Oral History Transcript - Kenneth Margerison - December 2, 1991

Interview with Kenneth Margerison

Interviewer: Mary A. Allen
Transcriber: Mary A. Allen
Date of Interview: December 2, 1991
Location: Dr. Margerison’s Office

 

Ms. Mary A. Allen:   This is December 2, 1991, and we are in Dr. Margerison's office, and we will interview him about the history department.   Dr. Margerison, I believe you came here in 1973?

Dr. Kenneth Margerison:   I think in was Fall of 1972.

Ms. Allen: Would you tell me about the department when you came here. Do you remember your impressions?

Dr. Margerison:   When I came here, I came out of a small liberal arts school.   It was a Catholic girls’ school primarily, had a very small student body, when I left maybe about two hundred and fifty, and I was the only history professor.

Ms. Allen:   Where was this?

Dr. Margerison:   In Belmont, North Carolina.  So when I came here, there were lots of history students.   At that time we had a tremendous number of majors, I don't know the exact number because I was not aware of those things in those days, but I think the number might have been as many as five hundred. So that was a big transition from Sacred Heart which only had perhaps two to three history majors at the most and no other history faculty then.   When I went there, there were others, but they'd all been fired so it was nice to come into a department of historians rather than a department of people who taught all different things.   At Sacred Heart I never really learned to teach very well because I didn't have any good role models, so within a short time I realized that there were some very good teachers in the history department, and I think my own teaching developed quite a bit because of my contact with them in a way that it never had in the few years I had taught before.   In that sense, I came into a department that offered a wide range of courses, had a wide range of faculty, and a lot of students.   In that sense I was quite happy to be in what seemed to be a more professional atmosphere.

Ms. Allen:   When you came, did you have your PhD?

Dr. Margerison:   No, I was just finishing it up. I finished it up that December.

Ms. Allen:   That was at Duke?

Dr. Margerison:  Yeah.  When I came in, I was still trying to finish up the dissertation and teach some new courses which was a bit of a trick.

Ms. Allen:   Dr. Swinney was the chairman.   How did you hear about the job?

Dr. Margerison:   I don't know if that's got to do with the history department.   It has more to do with my wife.   The job market was so bad in 1972, and they didn't really have this kind of national publicized listing of jobs that was as complete as it became later.   There were a lot of jobs, theoretically, that were secret, at least that is what everybody believed, that only certain people knew about.   I drafted a letter, my wife individually typed separate letters to about four hundred and fifty institutions.   Days before the computer, so they were personalized, not just xeroxed. One of the letters I sent came here, I got a response from Everette Swinney saying yes there was a job if I was willing to do certain things, and I wrote back immediately saying I would do anything necessary. He said he was going to be at the Southern Historical [meeting], and I wouldn't have met him if I hadn't sent that letter, and I'm sure that that ultimately being the first contact and one in which we had what I thought was a pretty good interview, from my standpoint, led ultimately to my coming out here and being interviewed for the job.

Ms. Allen:   Where are you from originally?

Dr. Margerison:   North Carolina.  That was my first trip to Texas, that convention.   It was in Houston, and I doubt if Swinney would have been there otherwise, because he doesn't fly on airplanes.

Ms. Allen:   I didn't know that.

Dr. Margerison:   He would tell you if you asked him.   It’s not a secret.   It’s one of those things that if I hadn't sent the letter I wouldn't have met him at the Southern, and I might very well not have gotten the job.  It obviously didn’t hurt and probably helped a lot.

Ms. Allen:   Did you have to come here to interview a second time?

Dr. Margerison:   Yeah, I came back in April and interviewed.   I'd given up on the job.   I thought they had long since filled it, and I just never heard from them.   Then one day out of blue I got a phone call.   Swinney was on the other end saying come on out for an interview.   I said all right.

Ms. Allen:  You started teaching that fall.

Dr. Margerison:   Yes, fall of 1972.

Ms. Allen:   Do you think there was a particular focus in the history department when you came here?

Dr. Margerison:   I think the focus then clearly was largely teaching.  We taught twelve hours, of course we've taught twelve hours almost the whole time I've been here.   Then they were sending historians into the classrooms to make sure the young historians were doing a good job.  My first semester Emmie Craddock came in, and I was fairly scared.   She, in those days, had quite a presence.  That was an experience.  I was quite nervous when she was in there.

Ms. Allen: Is that something they still do?

Dr. Margerison:  Oh yes, they do it more now.

Ms. Allen:   I thought so.  Dr. Josserand came in one day when I was in one of Dr. Yick's classes.

