Interview with Debra Journet, January 16, 2020

Date: January 16, 2020, 1:00 pm

Interviewer: Hayley Salo, University Writing Center consultant

Interviewee: Debra Journet, former English Department Chair

Location: University Writing Center in the Ekstrom Library.

Interview

Debra Journet: So this is for the 20th anniversary of the Writing Center? I'm trying to figure it out.

Hayley Salo: Yeah. They're counting from not the very first rendition of the Writing Center--

DJ: No, no.

HS: --but from the 2000 one.

DJ: When it opened? Or when it was . . .

HS: When it opened in 2000.

DJ: Okay, alright, yeah.

HS: From what I gathered from the other stuff that we had, there was a different kind of writing center, but it wasn't really the same as what we have now

DJ: No, it wasn't. I can tell you about it if you want.

HS: That would be beautiful.

DJ: I actually don't know a whole lot about it.

HS: That's okay.

DJ: But I know that it was considered remedial. We then offered courses, non-credit-bearing courses for students who did not meet threshold requirements to attend 101. I think it was called 098, 099. I think those were the numbers, and the Writing Center was primarily aimed at those students. If you wanted to know more about that--I don't know if she still works here, Joan D'Antoni.

HS: I will pass along the name.

DJ: I know she was an adjunct faculty, and now she's one of those permanent instructors. And of course Ruth Miller. I'm sure you've heard her.

HS: Yes. What was Joan's last name?

DJ: D'Antoni. [Spells the name.] And there were other people who taught in there. She's just the one whose name I can bring to mind.

HS: Yeah, that makes sense. It was a while ago to remember all the names.

DJ: Yeah, and I didn't really have much to do with that. It was pretty much kind of a separate enterprise, even after I became Chair. I didn't really have much to do with it.

HS: Do you remember how it started to change into the writing center?

[Laughter]

DJ: Oh yes, very much so. I had the whole story.

HS: I don't know where the best place to start with that would be then, so if 3:00want to tell me a little bit about it, that might be the easiest way to go.

DJ: Alright, so, I'm going to tell it from my point of view.

HS That's perfect.

DJ: Others may have others thing. I had always thought that we needed a real Writing Center--not something stuck in the basement--whose vision, whose job, was to help students who couldn't really do writing at the university level. I had been arguing for that for quite a while.

When I was chair, it was always one of my, well the department voted on priorities for action, but it was always one of those things that I promoted. My vision, in the beginning, was that it would be a resource center for--I keep saying my because there really weren't that many other people that were advocates of it--that were would be a resource center for students and all 4:00levels of the university, as well as for faculty, both in their own writing and in helping them in teaching. So, that was always one of the goals that I thought the English department really needed. I thought that was what the University needed, and I thought we should do it.

In 1997, we went through our 10-year SACS accreditation. That may have been the 5:00year before, I'm not sure, but it was in response to this SACS accreditation. And SACS-- you know about SACS--had, probably still has, a requirement that in order to teach, to be the teacher of record, you have to have had at least 18 hours of graduate education. Do you know this story already?

HS: I know that that part still is true. That's one of the reasons that the first-year master's (MA) students start in the Writing Center before teaching.

DJ: Right. Okay, so, but the exegesis for what happened was, we had like 40 sections of 101 and 102 each semester that were taught by first year MA students. So, we had this set-up, and SACS had given us a kind of pass on that in the last accreditation review, which was before I was chair, actually before 6:00I was even at UofL. Because we offered this course 602 in the summer that students would take, it would prepare them to teach 101 and 102.

HS: Right

DJ: When SACS came back, this being either 1996 or 1997, they were sort of, I don't know, everyone was appalled and surprised at this, and it was like, "well you can't do that anymore. You can't do that, and you shouldn't be doing that, and all this." And, there was some feeling on the part of the other people who were engaged in this conversation that this was just something that the English department had dreamed up willy-nilly. And I had to keep making the argument that this is not the fault of the English department. This was what the University had decided to deliver as first year writing. I should say by this 7:00point, we no longer had 098 and 099, and that's another story if you're interested about what we did in response to that.

