Date of interview: June 2, 2020
Length: 1:31:53
Interview conducted by Annette Vee over Zoom.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Dartmouth, English, Dartmouth Conference, schools, writing, education, composition, Nebraska, Project English, British, American, teachers, culture, curriculum
SPEAKERS
Paul Olson, Annette Vee
Annette Vee 00:02
Okay, in compliance with laws, etc. [I need to get permission to record]. So, So yeah, I mean, just to say that I, my I kind of wrote about this a little bit to you. But my objective here, you know, I'm trying to figure out what the what the meaning of this conference is, especially in light of current events. And if it if it does mean, anything in light of current events. I've gathered all the materials but and I found it really interesting to dig into the origins of my field of rhetoric and composition. And what I realized, I guess, is digging into all these things that I didn't have anything comprehensive to say about it. And so what I felt like might be the best work here is to provide a lot of other voices and provide access to other voices on, on this event. And generally, for people to make sense of what it means to do curricular reform. And to think about the context of these things. So, So that's kind of my objective here. I shared some of the questions with you. But I also want to invite you to say anything else that you're interested in, or that you may think is relevant.
Paul Olson 01:18
Well, one thing I was thinking about today was you are you are approaching the issue of the Dartmouth had developed any connection with the Dartmouth personal computer work. [AV: Mm hmm.] And I told you before that it had not. [AV: Yeah.] And I that's that's continued to be true. And the woman [discussed in a previous conversation between AV and PO] who had asked at a later Office of Education meeting, whether we could put the baby in the computer and test the curriculum by feeding the curriculum into the computer was was Ruth Strickland. She's an elementary education specialist from the University of Indiana. But that that anticipation was developing about the same time and it's puzzling to me why there was so little talk about computers, though personal computers really didn't exist or had no particular force in American society in 1966.
Paul Olson 02:26
But the other thing that I thought about as I was thinking about my conversation with you was the British people came to the meeting with 15-20 years of decolonization of the British Home nation, severing their, severing or lessening their ties with the world's largest empire, an empire made up largely of people of color. And we were in the midst of the Martin Luther King revolution. And yet we had almost no talk about culture. Aside from the mythology thing that I wrote, and that doesn't have very much, it's not very good. We had almost no, there were no anthropologists, so far as I know, at the meeting. So and not very much talk about sociology. Basil Bernstein was there talking about sociolinguistics, but mostly on the basis of a deficit model of, you know, disadvantaged kids had something wrong with them that needed to be fixed. So, it strikes me that that was an epic lacuna, you know, and it wasn't, it wasn't a failure on just the part of the leadership, Jim Squire and John Hurt Fisher, it was a, it was a failure on all our parts. And I'm not sure why it occurred. Fred Cassidy was there but there was very little talk about Jamaica as a culture or any, any other, Native American culture or Hispanic culture, or any other cultures that are Anglophone cultures and deserve to be treated with respect and to be recognized in the schooling process. Anyway, that was what I was thinking.
Annette Vee 04:57
No, I think that's interesting because I know that you've done so much work on that. And you had done work on that before and after the the Dartmouth conference, right?
Paul Olson 05:06
Yeah, well, I hadn't, I wouldn't say that I'm set any records before! I, we did include some work with Indian literature and Indian mythology, in Project English. And, and Native American, partly because the teachers wanted to do that; they were interested in doing something with that. And that had some spin off effect. There were other places. The Kamehameha schools in Hawaii were interested in emulating what we're doing. So they invited some of our people to Hawaii to work on Hawaiian sacred story. And we did do Black Elk Speaks, which is a very important book for the Lakota and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But I wouldn't say that, I mean, it was, the curriculum that I had done was largely the so called Great Tradition, which was a tradition of elite, American and English, social groups.
Annette Vee 06:23
But there was a lot of talk about, I mean, from what I can tell, about working with students and their cultures and what they might bring. But you're saying that it just wasn't particularly inclusive about the kinds of cultures that were being talked about?
Paul Olson 06:40
Yes, and it didn't... Ah, this is my perspective, I may be wrong, but this is my memory. We didn't talk very much about what, you know, what students from India or Anglophone students might bring in the way of the sacred literature of or the mythologies or the, the assumptions of Indian culture. What are the--if you're talking about composition--what are the contexts in which writing flourished? Or was needed in, in various regions of India? We talked about Black culture, as I recall, largely as a deficit culture. And, and when, when we, in our mythology group, the Uses of Myth group, began to talk about it another way, it seemed, it seemed to be almost surprising to the, to the group. I remember, Basil Bernstein came under a good deal of attack for having a deficit model. So there was a kind of reaching towards something else. But it wasn't there--yet. And that reflects the time, you know?
Annette Vee 08:11
Mm-hhm. I'm curious, I mean, in terms of reflecting the time, the group that was assembled, the delegates are, as far as I can tell, they were all white and mostly men.
Paul Olson 08:31
That's true. That's absolutely true. There was the only Black person in, in, in the, in the, in the company, in the community was a woman who was a Black woman who was a secretary. And she and Nelson Francis fell in love and were married. That was kind of a nice story. [AV: Ha, that's interesting!] He was so happy about that. And he wrote to me about his marriage. And we were we became quite good friends there. I like Nelson a lot. I assume he's dead. I haven't looked him up. Do you know if he's dead?
Annette Vee 09:05
I believe so, yeah.
Paul Olson 09:07
I think so, too. Yeah. Anyway, that was, and she was, she was treated essentially as a servant. And one of the things he did was to object to the leadership of the conference, about the kind of condescension that, that greeted her from members of the conference.
Annette Vee 09:30
And she was the secretary of the conference?
Paul Olson 09:32
She was essentially was the person who handed out position papers and took notes on what was going on. And, it was essentially what I would think of as a secretarial position.
Annette Vee 09:45
Yeah. I did get in contact with the porter for the conference, who was an undergraduate who's still around. I'm blanking on his name now. But I remembered him.
Paul Olson 10:03
The porter that worked in a dormitory where people stayed?
Annette Vee 10:06
Yeah, I think so, that he was tasked with making sure that you all were okay. He said a lot of his job was supplying alcohol. [laughs]
Paul Olson 10:14
Yeah, well, there was an awful lot of drinking. And I didn't I didn't know him because I was as, as you noted in your notes, we were living on the other side of the state border in a house and, and my children and my wife were over there and they were having fun with Bob Forster and his wife who were professors at Dartmouth. So. [AV: Okay.]
