{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/9p2w37md1d/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Kirk, Elizabeth, 2007 November 1"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/013/original/yale-blue.png?1678220072","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Preferred Citation"]},"value":{"en":["Kirk, Elizabeth, 2007 November 1. Oral Histories Documenting Yale University Women (RU 1051). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.\n\n https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/2559."]}},{"label":{"en":["Source Metadata URI"]},"value":{"en":["https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/archival_objects/801894"]}},{"label":{"en":["Publisher"]},"value":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library."]}},{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["Access to the materials is partially restricted. See Collection Contents for details.\n\nOriginal computer files may not be accessed due to their fragility. Researchers must consult access copies."]}},{"label":{"en":["Identifier"]},"value":{"en":["mssa.ru.1051 (EAD ID)","RU 1051 (Call Number)","ru_1051_2012-a-045_kirk_elizabeth_audiorecording.mp3 (Digital Object ID)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2007 November 1 (Creation)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["The materials are open for research. (Accessrestrict)","Elizabeth Doan Kirk was born September 5, 1937, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Her family had strong Quaker roots and both her parents were college professors.  Her mother, Helen Bell Hole, taught English at Earlham College (1948-1970), where she was also Provost (1971-1972).    Elizabeth Kirk attended The Westtown School, and then received her B.A. from Earlham in 1959; both are Quaker foundations.    She then entered Yale as one of the members of the first wave of women graduate students in English admitted by the then Director of Graduate Studies, the medievalist, E. Talbot Donaldson, who became her doctoral supervisor.  After completing her Ph.D. in 1964, she was an Instructor in English at Yale from 1964 to 1967.   In 1967 she moved to a tenure-track position at Brown University, Providence, RI, when her husband was appointed Director of Rhode Island Historical Society, and spent the rest of her career there, becoming a full professor in 1980.\n\nKirk held two distinguished professorships at Brown, first the Nicholas Brown Professorship of Oratory and Belles Lettres from 1989 to 1995, and then the Israel J. Kapstein Professorship in English, from 1995 until she took early retirement in 1998.     She held many administrative appointments while at Brown.  Most notably she participated in the historic settlement of Louise Lamphere vs. Brown University (1977)*, one of the most famous affirmative action cases brought against an institution of higher education in the United States.   For many years she served as the English undergraduate honors advisor, and was instrumental in designing and implementing Brown’s radical “New Curriculum.”  She served as Director of Graduate Studies in English, during which time she designed a graduate handbook which became a model of its kind.   She was also the first woman chair of Brown University’s English Department.  \n\nElizabeth Kirk’s publications include Dream Thought of Piers Plowman (Yale University Press 1972) and Will’s Vision of Piers Plowman (W.W. Norton, c.1990).  She edited (with Mary J. Carruthers) Acts of Interpretation: the Text in its Context, 700-1600 (Pilgrim Books, 1982), essays in honor of her Yale supervisor and mentor, Talbot Donaldson.  Kirk was honored with a festscrift in 2006, with the publication of Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk, edited by Bonnie Wheeler (Palgrave, 2006).\n\nKirk received the Harriet W. Sheridan Award for Distinguished Contribution to Teaching and Learning at Brown University in 1997.\n\n*Louise Lamphere, an assistant professor of Anthropology at Brown University, filed a class action suit alleging sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act after she was denied tenure.  In the subsequent out-of-court settlement in September 1977, Lamphere and three of her colleagues received tenure or damages, and the settlement mandated a procedure at Brown for women alleging discrimination, establishing a claims fund and an affirmative action monitoring process.  Lamphere returned to Brown in 1979. (Bioghist)","Elizabeth Kirk’s interview includes an extensive exploration of her Quaker upbringing and education, recollections of her powerful and academically accomplished mother, and an account of how those influences profoundly affected her experience of the academy at Yale and beyond.   She describes her first encounter with Yale culture in the late 1950s and the social, psychological and practical challenges that women graduate students and junior faculty faced.  This is placed within the context of the Yale tenure system and the effect it had in determining relationships between junior and senior faculty in the English Department.  She pays tribute to E. Talbot Donaldson’s qualities as a teacher and mentor of women at Yale, especially in his role as Director of Graduate Studies. Her experience of being one of the first women fellows at Calhoun College is described, including how it differed from that of her male peers, among whom was her husband.  She talks about other women in the Yale English Department, especially her fellow medievalists, Marie Borroff and Alice “Sunny” Miskimin.  Throughout the interview she highlights specific instances and experiences, at Yale and beyond, which led her to conclude that many of the difficulties women encountered in the academy were not personal but institutional.  Her experience of combining marriage with academic life is recalled, together with the challenge of carving out independent intellectual space.  \n\nKirk describes how she obtained her position at Brown University and details the cultural differences she perceived between Yale and Brown at that time.  She talks at length about her passion for teaching and mentoring at both Yale and Brown, in particular her role as Director of Brown’s Honors Program and as one of the authors who redrafted the Brown Medieval Curriculum.  She reflects on how her experiences as a Yale graduate student shaped and informed her emerging feminism, and how her growing feminist perspective influenced her work as Director of Graduate Studies at Brown.  An account is given of what she saw as gendered differences in the way that graduate students and junior faculty were treated, especially when it came to hiring and promotions.  She talks in general terms about the Lamphere vs. Brown University case, with which she was involved, and how it confirmed her view of the importance of due process and transparency to obviate what she regards as systemic inequalities in the academic profession.  From that time forward, policy issues increasingly became the major focus of her professional life at Brown.  She reflects on the challenge of attempting to maintain a balance between administration and teaching, and the personal costs of this conflict in both psychological and practical terms.  As Brown’s first female chair of the English department, she considers how far her management style and practice was influenced by her gender, and the pressures which led her to take early retirement. (Scope and Content Note)","https://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u0026amp;f0fd33ff-14e4-4409-a984-cdc9727b8ffa (Other Finding Aid Note)","This material was originally acquired in 2009 as a direct network transfer from Yale shared network attached storage and artificial logical AD1 forensic images were created. AD1 images were extracted in May 2020 and resulting files processed. Audio files which had been originally recorded in short sequential tracks, were merged together into a single processed master wav file with fre:ac software. (Processinfo)"]}}],"summary":{"en":["The materials are open for research.","Elizabeth Doan Kirk was born September 5, 1937, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Her family had strong Quaker roots and both her parents were college professors.  Her mother, Helen Bell Hole, taught English at Earlham College (1948-1970), where she was also Provost (1971-1972).    Elizabeth Kirk attended The Westtown School, and then received her B.A. from Earlham in 1959; both are Quaker foundations.    She then entered Yale as one of the members of the first wave of women graduate students in English admitted by the then Director of Graduate Studies, the medievalist, E. Talbot Donaldson, who became her doctoral supervisor.  After completing her Ph.D. in 1964, she was an Instructor in English at Yale from 1964 to 1967.   In 1967 she moved to a tenure-track position at Brown University, Providence, RI, when her husband was appointed Director of Rhode Island Historical Society, and spent the rest of her career there, becoming a full professor in 1980.\n\nKirk held two distinguished professorships at Brown, first the Nicholas Brown Professorship of Oratory and Belles Lettres from 1989 to 1995, and then the Israel J. Kapstein Professorship in English, from 1995 until she took early retirement in 1998.     She held many administrative appointments while at Brown.  Most notably she participated in the historic settlement of \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eLouise Lamphere vs. Brown University\u003c/title\u003e (1977)*, one of the most famous affirmative action cases brought against an institution of higher education in the United States.   For many years she served as the English undergraduate honors advisor, and was instrumental in designing and implementing Brown’s radical “New Curriculum.”  She served as Director of Graduate Studies in English, during which time she designed a graduate handbook which became a model of its kind.   She was also the first woman chair of Brown University’s English Department.  \n\nElizabeth Kirk’s publications include \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eDream Thought of Piers Plowman\u003c/title\u003e (Yale University Press 1972) and \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eWill’s Vision of Piers Plowman\u003c/title\u003e (W.W. Norton, c.1990).  She edited (with Mary J. Carruthers) \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eActs of Interpretation: the Text in its Context, 700-1600\u003c/title\u003e (Pilgrim Books, 1982), essays in honor of her Yale supervisor and mentor, Talbot Donaldson.  Kirk was honored with a festscrift in 2006, with the publication of \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eMindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk\u003c/title\u003e, edited by Bonnie Wheeler (Palgrave, 2006).\n\nKirk received the Harriet W. Sheridan Award for Distinguished Contribution to Teaching and Learning at Brown University in 1997.\n\n*Louise Lamphere, an assistant professor of Anthropology at Brown University, filed a class action suit alleging sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act after she was denied tenure.  In the subsequent out-of-court settlement in September 1977, Lamphere and three of her colleagues received tenure or damages, and the settlement mandated a procedure at Brown for women alleging discrimination, establishing a claims fund and an affirmative action monitoring process.  Lamphere returned to Brown in 1979.","Elizabeth Kirk’s interview includes an extensive exploration of her Quaker upbringing and education, recollections of her powerful and academically accomplished mother, and an account of how those influences profoundly affected her experience of the academy at Yale and beyond.   