Dr. Margerison: In those days, they did it twice.   Came in during your first year and in your second year.   Now we go in all the way until someone is tenured.   So, we check it more. More people go in, and we feel confident that we know how well someone teaches.  I think it’s because so many people go into their class and see how they do.  And of course, another thing about that you learn things about teaching if you watch other people teach.   Some of these young teachers we have now are very, very good.

Ms. Allen:   Is it a prerequisite that you needed to have taught before you come here.

Dr. Margerison:   Well, I think that's one reason that they liked me and one reason they were willing to take a chance on me is I had the three years teaching.   There's been a long-standing prejudice but certainly a feeling that if you can find somebody that has a little experience that's good because they are not so raw in the classroom.   I've never felt that way so much because I feel like someone can develop very quickly in the classroom, and they have to start somewhere. That's just a difference of opinion.   When I came certainly that was something that they looked for.   In many ways that still holds.   If someone has experience and they meet the other kinds of things you are looking for then they are that much more able to get in there and do the job.  We have people who come who haven’t taught much.  In most cases they develop very rapidly.

Ms. Allen: Do they stay as a general rule?

Dr. Margerison:   As a general rule, the people we brought in on tenure track in the 1980's have stayed so far.   We did lose one person; I think that's all.   The people we brought in the eighties have stayed so far.   Some have only been here a couple of years, it’s hard to know.

Ms. Allen:   You teach only nine hours now?   Do you think that's allowed the focus to change to research?

Dr. Margerison:  Personally, I think it has helped the teaching as much as the research because while I feel very embarrassed when I talk to my colleagues in the public schools (in TFA work you deal with a lot of public school teachers) because TFA is part of TSTA and NEA so I go to a lot of meetings with a lot of public school teachers.   I'm very embarrassed to tell them that I teach a nine-hour load.   For a public-school teacher that would be like not working given the fact they teach nine hours a day instead of nine hours a week.   The twelve-hour load is something akin to slave labor; it’s very, very draining.   I know public school teachers teach a lot more than that, and I think that is a mistake because I don't think you can teach that well when you are so dead tired. When you have twelve hours you have lots of students, you spend not only twelve hours in class, but you are just besieged by students.  That meant that much more, you have to be here every day of the week to talk to them.  It drains you; you are not very sharp in class, you can't think much about what you are doing.   You sort of run through the stuff.   I think my own teaching has improved since we've gone to the nine-hour load.   I was always so ragged from the twelve-hour load it was hard to be well prepared for every class.   I feel like I'm much better prepared for my classes and a lot fresher. I don't feel like I'm just going over the same think a thousand times over and over again.  In those ways I think it has actually improved the teaching.   It does of course give you more time for research which keeps you, I think, more alert.   I do think it has a benefit for teaching.   It's hard to make that direct correlation.   There is no question that without the nine-hour load we would not have the people we have hired in the last five years.   No one has a twelve-hour load, so you have competition.   If you hire someone and they get a book published, they are going to be out of here as fast as they can.   We wouldn't have been able to hire some of the people we’ve hired without the nine-hour load. That was a big break for us as far as hiring people.  It’s definitely in the interest of the students to have a nine-hour load.  We wouldn’t have as good a faculty.  I personally think the teaching is better. 

Ms. Allen:  The focus toward the students traditionally has been to teach teachers.   Do you think that is changing?

Dr. Margerison:   I'm not sure.   It was never exclusively that.  What’s changed is – I think everybody tries to teach their classes so that a student going through who will be a public school teacher will be well trained. I think of that myself.  If someone out there is training to be a public school teacher, they need to know certain things in Western Civilization or in the advanced classes, Martin Luther.  They certainly have to have a certain understanding of him to so a good job teaching Luther in the public schools.  I've never thought of myself as just training public school teachers from the day I got here.  That is always a component, but I've always felt that there were some people out there who were never going to be public school teachers.  I was trying to do something else for them, and that may not be true of everybody else.  What's changed is that when we went to the BA degree for everybody, when they did away with the BS in Ed degree, is all these students who had been getting a BS because they didn't want to do foreign language quit doing it.  

The reason we had so many people going to teacher ed was not because they wanted to be e teachers but because they didn't want to do Spanish.  So they'd come in and say “I want to be a history major”.   You'd say “Well, you can do a BS in Ed where you don't have to do the language, or you can do BA where you do have to take the language.   In one you have to take the Spanish, in the other the education courses”.  They'd say, “give me the BS in Ed”.  It was almost inevitable.   You hardly had any students doing a BA degree. 

