Oral History Transcript - Martha Brunson - May 12, 1986
Interview with Dr. Martha LuAnn Brunson
Interviewer: Kenneth Doyle Farrar
Transcriber: Kenneth Doyle Farrer
Date of Interview: May 12, 1986
Location: Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, TX
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Begin Tape 1, Side 1
Kenneth Doyle Farrer: You’ve been teaching here at Southwest Texas since 1967. What have been the most noticeable changes regarding the role of women faculty members here on campus?
Martha Brunson: Well, we’ve always had strong women on the faculty. I think most of them have been clustered in departments like history. I remember Emmie Craddock was here, and Betty Kissler, and there were some strong women in English, even in ’67, who were full professors. People like Gertrude Hudson, and always in many of the areas, many strong people. However, I think we’ve seen progress in some ways for women; more being hired, more staying in the profession, certainly we’re getting to be full professors. The only funny thing is, I think, things change just to stay the same, because when I came here there were four women on the senior faculty in English, and there are still four women on the senior faculty in English. Now they are four different women. The four here earlier were Hudson, Hightower, Young and Hayes, and now we have Diane Parkin-Speer and Mary Agnes Taylor and Nancy Grayson and myself [also Pat Deduck]. You’d think there would be others by this time, especially since I’ve tried to hire a good many women and keep a good many women, but both the men and women have come and gone in the department. I heard a story, which certainly happened before I came, that when the faculty men’s club met, they, of course, wouldn’t allow women to attend. What happened was that at one time they had a program come in and several women like Emmie [Craddock] and Betty Kissler and others wanted to go hear, so they asked if they could even come and sit behind a screen and pretend they weren’t there, and they still didn’t get in.
Farrar: Do you remember the year?
Brunson: It was probably in the early sixties or late fifties, and that is still—you still think about things like that. I don’t think that would happen now, but we still have a faculty men’s club.
Farrar: Is there a faculty women’s club?
Brunson: There’s a University Ladies Club, but of course that’s a different organization; it’s usually faculty wives and staff faculty women, and I don’t think it ever has quite become what I would call a substitute for the faculty men’s club. It’s an entirely different type of organization. I don’t know; it is kind of interesting to see the difference in the way that has happened socially. You know, you look upon the faculty men’s club—although socially it’s still partly professional. The president would come, as I understand it, and men would exchange ideas with him, and in a sense, it is kind of a “good old boy system” when there’s not a counterpart “good old girl system,” if you will.
Farrar: Have you noticed whether the women professors here on campus have been treated with more respect than they were twenty years ago?
Brunson: Oh, I think the women who’ve made it to professor rank have always been treated with respect. I think we’re organized a little bit better now than we used to be organized. For instance, when Dr. Wittig came as our Vice President for Academic Affairs, she began to encourage scholarship and research among the women faculty members and actually helped us organize and create a forum for presenting scholarly papers and discussing and encouraging our research. That was definitely needed because the women were not as active as the men in scholarly efforts, and now I think we’re seeing a definite change. The young women who are coming to us now from graduate school are being given much larger opportunity to develop their research skills, I think.
Farrar: Well, referring to graduate school then. You chaired the English department from ’72–’83. What is the history of the department, and how did it develop and grow during this time?
Brunson: The department had already reached a very large level. When I started chairing, we probably had about eight thousand students.
Farrar: In 1972?
Brunson: Yes, 1972, and we now have, what? Twelve thousand, nearly thirteen thousand students.
Farrar: The school as a whole?
Brunson: We have more than that, don’t we? Nearly twenty [thousand]. So we grew from eight thousand. We more than doubled. Interestingly though, we didn’t really double in the number of equivalent full-time faculty we were allowed to add, and therefore the classes had to get larger on occasion. That was always a problem: to keep freshman English classes from getting so large that the professors and instructors couldn’t grade their papers. We have always had a good composition department and have always been involved in teaching writing from the professor-level all the way down to the instructor-level. Always it would be a running battle when formula was distributed from the state coffers; not to have too many people put in those classes so the professor could, indeed, get themes graded.
