V13 #1 December 1991 - Archives - The Evergreen State College

What Will Be, Is
by Michael Wark
Evergreen's culture has just completed a
year-long "physical examination" called an
ethnography that revealed some fascinating
patterns and traditions on campus, including
an amazing amount of similarity between
Evergreen's early days and the Evergreen of
1991.
For instance, Charles McCann, Evergreen's
founding president, described the "right" climate
for learning in a paper called "Vital
Undergraduate Studies" in 1969, before the
first student stepped onto campus.
"You get a real jolt when you're reading
that paper and realize he's describing what's
happening at Evergreen today," says Peter
Tommerup, the ethnographer hired by the
college's Assessment Committee to take a
close, anthropological look at Evergreen's
culture.
Tommerup got another jolt reading an
article by founding Dean Charles Teske, who
described the organizational culture at the
end of the first year: "There is little room for
boredom, mediocrity or complacency. People
here are intense and involved." Again, the
similarities to present-day Evergreen are amazing,
says Tommerup. "Rather than envisioning
what will be, he is describing what was."
These archival papers are just frosting on
the cake in Tommerup's year of research at
Evergreen. He interviewed hundreds of students,
faculty and staff, tape recorded many
of their conversations, and had them transcribed
into 1,000 pages of text. Now he'll
throw in a truckload of personal experience
and blend it all together in a final product: a
book-length report providing fascinating insights
into how the Evergreen community
works. Although his focus is on the present,
correlations with the past are important.
"Wild successes happen in academic programs
when people are in a spontaneous,
serendipitous mode of working. The really
neat things that happen here happen when
people are in that mode," says Tommerup.
Conclusions like this started to surface
after months of hearing and recording stories.
As Tommerup read through his transcripts,
the stories began to "sort themselves" into a
series of themes that he named Discovery,
Initiation, Participation and Separation (See
Themes, page 9).
However, two themes operate throughout
everything that happens at Evergreen: flexibility
and transformation.
References to the college's early years were
also common, both from people here 20 years
ago and from people who were repeating the
college's "folklore."
"My sense is that it's amazing how much of
the essential culture is still happening here —
including attitudes of caring and compassion
and a value for spontaneity, informality and
flexibility," says Tommerup. "A lot of the
ethos of the culture from the early days still
exists."
Some things have become routine as successful
strategies are repeated and people are
no longer struggling to build a college from
scratch. As the average age difference between
faculty and students grows, some of the
edge has dulled on stories about field study
and potlucks. And a long-standing tradition
of freedom also has its mellowing effect.
"In the beginning, Evergreen was digging
its heels in the ground and saying 'we're
different,'" says Tommerup. "To communicate
they were different, some people ran with
the freedom and went wild. Now freedom is
taken for granted so people aren't out to
prove it exists anymore."
"There is lots of room for people to do
things from the bottom up. There's room for
people to personalize their learning experiences
and I don't think that has ever changed,"
he says.
One very strong perception off campus
and across the country is that you can "do
what you want" at Evergreen, meaning you
can latch onto an intellectual passion and
pursue it.
The Evergreen ReView
"I have stories from last year's freshmen
students who say they came to Evergreen
because you can do what you want, and
stories from faculty who report the same
reason for coming here back in the beginning,"
says Tommerup. "There are so many
true believers here, and there aren't many
cynics, especially in the student population.
They all came here because they believe Evergreen
is something special."
Tommerup says Evergreen really does offer
the flexibility and freedom to explore. What
people find in their explorations often transforms
them; hence the dual themes, flexibility
and transformation. Another example is the
faculty member who arrived as a political
scientist, became a photographer, then a cognitive
psychologist. It's not uncommon for
faculty to follow an interest and transform
themselves outside of their prior disciplinary
boundaries into new areas of study.
One observation persists that Evergreen
Ethnographer Peter Tommerup can't verify:
Evergreen is getting more conservative.
Tommerup does have evidence that the
complaint has been raised since Fall of 1972,
the second year of classes, and that it most
commonly is raised by students who are new
to campus and are responding to college oral
tradition and folklore.
"It seems to be a persistent myth," says
Tommerup, who's now documenting his
research into a book-length report in
California. "One of the last conversations I
had on campus was with a student I met on
my way to having dinner at "The Corner,"
who said, 'you know, this college is getting
more conservative all the time.'"
Faculty are happier here, Tommerup found,
because they can go through transformations
to stay intellectually challenged. And it's possible
for them to gain new academic credentials
relatively quickly because they already
have a framework in place.
One storyteller contrasted the college to
traditional liberal arts colleges by describing
Evergreen's style of flux and transformation
as "the liberating arts," rather than the structured,
traditional format that can make you
"feel like you're in a jail."