Now because they have to do the BA, there is no alternative, I think there are fewer people doing the student teaching just because they didn't want to do the student teaching anyway.   The only reason they did it was to get out of Spanish or French or something.   Personally, I don't know if most of the people we trained ever had any intention of teaching.   It would be interesting to know how many of them actually ended up as teachers.   Now the ones who go into teaching really are much more likely to be interested in trying to be teachers than I think back in the seventies.   In the seventies there were so many people who would do that.   You just knew from talking with them they had no intention of ever teaching.  I don’t have any statistics on that.

Ms. Allen:   I got that impression when I first came here from other students but I didn't realize until you just verbalized it what the reasoning was.

Dr. Margerison:   I've had students say, “well, I think I'll just get a teaching degree to fall back on”'.  I'd say, “what are going to fall back on?   If you don't like to teach you're going to be a rotten teacher so why do that?”   They'd say, “well, I don't want to take Spanish”.

Ms. Allen:   What about someone who is interested at teaching at the junior college level?

Dr. Margerison:   I always discourage that.   Not because they don't need teachers there, but junior colleges are mostly into the exploitation of people and so the way they staff their institutions is with a lot of part time.  If someone says they want to get an MA and teach at a junior college, I always tell them I don't think that will happen.   They will end up as a part timer and not able to earn a living. I don't think that's realistic. Whether or not they take my advice, whether they try to do it anyway, I don't know. You could talk to Mrs. Schneider if you want to find out about what it is like to teach part time.  She's an SWT MA who went off to teach junior college, and she can tell you all about it.

Ms. Allen:   You are not the first person who has told me that.   I've heard that from another professor, that a lot of this is people teaching in the public schools picking up part time work and that it is extremely hard to get a full-time position.

Dr. Margerison:  There are occasionally full-time positions, but they are very, very rare.  How somebody lands one, I don't know. In the Sixties when the junior colleges were first developing, when I was going to school, there was all this talk about you train people especially, sort of like training people to teach high school.   There was some talk about that.   In reality these things are under financed even worse than the four-year schools, the communities don't want to pay taxes.  They want free education with no taxes attached to it.   That means you're going to have to pay people cheap to teach.

Ms. Allen:   There is a course listed under the history department in the graduate catalog about teaching at the college level.

Dr. Margerison:   It’s never been taught.   It was stuck in there because we had a dean who wanted us to have all the graduate students who were maybe going to be teachers take it.   We've never taught it because we never thought it was worth anything.  It was stuck there because this dean insisted that every department have one.   It was stuck in the catalog absolutely against the wishes of the history department.  That and the capstone course.  [laughter]

Ms. Allen:   You were here during some of the Viet Nam business.

Dr. Margerison:  Yes, but there were no demonstrations or anything here.  The famous demonstrations of the Viet Nam era were already over by the time I got here.

Ms. Allen :   Does the change in presidents cause much of a ripple in the history department?

Dr. Margerison:   When Billy Mac Jones came in, I think it did, but I wasn't here to see it.  I just heard about it.   I just heard little bits and pieces.  He was a historian supposedly; he was high school coach kind of guy.   He brought in some historians with him from Angelo.   One became dean of liberal arts and one became graduate dean.  I'm not sure if he came from Angelo but he was one of Billy Mac's boys.   So you had all these historians floating around in the administration who had been brought in by Billy Mac who were given courses and tenure.   I'm not sure that was all something that people wanted to see is a bunch of historians they knew nothing about suddenly being.

Ms. Allen:   From looking at the chart I made there were four that came with him and when he left, all but one of them left.   I don't know whether they went with him or not.

Dr. Margerison:   Randolph went with him, I think.   Jerry Dawson actually got the job as president of some little Baptist school in East Texas.  Tug [James Wilson] knew Billy Mac, and I think there was some prior connection there, I'm not quite sure what that was.   It was all before my time.   Dawson left; fortunately for us he left.  Billy Mac was actually tenured; I don’t know for sure.  I don’t think he ever taught.

Ms. Allen:   It stands out in my chart, most everyone has started as an instructor or maybe an assistant and worked their way up.   At that juncture these four people came and were put in as tenured.  That was the first time that had happened, historically.

Dr. Margerison:   This is just a guess on my part, that people were not totally happy with that.   I do not know, but I wouldn't be surprised. This department does not normally like people run in on it against its wishes.

Ms. Allen:   That would be understandable.   Given the last twenty-five years everyone started in and progressed [advanced] through and then to have people come in.

Dr. Margerison:   Sometimes the department will legitimately go out and seek someone who is senior.   This department has not normally done that, but it is certainly legitimate to go out and hire someone as a full professor.   Of course, if you have a new president and suddenly you have four new professors sitting there with him, you can be sure the department did not jump up and down with joy.  You can be pretty sure there were some who didn't like that.  Whether everybody didn't like it, I don't know.   Maybe the thought was well heck we'll do so well with him as president that it will overcome the other.