There are several local ideas that we ought to look at along those lines. Of course, there has been a turnover in the faculty. During those years, we hired forty–fifty people, all told, in turnover. We started emphasizing, although as I say we’ve always been strong in composition, writing. We always had a strong teacher-ed program, but we became, during the late seventies, very active in a basic skills center, which involved the English department, the education department, [and] the math department. These departments worked together to try to help the teachers in this region get a little bit better in teaching composition and reading, mathematics—the basics. That was an interesting project we did together. As Dr. Houston puts it in his memoir of the department, [written] in our seventy-fifth anniversary celebration [year], we became, during my time of administering, the “department of multi-purpose regional university.” We branched out from just doing basic things like teaching composition and teaching sophomore English and a modest major/minor program and small master’s program to involving ourselves with the paralegal program on campus; taking courses to the [military] bases around in this region, both literature and composition courses on all levels; working with occupational education. In other words, we diversified and became certainly a bit more broad-based in our services.
I guess we have always been basically a service department. We’ve always had a strong master’s program with some good MA candidates who would go on to further graduate work and do very well. Some of them have even come back to teach for us; Ed Laird was one of ours, for instance. We are always pleased to see them go—he went to Rutgers, as a matter of fact—and came back. But we have broadened our base and become a mature and rather sophisticated department during my tenure. It seems to be the nature of the changes in the university as a whole.
Farrar: Thinking about time, progress is change, isn’t it?
Brunson: Usually, but sometimes it goes backwards. Another thing that happened during the time I administered the department, although we’ve always had people who were active in state organizations, like the College Conference of Teachers of English, South-Central Modern Language Association, it became, I felt, necessary for me to become very active with Modern Language Association and National Council of Teachers of English and some of the other national organizations, and I became so very active in MLA that the director of programs, Jasper Neal, who became a good friend of mine and who was also the one who helped the “chairs” on the national level do their administrative work well, suggested that maybe I ought to pay double dues since I asked a lot of questions. Ultimately, I became a member of the council on the national level, and that helped change my outlook on what was going on across the country. There were two–three thousand English departments that we would keep an eye on; the PhD degree-granting ones—the people on the council represented all different levels from community college to schools like our own, which are usually called “four-year-plus master’s degree” [institutions].
Farrar: Was there any attempt back then at that time to institute a doctoral program?
Brunson: We talked about it then and again. We talked about the Doctor of Arts in English, as a matter of fact. But we felt that with as many strong doctoral programs around us in the region in the traditional fields we really couldn’t compete. We have the faculty, basically good library, and certainly we’re close to other good libraries, but unless formula dollars and a willingness of the coordinating board became part of the picture, there was not any way to develop a doctoral program in English. We do have a strong master’s program. [There were] all these issues—[also] composition research, actually was born during the time, in a sense, when I was administering the department, and we had to keep our freshman English program up to date. We shifted, for instance, what we now say; instead of talking about the end product—we are more interested in the process—how one gets the end product. We have a good bit more research done in composition, and we had to be sure our people went to national and state and regional conventions so they could stay up on many of the things that were going on there. In literary criticism, we’ve had a complete, almost a revolutionary change over the last twenty-five–thirty years. From the formalist, closed-textural reading of criticism of works of literature to what is now being called, and I defy myself to even define what it means, “deconstructionism;” [then there’s] reader response criticism; all of these very exciting things have been going on these last twenty-five years in the profession. It’s been an exciting time in the profession, as well as seeing the university grow and become a multipurpose university. It’s been a very exciting time for all of us. I guess probably one of the most exciting things that have happened to us has been our receiving an endowed chair of literature.
Farrar: Right, that’s the Therese Kayser Lindsey Chair. Can you give me the history on that?
Brunson: Well, about 1977, we received a phone call from one of our people down in the development office at the Alumni House; from Lunelle Anderson. She said, “What would you do if you had a small endowment come your way? Why don’t you get some people together to brainstorm the idea?” I said, “Fine,” not really knowing exactly how much she had in mine. As a matter of fact, she called over a series of days. The first day we were thinking, you know, maybe $25,000, something tiny, and we were thinking about a small annual lecture series that we’d endow or maybe scholarships. All of a sudden, she called one day and said, “What would you do if you had a half-million?” W-e-l-l! That became exciting, and we began to think about ways in which that money could be used to bring people here; leading scholars across the country, a much larger idea about lecture series and things of that nature.