HS: So, was there a gap for a while when there was no remedial writing center and no writing center as we know it now? Or . .. .

DJ: I'm not sure because I can't 100% remember when. I think the 098/099 thing came later. But to answer that, I mean that's going to be in the records somewhere, but it was all kind of about the same time.

HS: Right

DJ: I mean these things were happening. But anyways, I made the argument that the department was not acting out of the rules. These were the rules that we had been told to operate under for the last 10 years, and it was the university's decision, not the English department's decision. So, it was like, what are you going to do? All those first year MA students are no longer going to be in the 8:00classroom. Two problems. Who's going to teach those 40 sections of 101 and 102?

HS: That's a lot.

DJ: And two, what's going to happen to any MA student that we want to recruit with an assistantship. So, at about the same time . . . if this is too much, if this is too deep in the grass, just . . .

HS: No, it's perfect.

At about the same time, we got a new president. His name was John Shumaker, who was very dynamic, had a lot of really great ideas. In the end, he kind of crashed and burnt after he left UofL. So, his name is not, you know, we do have a Shumaker building, but he's not someone people brag on about.

HS: Right

DJ: But he was very dynamic and really good for the university and he had a vision, which, up till that time, nobody had. And he was also from humanities; he was the dean of humanities at Ohio state early in his career and was a Classicist. He wanted to push the Research 1, but he was also wanted and realized that we had to have a strong undergraduate program and that the core was humanities, particularly English. So, he really wanted to build up our PhD, and that's why we got an Endowed chair, which Bruce Horner is now. Then we also got a new Dean, and his priority was--he was a biologist--undergraduates and 10:00undergraduate education. We never had a Dean as far as I know--maybe we did, I don't know--who really cared about undergraduate education.

So, over the course of a few days, I had this thing sitting in my lap, and one of the things that I was hearing was that the faculty were just going to have to take it on, and it just, I mean, even if everyone on the faculty taught an additional course, we still wouldn't be able to cover it. And, I went into my office--this all happed over one weekend--because I had to get it done; it was an emergency for the university. It was also an emergency for me.

HS: Absolutely

DJ: I had something bad that was going to happen in my life on the Monday. So, I said to him . . . I was by myself in my office, and I started making a spreadsheet. I didn't know how to (this was before I had spreadsheets software) 11:00so I just made a spreadsheet. And I tried to figure out how we could cover 40 sections. Oh, no, I'm sorry, let me go back a step. Randy Moore, the Dean, he understood that the department could not take it on, so he came to me and said, "I will give you four full-time assistant professors who will teach nothing but 101 and 102, and that's how we'll cover the gap." And I went into my office and I thought, that's a disaster. You know, this would be tenure-track full-time faculty. I said that's just a disaster. That makes us a two-tier department, and it widens the split between literature and rhetoric and composition.

HS Right

DJ: And since I was the first chair who was both, I didn't want that to happen. 12:00I'm still the only chair who's been rhetoric and composition. So, I went into my office, and I tried to think, how can we cover those 40 sections and make those 7, it was 7 or 8, full-time positions the same as everyone else.

And I started moving things around. Every faculty member had a first-year composition class, regardless of who they were. And then I upped the enrollments on certain classes, and just changed a few things around. It was really just--I wasn't lying, but you can do a lot. I mean, we have classes that never make their enrollment. So, I just dropped the enrollment, that allowed us to cover the same number of classes. Or raise the enrollment, I can't remember.

And so, I had this all laid out. I went to the Dean, and I said (this is getting back to the Writing Center, I promise you), "If you will let us do this, I will see if the department will agree to everyone in the department teaching first year writing." And he was just thrilled with that. It was like his dream come true. So, I went to the University, to the department, they all agreed. I'll just skip over the rest of it, but one of things I said that was that one of those positions would be the Writing Center, and it made students who previously were teaching these 40 sections Writing Center tutors. So, he thought that was a great idea too!