Ms. Allen:  Maybe it worked out well in the end.

Dr. Margerison:   At least Randolph and Dawson, well.

Ms. Allen:   Statistically, minorities, women, Spanish, Blacks are very underrepresented.

Dr. Margerison:   Pretty poor.   This department has had a tradition of saying that it's, and I think maybe its back in the 1950s and early 1960s it was Emmie Craddock and Betty Kissler and Merry FitzPatrick and there were a couple of others who floated in and out that I don't know much about, the department liked to think that it was real liberal on those issues because it had three women.  Way back then there was Retta Murphy that everyone thought a lot – of course back in the 1930s or 1940s if you had a woman that was about all you were going to get.   In the 1970s and 1980s what happened was we did hire a lot of women but they all tended to be temporary positions up until we started tenuring people again.  

You know we had this big hiatus when we didn't tenure anybody and Emmie left and then Merry left, and whatever we thought about ourselves was not true, and it’s been something that has worried me from the time we started tenuring people: what is the relationship [ratio] between women and men.   We have so many women students that to have two to three women on faculty is really quite embarrassing. It’s hard to hire women faculty when you don't have some women for them to interact with when they get here.   It becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and so the very first tenure track we hired was a Black woman, Leah Shopkow [Fall of 1985].   I happened to be chair of the search committee and thought it was my crowning achievement that we were able to get her.   She was extremely bright, Black and a woman.   Of course, all those things worked very nicely.   She was a wonderful teacher, one of the best teachers we ever had.   She was only here for a short time.   I hoped that would be the first step toward getting some more.        Of course, she ended up leaving.  Money was a factor.  But I think isolation was a factor too.   She was basically a New Yorker, and here she was in a little Texas town.  There were in this department at that time no other young women, and we hadn't hired Vikki Bynum yet.   I think she was feeling sort of frustrated by some of those things. If we'd had a couple of other tenure track people here more her age, another woman or two, I think a lot of those kind of frustrations would have left.  Now she still would have had the money problem.   We still had the twelve-hour load then which she was suffering under.   We were making her teach US history which was a problem, and she decided to start looking.   She ended up with a real good job and left.  But it’s something we fight every year.   Every position that we've had in the last few years with very few exceptions we really tried to hire women, and we have been turned down by so many women that it’s hard to count the numbers.

Ms. Allen:   Do you have any idea why?

Dr. Margerison:   Money.  The search we are doing right now for instance.   Very few women candidates, that are really legitimate candidates.   So, you put those on your short list, and then they are on about a dozen short lists.   They are on short lists in schools all across the country.   We don't pay as much as many.  It’s not the most prestigious school to be at, so if you have somebody who is good and female, there are a lot of other departments trying to do the same thing, and it’s hard to hire them.   We've often times been able to hire very good people.

Ms. Allen:   What attributes do you stress if you are trying to convince someone to come here?

Dr. Margerison:   What I stress is the nine-hour load, we have good young faculty.   There are some real go-getters in the department, got some books being published and if you’re coming in and you want to publish, you like to be around people who are publishing, and we've got that.   We're close to the UT library.   In certain fields that is very useful because you are close to a major research library where if you are stuck off somewhere like Stephen F. Austin or Northwestern Louisiana where are you going to go to get your books.   Of course, you are close to a nice city that a lot of young faculty would find as a good place to live, Austin.   Because it’s got the university and some cultural attributes.   It’s not the greatest but then again if you're at Stephen F. Austin where do you go?   So, a lot of these people, faculty are sort of strange.   Highly educated, often times they have very esoteric tastes like music or food even though they are usually dead broke.   University sponsored kinds of things like orchestras, or entertaining artists, or that sort of thing, or just people they can talk to.          If you're stuck out in the boondocks somewhere you might not find somebody you can talk to.   I think that's the way Leah felt.   There just weren't enough people for her interact with, that have the same interests and so forth.    So those are the kinds of things you try to stress now. It might or might not sell depending on the individual.   Normally of course those who are looking for a faculty jobs are just like anyone else; they will look for the best job they can get.   If this is the best job they might take it, if it’s the second best job, they'll take the first best one.   I think we lost the last two women we tried to hire.   We tried to hire two women for the same job they turned us down one after the other because of the money.   I think both of them felt the money was just ridiculous.

Ms. Allen:   Do you foresee that changing?

Dr. Margerison:   Well, it has changed a little bit.   We're getting a little raise this year and a little next year.   If the state comes through with its three percent [salary increase] next year, we'll be ten percent higher than we were two years ago.   That will help.   It won't solve the problem, we'll still be behind, but we'll be more competitive.