Farrar: You were head of the department at that time, so setting up that endowment was probably yours.
Brunson: Right, with a working committee in the department. Bob Walts, Ralph Houston, Jack Rosenbalm were all on the committee. We sat down, brainstormed, took the thing to the senior faculty, to the whole faculty and finally wrote a document that pleased the daughter of Therese Kayser Lindsey, who wanted to honor her mother, and [when] we did hit with what she thought would be a good working plan, which is a very broad-based plan. We had to be sure we furthered the cause of literature. Her mother was a poet. She was active in the Texas Poetry Society, some say one of the founders of it; she graduated from this university in 1904, and she was very interested—we looked up what she took when she was in school for instance, and she had a very, very beautiful classic education here in 1904, so we knew this was a woman who would want to see things literary, preserved and hallmarked and forwarded, enhanced in any way we could do it. Of course, we’ve had the chair filled for a whole year with one person only one time since 1977. We’ve used it mainly for smaller types of projects; lecture series, one on the Southwest—literature of the Southwest, which was very successful as a launching lecture series. One of our own alumni of Southwest Texas who was beginning to make it rather big [and] had won an award for the Texas Institute of Letter for his novel Solitude, Russ Vliet was here. Also, Lon Tinkle, now deceased, came down from Dallas. He had done a book on J. Frank Dobie and had done some things on the Alamo and was a noted Southwestern writer, and of course, John Graves, who did that wonderful history of the Brazos River, the one that runs through Waco, The Death of a River, was here, and of course, Larry McMurtry, as you might suspect, would be a good candidate to come down.
Farrar: I think I saw Alice Walker’s name, too.
Brunson: Well, now that was another series. That was a women writers series that we did a couple of years after this earlier one. That was in ’79 or the early ‘80s. Well, yes, that one brought Nikki Giovanni, [a] very fine Negro poet, and of course, Alice Walker. Of course, The Color Purple has given her “a name in fame” lately, though it didn’t win any Academy Awards. In that series, too, Denise Levertov, a very fine poet, and Maxine Kumin, another fine woman writer. Then Carolyn Osborn, one of our own local short fiction writers was here. Carolyn is one of our favorites. She just came back for a Texas Sesquicentennial series that we just completed. She was in the same series with James Crumley. Donald Barthelme was also part of this most recent series; he has a lot of stuff in the New Yorker and other places. As you can see, we’ve used it mainly to bring writers here and lecturers here. The opening lecture was done by John Hurt Fisher, a medievalist, from Knoxville, Tennessee, University of Tennessee, who was also long-time executive director of MLA, he delivered a wonderful lecture with a Matthew Arnoldian base, and about culture—and a really nice beginning to the series. We try to plan well. James Dickey has been a favorite poet. He has read here three times, and we’re hoping to have him here in about two years, sitting in the chair, at least for a semester. Right now he is over at the University of South Carolina.
Farrar: Were you ever at any time in the chair, then?
Brunson: Well, no. Not the chair of literature. I “sat,” —well now, that is sort of metaphorical, I sat in the chair of the chair’s office as chair of the department, but the chair of literature is something quite different. None of our local people have we named to sit in the chair of literature; it’s always brought people in from off-campus.
Farrar: So, that’s deliberate, then?
Brunson: Yes, right. We’ve talked, from time and again, about maybe naming some of the people here as honorary chair holders or something connected with that, but we’ve not done that yet; I don’t know if we ever will. But it has really enriched the opportunities of the students here to hear some of the finest writers; meet them, visit with them, talk with them about the creative process. It’s really enriched us—I think—
Farrar: The creative process is really a precious thing, isn’t it?
Brunson: Yes, and it’s something we need to know about as much as we can and in [as] many different ways as we can.
Farrar: The endowment, then, I take it is in pretty good shape?