I had to go talk to the Provost, because she wanted to make sure that she could believe in me, and she signed on too. We hired--it took us a long time to hire the faculty--but we immediately went to work looking for a director of the 14:00writing center. I wanted to get somebody who would be there from the beginning who would be able to negotiate where it was going to be. It had to be a senior faculty member.

So, that's pretty much how it happened. I mean, it was like a lot of things that happened. When you're an administrator, you know that you spend tons of hours on trying to get people to agree on priorities And in the end, it's never what you agree to; it's always what some administrator thinks is a good thing to do. And what you have to do is take what you want to do and write it in a way that shows how it responds to that priority for action. So, the note, the part that went to the president, said that new faculty will up the research output of the 15:00department and help us become a better known. He wanted us to be one of the best, like one of the best PhD programs. And for the Dean, it was everybody in the university, every member of the English department, will teach at least one section of first year composition. The department voted on that unanimously. I don't think they were all happy about it, but they didn't want to bring in a second-tier faculty.

So, the Writing Center actually came out of all of that mess. Brian Huotand I used to talk about Writing Center programs, which provided assistance for people who were teaching writing intensive courses. Eventually after I was chair, that got folded into the writing center too. But, he and I knew the importance of 16:00having a writing center. And I also knew that if I was going to send all these faculty members into teaching something they hadn't really done before (some of them never taught before, none of them really wanted to teach, and many of them were either really disdainful or terrified that a Writing Center was necessary), then you had to be able to say, "If you have a student . . ." I know that Writing Centers are so much more than this, but they got hung up on grammar, that was what they were all hung-up on, and for a long time, that's all they did was correct the grammar. I said, "If you have a student who is having a problem with comma faults--it seems to be a common grammatical error--you just send them to the Writing Center. Or write a note: this student needs some help with comma faults." No need to do it yourself. You just send them to the Writing Center. So, it was like a good thing all around.

HS: It was support for the student, but also support for the faculty.

DJ: Support for the faculty, support for the student, and it also increasingly 17:00became support for the University. I think that's one of the important things. It was when Carol was the Writing Center director as well, but I know Bronwyn has worked really hard to make it really vibrant in that way. And I also think because Provost Beth Boehm, who is in the English department, was here when all that happened. She was really encouraging. She tried to set up connections between graduate programs and the Writing Center, so they had dissertation week. And she would fund some of that stuff, dissertation writing week, things like that. She became somebody we drew on for support as well.

HS: That's awesome. They still do the dissertation writing retreats too. They managed to keep it going.

DJ: That's great.

HS: Where there any specific challenges you remember through the process other than rearranging the entirely of teaching, or did it kind of come together?

[laughter]

DJ: Once everyone signed on, that part was not hard. I mean, then we hired that person I think fairly quickly. I'd have to go back when we hired Carole, and we got a bunch of really good applications. And Carol Mattingly was the first director. I had been her dissertation director, and she'd gone to LSU where I had been on the faculty before. She fulfilled all the requirements. We had several excellent applicants, but I knew her, and I knew what I did not want. What I just couldn't take on was the responsibility of building it myself. Because there are people in the department, any department, anywhere, [laughter] 19:00who will be the director or whatever of something but have this kind of, I don't know, "earned ignorance." Developed people who just can't get stuff done, and probably could, but if they just don't get stuff done for long enough, someone else is going to step in and do it for them

HS: Right

DJ: I didn't want someone like that, I wanted someone who would hit the ground running. So, she did most of that, and she would be the one to talk to if you haven't already arranged it.

HS: I forget who is on our list of names, but I'll pass on her name as well

DJ: She's the one who built it from the beginning. She's the one who got it into the library.

HS: We were wondering about that too, because this seems like a prime location

DJ: Yeah

HS: Because before, I think, it was in Strickler hall?

DJ: No, it was in the basement of Bingham. I think, I'm pretty sure that's where it was.