Ms. Allen:  I think SWT is way behind when compared with UT.

Dr. Margerison:   We'll always be behind UT.   Every state has a leveling of schools.   A place like UT is always going to pay the highest.   A place like SWT or Stephen F. Austin or even the University of Houston is going to pay less.   You'll always have those kind of rankings.   That's true of any state.   If you go to California, UC Berkely is going to pay more than Cal State.   What you have to do is try to be competitive with similar kinds of schools.  If somebody has got a job offer between here and Berkeley, unless they just don't like Berkeley, they are going to take the Berkeley job.  It’s a more prestigious school, and people who feel like they are good are going to want to go there, so you have no chance of competing.   But the thing is, if you have somebody from Cal State Bakersfield which we did have, which is in a much worse place at least in my opinion, no better school than SWT, why would somebody prefer that job?  Because they are paying ten thousand dollars more, that's why, especially if they have a young kid they are trying to raise as a single mother, they can't be coming here for ten thousand dollars less. In that case it was clearly money.   There were no advantages to stay in Bakersfield except ten thousand dollars and better benefits than we could offer.   That's where we have to compete. We'll never be able to compete with big research institutions.  Somebody gets a job in a big research institution unless they just don't want that kind of work, they are not going to take this job even if the pay is the same.   But at comparable institutions they might.   So that is what we compete with, comparable institutions.

Ms. Allen:   Why did you choose history?   Was it something you always knew you wanted to do?

Dr. Margerison:   No, but I always liked history.  I didn't know what to do.  I was going to college to be a businessman, whatever that was.  I didn't know what you did.   I just knew you went to college, and then you got an education, and you got a good job.   That's what all our students say.  I got there, and I had a good advisor.   He told me that I should do something in liberal arts if I liked liberal arts subjects and then go off to business school and graduate school.  That sounded fine to me.  So, I said I really loved history.   He said, “take some history and see if you'd like to be a history major and then you can go to business school as a graduate student.  That's better, you won't be such a narrow-minded person when you graduate”.   I started taking more history, and I liked it more and more and I just figured, heck, I'll be a history teacher in college.   I never had any intention of doing it in high school.

Ms. Allen:   What do you see as the department's strongest attributes?

Dr. Margerison:   Right now, I think it’s changing very rapidly in a very positive direction.  Bringing in new faculty at as fast a rate as we can get them in and people who are very, very good.   I think we are continuing our strengths in teaching that we have always had, and we've got some real good research-oriented faculty who are going to make SWT a lot more well known in the history profession.   When Vikki and Greg's books come out, we'll have in the last two years four books if you count the De La Teja's book.   In the next few years we'll probably have some more.   These people are publishing at very good presses. We've always had good teachers; I don't think we've ever had any doubt about that. We've had some pretty good historians, but I think we've had just as good teachers.  We're going to have a more active department as far as publication is concerned.   I think it’s going to be an interesting department. We've broadened out the fields.   We have an Asian historian which we never had, and we're hiring for a Latin American slot this year.  We hope to broaden out Latin America in some ways.   We’re covering things we've never covered before.  My biggest disappointment is losing Leah Shopkow.   With her we would have had another woman of course, but also somebody with a very interesting urban background.  She was quite different personally from anybody here.   I think the department is much more diverse.

Ms. Allen:   I think students benefit from diversity.

Dr. Margerison:   Absolutely.   Different students can identify with different faculty.   If everybody is sort of a homogeneous whole, then you can only field a certain kind of student.   If you have a more diverse faculty the atmosphere around the department has improved in my opinion since we started tenuring people again.   For a long time we just hired temporary faculty, I think things had gotten sort of stale as a result.   Those old timers of us have been invigorated by the new faculty.

Ms. Allen:   Actually, you are kind of in the middle.

Dr. Margerison:    I'm not the oldest timer but I've been here twenty years.  Most of the existing tenured faculty came in the sixties, Ron Brown and I, and I guess Tug Wilson, and Dennis Dunn came in the seventies.

Ms. Allen:   In the next decade, probably, you'll be replacing several.   The trend of hiring and diversifying, do you think that will continue.