Brunson: Oh yes, we never touch the principal, only the earnings. And yes, another thing that we’ve done with it—two exciting things just recently—for the last three years, we’ve sponsored and funded Studies in American Humor, which is a scholarly journal started by one of our own people who is now deceased, Jack Meathenia. He is still the editor emeritus, but Jack Rosenbalm is his replacement and was his long-time managing editor. We now underwrite Studies in American Humor, although they get some money from subscriptions. They have about eight hundred subscriptions now, and they are from all over the world; many libraries subscribe. They’ve done some very fine issues; in fact, the last one that came out was on humor in the New Yorker; that was kind of an interesting issue. When Arlen Turner was here—the issue that you are holding is one that was done when he was here sitting in the chair as an American Lit Scholar. Arlen Turner was long-time WEB Duke Professor at Duke University. He’s a Hawthorne scholar and taught classes during the year he was here in the chair. The year he was here we did a humor conference, and it brought many, many of the leading scholars to speak about people—as you would expect—Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe—although some people think upon him in other way, he has a strong vein of humor in his writing. Of course, this journal has received very good press across the nation and is growing and is achieving some stature.
Then the other event—just recently, we have purchased some manuscripts that will go in our new library, and there will be a special room built for them. They are Southwest lit manuscripts, Dobie manuscripts, and other Texas writers. It was a collection put together by Bill Witliff, one of our prominent Texas screenwriters. We did a screenwriters’ series, which is how we happened to get to know him; and as a result, he asked us if we were interested in some of his collection. There will be a part-time archivist funded out of our money, which I think Ms. Therese Kayser Lindsey would be very pleased to have happen because, after all, she was interested in Texans and literature of Texas, as a Texas poet herself. So, as you can see, the chair has enriched our lives. There is no question about it. It’s been an exciting opportunity, and since we are so heavily into the business of teaching freshman English, it certainly has been a shot in the arm to the literature part of our program, which we don’t want to ignore or belittle.
Farrar: The Studies in American Humor. Is this the first edition right here?
Brunson: No, you’re looking at volume three, number two, in 1976. It started around ’73, when the first issues came out. We didn’t pick it up until right after this issue—right after Jack Meathenia’s death. Jack tried for a long time to fund it out of his monies. Jack was killed in a car accident, and his widow was really anxious to see—and so were we—to see his Studies in American Humor continued. So we picked it up and started publishing it, and we’re very excited to [have done] that. It already had a little reputation—from one of our department members, now deceased.
Farrar: Is this in the main [SWT] library?
Brunson: We have copies down there. I have a set here on the shelf that belongs here in this office to Liberal Arts.
Farrar: It seems like every time I walk through the stacks at the library, I find something new.
Brunson: Oh, w-e-l-l. It’s interesting you should say that; our library, for a growing university that sometimes has trouble getting funding, I think we do buy library holdings that are quite interesting and quite enriching. It’s interesting you should say every time you go to the library, you see something new.
Farrar: Speaking of funding, when you were the department chair, do you remember any funding battles you had to fight?
Brunson: Oh, yes, always scrambling for the dollar—the deans were usually fairly good to see that freshman English got funded, so I often found myself scrambling around to hire people at the last minute because we couldn’t always predict freshman enrollment as the students were applying. But, probably the toughest task as chair I had to face I faced immediately in 1972. One of our deans who was very new and inexperienced—he thought it might be a good idea to separate the composition from literature faculty—writing separated from reading.
Farrar: Do you remember that gentleman’s name?
Brunson: Yes, I do, as a matter of fact. It is Ralph Randolph. As I say, he was a very inexperienced dean. The faculty was just up in arms about it and I knew that it was going to be very difficult to overcome such a division; few departments in the nation separate their writing from literature programs; some have tried it, like a university in Florida. They tried it for about five years, it became more and more of a disaster; it took them ten years after [re]blending them to get over it. I haven’t heard yet of a successful division. I do know that composition teachers from across the nation get very upset because they feel the literature faculty gets the bigger part of the pie, so to speak, but I do think reading and writing go together. We call our freshman English “reading and writing” and I think, then, and I think now, it would be a disaster [to divide reading and writing]. So it was my duty, I felt, to the profession, to try to present that any way I could. We ended up in the president’s office, with the dean claiming that I promised that I would help bring this about, which I did not do—I told the dean, “We’re both new to our jobs, but the president has always said, ‘You solve your problems in the chair and the dean discussion,’ it won’t do any good to go up to the president.” Of course, he knew the president quite well, as a person that he [the president] had brought in. I knew the president, too, of course, and had heard what he said, and I thought I knew how to read him. He chose to see our little battle as amusing. He managed to call me a “stubborn woman” during the conversation. I told him to cut out his sexist remarks. But other than that, he chose to find that funny, even in 1972.