HS: Yeah, I think I read that it was in the basement first, then Strickler for a while, then here, but maybe we had the Strickler part not quite right.

DJ: Yeah, I'm not sure if Strickler Hall was a transition or whether it was just the last place. I don't know. But I'm pretty sure Carole--she did a couple of things that were really great and starting it off. One thing was that she was really active. I'm not entirely sure how the negotiations for the library went. She was really powerful to make the argument that it was the best place. It shouldn't be in the basement. It should be a welcoming place where students gather. The other thing is that she built a sort of research program that undergirded that. Have you heard about the Writing Center Research Project?

HS: No, I haven't.

DJ: Okay. So, she started this thing called the Writing Center Research Project. The documents, the archive, should exist somewhere in the Writing Center. She collected and started to establish an archive. She is an archivist. She did 21:00archival research. And she started to collect an archive of Writing Center documents, documents about Writing Centers, not just from here, but from across the country. She interviewed or surveyed many, many people. And I don't know where that is, because when she stopped being WC director, nobody else really wanted to do it. But she did. It became the genesis of several dissertations. And, if you go back and look at what the dissertations are, you can pretty well tell who the faculty was, because when Brian Huot was here, we had all these assessment dissertations. Almost nobody does assessment dissertations. We don't teach the course in assessment. But when Carole was here, she taught a course in 22:00Writing centers. She taught the practicum, and she taught graduate courses that fed into that. And one of the Watson conferences was on Writing Centers. You know about the Watson conference?

HS: [Nods]

DJ: So, like all of them, it was published somewhere, somehow. But you should try to find the archives

HS: I will. It sounds wonderful.

DJ: Yeah, surely the documents . . . she would have archived whatever we did. It should be somewhere in the English department. That stuff is I usually not thrown out. So, along with that, because you had mentioned English 101 and 102, they were kind of the feeders for the Writing Center, and she was doing all of the research.

HS: Were the intro level English course the main focus of the Writing Center, or were you able to pull in the upper level courses and the faculty?

DJ: You know, I don't know. You 'd have to look back and try to trace that out. 23:00Although I think they kept those records about who came to the writing center.

[pause]

When I taught intro level English courses, I didn't teach grammar in the class unless I got a stack of papers and there were like 15 comma faults. Then I would do a quick little thing. I didn't correct grammar, which is why I had to convince the people who were not trained in rhetoric and composition not to do it. I gave them all the research that's done. But, I would, sometimes, if I could see something of a consistent problem--and it wouldn't necessarily be grammar, sometimes it was cohesion, transitions, or something--I would mark 24:00"transition," and I would say, "go talk to someone in the writing center and show them this paragraph." So, I did identify things that I thought students could work on, rather than just edit them for them. I don't know what other people did, truly, more and more everybody who gets a job teaching anything in an English department will have taught composition or writing at some level.

HS: Do you remember if the students that came to the writing center were usually sent by an instructor, or was there advertising to get them to come in on their own?

DJ: I don't know, because I really didn't keep up with what they did on a day-to-day. I know they kept records of all that.

This is a different example; I just know this because I was more involved in it. When we stopped teaching 098 and 099, it was because the county or the state said that we could not deliver remedial courses anymore, and so there was all this stuff about where these students are going to go. They can be in all their engineering courses here, but where are they going to go? They'd have to go over to Jefferson County Community College (JCCC) or someplace like that to take their English course. Brian Huot, who was the director of the writing program, and who was an assessment specialist, said this to me. I didn't understand how it was going to work either, but he said, "we're not going to teach 098 and 099; we're going to mainstream them." And he kept records about whether the students were failing at a greater rate than anybody else in the class. It turns out they weren't. I'm certain that they kept records of that. I have no idea where they 26:00are though.

HS: We can track them down. Another little research project for us isn't a bad thing.

DJt: Yes, they would be on a computer. Ruth Miller would be the person to ask about that. And Carol. I think they would be more than willing to talk about it, and she was very instrumental in making it what it is. And she's in Louisville.

