Oral History Transcript - Victoria Bynum - December 2, 1991
Interview with Victoria Bynum
Interviewer: Mary A. Allen
Transcriber: Mary A. Allen
Date of Interview: December 2, 1991
Location: Dr. Bynum’s Office in Taylor Murphy Hall
Ms. Mary A. Allen: We are in Dr. Bynum's office in the history department. Dr. Bynum you started here in 1988?
Dr. Victoria Bynum: No, in 1986. I was an instructor.
Ms. Allen: My info. comes from the catalogs and is not accurate. Would you tell me about the circumstances leading up to your coming to Southwest Texas?
Dr. Bynum: I was an ABD, what they call “all but dissertation”. I had two kids to support, and I needed a job even though I wasn't quite through with my dissertation, so like a lot of graduate students I just started applying nation-wide for temporary jobs. Because I know that one- or two-year jobs fill up and hire people who have completed everything but their dissertation. So, I applied nation-wide, and I got turned down by SWT. In January I got a letter of rejection and just kind of forgot about the place, and then I got a call around late May from Betty Kissler, who was chair of the department then, telling me that one of their temporaries, three-year temporaries, Linda Schott, had gotten a job somewhere else and resigned at the end of the year. So, they needed an immediate replacement for the upcoming year. She was also leaning toward it being someone who could teach women's history. Linda Schott had been planning to develop a women's history course here. There had never been one. She was going to develop the first women's history course. So with her gone, Betty, rather than going through another search just went through the old applicants, the turned down people, and pulled my file out and called me up and just more or less hired me over the phone to fill an immediate need. So I got hired in June, packed up and left California in August. I had two months to get ready and get going.
Ms. Allen: What were your first impressions about the history department here?
Dr. Bynum: We were over in Medina Hall [over on West Campus during renovation of Taylor-Murphy]. We were temporarily quartered over there because they were remodeling this building. The first people I met were Betty Kissler and Merry FitzPatrick, and I was very impressed with Merry FitzPatrick. A very forthright person who stated what she thought the very first time I met her. I had a real good impression just meeting these two women first of all who were part of the department, and my initial impression that first year was that it was a very harmonious department. Everybody was very nice and courteous and most of the time went out of their way to be friendly. I perceived it from the start as a friendly department.
Ms. Allen: What do you think the focus of the department is? Do you think the emphasis is on teaching teachers or teaching just a good liberal arts education?
Dr. Bynum: I'm not sure there is a unified vision. It is a teaching institution, and everybody recognizes teaching as the life blood of the school but I'm not certain that there is any unified view that we are teaching teachers or preparing them to be teachers or that we're simply giving a good liberal arts education.
I can speak for myself; I just try to give the very best understanding of history, the same as if I were at a research institution. To me, what you're trying to get across in your classes is an understanding of history to the best of your ability to convey it. I feel like I would do that at whatever school I was at because I like teaching, and I think the students deserve as much of your attention as you can possibly focus on them in that particular class. I can't speak for other people. I think everyone recognizes the importance of teaching. How they handle it personally, I'm not sure. There is no policy of the department that we teach in certain ways or have a certain sort of idea of what kind of student we are teaching.
Ms. Allen: You're interested in women's history. You developed a course that you teach in women’s' history, is that a changing course? Do you perceive changes in the structure or focus of that particular course?
Dr. Bynum: Actually, I would like to change it. The most basic change I'd like to make is to turn it into a two-semester course. It's just a real chore to try to get from 1620 to 1980 in a survey course. I would like to turn it into a two-semester course. I think it would be ideal if we could get another person who is also qualified to teach women's history. I’d like for a twentieth-century historian to take the second half, since I'm really a nineteenth-century person. I would love to just wallow in the nineteenth-century in my women’s history course. That's the most basic change I see in it. Beyond that I think there is a place for a survey. I wouldn't want to change it too much where it is no longer a survey. I think more to the point would be to occasionally offer special topics in concentrations in women’s' history rather than try to remake the survey course. I'd like to keep the survey course.
Ms. Allen: What special topics?
Dr. Bynum: Well, you could have women of the western frontier, you could have an Old South focus, focus on slave-holders' wives and slave women. That would be an interesting course. You could have a focus on women in the 1960s. There's a whole number of ways, either a chronological focus or a topical focus. Women in the American suffrage movement-that would make a whole topic. Then people could really get into reading the documents of a particular era and go into more depth. That would be sort of nice, but I haven't tried to do that yet. I'm trying to make sure the women’s history course is firmly in place and it should be in the next catalog. It’s just making its transition from being a special topic to being a regular part of the curriculum. It should be listed in the new catalog with its own number.
Ms. Allen: Did you teach in another university before you came here?
Dr. Bynum: I did teach for one semester at San Diego State University and as a teaching assistant at UCSD but that wasn't really taking full responsibility for the class.
Ms. Allen: What do you think the strongest attribute of the history department is?