She describes her first encounter with Yale culture in the late 1950s and the social, psychological and practical challenges that women graduate students and junior faculty faced.  This is placed within the context of the Yale tenure system and the effect it had in determining relationships between junior and senior faculty in the English Department.  She pays tribute to E. Talbot Donaldson’s qualities as a teacher and mentor of women at Yale, especially in his role as Director of Graduate Studies. Her experience of being one of the first women fellows at Calhoun College is described, including how it differed from that of her male peers, among whom was her husband.  She talks about other women in the Yale English Department, especially her fellow medievalists, Marie Borroff and Alice “Sunny” Miskimin.  Throughout the interview she highlights specific instances and experiences, at Yale and beyond, which led her to conclude that many of the difficulties women encountered in the academy were not personal but institutional.  Her experience of combining marriage with academic life is recalled, together with the challenge of carving out independent intellectual space.  \n\nKirk describes how she obtained her position at Brown University and details the cultural differences she perceived between Yale and Brown at that time.  She talks at length about her passion for teaching and mentoring at both Yale and Brown, in particular her role as Director of Brown’s Honors Program and as one of the authors who redrafted the Brown Medieval Curriculum.  She reflects on how her experiences as a Yale graduate student shaped and informed her emerging feminism, and how her growing feminist perspective influenced her work as Director of Graduate Studies at Brown.  An account is given of what she saw as gendered differences in the way that graduate students and junior faculty were treated, especially when it came to hiring and promotions.  She talks in general terms about the \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eLamphere vs. Brown University\u003c/title\u003e case, with which she was involved, and how it confirmed her view of the importance of due process and transparency to obviate what she regards as systemic inequalities in the academic profession.  From that time forward, policy issues increasingly became the major focus of her professional life at Brown.  She reflects on the challenge of attempting to maintain a balance between administration and teaching, and the personal costs of this conflict in both psychological and practical terms.  As Brown’s first female chair of the English department, she considers how far her management style and practice was influenced by her gender, and the pressures which led her to take early retirement.","https://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u0026f0fd33ff-14e4-4409-a984-cdc9727b8ffa","This material was originally acquired in 2009 as a direct network transfer from Yale shared network attached storage and artificial logical AD1 forensic images were created. AD1 images were extracted in May 2020 and resulting files processed. Audio files which had been originally recorded in short sequential tracks, were merged together into a single processed master wav file with fre:ac software."]},"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["Access to the materials is partially restricted. See Collection Contents for details.\n\nOriginal computer files may not be accessed due to their fragility. Researchers must consult access copies."]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives Yale University Library"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives Yale University Library"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/013/original/yale-blue.png?1678220072","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - open-uri20210827-32762-x9dbal.mpga"]},"duration":13538.61225,"width":640,"height":40,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-yalemssa.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/122/269/original/open-uri20210827-32762-x9dbal.mpga?1630069690","type":"Audio","format":"audio/mpeg","duration":13538.61225,"width":640,"height":40},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["ru_1051_2012-a-045_kirk_elizabeth_edited_transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Interview with Elizabeth Kirk\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Was there anything?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I'll just have to go back from the start.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:We're here at Elizabeth Kirk's home at 824 Northfolk Road, Black Mountain, North Carolina.  Professor Kirk is going to do an interview with me, that's Florence Minus, to contribute to the Yale University Women's Oral History Project.  If we could start with your absolutely fascinating and, I think, entirely unique background as a Quaker, I'd love to hear about your background, about the way that you were brought up, and about your father and mother --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Sure.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- because I think they seemed to have a very remarkable take on life, and I think it certainly has been an influence in your life, where you're from.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, I think it has in all sorts of ways.  Let's see, my parents were both Quaker teachers, both coming from several generation of teachers, and my father grew up on the campus at [Irwin?] College, because his father taught geology there and was a very revered teacher who was referred to by his students as Daddy Holt, who -- and he taught geology through the period where there was a huge backlash against the teaching of evolution.  And [Irwin?] had been very much in advance of that question.  They were teaching Darwin within a few years of the publication of \"The Origin of Species,\" but there was a period in the twenties when there was almost a heresy trial about my grandfather and the teacher, Paul [Tesla?], who was beginning to do criticism of a kind that was also suspicious.  The, let's see, so, and my father's mother was a PhD in English and taught English, although, as people did in those days, she stopped when she married rather late in life.  Her sister, my great aunt Martha, was a chemist and taught chemistry at [Irwin?], both were esteemed women, and the two of them, before my grandmother married, traveled in Europe together quite a lot, and there were a number of things which I think was unusual at that date.  \r\n\r\nLet's see -- my mother's family had the same kind of connection with Westtown, the Quaker school in Pennsylvania, that my father had with [Irwin?].  My mother's family went back to a member of the community that originally bought the land from the school, so that there are all kinds of stories about these various generations of teachers.  Her mother was a mathematician and taught at Westtown, and my grandfather had been [her first?] algebra student and she was, I think, 15 years older than she was.  And, at least in family lore, he said to her when he graduated, I'm going to come back and marry you and she said, ha ha ha ha, and then he went through Haverford in three years and Columbia Law School in two and came back and said he was ready to marry her, and my mother felt like she really knew that she shouldn't do it because all kinds of gaps were widening, and she knew they'd be wider when they were both older, but he was a very difficult person to say no to, and my mother was an only child.  So, I think she got a kind of support from her father that a son would have had if ","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=0.0,300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"he had had one.  He was, he became a business man, and when my mother was a child, they lived in Atlantic City in very easy circumstances.  He ran a newspaper and they lived in a house by the sea, and she had a governess, and he was a sailor, and he gave her a sailboat which had, although it was small, had a complete suit of sails so you could learn all of the aspects of sailing.  Then, later, he lost all of his money, the family lore is, because of something that his partner did, and so they were in great difficulties for quite a while.  One year he was the superintendent of Pocono Lake Preserve, which was a Quaker development in the Poconos, and they camped out in tents until he built a house for them to live in there.  And later he was trying to get a job in New York City, and they went from boardinghouse to boardinghouse when they couldn't pay their bills.  And I remember, he scrubbed the floors because, although he didn't like scrubbing the floors, he was not going to have his wife scrubbing floors, so he got a job as a sort of glorified office boy at the American [Scieniment?] Company and it was one of those Horatio Alger stories where he got a promotion every week and, by the end of the year, he was a vice president, and by the end of another year he was the president.  \r\n\r\nAnd, the company, which started out just making fertilizer I think, became quite a developed chemical company.  When World War II broke out, the company wanted -- the directors wanted the company to make munitions, and he said that he would resign, and they said, well, would you make medical stuff, and he said yes, certainly.  So they went heavily into that, and they bought [Leonard?] Laboratories, which went on to develop penicillin and (inaudible), so he traveled a lot and went around the world in connection with that.  So my mother grew up, because of her French governess, speaking French and traveled a great deal.  But she became increasingly restless with this kind of wealthy life, and she was very embarrassed about it later and didn't tell stories about it.  They did a lot of sailing in competition, and she was the first woman to sail in a race at the New York Yacht Club.  She couldn't belong, but she could race, and the first race, which has just become family lore, when she rounded the first turn one of the old salts who had been particularly resistant to allowing women in was bearing down on her, and she had the right of way, but it looked like there would be a crash, and the sailing master who was with her was -- he was afraid that grandfather would be upset if the boat was damaged, so he's waving his hands saying, go about (inaudible), and she knew if she did that, that was the end.  So she just crashed right into him, and finished the race and went over to grandfather's boat.  She was pretty sure he would say she had done the right thing, and of course he said she had, and the dinghy had detached itself from the other guy's boat, and the sailor brought across the note, which, when she opened it with some trepidation, said, welcome to the class, Miss Bell.  You are a real sailor.\r\n\r\nAnd I remember people at her memorial service, who I wouldn't have thought would ever hear this story, which she never told except in privacy, said -- remembered it and it's particularly odd because she was a very -- she was a very quiet, very dignified, very understated person, but she felt that strength in her so that when people did hear this story, they immediately recognized somebody that they knew.  There is another similar story that when -- during the 60s, when students were very counterculture and were going around in bare feet ","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=300.0,600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"and eccentric clothes, the then president, Lander Bowling, got tired of trying to explain this to these various conservative constituencies, so he made one of his interruptions onto campus and announced there was going to be minimum dress code from now, and anyone who didn't wish to abide it need not remain on campus.  