Dr. Margerison:   Hopefully.   But it’s hard to hire people.  We're interested in hiring people who are doing new kinds of things, like the kind of research Vikki Bynum does.   Nobody around here did anything like that.   Sherow is doing environmental history, and we're doing different kind of things.  De La Teja can do public history.   Sherow can too. He worked in a public office, land office.   He understands how history is useful in managing records in dealing with things historical through government activity.   We are quite a bit more diverse than we were.   Just the range of courses is changing rapidly.   Every year we have a bunch of new courses.   It’s much more diverse, and I think we will always, I believe, be a department that does a good survey course that is interested in teaching good solid survey courses in US history, or western civ or world civ. for general students.   We will continue to offer very strong advanced courses, but I think they will be much different over time. Which is the only way the profession can be used to live.  If you do the same thing over and over one generation after another, what have you got?   There's bound to be repetition but on the other hand there has got to be new ways at looking at it.

Ms. Allen:   Its necessary to mirror the interests of society as well. Thus, your environmental and women's history.

Dr. Margerison:    Sure, look at [Frank] De La Teja.  When I came here the notion of a Hispanic teaching Texas history would have just been unbelievable. It wasn't done. [Laughter]  What you did, you got somebody you wanted to talk about, the great Texans of the past or something like that.   Frank's attitude toward Texas history is going to be quite different than an Anglo historian of twenty-five years ago.  That's not to say he's going to be in total disagreement with them on everything because there were good historians twenty-five years ago just as there are now, but he's got to have a different perspective.   That's something that I thought was very much needed for our Hispanic students especially in local history.

Ms. Allen:   They are underrepresented as well.

Dr. Margerison:   Sure, but there are some there.

Ms.  Allen:   There are some there, but look around the classroom.

Dr. Margerison:   No there are not as many as there ought to be.  You have to have some role models.   That's why we need more women historians.   You have these women history students out there who need a role model.

Ms. Allen:   Up until the 1930s or 1940s most of the women that filled most of the instructorships, women were the majority in the history department.   But after the 1950s it switched back.   The early women were not the PhDs. They did not stay.

Dr. Margerison:   Merry might have a little better sense of that.   She was a student here and is sharp as a tack.   If anybody could tell you anything, [she could].

Ms. Allen:   She went to school here in the late 1930s. Then she taught here briefly in the 1940s, left, and came back. Her recollections could be invaluable. I'm looking forward to talking to her.   What about your involvement with Phi Alpha Theta?   That organization started on this campus in 1971.

Dr. Margerison:   I think Bill Emory started it.   Swinney could tell you that for sure, maybe Bill Liddle. Emory was still here at the time; he was still working on his PhD.   He just thought it would be a way of improving the professional image of the department and something good for the students. When I came, I was already a member as most people are and so I was mildly interested, and then Emory left, and it just sort of hung around for a while.   It was still here but there wasn't much doing.  

Ron Brown is really the one who got that going All the Phi Alpha Theta stuff can be attributed to Ron.   He just thought that the thing should be done better than it was being done, and he wanted to invigorate it, and so I was willing to give him a little help on it, but he did most of the real work.   We made certain decisions together.  One was that we would have a banquet.   I don't think they had ever done that here.   We decided we would do the banquet which I think has been pretty much a success.   The first year it was horrible mess because we said the dues were twenty dollars, and if you come to the banquet, it's twenty-seven dollars.  Nobody came to the banquet.   So, the next year we said the dues include the banquet, and then of course people started coming. 

The faculty have been very good about coming.   We've always had a nice crowd.   We've had some real good speakers, and Phi Alpha Theta is not a tremendously active organization as you know but it serves its function.   Every once in a while, you get somebody in there who really wants to make something happen like Jonni Wilson this year. They'll get in there and really get some activities going.   That's been helped to some extent by our new faculty.  Greg Andrews and Jim Sherow in particular who've been anxious to get students to do papers and read them at Phi Alpha Theta meetings.   That's starting this year for the first time.   Jonni is going to read a paper in Chicago at the Phi Alpha Theta National, then Greg has organized some people to read at the session at the Southwestern in Austin.   That's really good for students going to grad school who think they'd like to be historians. So, while Ron was sort of the chief honcho I think that Greg and Jim have helped quite a bit in pushing this more professional kind of thing for Phi Alpha Theta.   They are both interested in helping students organize these kinds of things.   I think Phi Alpha Theta has been one of the successful things the department has done.   I can't remember when Ron really started pushing it, maybe in the late seventies or early Eighties.

Ms. Allen:   It is curious, SWT was one of the last state universities in Texas to have a chapter here. Even Sul Ross in Alpine had one earlier.

Dr. Margerison:   We might have been even later if Emory had not gotten on the ball.

Ms. Allen:   This Historian lists 1971 as the charter date. Other involvement on campus by yourself?