Dr. Bynum: I think right now the fact that it is a growing department, that we have some really talented faculty members both new and old. I think combined with the fact that it’s a dynamic growing department right now and that we have talent on both ends has really created a lot of potential for a wide ranging department that offers more and more new courses and offers more to students. I think we are right at the beginning stages of beginning to offer students more than we could in the past when the job situation was so tight that the department couldn't hire for many, many years. There's a lot of new courses. We have Joseph Yick offering World History and special topics in Asian history, Pierre Cagniart, environmental history [Sherow], my husband, Gregg Andrews in labor and Mexico. His book, Shoulder to Shoulder looked at the response of organized labor to the Mexican Revolution, so he's going to be offering courses in both those fields.
Ms. Allen: Is he going to teach Latin American history?
Dr. Bynum: Well, we're going to hire a Latin Americanist. Gregg was hired as a US historian, but I think that what he will teach is Mexico. He'll teach both US courses and courses on Mexico. Then we are going to get a Latin Americanist. We are in the process of hiring one right now who will do the general Latin American courses. Gregg probably just sticks with USA in Mexico.
Ms. Allen: I see you are in the schedule to teach a graduate course in Social and Intellectual History.
Dr. Bynum: Actually, that's Women's History. We're teaching it under [that number] which is one of those courses that has an asterisk which means topics may vary. We're going to do a nineteenth-century women’s’ history course.
Ms. Allen: You know of course you are in the minority here. Statistically the department is woefully underrepresented. I don't see that that is a deliberate policy.
Dr. Bynum: It reflects, I think, two things. In order to hire women and minorities you need a deliberate attitude toward trying to hire them, and secondly, it’s hard in these economic times to get women. I've watched these last few search committees. I saw us offer a job to 2 women and get turned down by both of them.
Ms. Allen: What do you think is the reason?
Dr. Bynum: I think women are often times more hesitant than men to relocate for family reasons. But I also think it’s because both these women were highly qualified, really good candidates. Frankly, as sought-after women candidates, they had other options. Texas salaries are too low. One of the things that I think is a problem in Texas right now is that nationally it is very difficult for Texas to compete for highly sought-after candidates such as minorities and women. This is not to say that women and minorities can pick any job they want. It does mean that if you are a highly qualified woman or minority you are in a small field. You are likely to have more than one job offer, and you're not going to take one that offers you twenty-four thousand dollars a year when you can get thirty-two thousand dollars. That's how big the difference is. Texas is really lagging behind.
Ms. Allen: Is twenty-four thousand dollars the salary for an entering tenure tract?
Dr. Bynum: I think its twenty-four thousand five hundred dollars depending on the experience you bring with you. I know it’s not more than twenty-five thousand five-hundred dollars.
Ms. Allen: Public school teachers make more. Why would you go on for a PhD? What's the motivation?
Dr. Bynum: This is lower than what you would expect to make. But the fact is anywhere that I would go I wouldn't be making more than about thirty-three thousand dollars at most for the exact same position. I had never made twenty thousand dollars a year in my life until I came here. To me, the salary, I never paid much attention to that. I wanted to be a historian. I wanted to work in this field. Teachers really do teach for the love of it. I don't think there is any doubt about it. Teachers know there is no big money in it. It can be a comfortable living. I think now it’s a little more uncomfortable than it has ever been because the cost of living is so high and people are so in debt. I live paycheck to paycheck because I have student loans to pay off, credit accounts. I literally can't get ahead. I'm trying to get caught up still.
Ms. Allen: What motivated you other than your love for history to continue from one degree to another?
Dr. Bynum: Because I wanted to write a dissertation as time went on. I really did want to do an original piece of research and write it up. To me that came first. If you can make enough money to be comfortable then you can do what you want to do. The first motivation is to do something you love. I love research. I wasn't sure if I'd like teaching because I think I was afraid. I don't think very many people envision themselves teaching until they do it. It was the research, the idea of writing and studying that first drew me in. Frankly, I think I was pretty naive about how little twenty-five thousand dollars a year is. I come from a very modest background. I had two kids as a student and lived off eight hundred dollars per month for a long time, just making ends meet and going further in debt every year. So I wasn't really making it on the eight hundred dollars. I was borrowing on top of that to stay in school. Part of it is that I never worried about money. To me any professional salary would be comfortable. But I was kind of naive about how little what seemed like a lot of money really was.
Ms. Allen: Do you think going back to school at a later age than the traditional student made a difference?
Dr. Bynum: I certainly felt like I had different values than a lot of younger people who would not even consider something like a Liberal Arts degree because they know it’s not going to bring them money. That was never a concern for me. Part of it is being from a different generation, and the other part of it is that I can't imagine doing anything just for the money. I've always been that way. To spend 8 hours a day doing something just because you are paid well, that's the major portion of your life, making money. That has never appealed to me. Maybe as an older person, you're more inclined to think about the quality of your life than someone young. I know a lot of younger kids think you can enjoy anything as long as it pays well. They find out the hard way they can't.
Ms. Allen: What do you think about the new technology, i.e. computers?
Dr. Bynum: I think it’s great. I'm still lagging. I have a real resistance to everything. I wrote my dissertation on a computer because my advisor basically did not give me any choice. He was a computer whiz. He led me to the computer, sat me down, gave me a little guide sheet, told me how to get started, told me to come down the hall if there was anything I couldn't figure out or do get one of the office workers who also knew the computer real well. That's how I learned. I would have never done that on my own and I think it’s wonderful. There is no denying the way they help you to write.