Farrar: And the president then was?
Brunson: Billy Mac Jones.
Brunson: So we were told to come back and solve the problem on this level, and we did that by keeping the two areas of the department nicely blended. Probably that was the toughest battle of my eleven years. So, I started out with a bang. I think the faculty has remained stronger and better for remaining together. That’s one I’ll always remember fondly.
Farrar: You actually told him to can the sexist remarks.
Brunson: I asked him to. When he called me a “stubborn woman,” I saw that as, you know, you’re always stereotyping women. I told him that’s a sexist remark. He laughed; he thought that was pretty funny. I knew him pretty well.
Farrar: Yes, well, that probably helped a lot, too.
Brunson: Well, you’ve got to cut down on what you might call the tension in a situation like that sometimes, and sometimes you have to live by your sense of humor. I think it’s probably a sign of health to have one, don’t you?
Farrar: Yes, it’s real important. So President Jones then told you “guys” to take it back and solve it yourselves.
Brunson: And we did.
Farrar: How did you convince Mr. Randolph, then?
Brunson: Well, we had long department meetings, presented cogent arguments, we felt, for what we wanted to do; did some restructuring and reorganizing that would tighten the structure if he felt we were in any way doing something loosely. I put in a very strong director of freshman English; we tightened the program a little bit, it was already a strong program. Dr. Walts, who was the chair immediately before me, had run a tight ship, and perhaps I knew we already had something good going, and Dr. Randolph just didn’t realize just exactly how strong it was. We were persistent and persuasive and simply tenacious, and ultimately he saw that as—
Farrar: The weight of opinion?
Brunson: Right. It just took a while to get it all ironed out but it happened—we had philosophy with us for a while. We used to be the Department of English and Philosophy, and now we’re just the Department of English, and that was an interesting interlude during Dr. Randolph’s time. He must have had some suspicion of philosophers in the first and second place, so he wanted to do some things with the reshaping of the philosophy department, which we prevented because we have some good people there. I don’t know, I don’t always consider myself a person who is a fighter, but there are certain things professionally that we knew more about than a person not in the profession. This dean was not an English person. We’ve come on now to develop even more of our composition programs. The coordinating board, if they ever unfreeze [programs] and let us do it—we have a major in writing coming up both on graduate and undergraduate levels. We’re mature enough now to go beyond our service on the freshman level and to offer [them], we’ve always offered a strong number of writing course, but not to the detriment of literature. What would have happened if this split had taken place? Literature is not taught as heavily as a service course; in a way, the person who would have directed the writing program would have had 90% of the faculty time, with literature having only a very small cadre—totally out of balance and incoherent as far as I was concerned and as far as the department was concerned.
Farrar: You saved the English department.
Brunson: No, we all saved ourselves. We worked together very well. Good esprit de corps, “group spirit.”
Farrar: Do you have some quotes in that book that you’d like to read us?
Brunson: I was going to read even from that little episode. Let me see what Dr. Houston said about that. He said something about “the first thing I had to do was the most challenging.” This is a history that was done by Ralph Houston; he was Dean of Arts and Sciences. It’s called Rosemary for Remembrance, and it was written to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of Southwest Texas [1978–1979]. Here’s the one I was going to read about that little skirmish:
“I felt that in her first year Dr. Brunson was confronted with the greatest problem of her chairmanship when she had to react to a proposal to divide the department into upper and lower divisions with a vice-chair in charge of instruction of all freshman and sophomore courses. The proposal had strong administrative support but many of us believed that with more than 80–90% of our sections given to courses below the junior level, such an organizational pattern would weaken the chairman and the department, and ultimately the university. She was successful in delaying a decision until a change of circumstances would permit our view to prevail.”