Dr. Margerison:   TFA [Texas Faculty Association] is my main activity, and it’s only been around since 1985, it’s a new organization. I was AAUP president one year.  AAUP [American Association of University Professors] is not an organization that ever managed to accomplish much but when we formed TFA, I was determined that we were going to make something happen at SWT with TFA if it was going to happen anywhere.   We have the largest chapter in the state, and I think we do more. The pay raise this year is an accomplishment.  As far as association kind of activities, that's been my principal one.   I belong to American Historical and French Society for Historical Studies.   I go to conventions occasionally. I'm not going this year.   I went to one last year and delivered a paper.   Those things, I get tired of pretty fast.   I do not go every year.   Actually, I am going to one this year, but there are times when I miss several years.   If there is something I really want to do there, I might go.  Other times I am just perfectly happy not to go.   It disrupts your classes. It’s good to go, you should never quit going altogether probably.   There is something about hanging around so many historians.  On the other hand, you can spend a lot of time doing nothing too.  I try not to overdo it. One year I went to three in a row.   It was just awful.

Ms. Allen:   Do you have any good stories?

Dr. Margerison:   That I'm willing to tell?  [laughter]   Well one of the best stories is the department's party in Everette Swinney's back yard with his cow.  It was back in the 1970s, I hadn't been here too long and he was chairman.   We always had the history department party at the beginning of the year in his back yard.   He'd cook up all the hot dogs or hamburgers usually, and one year we went over there.   He had a little tiny electric fence that was not very high, just temporary around this little calf – which at that time he had some land and some cows.   I can't remember why this calf was not there, but its mother was gone, or it had some kind of problem, so he had to keep it in his back yard.   So, we had a party with his calf back there which seemed a little strange.   It seemed fairly amusing that you'd have a party of historians, and the focal point would be a cow.   We have a party every year.   I might think of more later.   There probably are some.

Ms. Allen:   Other than money, what do you think the department needs most?

Dr. Margerison:   Besides money, I'd just like to have a few good women historians.  I think it’s the single thing we need most.

Ms. Allen:   There was an article in the San Antonio paper during the Thomas Hill controversy.   The only woman PhD tenured professor in the history department at UTSA was bemoaning the fact that she was the only one there.  That some came but never stayed.

Dr. Margerison:   I think this department has not tried to make it impossible, but it has been very difficult to overcome the fact that there are few here.   I really thought that there were more in the job market than there are.               This search has been sort of enlightening.  There are very few women in either search and a huge pile of men.

Ms. Allen:   Could that be because they also have families, they can't uproot?

Dr. Margerison:   Its possible.   A lot of these women are sort of on the second go round.   Have gone through one life and now gone back into the academic world.  A lot of women who do apply are older than men because they have raised families, been divorced and gone back to school and those kinds of things.   Well, look at yourself, your in school later that used to be the norm.  People go to school, turn out to be good students and want to go on and get graduate degrees and go off and teach somewhere.  You've got a different kind of demographics as far as your applicants with women.   There are a lot of older men too than used to be the case but at any rate I really think two or three more good women in the department would make a big difference, and it would a lot more balanced department.  It’s the one minority we can really recruit, I think.   We haven't done real well.  But getting Black historians is just about impossible.   There just aren't any out there, male or female.   The fact that we had Leah here for three years, that's probably the only Black person that's ever going to be teaching here because you can't find them.  Hispanics are a little bit easier, and there are some.   We got one which is sort of amazing in a way.   We may have more someday.  Women you'd think would be easier but so far it hasn't turned out to be the case. We really do need some.  We're going to lose Betty Kissler next year.   She's talking about retiring and when that happens, if we don't hire someone, we've only got Vikki left. That's just one woman.  That’s not enough.  She’ll be like that person at UTSA.

Ms. Allen:   Do we not have any as instructors that are working on their PhD.

Dr. Margerison:   Mary Brennan is here as a temporary right now, but you know that is not really satisfactory.   You really need permanent because as far as the department thinks about things and approaches things when people are temporary, they don't interact in quite the same way.   If you have a group of women, they tend to keep the rest of us honest so to speak.   I think it’s absolutely essential for our female students to have some females who are just as good as the men and can teach more than women's history.   You don't want people to think that if you are a woman the only thing you can do is women's history.   Not that women's history isn't worth doing but they are just as capable of doing any other kind of history as men are.  Men don't focus on the history of the male sex.   You could be a male and do women's history for that matter.  You want a wide range of women historians.

Ms. Allen:   How do you see this department interacting with other departments in liberal arts?

Dr. Margerison:   We've always had a sort of superior attitude which you probably picked up on.   That may be true of all departments.  Geography may think they're the best or English.

Ms. Allen:  I have a double major, geography is also another major.   It requires a different set of wheels to operate over here than it does there.

