which proved to be an amazing, hellacious amount of work, while of the three scientists that we hosted one had continued connections and there were subsequent visits. The other two I'm not sure to what degree there was ever continued. As far as the program, the group that funded this out of Washington, D.C. we were probably one of the more successful, responsive 01:50:00campuses. But the cost of doing this precluded us doing any subsequent ones. It was a wonderful experience. The women had a great time and I think culturally it was helpful for everyone involved. That's about all I can offer. There is a file. I haven't looked at it recently.

CP: Well, it was 11 years ago.

SC: Yes. I have a clap-trap memory for certain kinds of things, and I have total amnesia for other kinds of things. To me, the amnesia for that was at one point, reached a point where it's like we're done. There isn't any more to be done with this.

CP: I have a couple of concluding questions for you. But I'm wondering before I 01:51:00ask them if there are pieces of your career, of your OSU experience, that you want to share for this that we didn't touch upon, because as you say you've been involved in so many different things. I've tried to tease out the things that seem like themes or points of interest or highlights, but if there's something we've missed that you want to include... a totally unfair question [laughs].

SC: I have put high value in terms of my own satisfaction of serving as a mentor for younger faculty. Whereas I have always extended my help-orientation availability to all of the faculty regardless of gender, not surprisingly I have 01:52:00a particular soft spot for women faculty and especially for young women faculty who try to juggle child-bearing and rearing with their jobs. I have tended to track with those. Again, some of the male faculty who I don't see as often, I think have those connections of being there to listen and to provide insights and advice and help and sometimes it's just still problem solving-the last time 01:53:00it was a conversation, this was within the last six months, with one of our star young faculty who will get tenure, so they've been with us getting tenure soon, if not been announced just about that time when the decisions come down, who was having a great deal of difficulty spending grant money only because the rules for how grant money flows in regards to graduate tuition remains very problematic and rather broken at this institution. But she was relaying that I have the money and they say I can spend it on tuition but the system doesn't allow me to match up the money for tuition with money that's from a different source. That's the bottom-line description. It took a few phone calls and connections and determinations that maybe things are slowly changing and maybe 01:54:00there's a possibility for conversation so I kicked the problem back to one of the current Associate Deans and offered the faculty member who volunteered to help in any way possible, meaning if she needed to sit in a room and describe her dilemma. This is not about somebody saying I have no money give me money, this is somebody saying I have the money will you please let me spend it for the work that it was intended for? Hopefully something good will come out of that. That is something that has been a priority and I continue to check back in with my unretired colleagues, particularly and find those that are in positions, these are not in the college for the most part, some are but most aren't, are people who I've worked with over the years and who I respect and who I care 01:55:00about and so I will pop up and check in. Are you familiar with Paul Axtell?

CP: Mm-hmm.

SC: I had the pleasure, honor, learning experience of working with Paul from the very first time he hit the College of Ag Sciences doorstep, which has now been a very long time and so Paul's efforts and presence and work has always been an inspiration as well and I've learned a lot from Paul over the years and put him in my category of people who I'm close friends with and stay in contact with even when he's not here, but he's also someone who helped really shape the college as well as the broader university to being a nicer place and a more 01:56:00functional place to be than it might have been otherwise.

CP: Sure.

SC: I don't think... I think I have mentioned the people who have been significant here and elsewhere. It's been a really good institution to be at and to be associated with. I'm not, I suppose I've never measured the institution by all the measures that some people might measure it by. Rankings are of little interest to me. Certainly, our college, our research volume, our rankings were exceptional relative as two or three other pockets in the institution. To me, 01:57:00it's really been about the students and the faculty who teach the students and the caliber of faculty that you can keep in an institution such as this because the quality of life is so high in Corvallis. So, to me there are many dimensions of Oregon State University that are really important and really have spoken to the success of the institution that really do go not necessarily particularly noticed, although reputation wise we have scientists that are among the best wherever. I will mention one additional project that I was involved with for the whole duration of my time here, first as a department head and then as an 01:58:00Associate Dean, would be the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing or Bioinformatics or whatever are their last 'B'. We cleverly changed the name along the way to not change the acronym, so the CGRB, which was absolutely critical early on and continues to be and it's had leadership from a sequential number of outstanding leaders to facilitate the research of the faculty and the training of the graduate students. The importance of having an institute where you have a centralized facility, as opposed to a dispersed facility, not unlike the electron microscope facility, which I might say ended up very well evolving out of the department and into the institution's responsibility during the time 01:59:00that Sherm Bloomer was Dean of Science following and before he moved into the budget office. Sherm and work done by Vince Remcho and subsequent Associate Dean of Science to make this work as separate entity funded by the colleges appropriately for being an entity used by the whole university rather than being the physical and financial responsibility of Botany and Plant Pathology. That was a great accomplishment. The actual move happened after I moved to the Dean's Office, but it was certainly something that was a success story in and of itself. Other than that, I couldn't have asked for an opportunity for a more diverse, interesting, and never-dull career.