HS: I think we might have had her on the list of people to talk to.

DJ: Oh, well, I'd put a big star by her name.

HS: Will do. You had mentioned that as you were teaching, you would refer students to the Writing Center as it was applicable. Do you remember if your work with the Writing Center, either setting it up or afterwards, influenced your teaching at all, or was it just that it was another resource that you knew you could refer people to?

DJ: No, I don't think it influenced my teaching. When I would teach, I mainly 27:00taught 105. I was teaching it in a way that ended up fitting with the program's connection with Ohio State, and 105 worked out better for me. And, so, I had really good writers. In there, I would stop and talk more about surface--not surface stuff--but we would generally talk about introductions, and we would talk about not letting your evidence speak for itself. We would talk about these things because it was part of what the class was about. I did do some of that. I brought that terminology because I always taught writing intensive courses. I would bring that terminology in, but I think I would have done that regardless of the Writing Center being there because I'm a trained writing teacher.

HS: Right. It was already what you were doing

DJ: It was already part of my background and experience.

HS: Do you know how the early master's students took the transition from working in the Writing Center to going into the classroom? That may be a little outside of what you were focused on.

DJ: I don't know. The person that would, the place where that would be, would be through the first-year composition office. They also stopped doing 602 in the summer, so they didn't have to take 602 before they taught 101. They took it concurrently

HS: That's still how it is now.

DJ: So, I mean it would have had that change. Brian Huot was comp. director for quite a while. He would be somebody you might be able to ask, and Bronwyn was comp. director for quite a while. So they would know. I didn't really have much to do with it. When you're chair of a really large, complicated department, you delegate. I just trusted them to do that, and if there was a problem, they would bring it to the department

HS: Right, so you were mostly there in the very beginning to set it up, to advocate it, to go through the bureaucratic red tape, so to speak.

DJ: Yeah, my main contribution was administrative. I think the most important 30:00thing I did was to craft a proposal that spoke to what I understood were the priorities of the people who were going to be able to make the decision. And I think I'm very good at that. I think I'm a rhetorician. The memo that I wrote resulted in us hiring all these people in the Writing Center and all that. It is where I explained how we would do it and what the benefits were. I wrote it so that the president would like it, the dean would like it, and the faculty would take on. I think of all the stuff I've written in my life--I've done a lot of writing, I've published a lot, and I've written a lot as an administrator and a teacher--that was probably the most important thing I'd ever written because it hard real consequences for people. My scholarship--while I think it's good--does 31:00not have real-world consequences in that way.

HS: Yeah, this was directly about the practical problem of first-year students.

DJ: Yeah, and changes the lives of seven people who probably wouldn't have a job now.

HS: That's true. Did you see any other administrative challenges, or anything you had to go through later, like staff changes as time went on? Or did the WC stay pretty stable?

DJ: Well, I'm trying to think. There was Susan Griffin, who was the chair after me. I think there were some problems with one of the people who was who was the Writing Center director, and she had to be removed, but I don't really know the details of that.

HS: That's totally fine.

DJ: Okay.

HS I was just kind of getting the feeling that it was more or less pretty stable and consistent, so I didn't know if I was missing something.

DJ: While I was there it was fine because we had Carol. The people who were directing the Writing Center did a great job, and they never came to me with problems, and I never came to them with criticism. They would do their own kind 32:00of review stuff, and we included them when there were departmental reviews. They would be appended to the departmental review. So they collected all the data, they did all of that, which was just outside my prevue.

HS: Right. You mentioned earlier that they kept track of the success rates of students that would have been in the remedial classes that were now in the--

DJ: Brian did that. The comp. program did that.

HS: Between that and the Writing Center collecting the data about what was going on, then, those two piece would give us a pretty good sense of what the writing center was accomplishing, if that's the right way to put it.

DJt: Yeah. The Writing Center obviously had some effect on the mainstreaming 33:00project, but I don't know that you could tease out how much that was. There are too many variables. You would have to look at who was teaching the classes there's just--

HS: You'd have to find out who the students were.