Annette Vee 10:44
Can you say a little bit more about that, like the, the life of the conference? I'm, I've been talking with somebody in the UK, John Hardcastle, about Doug Barnes, who he's been in contact with, and Dorothy Barnes, who I guess, they worked together on a lot of things. And I believe that she was there as well. But whether she was a, a wife and a supporting role...? I know Connie Rosen was there, too, as a delegate. Dorothy Barnes is not listed.
Paul Olson 11:14
No, I think Doug Barnes, Doug Barnes was not [very active], at least in the General Sessions, he was not in my subcommittee. And in the General Sessions, he was not very vociferous as I recall. But what, now, I've forgotten what your question is now. [laughs]
Annette Vee 11:36
[laughs] I'm not sure if it was a question exactly. But I'm curious about, well, I'm curious generally about the women that were there. So you know, we talked about, you know, that this was, this was 1966. So the demographics were reflected there.
Paul Olson 11:49
I'll go, I'll go through that, I'll say a little bit about that. Barbara Hardy was there. And she was a George Eliot scholar. And she and Ben Demott had an affair. And she was quite, she was she was quite vigorous in conversation. And her interested in George Eliot, I assume that that was partly because a lot of the people who were from the English side were students of [F.R.] Leavis. [AV: Yeah.] And as George Eliot scholar, Leavis admired George Eliot tremendously. So she was probably--I don't think she had any particular credentials as to working with the schools. But she did have a connection to George Eliot. And she was very intelligent. And she she did she was.. Not all women were silent. Most of them were pretty silent. Ah, I remember Connie Rosen. And Connie Rosen was a very gentle and winsome woman--brilliant, I think, brilliant elementary teacher. And I liked her a lot. Barbara Strang, I don't remember very much what she said. And Miriam Wilt was there. Miriam Wilt was a big, was a power in elementary education. And she spoke occasionally. But I would say that the people who dominated the conference ... I can go with I can go through that list. The list...
Annette Vee 11:52
That would be interesting. Yeah.
Paul Olson 14:06
[Going through the spreadsheet listing all of the participants...] Well, the people that I remember speaking a lot were... George Allen, who I had known from because he had visited me before. Basil Bernstein, but he was kind of a bete noire and he was roundly rejected, and I think he tried to commit suicide at the conference, [AV: wow (AV: I was unable to verify this. PAO: Yes, this is gossip I received from Doris Young.)] I'm not sure. I was told that. Wayne Booth spoke a lot and spoke from his sort of generous rhetorical position. Then Demott spoke a great deal. And he had a kind of a mantra that he, that education should be about dealing with objects and situations. I never didn't know quite what that meant. [AV: laughs] Arthur Eastman spoke some. John Hurt Fisher and Jim Squire were the organizers of the conference, at least as I perceived it, and they spoke quite a bit. John was very upset that the American emphasis on academic rigor that had developed through Project English was not being terribly well respected. And Jim Squire was more comfortable with the British side. Boris Ford spoke a lot and spoke with a with a kind of high intensity and domineering tone that was, to my mind, not helpful. I don't remember Nelson Francis speaking a lot, although he was behind the scenes a very winsome presence. Al Grommon didn't speak much. David Holbrook was, came to the conference having done some sort of bibliotherapy with students... [audio quality breakup] apparently, he was really very aggressive with insisting that, that was the way to go. And we may not have listened to him enough. I don't know. I was not very sympathetic to what he had to say. I think he probably was a brilliant teacher. I don't remember Arthur Jensen. Esmor Jones was... had visited Nebraska and I knew him some. I think he was a kind of school inspector or something like that. And he had some voice. Al Kitzhaber was very upset with the conference and left halfway through the conference. [AV: I was unable to verify this, though he did apparently threaten to leave.] Because he was so angry at the treatment he received...
Annette Vee 17:33
What was the treatment that he received?
Paul Olson 17:35
Well, there were the British people and some of the American educators were not very respectful of his Oregon Project English. And he came there as one of the gurus of American composition and also as a great defender of Wayne's, Wayne O'Neil's linguistics track in the Oregon curriculum. And by the time the conference took place, Wayne no longer believed in that track. I don't know if he ever did but he certainly didn't by that time. So Al was in a very fragile position because he'd he'd put his, his reputation and his, uh, he put everything on the line for the Oregon curriculum and it wasn't treated with respect. I felt a little bad and he, Al wasn't good at taking, taking a punch, he... I don't remember Robert Lacampagne. Do you know what he looked like?
Annette Vee 18:57
I don't; I don't have... I have some pictures but they're not labeled.
Paul Olson 19:01
Okay. He's English for the Disadvantaged Student. I don't remember his conversations at all. And Al Lavin was in my mythology group. He was a high school teacher. And he was I thought very bright and very articulate and I liked to work with him. Evan [Glyn] Lewis was an inspector it says here psychology of language, teaching of English as a second language, bilingual education. But he was, became kind of the the scapegoat, particularly of the British people who were there, to my perception. He was defending the greats. He was defending the, you know, the sort of classical curriculum and, and the, what he called the tradition and the Leavisites, and also David Holbrook didn't have much use for that. And they didn't have much use for him. And he was, I felt kind of sorry for him. I felt that he was kind of, I didn't believe in his position by that time, but I, I didn't believe that he was treated generously. Walter Loban, I don't remember his saying much. I don't remember Mackay. Al Marckwardt was the probably the guru among the American linguists there, the structuralists. He was at Princeton at that time, and yet he didn't say a whole lot. Teaching English as a native language could have been a very important topic. And the education of people from non-English speaking cultures could have been an important topic, but it wasn't, as I recall. Maybe it, maybe it was simply that I wasn't open to hearing the importance. Jim Miller was there; he was my former chairperson. He was at the University of Chicago along with Wayne Booth. And there was a kind of effort at the University of Chicago to do something about English education. They had gotten a chunk of money to do that. But Chicago is not in any position to deal with the Chicago public schools--no credit, no credibility. Jim [Miller] was excited about the DH Lawrence and some, in some ways, excited about the kinds of things that Leavisites were excited about, but he also had a very populist side to me, he cared about. Well, when he was in Nebraska, he cared about the public schools incredibly, and he worked with them a lot. Jim Moffett was excellent. He didn't like the stuff I had done. And he influenced me a lot. And he was very thoughtful in discourse at the conference. And in developing compositional sequences that were centered in what the child knew, in the culture of the child. I came to admire him a good bit.