And of course the faculty with its long Quaker tradition, autonomy and individual conscious and all that, were outraged by this, so they constituted a committee to go and talk to Lander about this, and they were hesitant whether to include my mother because they knew that she felt just revulsion for dirty bare feet in her classroom and all that, and they thought -- she was older by then and they thought maybe she would be just a little old lady, but they decided to take her.  And as always happened, she -- whenever she was in a meeting, she didn't speak a lot, and usually at the end, and somehow miraculously tied everything together.  So they each spoke and then finally when they got to her, my -- my friend who told me this story kind of held his breath -- and she looked at everyone and said, Lander, if there is no room for these people at [Irwin?], there is no room for me.  And, wang, right between the eyes.  A little old lady.  But that was, again, something that really kept her -- something that mattered.  \r\n\r\nBut I think she felt somewhat conflicted about this really leonine strength, because this was the period when women were all being told that if there was anything wrong with anybody it was because they had a strong mother, and everything was mother's fault, and where autistic children were said to have been raised by refrigerator moms, and all of these things that have since been exploded, and she was very conscious of how extraordinarily invested my father always was in her autonomy and professional development.  So she was very, very cautious about making sure that she was not, in fact, dominating the situation or taking too much of a lead in it.  She and my father met when they were both teaching at Westtown, and they married, and then he went back to Princeton to finish his PhD in French, and they -- his -- at least the family story is that his mentors at Princeton wanted him to stay there and be a proper academic, but he announced that he wanted to go back to teaching in his Quaker high school, and they felt that he was absolutely insane.  \r\n\r\nThen they spent a year in Paris, just before the war, as directors of the International Quaker Center in Paris.  And, were, I think, very heavily involved in trying to mend fences and create better working relationships between French Quakers and English Quakers who had very unpleasant stereotypes of each other and tended, also, when brought together to act in such a way, as to confirm them as much as possible.  Then when the war broke out, they -- there was a period of the phony war when nothing seemed to be happening, but they decided that they should send me home and leave me with my grandparents and then come back and finish up.  So, I've been a very verbal child with a huge vocabulary by the time I was 18 months old, so I found myself back with my grandparents.  Of course, I don't remember this, but speaking only French, which my grandparents did not speak, so that must have been a considerable shock.  \r\n\r\nSo they came back and taught at Westtown and then in, let's see, in the last year of the war, my father traveled in France for the American Friends Service Committee trying to explore whether the French Quaker Network was what they should work through to do the \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=600.0,900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"relief work and decided that it was not a sturdy enough network.  So he was away when my youngest sister was born, for that reason.  \r\n\r\nLet's see, when my parents married, they had a very strong commitment that they saw as Quaker-based for equality of the sexes and for creating in the family a kind of magic world separate from the world around, which was protected from American popular culture and American capitalism and business values and very focused toward social justice and accountability and individual conscious.  They didn't pay the part of their taxes they had figured out represented preparations for war and, of course, the IRS just came and took it out of their account anyway.  I mean, they would write a letter saying they were giving twice that to the American Friends Service Committee or something, so they ended up paying three times, and they had a lot of students that became conscientious objectors or, in some cases, non-registrants, so I remember FBI people coming around to interview them.  And during that period of Red Scare, a small Indiana town was not a very hospitable place, although the college, of course, was.  \r\n\r\nLet's see.  They split one full-time job between them when all of their children were small, so that they were both engaged in teaching and in creating the family, and they told us this was just a Quaker thing, but I finally figured out years later that I didn't know any other Quakers who did this, and they tried to have family governance in the form of a Quaker meeting for business, where decisions were made by consensus.  And as I look back on it, I think there was a tremendously fake element to this because the kind of consensus you could really have with two highly articulate adults and four small children, I'm not sure, but at least it gave us a sense of what that kind of decision-making process is like, and how -- that persuasion is done by understanding what the other person needs or wants to get out of it, and therefore you start by addressing -- understanding their point of view well enough that you can explain it in such a way that they would recognize and then address what their concerns really are.  So this is a tremendously, costly time-consuming process, but I'm not sure, having lived under Robert's Rules of Order, that it's really, in the long run, more time-consuming than getting something through by a narrow vote and then having to deal with all of the people who were carrying it out when they didn't really want to in the first place.  And when you've already amended the original idea so much to get your 51 percent of the vote, that a great deal of work, which was the point of it in the first place, has been lost.  And I think the interest that I had in life and the possibility of making -- of legislation or organizational arrangements, would actually prove things that were more workable.  This probably goes back to that.  \r\n\r\nAnd the other thing is I learned to take minutes.  In a proper business meeting, the recording clerk takes minutes during the discussion, and as each decision is arrived at reads the minutes back at the time.  So, otherwise, there would be -- if there were five people present, there would be at least six different memories of what was decided. So I think I learned very early to see what the issue is and lay it out clearly in a limited amount of time.\r\n\r\nLet's see, so --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So, was it natural, then, that the assumption \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=900.0,1200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"would be that you would go to college --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- that you would have a career --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- and a job.  It was?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And I just assumed that I wanted to be a teacher.  I don't remember ever deciding that.  I was very much a loner and very much a bookworm, and because of this peculiar way of being brought up, I didn't have, really, hardly any close ties with people my own age, because I had been really brought up to know absolutely nothing about anything that any of my contemporaries were experiencing.  And also, at the same time, with the feeling that you were supposed to get along with people and make them be forthcoming and like you, but no idea how to do it.  So, I was really a lone hiker and tree climber and brought three books home from the school library every day and returned them in the morning.  And I was extremely -- well, I went to public school through the ninth grade and then went back to Westtown for the rest of my high school.  And I was bored to tears in the public school, and I used to prop the book I was reading up behind the textbook so I could be reading while all of this discussion was going on.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Did you have ever any problems with your peers at public school?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Not overt hazing, but, you know, complete incomprehension and exclusion.  I felt like a little mouse kind of creeping around the corridors.  By some demographic accident, I think I was the only faculty grad in the public school system at that point, so I think I was just a mystery and probably regarded as -- I think it probably looked like pride, where as it was actually extreme shyness and ineptness.  So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Were you encouraged in your intellectual pursuits by any teachers at school?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, I had some good -- I had the luck to have a few good teachers, particularly one of my English teachers and my Latin teacher were very good.  But I think the teachers who were really formative for me were my parents.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Right.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:My mother had a -- she liked little babies, and then she liked children, then, when they hit the point when they were starting to really think.  And she would involve us in wonderful, Socratic one-on-one conversations, whereas my father was very good with toddlers and small children, so I think they balanced each other quite well in that way.  But I remember just doing dishes with my mother and her asking all kinds of philosophical questions, not in a very patronizing way, but as if she was really thinking about them herself, which she was, and we read books and just talked about books all of the time and she left -- when there were books that she thought I might be old enough for, she would leave them lying around and I would say, what's this, and she'd tell me a little bit and I would say, think I would like it, and she'd say, well, try it and see if you do.  And I was always pulling books off of shelves and asking what they were and she'd say, well, I think maybe not this year but maybe in a couple of years.\r\n\r\nMy father was a musician and somehow he did not succeed in transmitting his love of music.  I took piano lessons and then I took violin lessons, but I had really absorbed the idea that music lessons were good for developing moral fiber and that that's what practicing was all about.  And it was only when I went to Oberlin and roomed with someone in the conservatory that I figured out that people do this for fun.  I mean, because they like it.  And I think it was rather compulsive with him.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Why did you choose Oberlin?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, I wanted to go to a small college, and I liked the combination of music and \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=1200.0,1500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"the history of social engagement and what sounded like the intellectual environment.  But I was actually quite unhappy there.  I spent a year between Westtown and college in France, and that was the year I spent in the Sevine Mountains in a small village, which had been the center of the sort of Underground Railroad smuggling Jewish children out of occupied France, and also the center of non-violent resistance to the Vichy government.  There was also a [marquee?] of the regular resistance kind, but -- and my close friends of my parents were one of the three families that were primarily responsible for this movement.  