I never got ever bored with anything I was ever doing, unlike some of my colleagues who, let's say had done something once were afraid to do something different next time. I think the incremental and the really long time it takes the change some things but my approach always was that if the motivation was right that one just kept working, meaning you're working on behalf of a larger entity, either students or faculty or both or institutionally, if the motivation was the right motivation that you'd just chip away at it until you get there. An example of that which is still pending and not yet done, so I speak prematurely, 02:01:00will be, however, the major renovation of Cordley Hall that is in process, which that project was picked up by a successor department head but then continued to be facilitated, in terms of getting the university's attention about this major research building that was in the process of becoming uninhabitable, rapidly anyway. I will certainly be looking forward to the ultimate renovation and the good things that it will facilitate.

CP: My concluding question is on the theme of looking forward, your thoughts on OSU as it looks forward to its future. How is it positioned now and what do you see laying ahead for it?

SC: The university has arrived at a place which may prove to be a difficult place, as many institutions of higher learning have, which is with a good economy there's a shortage of students and the competition for students is fierce. I actually think if one hires a president as astute and capable as Ed Ray proved himself to be on many fronts, but someone who actually understands and embraces a land-grant institution for what it can do and what it can contribute, that the future can be bright and certainly brighter than it might 02:03:00be for an institution without that heritage and ability to capitalize on it. It remains to be seen whether that is possible. I think the rapid growth of the student body and somewhat uneven growth of the student body and also the issues tied to and inherent and I have not tracked, and I tended to not pay attention to anything that, from my perspective, was not anything I wanted to be involved in after I retired. I think there's complex issues brought by groups like INTO 02:04:00in its length of time. I did not participate in their recent ten year celebration (I'm not quite sure what it was).

CP: I think so.

SC: I'm not in a position to assess the success or the stability of those kinds of programs. As an Associate Dean, I was in a position to be made aware of a lot of the, I suppose you could say, challenges associated with something like that on campus. Not all bad, but still the things that you need to figure out how you serve the students who come to those programs well as an institution as opposed to being a revolving door, where they come and they go, kind of thing, onto other institutions. I can't really assess that. I can assess the growth of Cascades and clearly, they've always wanted to be independent, and to a large 02:05:00degree they are independent.

It's unclear to me how the Marine Studies Initiative will actually play out for the university at Newport. Time will tell. The budget model, the new budget model drives a different potential makeup of majors and investments. I have been blessedly spared from all of those conversations and dimensions beyond knowing that overall the institution has a tightened belt mode at the moment which impacts everybody's units.

That said, the actual enrollment in an enrollment-driven model, the actual 02:06:00enrollment for the Agricultural Sciences was up this past year. I am aware of that little fact only because it was delivered probably to the E.R. Jackman Group last fall, the enrollment, so one does tend to pay more attention to the things you're closest to. I think with the quality of life in Corvallis that, barring any catastrophic bad moves or decisions made somewhere, that the institution should have a bright future. I think it's unfortunate that the state's system of higher education deteriorated into a group of individual institutions once again. But this comes back to the cycle phenomena. What will happen in the longer term? Who knows what will happen in the longer term? But I 02:07:00think we've been fortunate to have Ed and Beth through the period of time that we did, because certainly it's a better institution than it might have been under different leadership, so that's positive. They were building off of strong blocks to begin with. Does that suffice?

CP: It does. Thank you very much, Stella. I appreciate this.