Paul Olson 22:40
Herbert Muller was the historian; he didn't say a lot. And I didn't think he really understood very well what English can do. He understood what history could do in a curriculum, but I didn't think he understood very well what English could do. Charlie Muscatine was a, was another medievalist there. He had just come from the Berkeley uprisings in the '60s. He was a man who had refused to sign one of the--I think the only tenured professor--who refused to sign the oath, during the, the non-communist oath, during the '50s, the McCarthyite oath, in the University of California. [AV: huh] And although Charlie didn't know much about the schools, and he didn't adhere to the same school of medieval studies that I adhere to, he was, he was a generous man and of generous education. And I think his contribution was helpful. There's a mistake in my description here. I'm seeing modern British psychology and the investigations. That's Ludvig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. I spent quite a bit of time studying Wittgenstein's work, and studying with a chief American philosopher that had worked with Wittgenstein, a man named O.K. Bouwsma, and so I was trying to bring that into the discussion. I think without any success. Discussions were rarely very analytic. They were, they were discussions of very intense emotion.
Paul Olson 24:43
Wayne O'Neil I've talked about. I liked him a lot, and he was very honest. I think he was right about the uselessness of transformational linguistics, teaching transformational linguistics as a tool for composition, or, he talked about, he suggested that it could be something that students might be interested in for its own sake, and I think he was right there. And this might interest you that, you know, the development of computer languages depended. There was a quite, there was, there was some work being done at that time on the relationship between computer languages and natural languages. And one path that we could have followed would have been to look at what the schools ought to be doing with the relationship between natural and computer languages. We did not. And that's still a track that I think could be pursued with considerable utility. My granddaughter is doing a dissertation on computer, in computer science, on natural and computer languages at the University of Delaware. [AV: Oh, wow.] And I hope that she does that.
Paul Olson 26:13
Wally Robson was kind of the British sage, he was the only, he and and Jimmy Britton, I should say, I didn't, I skipped Jimmy Britton for some reason. He, he and I came to be very good friends. And when I founded the Triple T [Teaching the Teachers of Teachers, which Olson directed in the 1970s] project, a huge reform project and that had $80 million. I used Jimmy Britton a lot as a resource. And so and, and he understood, he understood how to use contemporary linguistic theory and also contemporary, contemporary Piagetian theory and in a way that was very helpful. The Rosens, I mentioned. Mike Shugrue was there representing the Modern Language Association. And he was committed to doing what he could for the public schools. He was there largely as a politician, an academic politician. He was gay, but he hadn't come out as gay yet. And, I'm sorry that the conference did nothing with with gay literature, with the rights of gay people in the classroom, or was composition centering in gay children. That's something that was very.... Sinclair, I don't remember very well. I should have been interested [audio breakup 27:46-28:18]
Annette Vee 28:18
Okay, I lost you for a second there.
Paul Olson 28:20
Yeah, that's fine.
Annette Vee 28:21
Okay.
Paul Olson 28:21
You know, I was asking, asking you, did Sinclair write any papers that came out of the conference?
Annette Vee 28:31
Um, I can check. I don't remember any off the top of my head. There has been a lot, but um, I don't think I have anything from him. Why do you ask about that?
Paul Olson 28:43
No, I don't, I don't remember his being a strong presence. [AV: Okay.] Jim Squire was there as the, sort of the leader of English education the country, and very bumptious. He was he was a very energetic and bumptious person and, and he and John Fisher got along well. And so it was, that was helpful. Barbara Strang I don't remember. Geoffrey Sommerfield was, was very good. He had a good education in literature, he was a Leavisite. I later hired him to work in the tri-University project, and I had hoped that he would do work with us on the basis of the work that was going on in the Lancashire schools. But I later hired some other British people, Charles and Christine Frisby[?], who were really better at that, but he [Sommerfield] was good with poetry and children. Dennis Thompson, I don't remember. Frank Whitehead. I've talked about him quite a bit. [AV: Mmm-Hm.] And he was very influential first as sort of dominating the ethos of the conference and then becoming less and less influential. I talked to you about the letter I wrote...
Annette Vee 30:15
Can you say more about it here?
Paul Olson 30:19
Well, I just wrote a letter. I can't say very much about it, because I don't remember it very well. [AV: laughs] But he, he was--he had written--had written a book called The Disappearing Dias, which was arguing that the teacher was becoming more of a consultant and less than authority figure in the British classroom and arguing, as to how that ought to be affecting education. And then he was describing how children's, how linguistics ought to affect children's reading and writing and compositional strategies. And he was very, to my mind, I, you know, this was a long time ago, and I admit may have been more riled than I should have been. But to my mind, he was very arrogant in his treatment of... He didn't understand the situation in American education. And I came to believe that he didn't understand it entirely in British education, as I came to understand it from Jimmy Britton. You know, that England was just going through the Lancaster, the open schools revolution, and had also developed the comprehensive schools, which I welcomed. I had lectured in the old secondary modern schools when I was on a Fulbright there in the '50s, when I was still in graduate school. And they were terrible! Did you ever go to a secondary modern school? [AV: No.]
Paul Olson 32:09
Well, there was, you know, that England, essentially, my perception is that there may have been good ones, but the ones I lectured in, they were not. They were essentially not holding school! I mean, they were just trying to entertain the kids and trying to get them to the age where they could let them out into the streets and send them into the factories. And I was invited by the embassy to lecture on TS Eliot at a secondary Modern School. And I got into the schools; kids were running all over the place and all over the playground, and the headmaster had forgotten that I was going to come. So he sent people around to round them up, to round the kids up and get them into the classroom, into an auditorium where I was to speak. And I said a little bit about TS Eliot, and I realized there wasn't--that was not...they had not been prepared for what I was going to do. So I just threw it open for discussion. They said, 'Well, have you seen any cowboys?' [AV: laughs] You know, 'do you lasso people?' They had seen American westerns, and that was all that they knew about American literature and culture. It wasn't, I didn't mind that, that's fine, that they should be interested in that. But that the school to my perception, had no sense of its responsibility. The students had apparently no strategies for interesting, interesting them in education, bothered me. And one of the things that I think undergirded the British interest was that these two major revolutions were taking place. They were interested in developing popular education that did have some content to it. And more power to them. That's great. But we didn't entirely understand that in the American group. And the American group, as I, as you say, in your notes, was just coming out of life adjustment, and trying to get people to read something that was worth reading.
Paul Olson 34:18
So, Ah, let's see. I don't think I have much more to say about Frank Whitehead. Except when I wrote the letter, Barbara Hardy, and several other people came to me. And Barbara, who, by the way, was British, came to me and asked me not not to read the letter, which I didn't do. I said, I wanted them then to make sure that Frank Whitehead treated other people with respect and that he understood what people were trying to do before he sounded off and they said, they said that they they would talk with Frank Whitehead. I mean, I don't remember what they said--nervous breakdown, or he'd disintegrate if my letter was written, was read. So I didn't.
Annette Vee 35:11
Read publicly, you mean?
Paul Olson 35:13
I didn't read it publicly, no.