And, there was a private lyceum there, which emphasized -- was Protestant -- and also emphasized international contacts, and they were trying to get away from the militant, the anticlerical character of French education in general.  So my father and mother spent a year teaching at the college in -- when they were on sabbatical from [Irwin?] and they -- the whole family went, and I did the second year of baccalaureate, and my sister, my little sister, went to the village school, which was really a baptism of fire, and my brothers were doing middle school and high school.  And that was an extraordinary year.  And I think that one of the most formative of times for me that I could sort of point to very specifically was being in the Charbonneau and learning through my parents' friends, who were first very reluctant to talk about the war, they were just -- the wounds had gone too deep.  But then they would gradually begin to tell us about the heroic achievements of each other, so we began to get a picture of the situation.  There is a book by Phillip Holly called, \"Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed,\" about this, which is, I think, quite good.  \r\n\r\nBut my father had an extraordinary ability to get people to talk by a sort of “fools rush in where angels fear to tread” method.  He just kept asking dumb American questions, until the person would finally break down and begin answering them and then finally begin to have a good time --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- originally sort of putting it right.  So, that sense of what it was like to have your life on the line all of the time because there is a truth that you're trying to keep alive in the middle of appalling and pre-possessing circumstances, I think, was -- it didn't create it in the first place, but it brought to the surface a very conscious commitment, that sense that you're going to live your life by being in but not of, and working wherever you are to try to create a world where violence and evil are countered by something that we call non-violent, but which is not passive, but what we call truth force, by living in such a way and responding to people in such a way that more is brought out of the situation than would have been thought possible, but that it's always going to leave you, in a funny way, not belonging anywhere and in search of a community to belong to.  And I think a lot of the tensions that I experienced in my life had to do with trying to carry on with these sets of missions, without a sense of community to do it in.\r\n[break in audio]\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=1500.0,1800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:  You've described the unique qualities of the Quaker culture and the Quaker community, what it means to build a Quaker community.  At Yale, we hear a great deal, past and present, about the Yale community and it is -- it is a particular kind of community, the Yale community.  I just wondered what it was like when these two worlds coincided, collided in your own life, when you became a graduate student at Yale.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, it was culture shock of the most fundamental sort.  Let's see, I mean, there were lots of things like -- just general sophistication and suavity and this Yale tradition that you always have to live as if you've heard of things before and you're not surprised by anything or rattled by anything, and that you don't do anything to reveal the fact that you might not know what you're talking about until you've listened enough that you know and at a deeper level, well, I didn't have any of the, I guess what you'd say the normal sense of professional vocational ambition.  I came in with the sense that graduate study was the thing I wanted to do for its own sake and because it was such an extraordinary vista of discoveries.  And I knew it also had something to do with earning a living, but one of the things that I can't really figure out at this instance of time, is how much this lack of immediate goal focus was something that I brought with me and how much was characteristic of the time and how much was Yale, where, I'm sure, at somewhere like Oxford, at however hard you may be working, you have to always look as if you weren't and never look driven or as if you were trying.  So it's a mixture of things.  But I think it was true.  Let's see, I went to Yale in ‘64 -- sorry, in ‘59 -- and, I think during that period it was still the notion that it was a gentlemanly opportunity, and being in the humanities was a gentlemanly occupation and part of living in a certain leisured and cultivated manner, and that you didn't behave as if there was anything utilitarian about being there, even if there may have been.  I remember many years later remonstrating with my mentor, Tom McDonaldson, about the fact that Yale had not cut back the size of its interim graduate class in response to the job market, and he looked at me and said, my dear child, we are not a normal school.  [Laughter.]\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Cute.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And it was just a gulf that --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- and in general, I think he's a very good example of what was the deeper culture shock than just the obvious social change.  There was a sense in which he was just not in any way driven by the kinds of compulsions that I had grown up with, in a sense that partly my parents had raised us with a sense that we had been incredibly favored and privileged and had given -- been given all kinds of legs up on everybody else and there just was a fundamental underlying requirement to give back in response --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Right.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- to that and to -- that the only way you could live with yourself having had this level of privilege was to give back, and that that was really the only underlying reason for doing anything.  And, I had somehow felt that \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=1800.0,2100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"the aesthetic dimensions of life and just the pleasures and energy of life were somehow all harmoniously at peace with this.  And, to come to Yale and see experiences and people that had their own extraordinary intensity and revelation, but which were not of a peace with this at all -- I remember at one point talking to a friend of mine who was an undergraduate student about this sense of being pulled apart and not knowing what to do with myself without any sense of continuity of community with where I was.  And she said, they're just not your people anymore.  And I remember just crying and crying and thought that this was probably true, and that I was now sort of amphibious and was not going to belong anywhere.  And someone like Talbot, who was frightening, not just because he was formidable in his very diction and his demands for excellence, but because he had his own inner map full of things that he felt an absolute dedication to, but they didn't correspond to anything I recognized and they weren't predictable.  \r\n\r\nSo, and I think he probably had more inner consciousness of discrepancies between how we felt at a place like Yale than I had any idea of at the time.  I remember -- the same friend that I was just mentioning -- who was a very plucky and eccentric person who just rushed out and asked people things that nobody else would.  She was in his office one day and she said to him, I was just -- learned that you were a very successful high school teacher at the -- I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the name of the school.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Is it the Taft School?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:The Taft School.  Yes.  That he taught Greek and Latin there and was -- so when he came back to finish his PhD -- to do his PhD at Yale he was probably what we'd now call a resumed ed. student.  And she said, and it sounds like you were much happier then.  He and his wife used to have students over for pizza and all that kind of thing.  If it was pizza and Wednesdays.  And she said, I look around at all of these men, and they don't look very happy, and they've achieved this eminence, and they don't look very happy, and I just wonder why they're doing it.  And he looked at her under his eyebrows, and said, money and power, my dear.  Money and power.  And she said, I think men are very odd.  And he said, they are.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Have you ever read the novel by Helen Hudson called, \"Tell the Time to None\"?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:No.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:It was published in 1965, ‘66, so it would have been during your time, and it's a Roman à clef about Yale --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Oh my goodness.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- and certainly the men don't come out of it well.  I think it caused quite a few reactions when it was published.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I'm surprised I haven't --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- heard about it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I imagine it's quite hard to get ahold of.  The Sterling Library has a copy, I know, because that's where I found it.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, I will rush to Abe books.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And see what we can find, yeah.  There was -- coming back to this tremendous culture shock, did you -- do you think that was particular for the women.  Were the women in such a tiny minority that they were immediately kind of on the periphery?  Or do you think if the women -- that if there were more women who arrived -- that it was something everybody felt who had come in from the outside?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I have absolutely no idea.  I think a great deal of my reaction was very idiosyncratic.  I mean, I think there was no question that if you were a woman you felt on the outside of the network.  I was just extraordinarily fortunate in my mentors, and especially Talbot.  He, more than any other academic I can think of in his time, he was a wonderful mentor to women.  And I think it was just \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=2100.0,2400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"that he liked women.  He liked the way their minds worked.  He liked working with them.  And it wasn't anything to do with sexual attraction, although I don't think you can ever -- I don't think there are any relationships that aren't, in some ways, weighted with that.  But he wasn't avuncular, he wasn't flirtatious, he wasn’t patronizing.  He just enjoyed what students were doing and engaged with it and was scathing and demanding, and everybody was terrified of him because when he looked at you, you really felt seen.  But I think the men were just as afraid of him as the women.  And he just made me feel like I was being treated like a human being, and I took this for granted.  I had no idea that everybody didn't treat women like human beings.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:But, coming from your own background, that's not surprising, is it?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Right.  Exactly.  So I had no idea that this was very unusual.  And that's one reason I have trouble defining it in retrospective.  It's like defining air or something that is so natural that you can't -- he wasn't protective, he was just very spontaneous and direct in his intellectual engagement with what you were doing.  