He goes ahead and says, “substitute plans for organizational change had full department support,” and it mentions that we had a strong director of freshman English come in—one of my colleagues, Nancy Grayson, who ran the program for about six years, excellent scholar, trained traditionally in both language and literature. You can see the blend. Ralph also talks about the shift from Dr. Walts’s time to mine, and he puts my full middle name in—“Luan Brunson,” because most people call me Luan—“Succeeding Dr. Walts’s chair in the fall of 1972. No other woman in the history of the institution had comparable responsibility in academic administration, previous woman chairmen having been in markedly smaller departments, geography, modern language, special education and departments in which the staff was comprised entirely of women, like home economics and women’s physical education. This fact did not escape the consciousness of the faculty as a whole nor of English faculties in other colleges and universities in the region as quite a considerable achievement. Her seven years [it would have been then] must make a positive contribution to the women’s rights movement in higher education in Texas.”
Bless his heart, a nice statement. He was a very good colleague, a strong supporter. It’s been fun [then], and since the chair—I decided in ’83 on an April day that I’d had enough administration. So, for about a year I did that [just teach], but I was prevailed upon by Dr. Bardo, our Dean of Liberal Arts, to come over and work in his office [Liberal Arts] half-time with students. Now that was the lure I would accept. I love students; I work with the whole range from those on suspension and probation to those looking for career opportunities. We now have a liberal arts student advisory council; we have leaders in all the different departments that help us with school-wide events and help us build a sense of community in liberal arts. So, for a couple of years, I’ve worked over here half-time and enjoy that, but my main love is teaching. I am always glad to teach graduate students, undergraduate students, I love to teach even freshman.
Farrar: If we follow along with those themes, your liking to teach students, you originally began teaching in 1967, right?
Brunson: On the university-level here.
Farrar: What changes have there been in student, if you had to compare students then with students now. Can you give us some input on that?
Brunson: I told one of my sophomore students who came in for a conference this morning—she was saying that she didn’t have time to do all the reading; this was for “World Masterpieces,” which takes you back to visit the Iliad and Odyssey and Aeneid, we’re now currently working on the Divine Comedy; some pretty heady literature, obviously—I taught that course the first year I was here also—[English] 2330. I said, “I realize you have a heavy reading load and you have to learn a lot, but in 1967, I required, as did we all, almost double the reading we now require. You kiddos come to us needing so much more help with just basic reading. You are a university student now; we can’t teach a high school course here.” Indeed, we just can’t get as much reading from these kids. I think they also want entertainment more than they want substance in the classroom, or at least I get that feeling occasionally; maybe it’s because of their TV glitter. I can’t give them soap opera. They may feel like they are in a soap opera in my classes, but I think the students are not as well-prepared on the whole. We still have absolutely wonderful students. We have unevenness across the state in the kids we get. I’ll have sitting side-by-side one who is impeccably prepared [and] another who has never read Chaucer or Shakespeare or anything in a senior English course. We could, in 1967, assume that a student had read certain things. We cannot assume that anymore.
Farrar: That’s kind of interesting. What do you suppose is the reason for that?
Brunson: We are not a reading nation anymore, although the TV is ironically based on a script. Therefore, our kids should be better readers and better writers. We’re told if they watch masterpiece theatre—Anna Karinina, Tom Brown’s School Days—they are more likely to go out and buy those books and read them, and that’s good. There are some plusses to TV, but I’m not sure it’s sophisticated itself to keep up with what it could. It is indeed, maybe, the wasteland that T.S. Elliot was trying to tell us about in the early part of the century. Some excellent things are happening on television, we have done some beautiful documentaries, wonderful nature series, some science series, even literature, and on the whole some of those are “taking,” but the mass audience goes to the—superficial—maybe even being living-dead-people or dead-living-people [as to intellect]. People are just not as connected as they should be to the printed page, the ideas behind the printed page—if anybody could find the way to motivate people [to read], I would be thrilled to death.
Farrar: Do you suppose some of the differences would have, to going back that far, in 1967, the Vietnam War was raging; there was an intensity of life through the happenings of events.
Brunson: I was having to go through my mind some of those early events—the sit-ins, the intense engagement of the student in every issue, human issues; now, we still have today, we have some interested in nuclear issues, ecology issues, but they seem more interested in survival; back to the essential needs, food and shelter and a lot of it. We have more people at our business school than [in] any other school in the university—not that I would complain about that fully, but there aren’t going to be slots for all those people in accounting and some of the things that they are training themselves for with sort of tunnel vision. Now, much of the career counseling I’m doing now and the literature coming out in career counseling—very fascinating. They are beginning to want once again the broadly-based, adaptable, flexible, creative thinker who is liberal arts major. I’m getting a lot of that in the literature; it is coming full cycle now.