Annette Vee 35:15
Yeah. Just sending it to him privately.
Paul Olson 35:17
I don't even know that I sent it to him. I gave it to them. [AV: Oh, okay.] I think what they did was to talk through the content of the letter with him.
Annette Vee 35:25
I see.
Paul Olson 35:26
That's my recollection. I know they did everything they could to protect his fragility, and I respected them for that. That was... But I was very upset. And I was grateful to them for their generosity in coming to me to tell me what was, you know, what the story was. Is that your dog?
Annette Vee 35:50
Yeah, sorry. [laughs]
Paul Olson 35:53
That's fine. Anyway, that's that. Let's see, who else?
Annette Vee 35:59
You gave it to Hardy and who else? I'm sorry, I missed that part. [PO: Did I what?] You said you gave the letter that you had written for Whitehead?
Paul Olson 36:09
I think Barbara Hardy and I don't remember who else. Okay, some of the, the more quiet and less disputatious (I don't know where I put that page now...) people, and they said that, they said they would, they would talk to... Maybe Wally Robson? I don't know. Well, Wally, I mean there was that, what was really crucial was that, I mean, we had these factions. What was really crucial was, was that there were people with whom one talk across the factions. Wally Robson was one. And George, George Allen was one although he wasn't particularly a heavyweight intellectually. Jim Moffett was one. Harold and Connie Rosen were two. And I think Jim Squire was, was able to communicate across the, the chasms. So that's about my statement.
Annette Vee 37:37
Can you say about, more about the chasms as you perceive them? What, who was, like, what the factions were?
Paul Olson 37:49
Well, my sense, my original sense, as I described it to you last time was that there was they were the Leavisites from Britain, who controlled the British group, and the Project English people from America that controlled the American group. I think that's too simple. As I look at this list, I think that's a fair characterization, but it's too simple because within the British group, there were, there were people who had responsibility within for the, sort of bureaucracy of the public schools like Esmor Jones and Glyn Lewis, and George Allen. And then there were people who were, like the Connie and Harold Rosen, who were actually working in the schools, teaching in the schools. And then there were these people that were the products of FR Leavis's training, both psychologists like Dennis Harding, and, and literary people. So those were the sort of the groups and they, they all came, I think, with the sense that they had something good underway, and I think they probably did. And that they were certainly discussing in the small group groups. You know, topics like myths, or elementary learning or composition or whatever. But they were also, I think, trying to validate what they had been doing and I understand that because I was trying to do the same thing!
Paul Olson 40:02
And the Americans were I think, of two groups: Project English people who were trying to introduce some sort of academic rigor into the curriculum to reflect what we knew in the way of scholarship about language or composition or, or literature. Because we argued that we shouldn't be teaching stuff that wasn't true. I mean, that's a simple way of simplistic, simplistic way of putting it, but that was our, our mantra. And then there were a bunch of people like Marian Wilt, who were active in the schools. Jim Squire, who weren't so active in the schools, but in the bureaucracy of American education. So, and then there were odd people that were sort of oddly placed people. Wally Douglas was at Northwestern. Wally Douglas was working on the teaching of composition. And he wasn't very far along on he's thinking about that. And I don't know if he ever did get very far along. [AV: laughs] Anyway, there were, there were the people who are practitioners. And on the American side, there were also the school teachers. Some of them still sort of heavily influenced by the life adjustment mythology. Then there were the sort of the organizers like the Jim Squires and John Hurt Fishers of the world who were big organization men. And then there were those of us who were in Project English, that was, those sort of splits, in the... And a lot of this had to do with, with class. The British were trying to get away from the class stratified schools. And they saw what we were doing as reinventing class stratified schools for the Americans. And I think that was maybe part of the agenda behind the scenes. [AV: Mm hmm.] I don't know if that helps.
Annette Vee 42:33
Yeah, that helps a lot. Um, can you, I mean, I know, you were involved in Project English and related sort of initiatives. Right?
Paul Olson 42:43
I was in, I was involved in Project English, in the Institutes. And then afterward, I was heavily involved in the so called Tri-University project.
Annette Vee 42:54
Mm hmm. And I read the, I read the dissertation about you. So I learned a little bit more about that. But I am curious about whether and when we talked on the phone, or when you, I guess when you wrote to me, you said that Dartmouth was kind of a just something in between when you were doing a lot of other work that seemed to be focused on K12 education. So I wonder if you see any influences either way there or what influence you might, you feel like you maybe had on Dartmouth thinking about those things, too.
Paul Olson 43:24
I, you probably should ask somebody else. I mean, I, I it was, it was so tumultuous, that I have no idea. I know there are other people who said that I had a lot of influence, but I don't remember who they are. I think you can see in the, in the Uses of Myth that was... I put that together and I can, you can see where I was going at that time. [AV: Yeah.] Also the the write up of... I think that the people who did the, Herbert Muller and John Dixon, who wrote about the conference were bothered by the Myth group, Mythology group. I know Herbert Muller saw us as sort of going, I think, in the direction of irrationality and romantic craziness. Which I didn't, I didn't see us doing. I thought it was in the direction of trying to understand the multicultural world in which we live, and also trying to use myth to test it against reality in such a way as to require some kind of empirical clarity. And, that nothing could be more needed now in education. So that I, that the Mythology group and my effort to not allow abusive polemic to dominate the conference. So those were my, my two contributions as I perceive them, but I don't know that they're, I don't know, you know, I don't know whether that was the case. But the Conference had an influence on me in that I came to see... I had begun to see that the curriculum materials, even written by teachers, which ours were, and supplied to classrooms all over Nebraska, by themselves good, not entirely reformed teaching and perhaps and sometimes, sometimes they were an impediment to good teaching, because the teacher was not thinking on his or her feet, or thinking for themselves.
Annette Vee 46:32
Mm hmm. Did you see because of the reception of the, like the Project English materials at Dartmouth, or, like, what about the conference led you to think that?
Paul Olson 46:44
I don't know. I'm not sure. That may have been part of it. Just thinking about what it is to stand, from my own teaching, and from listening to other teachers. And thinking about what the what it is that one does when one teachers, and when a child is taught, or listens to a teacher or interacts with a teacher. It seemed to me that a lot more of the curriculum, had to be in the immediate intellectual interchange. And couldn't be fed from the outside. Uh. And, and I think that came from my visiting classrooms in Nebraska, where Project English wasn't working, some of the time. It came from talking to, to people at the conference. Probably, particularly to Wayne O'Neil, whom I admired a lot, whom I liked a lot. And maybe to Jim Moffett and Jimmy Britton. Just trying to listen to those people. And what I did with Composition, after I got home, since you're working in Composition, you know, we worked. We worked on composition a lot in the Tri-University and Triple T projects. And after that, Les Whip, I don't know if you know him or know of him. He's a colleague of mine, he worked in the National Writing Project. And he spun that out of the Project English and became the best of the National Writing Project projects according to the evaluators. And he worked a lot on a kind of, beginning with the student and beginning with the student's world. And spent a lot of time not only on understanding students and understanding how students write but on publishing their writing, and editing it and distributing it and making it, monitoring the transition from private to public. And I think that was important, really important work. He was he was very, he never tried to publish. But he was an incredible leader in Composition, and that Composition work is still going on. That came out of Project English and the Triple T project, and it still still goes on. So. And that I influenced Les; there's no question about that. And I think the directions we took probably wouldn't have developed without Dartmouth being part of it.