Very sparing of praise, so he would write -- he wrote very little on papers and you would -- I mean, I never turned in a paper in -- I guess in the whole course of my college either, but definitely in graduate school without feeling this is too awful to turn in.  It just completely falls short.  But I'm more afraid of getting an incomplete than turning it in, when push comes to shove.  So, and it would come back with tiny little handwriting, like, intelligent job, or something like that on it.  And nothing to let me know what I had done right, which I am sure it never occurred to him I didn't know, and very little specific suggestions.  So, and he didn't put grades on the paper and he -- our grades were registered.  They gave grades for our courses, but you had to go and get them at the registrar's office if you wanted to see them, and I never did.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:So I didn't know until -- until I was nominated for a Sterling Fellowship in my dissertation year, for my dissertation year, I had no idea that I had an exemplary academic record.  So I was kind of floating around in a world in which I just couldn't locate myself.  I remember, again, this same friend I was mentioning before, saying that on the first day of the first year, when we were all sitting in the Chaucer class waiting for it to start, that she looked around the room and looked at me and said, well, there's one who knows exactly what she's doing.  And I would have said the complete opposite about myself.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I had no notion about what I was doing, but I always had the sense, which I think I got from my mother, that I guess it summed up nicely as might as well be hung for sheep is a lamb, that is, if you don't know what to do, you just stick to basics and forge ahead, because either it will work or it won't, but doing nothing doesn't work.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:How did you get into graduate school?  What was the process at that time?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, it was, you know, an application and a statement and letters of recommendation and I found out later -- I was actually admitted by John Pope, who was the director of graduate studies before Talbot and his custom was -- everybody came in with just glittering credentials.  Every year to take a gamble on one person from somewhere he had never heard of.  And I was John Pope's gamble that year.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And that was nothing to do with your gender?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:No.  And, when Talbot became director of graduate studies the next year, he, I found out later, in those days the director of graduate studies just unilaterally did the admissions, and that he just silently started admitting 50 percent women and he -- that when he was asked about it later by somebody -- I don't remember who.  But it's in the anecdotes in \"Speaking of Donaldson,\" somebody asked him why he did it, and Pope usually had depths after depths of irony \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=2400.0,2700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"in almost anything he said, just looked at her and said, because it was right.  And, it certainly exemplifies the fact that if you're going to do reform, that it is in some ways easier not to have to carry a whole institutional decision process with you.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You were married by this time, weren't you?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.  I got married between -- right after graduation.  And I really ended up going to Yale only because my husband ended up choosing Yale Divinity School.  We wouldn't have gone somewhere where it would not have been a good program for me.  But I didn't really choose Yale out of any sophisticated sense of what Yale had to offer as opposed to somewhere else.  And I had been brought up in a tradition that a really important thing is teaching, and that any institution that starts prioritizing scholarship and publication over teaching has sold out.  And, so that I went to Yale without any sense that I belonged, in the long run, in a privileged, elite institution like that.  And I had no notion when I went in that I was going to discover that the world of criticism and scholarship was just exciting and that I could do it.  I just thought I was being trained to be a teacher, and I continued to carry all through my life a sense that that was the primary thing, the thing I loved -- it's like the giant who touches the earth and that's where you get your strength from.  But I also discovered that I had this other interest, about which I felt very ambivalent.  And when I ended up by another set of accidents at Brown, I had a great deal of trouble dealing with the fact that here I was at an elite, publish-or-perish institution, although Brown has more emphasis on teaching than a lot of the places.  I mean, it has to compete in its league, but if you don't back it up with scholarship as well, they're quite open from the word go about the fact that you have to do that or else.  \r\n\r\nSo I had a funny sense that I had sort of sold out by being there in the first place, which I think helped make me feel pulled apart.  So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So you really, from the beginning, you've been quite conflicted about the academic life.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, very.  And also I had a sense, which I think comes from my father rather than my mother, that ambition is dangerous.  Wanting to be successful.  Caring whether anybody has recognized you as having succeeded is very bad.  And, that the only way you can deal with that problem is by managing, somehow, to ignore the fact that you've succeeded, and to regard it as a series of horrendous accidents that don't really have anything to do with you, and that you don't allow to change your image of yourself at all.  And I remember trying to explain this to my mother later, and she looked at me and said, you did not get that from me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So I was going to ask you -- is that a much more a female thing than a male thing?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I don't know.  I think it probably is.  But in that respect, I think my mother was more \"masculine,\" and my father, more \"feminine.\"  And one story that I remember about her is -- while she was teaching at Westtown, she was doing her MA at Columbia ,and when she went to pick up her exam results, which she just picked up in some anonymous window in some anonymous building, she discovered that she had placed first in her exams, and she was just thrilled and she walked the streets for a while in celebration, and then she went into a phone booth and called my grandfather, and his secretary said, I'm very sorry, Miss Bell, he's in a board meeting.  And she said, get him out of it.  And he agreed, that had been the right thing to do.  So, I think that was much healthier, I think, in a lot of ways, but to somehow think that you had done it by your own \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=2700.0,3000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"ability and effort just involved a set of ethical dilemmas that I just couldn't face.\r\n\r\nSo I talk about the fact that nobody told me what I was doing right, and I think that's true, and I think in my own teaching I tried to remember all of the time that students need to be told that, but I think a lot of it was also self-created, because there was no living with it, otherwise.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yes.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And you always had to remember that anything you did well was really a result of all of the privilege and the help that you'd had that other people didn't have.  So my parents were, I think, more afraid of our getting swelled heads than anything.  I found out when I went back for, I think it was the 50th reunion, at Westtown, they'd always had in the great long hall in the center of the building wooden plaques that had the athlete of the year going back to God knows when, but when I went back, I noticed they now had plaques for highest academic achievement of the year and there was my name.  And nobody had ever told me this.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Really?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I don't know whether the school didn't tell my parents or whether my parents didn't tell me, and certainly nobody at school told me.  And, it turned out that if I had read down a little further, that my sister had this award both in her junior and senior years, and nobody had ever told her either.  She had absolutely no idea.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Do your siblings, you've got brothers and sisters --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- do they share the same kind of feeling about success?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:My sister does, but not as nearly as much as I do.  She really grew up in almost a different generation.  We're only eight years apart, but the first three of us were much more bunched together.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:So we were almost one family and then she came along and she -- just as she was learning how to do something or how to learn something, the three of us had just decided that this was a childish thing we never wanted to do again.  So I think she had a very much more difficult and isolated childhood.  And also my parents were moving into a fairly bad patch in their relationship, which I don't remember.  So she -- her recollection of my mother is of somebody very cold and formidable, and I remember formidable but not cold.  And I think her distance, my mother's distance at that point, was partly a result of what was happening with her relationship to my father, and partly that she was not a motherly sort of person, and she had wanted very much to have a child when -- in fact, she was three years older than my father, and she was beginning to think she wasn't going to marry, and she had decided that if she didn't marry in the next couple of years, she was going to adopt a child and raise it.  But I think she really was a one-child person and -- but they used to describe four as their compromise between one and 12.  And my mother, I think, in some ways would have been better off with one, and I think Susan was just past -- came just past the point at which my mother's greatest creativity as a parent was there.  And also my father had become -- had sunk into what clearly was clinical depression with some rather ugly sides to it, by the time she was a teenager.  And I knew enough to know that something was very not right, but I wasn't there.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:So I didn't understand.  And my mother would have felt that telling anybody what was the problem would have been like giving us his hair and toenails, and she just would not have done it.  I didn't know until many, many years later when my husband and I separated that she had almost left my father at that point.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Besides your brothers --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I think this system was much harder on boys?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Really?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:It was -- they didn't have anybody who mediated for them what the expectations of the masculine \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=3000.0,3300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"were, and many of which my parents would have thoroughly disapproved of, but it left them at kind of at sea dealing with this.  