Dr. Margerison:   I'm sure it does.  That's just a discipline difference or maybe the personality of the departments is different somehow.  We feel pretty good about ourselves over here.  That's probably good and bad.   Does that affect the way people look at us?  I don't know.   If you let that slip out to the point where it makes other people sort of angry because we are sort of arrogant about what we think are our strong points.   Of course, they've always got us on a number of things.   They have plenty of female English people, and they worked hard to do it.  They had a female chair who was determined to hire a lot of women.   I'm sure that was it. Lou Ann Brunson wanted a lot of women.  They hired a lot of women, some very good ones.   I think they consciously set out to do that.   Now they have a nice balance which is what we want, what I want anyway.  We have really tried in the last three or four years to hire women.   We have offered jobs to women that turned us down, at least four or five. 

Ms. Allen:   Other than English, women are underrepresented in the rest of liberal arts.

Dr. Margerison:   English is the one real exception.   Like in Geography there is one, I think. Sociology may do a little better.   Philosophy, one.   Anthropology, none.   Languages have some very good ones.    That might be to some extent due to the fact that people have traditionally thought women were more likely to go into English than History.   Even though that is not necessarily true.   That's kind of a stereotype.   It’s a real embarrassment to have so few women.

Ms. Allen:   If you think the English department made a conscious effort and now has a new balance, then with the conscious effort you will go forward.

Dr. Margerison:   There is no question it’s a conscious effort.  Now of course you want to get good people.   You want your students to have good teachers, and I don't think we have ever failed them on that.   You do have to make a conscious effort, or you're not going to get them.   At some point you run out. There's nobody left to offer the job to.

Ms. Allen:   How do you advertise?

Dr. Margerison:   We do it in the NID. (??) [shows me a copy of it]

Ms. Allen:  How long will this process take?

Dr. Margerison:   We've got a short list now.   We're going to interview some people next week.   We will hire in January or February.   Hopefully we'll get at least one [woman], if we are real lucky, two.   This attitude on women is not shared equally by everybody.  There are some people who are desperately determined to get some women and others who are if you get a good one fine but the bottom line is they just want to get someone good.   I think the department members vary on that from their own personal perspectives and backgrounds.   I happen be one of the people who think, well I have a daughter.   People with daughters and no son tend to be thinking, "hey what's going to happen to my kid?"   I don't think that's the only reason I think that way.  I've always liked having women around.   I've always liked having women friends and colleagues. Its personally very pleasant to me to have some female acquaintances and colleagues.  But I do think it’s good for the department.   The search committee this year is me, Betty Kissler, and Vikki Bynum. We're looking hard to get as many women as possible.

Ms. Allen:   Is that a deliberate placement on the committee? The age groups?

Dr. Margerison:   I didn't make up the committee.   We've been trying to put some of the tenure tract people on committees because there are so many of them, and most of them are going to be tenured pretty shortly.   It just seemed like they should be included.   Teaching them and finding out how they look at it.   If it’s just the old fogies doing it all then you miss out on using some of the talent you have in the department. It was a conscious decision to try to broaden things out which I think was a good decision.  It’s one reason why the department is changing because you have more people with more ideas participating in the activities.   What we did in 1973 might have been great but this is 1991 so you know you've got to look at things differently, and I can't look at things like I did in 1971.   I don’t want to. I don’t think the department should.  I don’t think we do. You’ve got to grow and change as you grow.   This department has broadened out maybe not as much as some people would like but I think it has broadened out quite a bit in its whole attitude towards things in the last few years.   It’s all because we have all these new people, and it’s just made a world of difference.   Basically, it’s a good difference.   It makes those of us who have been around a long time better. It’s opened my eyes on a number of things.

Ms. Allen:   You sound very optimistic about things.

Dr. Margerison:  I feel good about this department right now because I think we've done a real good job in our hiring except for the fact that we haven't got as many women as we'd like but as far as the people we have, we have good faculty here.  I would like to hire a larger portion of women in the future. Of course, we tried to hire in some of these other jobs but we have not been successful except for Vikki.  She's the one person we've been successful in hiring.   I hope that changes this year.

Ms. Allen:   Do you have any other things you'd like to put down for posterity?

Dr. Margerison:   I might have some in another twenty years I'll put down.

Ms. Allen:   I think I've asked all my questions.

Dr. Margerison:   Are you asking the same questions of everybody?

Ms. Allen:   Basically, sometimes I get a response going in a different direction.   But basically, yes.

Dr. Margerison:   Are you going to be interviewing some of these tenure tract people?

Ms. Allen:   Yes, I hope to.   I'll tell you thank you now.

 

--- End of Interview ---