Annette Vee 50:10
The directions you took in terms of centering student work and how they write, you mean?
Paul Olson 50:16
Well, centering not only on how they write, but centering on their, their worldview, their picture of reality. The folklore they bring to school, the myths they bring to school, the religious culture they bring to school, the assumptions about other people and other cultures they bring to school. The sense of verification, how they verify things that they bring to school, those are things that we emphasized not only, not only on how they write, but how do they, how they think, how they, how they translate the verification project, process into prose, prose and poetry. (laughs) I don't know if that makes any sense.
Annette Vee 51:14
No, I think so. I think that makes sense. I wonder if you can say more about. I mean, one of the interesting things about the conferences and your own work, too, is that it's bridging K12 and college teaching, which I think is sometimes hard to do, outside of English departments. National Writing Project does that and things like that, although at Pitt now that's in the Education School. Can you say more about like, how that how that was working? Like how the college? Or was there a college - high school kind of divide, or how people were talking across those things at Dartmouth?
Paul Olson 51:54
Do you mean at Dartmouth, or in Nebraska?
Annette Vee 51:57
Well at Dartmouth, but then you know, how that, you know, how that influenced later?
Paul Olson 52:02
I can speak to that, first in Nebraska and Project English, one of the great accomplishments of Project English is that we did form a genuine intellectual community of hundreds of teachers that were writing curriculum and writing for Project English, or writing variations of the Project English curricula, for, as adapting them to their own needs. And, and that still goes on. Teachers that are, ah, I'm thinking of a teacher named Sharon Bishop, who's probably pretty close to retirement, who teaches, who's a Mennonite and teaches in a Mennonite community in Nebraska, and works with several other teachers on the history of that community in writing, you know, doing serious research work on, on what, what their lives have been, and, and, and, and there are, there's a historian in that community who teaches in the schools is doing the same kind of thing. So, and we had summer institutes and year long institutes through which that kind of work was facilitated. And I can, I can I feel that we started out with me and my colleagues as authority figures. But that didn't last very long. I mean, the teachers became, because they were the practitioners, became the authority figures and where Project English worked, it worked because they took over.
Paul Olson 53:59
So that when I came to Dartmouth, I didn't feel... First of all, there weren't enough teachers, there weren't enough schoolteachers at Dartmouth. And there were not enough of them who were aggressive or, or willing to talk so that they tended to be dominated by the David Holbrooks of the world. And the Boris Fords, and the Jim Squires, and maybe the Paul Olsons--I hope not, but! [AV: laughs] And so, I don't think there was a sense of division between the teachers, the schoolteachers and the college intellectuals that was very deep. I mean, the ideological differences are far deeper than school. There were people like Harold Rosen, who had been a college teacher and who was... whose wife was a school teacher. Or there are people like Jimmy Britton, who works in the schools all the time. I'm sure that Jimmy knows the schools as well--did know the schools as well as any school teacher. And so, but there were not enough, not enough Al Lavins there. You know, and that this was, it was kind of too bad, because this was about the same time as Herb Kohl was writing 36 Children and John Holt was writing How Children Fail. And we have people who are, were apparently brilliant teachers, but also did informal ethnographies in their classrooms that were very illuminating. And we didn't have enough of that. At least in my perception. I don't know what other people have told you. But, has anyone talked about that with you?
Annette Vee 56:12
No, I haven't talked with anybody else yet. I'm hoping to talk with a couple of British participants, but I've been working with John Hardcastle there, who may end up being the one who talks to them, who passes on notes.
Paul Olson 56:28
What other American participants have you talked to, or I'm the only one alive?
Annette Vee 56:33
Ah, you're the only one I've talked to. You might be the only one left. [PO: laughs OK!]
Paul Olson 56:41
I was at a conference where some woman had decided I was a great hero and she wanted me to talk and, and she was very lionizing, which I don't think was particularly helpful. But Al Grommon was there and Don Tuttle was there. Don Tuttle was the Office of Education contact with with all of this work. And, and I don't remember who else that was part of the, of the Dartmouth conference. There were some Dartmouth conference people there. Al Grommon, do you know if he's still alive?
Annette Vee 57:26
I don't.
Paul Olson 57:28
He's, he's a very nice man. I'm sure he would have good insights. And he wasn't, he wasn't a bully.
Annette Vee 57:38
I saw Wayne O'Neil just passed away this spring.
Paul Olson 57:42
Oh, he did. Wayne was very, he went on to teach at the Harvard School of Education and, and I stayed with touch, in touch with him a little bit. I don't know if he worked with, continued to work with the schools, but he was a very insightful person. It's too bad you didn't get didn't get to interview him.
Annette Vee 58:04
I know. I wish I had. I know he was, he was very critical of this Seminar and publicly critical of the Seminar. I'm curious what you thought of that, or
Paul Olson 58:20
What I knew of his criticism? After the seminar was over, I didn't pay any attention to it .
Annette Vee 58:26
Yeah. He and Ann Berthoff were both critical of it, but critical of it along the lines of some, some Project English questions.
Paul Olson 58:36
What, what? What was it? Do you remember what his criticism was?
Annette Vee 58:40
I'd have to look it up. I could share it with you via email, if you want, give you a little summary. But um, yeah, he felt, he felt he hadn't. It hadn't gone as far as it could have, in a lot of ways, which is maybe, you know, what I've seen from other accounts.
Paul Olson 59:00
That's what, that's what I would say also, that, you know, you needed to have. Too much of what was discussed, was not discussed, in a way that would lead to thoughtful conclusions, I think. It was it was too polemical. And there was not, there was not a process for laying out the evidence, for identifying a problem, laying out the evidence and coming to a conclusion or alternative conclusions. That, if you look at the books that were written out of Dartmouth, that isn't there. At least--
Annette Vee 59:53
The process? Or the, for laying out evidence and coming to conclusions you mean?