Ms. Allen: What type of research do you do?
Dr. Bynum: I do a lot of research in local records. I wouldn't call myself a quantitative historian, but I do a lot of quantifying because I use social history to get at ordinary people which means I do a lot of census tabulation, census work. I go through a lot of ordinary court records to put together a historical picture. The work I did on Unruly Woman is largely based on court records. I kept long sheets of short entries on the type of crimes, or the type of offenses women were charged with and the sort of sentences they got. I really enjoyed it. I'm one of those strange persons who feels really cozy and happy when I've got a big census in front of me to go through. There were a couple of days in the North Carolina archives when I'd get tired of the routine and tedium of just copying things, and I'd have some particular mystery I was working on. I knew that I was not going to be able to use it in my dissertation, but I would give myself permission to go tract that down. It would often mean going into a different county's records because the archives held all the counties' records together. They had consolidated the court records and had them arranged county by county and topic by topic within the counties. It was a researcher's paradise because if so-in-so moved to such and such a county you could just go look them up. Sometimes I'd spend an hour or so doing something just because I couldn't let it go; I wanted to know.
Ms. Allen: Did you keep notes; perhaps you can go back again?
Dr. Bynum: Yes, I kept some, sometimes; I never found anything, and the time was just given up. I've got a lot of stories I could go back and write articles on.
Ms. Allen: You've not been here very long, but do you have some good stories on some of your fellow faculty members?
Dr. Bynum: [laughter] No, I'd better not. There are things that have irritated me. In fact, there are a few things that have infuriated me.
Ms. Allen: I meant good stories. Do you see any great degree of conflict within the department? I'll make it just yes or no.
Dr. Bynum: Yes. I think it’s a department in transition. There are some people who would like to block the transition, and I think it is the result of a department that was a certain way for a long period of time because there was no one to hire, no positions to hire for. They had temporaries sort of coming in and out and then they elected to make a change for obvious reasons to begin to hire tenure-track people.
It’s meant the coming of potentially rapid change. I think in any situation there are people who don't like the idea of rapid change. There is some strong resistance to change. It has created conflict. I don't really think conflict is something to be denied or buried or acted as though it's a horrible crime. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to tell any stories; but I want to say this: there is genuine conflict over the direction the department is going to go in the future.
Ms. Allen: Traditionalists vs. new, varied curriculum?
Dr. Bynum: And a more active role for junior faculty in formulating policy, which is part of the same conflict. Should there be changes in curriculum? Should junior faculty be part of the policy-making decisions? Obviously if the junior faculty is part of policy-making decisions there will be changes in curriculum. If you resist one you tend to resist the other, and there is resistance to both.
Ms. Allen: Some of the older faculty that I have talked to have given me the impression that consensus rules.
Dr. Bynum: That's a real popular idea here. And it’s really interesting to me as a historian. It seems to me that there is always an effort on the part of those who are in the driver's seat to present consensus as the norm. Maybe they really believe that, but it is just not the case, as it rarely is. It is interesting because when I first came here, I perceived consensus and harmony but I was an outsider. I remember talking to Dr. Leah Shopkow who said there's a lot more tension in there, but no one wants to confront it. There's a difference between confronting tensions, avoiding them, and pretending they don't exist. They don't go away.
Ms. Allen: Sometimes conflict is good. It strengthens.
Dr. Bynum: It’s inevitable. I think it’s inevitable in a department that has gone through rapid change.
Ms. Allen: You would think historians, more than anyone else, would look at conflict
Dr. Bynum: There are consensus historians too. [Laughter]
Ms. Allen: Yes, but they are supposed to be being left by the wayside. I have a presentation to do tonight on Richard Hofstadter.
Dr. Bynum: Okay, you know just what I'm talking about. He's my favorite of the consensus historians.
Ms. Allen: I have a big problem with labeling him as consensus.
Dr. Bynum: I always did too. I see how he got in there, because of certain arguments he made, but he was never a major consensus historian.
Ms. Allen: He had a more radical viewpoint. It wasn't the admirable picture that most consensus historians wanted.
Dr. Bynum: There are historians that made the argument that Richard Hofstadter does not properly belong in that category, that it does a whole disservice to the level of scholarship that he produced. I really agree with that. I love using his work in the classroom, his essays. His essay on nineteenth century politician, John Calhoun, "The Marx of the Master Class" is a wonderful essay. It's in his book The American Political Tradition.
Ms. Allen: Do you have any involvement with any organizations here on campus?
Dr. Bynum: The Women’s Studies group. There is Women’s Studies minor, and I help to team teach the course over there. As far as organizations, I was the sponsor of the student group, the Women’s Studies Association, but frankly I don't have a lot of time to be involved in a lot of organizations between committees and scholarship and teaching.
Ms. Allen: Do you have anything else you'd like to add for posterity? I'll come back in twenty years and remind you of it.
Dr. Bynum: No.
Ms. Allen: Thank you, Dr. Bynum.
---End of Interview---