Farrar: Very interesting. You would suppose then that the students of the late sixties and seventies were more flexible than students now.
Brunson: They were likely a little bit more flexible; they were more broadly trained before we saw them, and they could build on that. We’ve always had strong academic foundations at Southwest Texas, which has really been a plus for this university. We held on to it when other universities were going to what one might call a “do-you-own-degree outlines,” smorgasbord-type education, and as a result our kids stayed with us—they were really well-grounded to be that adaptable, flexible individual.
Farrar: Can you remember any large protest that happened on campus?
Brunson: Yes, I can. Floyd Martine was our Dean of Men—we called him the “Great White Eagle”—tall, stately man—and I know that some of the students were protesting Vietnam, and he had set aside a certain protest area, and evidently they overstepped the bounds, and he had a confrontation with them, and some of them were arrested—but they were later released. It did cause quite a ruckus at the time; it was a territorial dispute about where indeed they could protest. We didn’t have class sit-ins, but we did have a lot of people marching up and down the mall being concerned about the issues.
Farrar: Does it appear as if students nowadays don’t care as much?
Brunson: Some do and some don’t. That’s a hard question to answer. I can sit in my office and talk to kids with the capacity to care and love and be spiritual and all those things that humans should be, and then I see others who are just interested [in] at the moment going through the ritual; these are the ones who are not awake yet because they’ve been told they must come [to the university] or because they are interested in finding a mate; some just have been told that if they get a degree, they will get higher pay—which is not necessarily true. Their motivations may be different. And I think there are more of them who maybe have not yet understood that there is more to living than earning money and having things. These kids have been given more things than the generations we taught twenty years ago. We were on the edge of that materialism, I think, then. I could go all the way back to my own college experience—in the forties and fifties. World War II was closing down, and the veterans were coming home. That era was quite interesting, too. But you’ve got kids here who are just as intensely engaged—in caring, but not as many of them.
Farrar: Do you look upon that as a negative trend?
Brunson: What, caring?
Farrar: Well, the fact that they’re not as aware as much as what’s out there in the world.
Brunson: I look upon it as almost a disaster. They are closing in on and narrowing their range and becoming almost little egocentric narcissuses staring at their own image in a pool. We are living in a “global village” and—some of these kids are not alive to the fact that they are living in a very large world with many, many different ideas and exciting things going on. I hope some of them are waking up to it. It worries me, but human beings are very resilient, this too will pass. I’m an optimist on the whole.
Farrar: What do you want to add?
Brunson: My vita, you mentioned you wanted that. I would mention one interesting thing as you glance at that I have a husband who teaches here. When I was hired here in 1967, that was the first year that two married people could teach in the same university [in Texas], and both had to have PhDs for me to be hired. That’s changed a little bit, you can find across the university husband and wife teams that are a little bit different, one without a PhD. Indeed, that has changed a bit. It was five or six years before another couple was hired on the staff. It’s delightful that we can both be here, though we are in different fields. I started in history and changed fields to English because I knew our chances of being at the same place would be limited.
Farrar: What do you mean by reviews?
Brunson: These are simply reading a book and involving yourself in making a criticism of the book for the general public. The ones I did in the seventies—I had more leisure time to read and I was reviewing for a national group called “Choice.” They review for libraries. Since my field was late-eighteenth century English literature and Victorian literature, and my dissertation was on Thomas Hardy, I often would review in the Victorian period, especially Hardy’s works or Samuel Johnson in the late-eighteenth century.
Brunson: These reviews were published, then?
Farrar: Yes, they were little blurbs that were published, and they are hard to write because you are limited to two hundred words—you make one statement after several hours of research—it was fun to do. In 1981, I took a leave and was invited to write a chapter about writers who perform their literature, and so of course, I chose Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, and I was determined to find a woman who read from her works, so I picked Harriet Beecher Stowe, and I wrote an interesting chapter on the novelists reading their own works. That has since come out as a chapter in a book. I’m proud of that piece of writing.