Paul Olson 59:59
Yeah, the process, well, the process of laying out, the process of identifying a problem. I mean, mythology is not a problem. [AV: laughs] Look. Our group was a myth group, we were supposed to talk about myth. Well, that's too vaguely defined. To my mind, there should have been, there should have been, a, you know, and that's the kind of thing that that could occupy 100 years of discussion, what we ought to be doing with the multiple myths that are, that are at large in the world and in the school world. And it seemed to me that, that a more fruitful process might have been to, to lay out a problem since we were there together for a month, to lay out a series of problems that were central, in, in British public school education, lay out, try to lay out, before the meeting, some of the empirical evidence that bore on, the on the issue, and then have a discussion about what we're going to do about it. No, the, for instance, a disadvantage, the idea that there are students, that there's a culture of disadvantage in the schools was a, was a was a major topic. Linguistic disadvantage, that was part of Basil Bernstein's assumption, that was a lot of the assumption that undergirded Headstart in the United States at that time. We never asked the question was, is there such a culture? What's the evidence for such a culture? What is it? What does it mean? What are the alternative views of the cultures that are described as 'disadvantaged cultures,' you know, their linguistic facility? And, and and then, how do we use what the culture brings to the school either in the way of disadvantage or in the way of advantage to inspire growth and facility with the English language? That, that, that kind of discussion. At least I don't, I don't believe it happened.
Annette Vee 1:02:30
You said epic lacuna earlier. I like that as a way of describing that. It's interesting. So what do you think, I mean, what do you think that the..? Well, the interesting thing is, perhaps it didn't go far enough, right? And there were a lot of things that there were not, that were not talked about at the conference. And yet a lot of people cite it as being incredibly important and influential in a number of ways. Why do you think that is?
Paul Olson 1:03:05
Well, I think there are two reasons. One, if you had gotten that group together, if they'd come up with recipes for making apple pie, they were so powerful, that that group was an extremely powerful group in English and English education. If they had, if they had written down the Gettysburg Address as their pronouncement, it would have been influential. People would have found a way to make it influential. That's, that's the one thing. The other reason it was influential, I think, was that both cultures were at a convergence...at a, at a turning point. The culture of the, culture of the culture of the English Grammar School was at least partially being, being abandoned in the English class system and the English, well, colonial system on their side. On our side, the culture of anything goes so long as we keep them entertained--'life adjustment'--was coming under extreme criticism, probably because of the national security debate that was going on with respect to the lack of rigor in the public schools. I should tell you something which you'll find interesting. That, that debate began, I think, largely with Hyman Rickover. And the critique of the public schools in the United States as lacking rigor. Hyman Rickover was the man who invented the first nuclear submarine. His daughter lives in Lincoln, Nebraska; his granddaughter is one of my closest friends and most brilliant. She's a student of Jewish and Islamic religion. And she knows both Arabic and Hebrew. And one of my closest friends, so it's kind of ironic. Anyway, it was, I think the national, you know that the Project English money began with The National Interest and the Teaching of English. And the claim was that national security was in jeopardy if we didn't write, if we didn't have better English education. Which is, seems to me a little dubious. [laughs]
Annette Vee 1:05:52
This is where it's connected to the funding that went towards BASIC programming at Dartmouth, these like big funding initiatives that happened in 60s, you know, related to National Defense Fund, and you know, things like that.
Paul Olson 1:06:07
Yeah. And I can't, I can't, I can't see that there is any immediate nexus there may, Jim Squire or some of the big shots. I was, after all, small fry. I was, you know, I was! I was 36 years old. I wasn't a grey eminence. I'd had some success with Project English. I didn't have any [personal] money. I remember, I told the group, they were arguing about the dangers of having this kind of political power where there was a mandated curriculum, and I told the group I said, I don't have any power in Nebraska. I'm not, I'm not an authority. I'm not an authority figure. Other people are doing this stuff. And Glyn Lewis, well, he was very glad I didn't have any power. [laughs] And he said that, he said that in it in a generous way. I mean, it was not out of malice. But, so why it's, why it's influential. I think it's because we had to deal with this, the issue of, we had to deal with issues that were raised by what was happening, and we had to start to deal with issues of what was happening in America and what's happening in the British Empire, or in the in the former Empire. And we, I think, Wayne O'Neil is absolutely right. We, we spent a month and we could have gotten a lot more done, we should have gone a lot further. Maybe, maybe what we did was enough to get us off dead center and to start us in new directions. That, that, I think, that may be it.
Annette Vee 1:07:58
A lot of people seem to have had different takeaways from it. That there was, looks like, I don't know, if you knew the... I can share this with you: a list of 11 principles that were agreed on from it. The, you know, including the centrality of people's, people's exploring, extending and shaping experiences in the English classroom. Urgency of developing classroom approaches, stressing vital creativity, imaginative involvement of children and young people in language experiences.
Paul Olson 1:08:30
Can you put that up? Maybe I can see it. Yeah, yeah,
Annette Vee 1:08:32
I can send this to you to send you pictures of it. But it's, um,
Paul Olson 1:08:39
Where's it come from?
Annette Vee 1:08:40
Um, this is from the Carnegie archives.
Paul Olson 1:08:46
Who wrote it?
Annette Vee 1:08:47
I don't know. It's a press release. And it's not signed, and it doesn't have it just says for release at any time. September 26 1966. And it doesn't have actually, oh, wait, no, it's from Jim, Jim Squire.
Paul Olson 1:09:01
That's what I was gonna say. Jim Squire wrote that. Yeah. And Jim Squire put in now. He won. And I don't think that has much to do with what the conference said.
Paul Olson 1:09:13
I'm not saying that he's lying. But I'm just saying that's uh. That was what he took away.
Annette Vee 1:09:13
Oh, that's interesting.
Annette Vee 1:09:20
Yeah, so what, um, I mean, at the end of the conference, was there some sort of consensus or discussion of things that people seemed to come together on?
Paul Olson 1:09:32
No, I would say no. I, and I think if you could look at Herbert Muller's and, and John Dixon's thing, there were, I think there was there were some consensus as to the issues. I think that that was, that was very helpful. And maybe that's what it was for, as a, as a as a, program to identify the issues. But we didn't, we didn't deal even in dealing with the issues, we didn't deal deeply enough with the issues of race and culture. But there was not, you know, we didn't have a discussion where we said, Well, why do we agree on on? What are the nine things we agree on. And after the conference, I think I remember that, that press release, because after the conference, I wrote and said, we never did have a discussion of what we agree on. And I said, I refuse to, I refuse to endorse, to have my name put to something that I haven't seen. And he wrote, he wrote back and I have forgotten what he, he wrote back, but I think he wasn't, he wasn't pleased with that. But then I, then they developed this process to publish the papers that were written in the various groups, which I think was a constructive way of, of sort of addressing what the outcomes of the conference were. What are, when people say the conference was incredibly influential, what are they saying?