And it was not just that we did hiking and stuff, but didn't do any of the sports that you were expected to know, and I had no idea that they were teachable.  I just thought I was some inept lump, and I think it was much harder on boys to not know how to throw a ball and not to know that you could learn this and that it wasn't just a form of original sin or something.  And I think they have been much more conflicted, both about the clash of cultures between the family and the world and about how to live with her whole maternalistic authority in the whole world.  My -- the younger of my two brothers went to medical school, and actually ran a bush hospital in Africa for a couple of years in the middle of that, and became a pediatrician, and then became extremely interested in computers.  He is just brilliant and came to Washington to be involved in setting up the computer systems for the National Institutes of Health Library, and he came on a one-year job and just took a flier on it and was a great success at it, and he’s been there ever since.\r\n\r\nMy older brother, I think, is the most troubled of all of us, the most unable to form relationships and enjoy his life.  And he looks like a little codger, about 10 years older than the rest of us, and he went to law school and dropped out and got training as an accountant but never completed it, and has been earning his living by being an accountant for small law firms and getting their computer systems and so forth set up.  But, never at a very deep level, and then those law firms always get gobbled up by a bigger law firm.  And then he is unemployed for a while, and then he gets another job of the same kind, so he lives a pretty much of a loner life, and I just don't understand where he is at all.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:So -- it's also complicated by the fact that my younger brother married my ex-husband's sister, so I think this is illegal in many religions.  So that gives considerable weight to the saying, you can divorce a man but you can't divorce his family.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Coming back to Yale --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- were there -- I think you said that Talbot took on 50 percent of women in his -- in Medieval studies, but were there similar kind of constituency of women in other parts of English or indeed in other parts of arts and sciences?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:He was admitting for the whole English department.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Right.  I understand that.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:So I don't know what happened in other departments.  And one of the things that makes it hard for me to answer many of the obvious questions here is that I was so much of a loner, plus I had just gotten married --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- so I was, in many ways, not in the culture of the English department, and I was so naïve and so preoccupied with my own world and the conflicts in it that I have very little sense of the Yale community as a community except for a pretty basic suspicion of the -- glitz is not the right word but the finish, the polish and the competitiveness -- I mean, I found the seminars, the amount of name-dropping, which I found very distasteful -- and in those days, the seminars were all run by having student papers presented.  And so you got very little of the faculty member's own take.  \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=3300.0,3600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And Talbot would comment on each paper briefly, and then you'd usually end up with maybe 10 minutes at the end of two hours in which he would then move on from the last paper to think aloud about various things, issues, raised by the material.  And then he would just move into this world of lucid perception and intelligent analysis, and it was just like suddenly breathing fresh air.  I mean, I'd feel that I was momentarily in touch with some kind of sublime common sense and something that I thought intelligence was really all about, and that 10 minutes of it was enough to get me through the next week.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:But I was also very lucky.  Maynard Mack was also someone who had values beyond the strictly academic and wasn't shy about allowing the academic discussion to engage with them.  So, and he was another formidable person because he has -- he was very kind to me and his classes -- I mean, on the one hand, they were devastating.  You didn't start mouthing off about something that you didn't know anything about.  If you would say, the landscapes in this poem are reminiscent of Clode (sp?), he would stop you and say, well, Clode, when did he [florowit?] --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- what did he actually do, and you, of course, had no idea.  So he would say, well, tell us in two minutes next time about Clode.  So, you didn't do that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You've talked about Talbot and you've talked about Maynard Mack --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- did you form any impressions of any of the women on the faculty at that time?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, the only one I knew was Mary Boroff, and she was very kind to me later when I was a young instructor, but I didn't have any classes with her.  I later audited her History of the English Language undergraduate course, which was wonderful, just masterful.  But while I was a graduate student, the only time I remember being with her was that she was on my oral exams committee, but I didn't know her.  Beth knew her, my foster sister, very well and ended up doing her dissertation with Marie.  Talbot had absconded to Columbia.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  Did you form any impression of her, women to women?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, I wasn't thinking in those terms, but I remember -- for example, I remember sitting for that exam and looking around the room at all of these faces of faculty people and thinking that I did know her work and admired it.  As I looked around, there were all these men whom I didn't really either know very well or have much -- not directly appealing.  But they had a look of being comfortable in their skins and being, you know, open to what was happening, and she had such a guarded, closed-in look, like a fruit that doesn't have smell because it hasn't ripened to that point yet.  And of course I had absolutely no understanding of why this would be, so now I understand it perfectly.  And so another student of hers said she wears her clothes like armor, and he meant it very negatively, but I remember years later when I heard this story thinking, well, of course, you know.  It was just an extraordinary situation to have to have to be in.  And I think she made her way through it by being very guarded and very formidable and that that, in turn, probably exacerbated a lot of male stereotypes.  So I didn't know her then --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Right.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- and I later, when she was so kind to me when I was beginning to teach, I kept thinking, why is she doing this.  I mean, she doesn't know me.  Why is she bothering, and I think it never crossed my mind that she liked me and thought I had a future and was interested.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And thought that women might need some help.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, exactly.  And I didn't -- I lived in such, really, in a sense, a very sensible world where problems were about good people and bad people and problems were caused by bad people and good people would try to do something about them, \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=3600.0,3900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"so I think it never occurred to me that there was any systemic pattern here, and I know it didn't occur to me until I was teaching and my first crop of women students went on the job market.  And then when they came back and talked about the way they had been treated -- and also I saw things like frequently it was the least original, least interesting, least powerful student who got the interview.  And in some cases I think it was probably deliberate to say, well, we interviewed a woman and she wasn't very good.  But I think more often it was just men were not -- found the strong, original women who knew what they were doing off-putting and didn't quite analyze why, and deep down inside it was this one is not like us.  So -- but the things that my students came back and said was -- well, one of them was asked at her interview what contraceptive she used and, you know, that clearly the -- what can you tell us to make us think that you aren't just going to go get pregnant and disappear on us.  \r\n\r\nAnd one of my two first PhD students had an interview at Columbia and afterward the chair of the committee, who was not anybody in Medieval studies, wrote her a letter, an enthusiastic letter saying she would be hearing from them presently, and it ended with, the committee was very impressed with your charms, academic and otherwise.  Charms, plural.  And I was just outraged.  And she brought it to me to say, is there something rather odd about this?  Well, I remember a member of my own department, well, one of his -- he had a number of very good women in American literature working with him, but several of them told me that when they were -- their dissertation was well along, he would say to them, you're not going to be taking a job away from some man who really needs it.  And he also had -- it was not that he was easy on his male students.  He would often, again, when they sort of finished Chapter 2 or 3, he would call them into his office and say, I think it is really my duty to tell you that I will not be able to support you as first rate, and they would come reeling into my office, pea-green, having had this dropped on them.  So I'm not saying it was easy for men either, but what I didn't understand is that you're not up against something about who was nice or not, but about compulsions that were at a level that none of the actors were thinking of consciously and -- I remember, when Washington and Lee had decided to admit graduate students, one of the supervisors in the English department who had been one of my NEH summers for college teachers and had become a friend, invited me to come down and do a formal seminar with the department on what difference this would make, and he told me that that year, when they had gone to the MLA to interview and they'd been going through the candidates to select the interviewees, and they knew that they had to hire a woman under the circumstances since it was an all-male department, and they kept bringing out, you know, attractive male candidates, and Ed was chair, I think, at the time, but yes, we're looking for, under these special circumstances, we're looking for a woman.  And finally one of the guys said, you mean, we're never going to be able to hire someone like us.  And I think that sense of just -- these are strange animals and I don't know what they are going to do.\r\n\r\nI had very much that sense the year I spent at the Pontifical Institute in Toronto that \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=3900.0,4200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"really they looked at me as if I was some strange animal that might jump on the table or might -- you didn't know what it ate.