Farrar: Is there anything else you would like to cover?
Brunson: I could say a good bit more about roles of women on the campus. I’m very excited about our women’s studies minor. We need so badly to make women in this part of the world aware of how their role has changed; that seems to be passing so many of our women by. I think we’ll be a much happier society when both men and women understand who they are, on equal terms, so I’ve been very pleased to be involved in the development of two courses that are the introductory courses to a woman’s minor. We’re always delighted to have men in the course because it adds perspective; what we do is introduce them to all the disciplines and what is going on in the disciplines and research on the question of women. I work with Angela Ingram in this area to do the literature part. The sociology part is fascinating—women in the work force, psychology—we look at sex roles, marriage and the family, political science, history. Women have been left out of a lot of things, so it’s been exciting to see this evolve. After those two courses are taken, you can take courses in different departments like women in history or literature or psychology or sociology, and I think it has done a lot to broaden the perspectives of the people who’ve gone through the course. We are late to this. There are probably well over 250–300 very active women’s studies divisions in universities across the nation.
Farrar: Was there any consideration given to this in 1972?
Brunson: Not then, but I’ve always been interested in the women’s question. I had read Betty Freidan’s Feminine Mystique, which really did revolutionize thinking of women in this country and was one of the very important documents that rose to consciousness enough that we had this last onrush of feminism. I think it’s done a lot to change the workforce, ideas about who women are. Another book I read early was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which was written in the late forties and translated. She had done a very interesting psychological study of the role of women. Those documents raised consciousness in the seventies, please note that Simone just died—but I had enough to say grace over in the department. There were a few women in the department, and they were trying to forward their careers. It was when Judy Alexander came to the department from the University of Arizona in about ’74 that we increased our interest in the woman question. But bless her heart; she had cancer, very young, one of those disasters. So we didn’t get it off the ground, so we were in search of others who would be interested, and until Susan Wittig came and we had the support at a high level, there was no way to get ourselves organized. We were preoccupied with the mundane. Angela came, and we have many fine women scholars; there are more of us, we are more vital and connected.
Farrar: If you would have had the time back in 1969, would it have gotten off the ground?
Brunson: It would have been harder. It was a lot smoother with help from high places. Not that we haven’t had some of this support; for example, Dean Bardo has been supportive. It was only last year we had a director of women’s studies, although we now call it “gender studies.” We are interested in both sexes, but there is more patriarchal stuff out there so we are going through a catch-up time. As Germaine Greer told us, “Until we do the research and have bona fide credentials and retrieve women’s history,” and so forth, “we will not be equal.” So we have been busy doing it across the nation since the mid-sixties. So that’s new. It hasn’t been very long. No, it would not have been easy; it would have been looked on as not quite scholarly, not substantial enough.
Farrar: Was it just the time or also the place?
Brunson: We are in the Southwest, and we are in a lag of ten or more years. We are behind. It does have its advantages. You don’t have to get into the big wars. You can go at things with a more leisurely, thoughtful pace, but it does leave people out there not knowing things a lot longer and probably making it a lot harder for us to be equal in the humanity game.
Farrar: Being ten years behind, you could see the mistakes that were made ahead of you.
Brunson: Definitely. You don’t have to go out quite as militantly. You can see where the ragged edges are and where you can do some balancing and sensible things—although, you need a few feisty people; you’ve just got to have them. I love them and am glad they are around. Being one of the few women chairs on campus, I felt that I had to be better. We are stronger now that we’ve done it with style and dignity in 1986.
Farrar: Better late than never. I saw the posters for women’s studies on the wall.
Brunson: Well, we’d like to have more men. There are men in the movement with Alan Alda leading the way.
Farrar: Perhaps men worry about what it would look like to a prospective employer.
Brunson: That’s an interesting question. It might depend on where you are going. A lot of people out there are still biased. There was an interesting study at A&M of resumes that were sent out, and those that looked more militant on paper were screened out. Women who were more traditional were not.
Farrar: The program, however, is a minor.
Brunson: Correct. It would complement another program. We have some very fine people in the program. It is team-taught and we network together. It is a whole different management style than what you read about in the books.
End of interview