Annette Vee 1:11:15
Well, one of the things that, you know, I've been talking to different generations of scholars. So, you know, for instance, Dave Bartholomae, who is my colleague here, maybe somebody you've heard of in Composition. [PO: I don't.] But, you know, talked about it being important for supporting research, as or, you know, professionalizing, the field of composition, that it was a space to think about the professionalizing the teaching of writing, and how we might think about it more rigorously moving forward. Which I thought was interesting. You know, a lot of people... Go ahead.
Paul Olson 1:11:56
Well, I was wondering if that came out of Compositions, in the composition subgroup?
Annette Vee 1:12:05
Could be. [PO: I don't know.] I mean, you know, it might be a different way of saying what what you've said in terms of, there was a moment for really important people to get together to, to consider issues of teaching English.
Paul Olson 1:12:23
There was, they may be, your colleague may also be... I mean, there was a, there was a moment, writing up to that time, at least in Nebraska, had largely been teaching usage, teaching usage and the teacher doing editing of the student. So the, the parts of invention and disposition as opposed to doing the final draft, were not very carefully considered. And, but there was a movement that was independent of Dartmouth to get rid of, get rid of the textbooks that dealt with nothing but grammar and usage and to use various forms, various rhetorics on various modes of inspiring writing, as as a basis for teaching and it may be that that process was was rendered more rigorous by Dartmouth. I, I didn't perceive that and I think you need to look into what the Composition group was doing and and also look at at. Well, maybe Wally, do you know if Wally Douglas is still alive?
Annette Vee 1:14:18
Ah, I'm not sure about him. I could look. I know John Dixon and Douglas Barnes are.
Paul Olson 1:14:27
There. John Dixon is? Yeah, talk to them. And and if, if Jim Moffat is still alive, talk to him. I think he went sort of went off in his own direction. But he might be worth talking to. I'm trying to see who were leaders in the discussion of composition.
Annette Vee 1:14:50
Mmm-hmm. I can look at more what they've published too, I think. Yeah, it's it's just interesting to see everybody's different take on it. You know, it was a conference of a lot of different people who came to it with certain ideas and came away with slightly different ideas, but certainly different interpretations of what the conference was.
Paul Olson 1:15:24
Yeah. Well, that partly depended on, there were the large group discussions. [AV: Mm hmm.] And then there were the various committees that produce these little booklets that came out of the conference. And then there was the stuff that went on, on at the dormitory, with the drinking [AV: laughs] and the, and whatever that whatever the hairy things were, that went on there. [AV: laughs] So and I'm not sure which part, you know, inspired a different direction. I can say that I came away not only with the things I said, but with a will to try to use people like Jimmy Britton and Geoffrey Summerfield and the Lancashire infant schools as resources in the reform work I was doing.
Annette Vee 1:16:25
Mmm-hmm. And this, you know, maybe this was one of the important things too, as you said that this was a gathering of so many important people. Right. And a lot of as far as I can tell, a lot of the Americans didn't know each other ahead of time. The Brits seemed to have, many of them knew each other.
Paul Olson 1:16:48
Most of them know each other because most of them were Leavisites.
Annette Vee 1:16:52
Yeah. Yeah. Um. But you didn't know a lot of the American participants before this?
Paul Olson 1:17:00
No, I knew Al Kitzhaber. Let me see. I knew John Hurt Fisher because he had wanted me to come to Duke as a, as a medievalist and I knew Jim Squire because he'd been out to Nebraska a number of times. [AV: And it seems that...] And I think I had met Nelson Francis, although I'm not sure. That's about it.
Annette Vee 1:17:34
Okay. But it seems like you had some communication with many of the participants later then, after you had met them.
Paul Olson 1:17:44
Yeah. Somewhat. Somewhat, although not a whole lot of them. I interacted with the people I mentioned, and with Wayne Booth quite a bit. And with... Wayne O'Neil wanted me to come to Harvard to be Dean of the School of Education later on, but that didn't have anything to do with, it had to do with academic politics. Yeah, I [audio breakup 1:18:26-1:19:04]
Annette Vee 1:18:56
I'm losing you.
Annette Vee 1:19:02
Hi.
Paul Olson 1:19:03
Hi. Are you back?
Annette Vee 1:19:04
Yes, I am. Sorry about that.
Paul Olson 1:19:06
Okay. Let me let me go through these questions that you gave me.
Annette Vee 1:19:12
I think you've addressed most of them. But if there are other things that you want to...
Paul Olson 1:19:16
I'll go through them. I'll just look at them. How were you invited to join the seminar? I don't know. Except I know that Al Kitzhaber was surprised that I was invited. So apparently I was a late, Johnny come lately to the seminar. [AV: laughs] When when I first came, he said, Oh, you're here. I didn't I thought you weren't going to be invited. I thought you weren't supposed to be invited, I think he said. Anyway, it was an indication that somewhere in the inner sanctum I had, I had gotten the Black Rock. And then somebody had decided that the Black Rock wasn't appropriate.
Annette Vee 1:19:54
That's interesting. Why do you think you might have gotten that?
Paul Olson 1:19:57
I have no idea.
Annette Vee 1:19:59
It's interesting. Somewhere in the I should look I have, from the original proposal a list of the people who they had originally thought they might invite. I don't remember if you were on that list or not.
Paul Olson 1:20:12
I'm. I probably wasn't enough of a grey eminence. I wasn't a big shot. I was. [AV: Yeah.] And Nebraska wasn't wasn't big on the map, map. It may have been that this was drawn up. John Fisher probably would have wanted me invited because I think he liked the work I was doing.
Annette Vee 1:20:34
You received a letter of invitation? And...
Paul Olson 1:20:37
Yeah, and I don't have, I don't have any of those documents.
Annette Vee 1:20:40
Yeah. Somebody might.
Paul Olson 1:20:43
There were no non-white delegates, or no consultants, and no non-native English speakers, as far as I know. I mean, I'm singing one tune the whole time about what was good about the conference and what wasn't good about the conference. High school teachers were there but not very prominent. The role of British versus American delegates I think I've spoken of pretty much. The tenor generally I've spoken of. Notable interactions or incidents that you remember from the seminar? Well, I remember notable interactions where there were the attacks on Glyn Lewis, which seemed to me to be uncivil. The attacks on Basil Bernstein and the emotionalism of those attacks, which I thought might well have had an antisemitic overtone, but I didn't know the people well enough to know what their, know what their... I remember Ben DeMott, rising to the occasion, and perorating almost daily on the fact that English education dealt with objects and situations. And I remember the Frank Whitehead letter. Those are the main things I remember. I remember, I remember Al Kitzhaber's going home [PAO: threatening to go home]. What role has the Dartmouth seminar played in your scholarly formation? I described that pretty well. What legacy do you think it has had for others, or for the field of rhetoric and composition, or writing studies generally, either in the UK or the US or elsewhere? Well, insofar as the National Writing Project had a division here in Nebraska, in the Nebraska Writing Project, and Les, Les Whipp, who was the leader of the Nebraska Writing Project was also a member of the Triple T [project]-- after I came back from Dartmouth, we've had a lot of influence on how that [latter] project went and how it continued.