DJ: I think what he discovered--it wasn't like that they all did fine--it was that they did fine at the same general rate as everyone else did. I think what it speaks to most is the entrance criteria, the testing criteria for getting into a college are just not valid.

HS: Got it. Do you remember if you or any other faculty members noticed a difference in student writing when the Writing Center started seeing more of the first-year students?

DJ: I don't know. I didn't, but I didn't teach a lot. I taught one seminar every 34:00semester, and then one other course, usually 105, until I stopped. When I was chair, when I said that everybody had to teach a freshman writing course, I felt like I had to be one of those people too. I actually took on an additional course; otherwise, I would have taught one course a semester. I wanted to and had to teach a graduate seminar, so I taught 105 and whatever seminar I as teaching.

HS: Right

DJ: I know that a lot of the faculty were very happy teaching 101 and 102 and continued to teach it after. I think that what they did was that they said you didn't have to teach 101 or 102, but you could teach any writing course, and that includes--not like a writing intensive course--but you could teach, 35:00technical writing, business writing, creating writing, or writing about literature. So, a lot of people moved in the direction that they wanted to move in, but a lot of people stayed in 101 and 102, and then a lot of people just left it.

Some, this is again more about that, but, Beth Boehm and I gave papers at some conference. Oh, I think it was the Association of Departments of English (ADE), which is a constituent of MLA that focuses on the people and the administration. It sort of supports chairs and directors of graduate studies, stuff like that. And we were invited to give a talk on this because I had talked about it at ADE 36:00meetings before. They asked if we would come and give a formal talk. And so, I gave my talk, which was the sort of positive side. Then Beth did this survey and showed that people were not as happy as I had sort of optimistically claimed they would be.

HS: Was your talk focused on the faculty or the program itself?

DJ: The faculty.

HS: Okay. I can see where yours would be a little bit different than another person's.

DJ: Well mine was more about what this is supposed to be, and how it would work, and didn't work, and what it would accomplish. I emphasized the Writing Center. We got new money for technology, got a new technology classroom, and got all this stuff. Then she did a survey which was titled something from the Heart of Darkness.

[laughter]

HS: Optimistic

DJ: It was funny. And it was like, I'm sitting right there next to her. She's one of my best friends, and she said, "I realize I'm sitting next to my chair, 37:00one of my best friends . . ."

[laughter]

I'm not sure that had anything to do with the Writing Center, but it's all part of the same ecology. It's the same people.

HS: Especially when everything in the Writing Center stems from the English department, it's kind of, in some ways, hard to separate the English department from the Writing Center in many cases.

DJ: Well, I imagine the English department--well, you could tell me, is the percentage of students from the English department higher than other departments?

HS: That work here?

DJ: No, that come here as clients.

HS: It kind of depends on the time of the semester. As the 101 and 102 papers come due, we see a lot of students from those populations, but at the same time we see a fair number of graduate students that are publishing journal articles that are getting us to look through those. However, I think a good percentage of ours are the early English classes.

DJ: Right. So, you don't get a lot from, say, history or biology.

HS: No, I've only seen a few history papers. Once in a while there's biology paper. We see a fair amount of engineering papers.

DJ: Engineering, okay. Well, that tells you something. Engineering students have to take a writing course, which they offer. That was another decision. I wasn't chair then, so that was not my choice.

[laughter]

HS: We see a good spread of people coming in for help with learning to write a regular English essay, or learning how to work through a memo, or a letter of some kind.

DJ: I used to send my students--I guess this would be 105 students, because the graduate students kind of mentor themselves--but I would send them to come and to get help developing a thesis. We talked a lot about that in class, and I 39:00talked a lot about that in conferences, but it never hurts to have somebody else look at it. Not a thesis statement, but an argument.

HS: The actual thesis. That makes sense.

DJ: Not how to write the sentence, "but this is my thesis."

[laughter]

HS: That's part of it.

DJ: Just an argumenty thing.