For students, transformation leads to an
individual voice — what a founding staffer
said has beenreferred to as "finding one's self."
Tommerup developed a prototype, a sort
of common individual experience for students,
to describe how Evergreen fosters a
consistently powerful learning experience:
• Being able to take charge of one's own
learning is a central factor in a student's
decision to attend Evergreen.
• The experience of ambiguity in the process
of getting an education leads to frustration.
• This frustration leads to some kind of "sorting
out process" that teaches students to find
out what matters to them. Then they figure
out how to achieve what matters.
• Through this exploratory process, students
probe their environment and ask lots of questions
while working with faculty toward the
"discovery and construction of a meaningful
personal voice." (Common elements of successful
programs will be documented in
Tommerup's report.)
The roots of this prototype lie at the very
heart of the college's history, according to
Tommerup. He sees a definite correlation
between the founding faculty's process to
create the college's curriculum.
Flexibility is valuable to everyone on campus,
but for faculty who love to teach, the
experience is especially strong.
•
Although Evergreen's ethnographer. Peter
Tommerup, continues to evaluate a year's
worth of data collected through hundreds
of interviews, archival documents and personal
experience, he provided Review with
preliminary glimpses of major themes he's
iscovered in the Evergreen experience.
I
This theme is fascinating to Tommerup.
"When many Greeners first learn about the
college, suddenly they don't want to hear
about any other," says Tommerup. One student
described Evergreen as a mecca. Another
said many students describe this
"weird, mystical reason for being here." For
faculty the experience can be similar. One
storyteller talks of being in a dead-end situation
while teaching in a somewhat interdisciplinary
format at a small private college.
Faculty at that college talked in terms
of punching a time-clock and rarely expressed
excitement over teaching and learning.
When a friend was hired at Evergreen,
the storyteller realized the current position
was not right and took a short-order cooking
job in hopes the next job would be at
Evergreen.
"Evergreen is an important symbol for
people," says Tommerup. "People out there
have mythology about the college—it does
something to them."
Finding out what it's like to be here
means having a lot of bubbles burst," says
Tommerup. Across the spectrum of interviewees,
a definite "Evergreen" brand of
adjustment became a common theme.
"Afterthe bubbles burst and they think'this
isn't friendly' or 'this isn't wonderful,' they
start to discover that it can be really friendly
and really wonderful, just in a different
way," says Tommerup.
The prime example of separation begins
when a student realizes, "I'll be graduating
soon." Tommerup cited two extremes. One
student worked on a contract to catalog and
analyze all she'd learned because she was
experiencing so much anxiety over what to
do after graduation. She didn't feel ready to
leave "the stimulating, interdisciplinary,
problem-solving environment" she had become
accustomed to. Another student carefully
planned the last two years of her education
and was thrilled to land a job in
exactly the field for which she had
prepared in her internships.
When people prepare to leave the college,
they often undertake a careful inventory
of what they've learned and steel themselves
against what appears to be a very
different outside world.
Many faculty go through a fourth stage
Tommerupcalls "Continuation." "Sometimes
deciding to stay can be as difficult as deciding
to leave," says Tommerup.
"You usually have books on their Library
shelves and faculty in their offices, both fitting
into their slots. But for faculty at Evergreen,
there are no rigid slots. They not only avoid
pigeon holes that they're plopped into and
can't get out of, they can even teach outside
their original discipline," says Tommerup.
Whatever form they take, transition and
finding one's voice are enduring Evergreen
qualities.
Looking to Evergreen's future, Tommerup
sees a continuing debate about how to infuse
multiculturalism and math instruction across
the curriculum.
"Multiculturalism is giving the institution
a chance to look at the fundamentals of the
college to see if, for instance, seminars are
really the crux of an effective education. That's
very healthy for the college. Multiculturalism
has been a topic of discussion since the beginning,
but now it's the dominant vision. In 1971
they were worried about getting the college
going. Now multiculturalism is more timely,"
says Tommerup.
The next step for Tommerup, who's now
working at his home in California, is the
process of narrowing down a mountain of
data into a pile of prose that will serve as a
summary for the document describing his research.
His report will include hundreds of
stories to illustrate the themes he discovered
in his work, all cataloged without revealing the
identity of the storytellers. The report will be
printed and available on campus by spring.
Tommerup pours a lot of humor and passion
into the work he takes very seriously,
noting that "whether people love or hate the
college, in all those hundreds of interviews
nobody ever said it's a boring place."
The fluid nature of Evergreen's structure is
fascinating to him and ties neatly into his
doctoral work at UCLA in organizational culture
and folklore.
"Evergreen fits a sort of Shangri-La in
my personal mythology," chuckles the ethnographer.
Ironically, his work to document life at
Evergreen guarantees him more than a footnote
in the college's institutional folklore —
he'll have his own book-length chapter.