Paul Olson 1:23:08
The, there are very, very large number of composition students who come out of Nebraska. The Composition program is very strong here. And I think that probably happened. Dudley Bailey, who was my chair at the time of Dartmouth, had no interest in Composition as a separate discipline. And so it may be that the Writing Project and the change in leadership, the chair, had an effect on the development of writing scholarship at Nebraska, which I think does have some, I mean, it's probably the largest program in our department now.
Annette Vee 1:24:00
You're, the director of it, Stacey Waite, think she's the current director, was a Pitt graduate. We overlapped here [at University of Pittsburgh].
Paul Olson 1:24:06
Okay. Well, I have, I mean, I have no particular [knowledge]. Robert Brooks is a friend of mine, and he's been influenced by me quite a bit. But otherwise I I don't think I have any particular influence on that. Except that, you know, what we laid down in the, in the 60s, still has some influence. We did develop a thing called the, the School at the Center project in the 90s, which is a rural education project. I then became worried about what has become central in the divisions of American culture that is the leaving behind of rural Nebraska. And so we developed the School at the Center project to talk about schooling as culture building, in every respect, in writing, in history and building the history collections in the small towns, in economics, and building up the economic structures of the small towns, etc, etc. And there's a part of that project called the Rural Writing project, which comes out of the Nebraska Writing Project. And the school to center project, which is headed by Robert Brooks, which continues with a fair number of schools and places. And you'd have to ask Robert Brooks, he's my colleague [AV: Okay.] what goes on there in the way of research. That's, that's influence. That's, that's what I can. That's, those are my answers to your questions.
Annette Vee 1:25:53
That's great. Thank you. You've been very generous with your time. I really appreciate it.
Paul Olson 1:26:01
Yeah, well, I don't like to type. Because I broke my hand, and I can't. It's very, it's very unflexible. And also, I make so many mistakes when I type. So I use a Dragon Naturally Speaking dictating machine to dictate most of my stuff, and it has a lot of mistakes in it. But I will answer things, I may answer them in ways that are where there may be mistakes because of the Dragon machine makes mistakes, but I'm willing to respond. My sense is that your colleague is, overestimates the influence that Dartmouth conference had on Composition, but I could be all wrong. [AV: It may be.] I mean, I would ask a bunch of ask a bunch of gray beards that are important in Composition, whether they think that's true and see if they think of it in the same way.
Annette Vee 1:27:07
Yeah. Yeah, I think I mean, that's the goal. I, you know, I'm also interested in getting some more diverse voices too about what that influence is, and where they see it. And you know, whether this influence is, potentially not just a positive influence, too, for some of the reasons why you describe it there.
Paul Olson 1:27:26
Well, Martin Luther King... Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed in 1968. And it was time like this time, when it was impossible to speak about education without speaking about culture, and race and colonialism. And, look, and community. And so what I took away from Dartmouth, I took into that, to our call, and it helped me. But I wouldn't say that it was all. It wasn't everything that I had to carry with me.
Annette Vee 1:28:15
You did that work later then, too.
Paul Olson 1:28:19
Excuse me?
Annette Vee 1:28:20
I said, and you did more of that work later, too. Right?
Paul Olson 1:28:24
I did that. Well, I did that work through from from '68 through '76. The most Influential work I did was I headed the [USOE] Study Commission on Undergraduate Education and the Education of Teachers. And in that work, what we assisted in setting up, the Indian community colleges on the reservations. And Universidad Boricua, the Puerto Rican university in the United States and a series of [efforts] with the Black universities, et cetera. So that I think was even even though it wasn't well advertised, because the Office of Education was under Nixon at that time, and they were kind of ashamed of what I was doing. We still got it done. I think it was more important. It's probably the most important work I've done. I don't know.
Annette Vee 1:29:21
Yeah. Well, I don't want to keep you anymore. I know you're writing your letter [a letter to the editor], which is also probably more important. [PO: Well, I don't know; we'll see.] It's something concrete to do in response that you know, might be important work.
Paul Olson 1:29:42
Okay, well, if we're done, we're done. And yeah, I appreciate your. I think you do a good interview.
Annette Vee 1:29:47
Well, thank you. I really appreciate the talking with you. And I'm impressed at your memory. That's a long time ago.
Paul Olson 1:29:55
You may find out that it's all made up!
Annette Vee 1:30:01
Well, there's not a lot of other people to check you at this point!
Paul Olson 1:30:06
It's surprising that there aren't, that people haven't written about this thing more.
Annette Vee 1:30:11
Well, you know, there have been a lot. I don't know if I shared with you the biography. I can, I can share the bibliography that...
Paul Olson 1:30:17
No, I mean, apparently they have written about the dynamics, the process very much.
Annette Vee 1:30:22
No, they haven't. I mean, the most that I saw was one from Miller, James Miller, who wrote a piece that looks like it was just like something put out by NCTE. Like a, you know, something about Dartmouth from one who is there, and he talked about, it's actually quite a humorous account.
Paul Olson 1:30:43
Oh, yeah. He has a great sense of humor.
Annette Vee 1:30:45
Yeah, it was, it's, I mean, it's actually quite enjoyable to read. But he talks about the contentiousness a little bit there and the drinking. And yeah.
Paul Olson 1:30:55
Jim, Jim [Miller] died just a few years ago, too. He was out here to Nebraska about five years ago, and. And, his first wife died, and he married again, and he was talking about those days. But, and he was wonderful. He was one of the, there need to be some lubricant for the machine because the gears were grinding pretty hard. And he had; his sense of humor helped a lot.
Annette Vee 1:31:26
Yeah. That's, um, that's the impression I got from reading his report, too.
Paul Olson 1:31:31
Yeah. Okay.
Annette Vee 1:31:34
Well, thank you so much.
Paul Olson 1:31:36
You're very welcome.
Annette Vee 1:31:37
I really appreciate your time. I will, I'll send you a transcript or a write up of some notes just for your own for your own curiosity if you like. Okay, thank you. You too. Bye.