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:You didn't know what it might do next.  And, in that case, it was exacerbated by the fact that they were resilient fathers, and they were, many of them, were wonderful to me individually.  And also, I think for many, many years, I looked a lot younger than I was, so people tended to think that I was an undergraduate and not the Director of the honors program at Brown or whatever I was at the time.  And I know at Yale when -- of course, there were no women undergraduates, people always thought that I must be the kid sister of some entering freshman.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I suppose one of the things about Talbot is, if I got it right, is that he actually did treat women as equals intellectually --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- but I wonder when it came to the hard realities of academic life and the business of jobs and where you were going to go -- where you could get a job, if you were going to get a job, how you were going to get a job -- did he mentor in that sense as well?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:No.  And I don't know how much is that Yale maintained the attitude that we were not there to get jobs, that jobs would fall into place, that if you were what a Yale education would turn you into the world would open up.  I don't remember his talking to me about how you apply for a job or how you interview or how you're -- how to put together a vitae or how to present yourself.  And, in fact, and he may have already been thinking of this, but Sunny and I were the first women to be included in the pattern that Yale had always had of keeping a certain number of its new PhDs on for what sometimes extended on as long as nine years, and sometimes longer, but with the understanding that you would almost certainly not get tenure.  And I had never thought anything about a job and I had -- my husband and I had Fulbrights for the year after I finished my dissertation --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:When would that have been?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Hmm?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:What date would that have been?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:‘63/4, I was in England, and we had both applied thinking that maybe if one of us got it we might both manage, and we ended up both getting it, so I wasn't really thinking job and then he just -- well, I remember after I had apparently done very well on my orals, and I remember his looking at me and saying, do you suppose you could do that in front of a class, and I said, I guess so, or something like that, so he was already thinking of this, and then he told me that I had a job for the year after I came back.  So I had actually never really applied for a job in the sense of going through the process that I had to then teach my students.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Really?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:We had -- my husband I had decided -- his field was Early American decorative arts, and we had decided that there were not many places you could do that, whereas you could teach English in a lot of places and, other things being equal, we would go where his job opened up.  So after I had been at Yale for three years, I really hated it, and so I was very glad to leave, but he got a job in Providence and was then the head of the Rhode Island Historical Society of the American Decorative Arts Wing of the Rhode Island School of Design.  And so I think people just -- the Yale department just called Brown and said, we've got this nice little woman who is following her husband and who is really quite good.  Do you happen to have room, and they had happened to have just fired their junior medievalist, who was, in fact, a student of Talbot's, who just had not been able to finish her dissertation.  \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=4200.0,4500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And you'd think that might have made them wary, but, of course, my dissertation was finished and I had been teaching then for three years.\r\n\r\nSo I did go up for an interview, but in those days the department chair just hired junior faculty unilaterally and they -- I was told later that, in this case, he had actually shown my dossier to a couple of senior people and I did have a little interview with the senior medievalist, George Anderson, a Chaucerian, and the only thing I remember about it was he said, you understand, I'm going to sit on the Chaucer course as long as I'm teaching, and I said, I would in your place.  So they hired me and I -- you know, just like that.  And, because he -- because George wanted to go on teaching Old English and Chaucer, I was teaching a graduate course in non-Chaucer Middle English from the word go, which was just an extraordinary experience.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Coming back to Yale --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- you said you were very glad to leave because you hated it.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:What was it that you really hated?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, let's see --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Because, by this time you were an instructor.  You were on the faculty.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:In a very small, junior way.  But what was it that you hated?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And I loved the teaching.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You had no problems with the male students?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:No.  And I think it was -- as long as I was there, I think it was a co-ed class.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:But I don't remember thinking anything particular about it except, well, I knew people thought it was unusual and when they saw me, they didn't think of -- classify me as faculty.  But I really enjoyed particularly teaching the -- I suppose you'd say the bottom-half of the freshman class, many of whom came from families that had never sent anybody to Yale before, and I just enjoyed them because they were very bright and very open and thrilled to be there, and you could gradually see this Yale requirement to look as if you've heard of everything before and have this -- there's this look that descends upon the face of a Yalie listening to something, which is -- it's a mask and you can't tell how they're reacting at all.  It's very disconcerting.  But that didn't settle on them until sometime between February and April, so they were a lot of fun to teach.  So that part was fine.\r\n\r\nAnd I didn't mind the fact that women couldn't be members of colleges and therefore -- our male colleagues would be wined and dined in the dining hall and Sunny and I were eating sandwiches in our office.  In fact, they had to put in a ladies’ room just for us in that building, in Calvin College, and the -- where there hadn't been one before.  In fact, in those days, it was a little like -- it was like a little like being in the South and have to have a little map of where there are bathrooms you can use.  There was one on the fourth floor of the ROTC building I understand.  But anyway, they made one in our office building and the sign on the door said LADIE'S.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:That's wonderful.  Come to Yale and have problems with your apostrophe.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And Sunny was wonderful because she -- I mean, her husband was a Yalie and taught at Yale and knew the whole system.  And I think she thought my extreme naiveté was kind of funny and maybe a little endearing.  And she was a wonderful mentor.  I remember -- I was just engrossed in the teaching.  I just loved it.  And I would spend hours with students talking about their papers and stuff, and one day she said to me after a student had left, Elizabeth, do you know what a scab is?  And I said, no, what is a scab?  And I remember her extraordinary powers of concentration, because she had done all of her graduate work with small children underfoot, and she had learned to concentrate totally on what she was doing, but have her ears peeled so that the whisper that was relevant to whether the children were all right would just come right through.\r\n\r\nSo she would sit there working hard \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=4500.0,4800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"while I was talking to one student after another without being distracted by it, which I couldn't do.  And I remember talking to her -- well, one of the things that I really hated was that the atmosphere among the junior faculty who knew almost certainly they would not be kept but not totally certainly, so that everybody thought that maybe they might be the one --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:This was men and women, both?  It was just you --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Women were me and Sunny.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yes, of course.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And it seemed to me that that combination of fear and desperation and hope was very corrosive and very bad for people's characters.  And of course I didn't get to know anybody much, except Sunny, so I didn't have any reality to interfere with this feeling.  But I remember talking to Sunny about how dreadful I thought this was, and she said comfortably, well, it's not doing anything to them that life wouldn't do eventually, too.  And I remember finally, this is what I asked, I said, I don't quite understand this.  I'm going to think about it.  So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I mean, one of the things that somebody told me, and I can't recall who, but somebody told me that it was -- some of the senior faculty didn't even entertain the junior faculty to dinner or to their house.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Absolutely.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Because they didn't see, why should they put the investment in them?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, they're ephemeral.  The only time I was invited to a faculty home, except for the punch parties that some faculty had the end of the class, was I was invited by John Pope and this was amazing.  He -- Sunny and her husband and my husband and I were included in some kind of a dinner party, and it was a pure 19th Century dinner party, which I hardly recognized since I didn't know what that was.  And, I was very fond of him.  He was a wonderful, very kind, gentle man with excruciatingly high standards, and I didn't realize that women were supposed to withdraw upstairs to Mrs. Pope's room upstairs after dinner and I didn't get signals at all, so I was just sitting there as the only women until Sunny finally just came and fished me out.  I just couldn't believe it.  \r\n\r\nI think my most formidable experience at Yale was in John Pope's advanced Old English seminar, and I had done a paper on the advent lyrics, in which I -- on the metaphors in advent lyrics -- and I, in one instance I admired the way a particular metaphor had been developed through about two-thirds of the way through one of the lyrics, and then I said it was, you know, a failure that it had not continued.  And after I finished reading it, there was a silence, and then John Pope said, what made you think they were parts of the same poem.  It was just -- the earth was going to open --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- and swallow me up.  