HS: Do you remember if there were any major staff changes in the early days of the writing center, either at the administrative level or who was running the Writing Center itself?

DJ: Carole was the writing center director for quite a while. Then, I think it was after that, so not while I was chair, there was this other person, who did 40:00not work out. And then, after that, it was Bronwyn. I think that's only been the three.

HS: Pretty short line. Short and consistent.

DJ: Yeah, because when Carol was hired, that's what she was hired for. And it didn't mean that she had to do it for the rest of her life, but she made a substantial commitment to us. I think she did it until she retired, but I could be wrong. I don't remember stuff like I used to. It's been a while; I don't remember the details like I used to.

HS: It's tough, it's 20 years ago, and it was someone else's job at that point.

DJ: Yeah. I consider the writing center one of the great successes of the English department, and I always used to say that. It always used to be one of the things that I always included in a list of accomplishments. I'm not sure if 41:00that's the case anymore or not.

HS: Well, it's continued to help lots of different students and writers. It's still helping them after 20 years.

DJ: I know it's still successful. I don't know if its success is still touted by the department. I mean it could be, I don't know.

HS: Oh, right.

DJt: It could be, I don't know. I don't have any information about that.

HS: I don't know. We could probably dig into that too. See what there is to say.

DJ: Yeah. Well, I think that the relationship between the department and the Writing Center was fostered by having a rhetoric and compositions studies chair.

HS: That makes sense because it goes hand in hand with what Writing Centers do anyway.

DJ: Yeah. I had always worked at universities and that had strong Writing Centers. I knew about Writing Centers; I knew what they do. I used to teach 620 every other year, which is the research methods class. We would read a lot of research articles, and we would talk about how they work. I would always try to include different methodologies. I would always try to include different things 42:00that people did research about, and I would always have at least one on writing center research. I was the first rhetoric and composition chair and the first woman chair in the department. However, I had a PhD in literature, and I think because of that, I was not seen as a sort of threat to the rest of the department. Although, in the end, I probably did threaten someone.

[laughter]

But I, I don't know. I mean, I think because I had that background, I understood 43:00the importance of it, and I was prepared to argue for it. Which I don't think the chair before me did.

HS: Because you had the dual focus of the literature and the rhetoric and composition, you understood both sides.

DJ: That was my background. By the time I came here, I continued to teach some literature classes, but most of my teaching was in graduate seminars or, you know, 105.

[pause]

HS: I think that addresses all of the questions I had down. Is there anything else that you can think of to add?

DJ: I don't know if this is something that you've thought about asking about, or care to even follow, but I've always sort of wondered about the relationship between the Writing Center and the Delphi Center. If there's a source of tension there.

HS: I've never thought about that. I've worked with a few people from the Delphi center, but I've never been up there to see.

DJ: Well, it's just in terms of what they do. They did a conference (they do these annual conferences), and they did one on computer stuff. Someone recommended me, so I was on the committee that year. I was just sort of struck by how different their mission was. I'm just wondering. I guess because they work directly with teachers, and they don't work with students at all, maybe it's not an issue. I just always wondered about it. It seemed like it would be odd to have overlap, but I'm not sure there is.

HS: I can look into that.

DJ: It may be too political to bring that up.

HS: It's an interesting point, either way.

DJ: I think the last thing I'd like to emphasize is that there's got to be tons of data somewhere about the Writing Center.

HS: In a cupboard or on a hard drive.

Journet: Probably on a hard drive. And you should, because I know they kept records every year, as I'm sure they do know, about who comes in, blah blah. And I know Carole has all the archival stuff, which it seems to be would be really interesting to look at. And she would have her own archive. She would have her own archive just for us. It would probably have flyers, and folders.

HS: It's exciting

DJ: Yeah, you should certainly talk to her.

HS: Will do.

[pause]

Anything else?

DJ I can't think of anything.

HS: Thank you for coming in and for sharing all of your memories with us.

DJ: You're welcome. Thank you for inviting me. It's interesting to look back and talk about.

[End]