And I had never forgotten since that what you see on the page about this poem or, indeed, any other poem, is an end product already of a set of judgments.  And I remember Talbot used to say, formidably, never base an interpretation on a disputed reading, which, of course, means you have to know whether it is a disputed reading.  But for somebody who was so gentle in his manner, it was, I think, more so -- I remember Ted Irving, who went on to the University of Pennsylvania, was in his last year as a junior faculty member of some kind, the year I took Old English from John Pope, and that was the year that John Pope had his head in some kind of sling because he had some kind of very serious neurological illness, and so Ted was assisting him with the Old English class, and he would come in every day and distribute the mimeographed sheets and say, Mr. Pope wishes me to distribute these corrections.  \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=4800.0,5100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mr. Pope is never satisfied with perception.  And it -- his corrections were already done in a \"this hurts me more than it hurts you\" way, which is particularly excruciating.\r\n\r\nSo, but I think the basic answer to all of these questions is I saw these patterns of discrimination, which, obviously, involved race and class but most particularly with gender.  And, I saw them clearly enough that later, in retrospect, I could understand them and analyze them and wonder why I hadn't seen it, but it was only later when I became engaged with what was happening to my women graduate students, and in general a problem of how you make a department a less-destructive place than it might well be at an elite institution, and began to understand what it meant to struggle with the administrative structure and a culture that I could look back and see.  And I realize now the many ways I learned what made me able to do that work at Brown from seeing it at Yale.  But I certainly did not have a conscious sense of what I was learning at the time.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So, the early feminist, Betty Friedan, who had written by 1962 when you were still a graduate student -- did all of that sort of pass you by?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yeah.  I didn't read any of it.  And I remember my mother saying to me once about all of this women's movement stuff.  She said, I don't understand because half of this seems to me to be totally obvious and half of it crazy.  And I think I had such a secure grounding in the idea that there was equality between the sexes that I just couldn't even recognize what was going on until a long time afterward.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  So if anything wasn't going wrong or wasn't -- didn't feel quite right to you -- you took it as a kind of personal thing.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Something you weren't doing right.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.  Usually.  That it might be that I hit a bad apple, but more likely it was something that I either had done wrong or -- I didn't know the ropes, I hadn't explained myself well enough, something like that.  I was much more conscious of not knowing where I was because of being a Midwesterner and it was that kind of thing.  I mean this was part of the country where they say “out there” about Indiana --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- so and I think the thing that makes the gender stuff so insidious in a way that isn't true of race discrimination is that the way women have learned to live with it for a millennia is to simply take it for granted.  That it's been naturalized so that we don't -- we literally don't think anything is going on, and it takes a huge mental reorientation to become aware of it.  And then it is so obvious, and you just can't understand how you could have been so dumb.  \r\n\r\nAnd as long -- I guess it's like any kind of privilege.  If you don't have it, you don't see it.  Like, nobody has an accent.  You have an accent and somebody else has an accent, but I don't have an accent.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yes.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And it's the same kind of thing.  And so often what happens once you -- once the penny has dropped and you begin to see it is that you become so angry that you start blaming everybody and thrashing around and often becoming very embittered and somehow managing to find villains, even though what you've noticed tells you that it isn't primarily a problem with the villains, and then you start thinking that nothing could be done about it or that it could only be done by hitting people over the head with a hammer in a very abrasive manner.  And what kept \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=5100.0,5400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"that from happening, I think, for me, was this sort of incredibly, deeply ingrained habit of thinking that you have to work within whatever community you're in to see if you can’t bring about something better -- like, for example, when I was first on the committee at Brown, I was of course always asked to take the minutes, being female and youngest, and I discovered that by composing the minutes in such a way that the issues and possibilities were just a lot clearer than they had been in the discussion, you could sort of retroactively make the committee's work much more meaningful and purposeful.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:That's a very interesting way of negotiating yourself some power.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.  Mm-hmm.  And it was precisely because of having been stuck with this task, and if I had been more militant about it and refused to do it -- well, I guess that would have produced another set of cause and effects that would have had learning in it.  But I learned something different.  So what I used to call the “kitten with its eyes still closed” method actually got me through quite well, and I think it was only in retrospect that I realized that I must have been a lot better at what I was doing than I had any idea of.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Because something was overriding a whole lot of inertia, and I didn't know what it was.  So it was possible to do this in a sort of innocence and without violating any of these family taboos against ambition and success and noticing that you've succeeded.  I could go on thinking that it was all a happy accident and a piece of luck and so on.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Rather than your native intelligence.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  But I imagine, I'm assuming I suppose, at Yale you were an instructor, so that was a pretty lonely position --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Very.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- in the hierarchy of the department.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And did you have any service obligations?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:No, I was a second reader on a few dissertations and boy, I'll tell you -- there is something horrendous about -- you submit your evaluation in advance and then they read them aloud and in alphabetical order and you hear Boroff and Donaldson, and then you get to Kirk --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- and there you were, this junior person, and you didn't have really any idea while you were writing it what the real world parameters for judgment were, so I'm thinking, I'm just going to die, I'm going to die when they get to mine.  And junior faculty -- junior instructors anyway didn't go to department meetings.  I think those dissertation meetings were the only ones I ever went to.  And I don't think people were put on committees -- I suspect they were eventually, but I don't know.  Maybe not.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  I've certainly been looking at the archives trying to figure out what level women did finally get -- I think it really was the ‘70s before associate professors and assistant professors were voted onto committees, but it was partly because I think there was still so very few women around that they had to be spread around all of the committees.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And so they would often be doing an awful lot more of that work --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- than their male counterpart.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I think that was definitely the case.  I know at Brown that there had to be one on every committee, and when there are few enough of you, that means that you have to be on all of these different committees.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And the other thing that was just exhausting was that whenever you are on the committee, you have to be the exemplar of all women.  You have to be standing for them, standing up for them, explaining, trying to educate them as to what they're not seeing, and it's just exhausting.  And it makes me realize when I look at junior -- at minority faculty -- that just the burden -- that I think the male counterparts don't have any idea about the burden of being the example all of the time is just exhausting.  And I remember the point at which there began to be enough women \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=5400.0,5700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"that I didn't feel that way anymore.  I remember, when you've been at Brown for 25 years, you start being invited to a reception for people who have been at Brown for 25 years or more, and the first time I went, I was wandering around the Faculty Club thinking, why do I feel so awful and at loose ends and like I don't know anybody to talk to and I don't know how to talk to them, and then I suddenly remember, this is the old Brown.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:This is the Brown I came to and it felt just like that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And there weren't any women, probably.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:None.  Well, when I came to Brown, there were three women full professors.  One was the dean of Pembrook and one was the head of women's athletics, so there was only one really academic full professor and there were, I think, six or so associate professors, and that was it out of six hundred and something.  And that was in a field where women have traditionally been not in large numbers but recognized, so --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:It's almost really almost impossible to imagine that world, and if you've come after it --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- it really is.  Let me just stop for a moment and figure out what we've got.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n[break in audio]\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Let's go back to Sunny.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Sunny and seven other women were the first women admitted into the colleges.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:In ‘65 I think it was.  And Sunny told me that they called themselves the Ancient Eight.  Did you know that?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:No.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:No.  And I've not seen that written anywhere at all.  But it was when I was talking to her, she told me that, they called themselves the Ancient Eight, because I think there was also an Ancient Eight in the Ivy League as well.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Oh.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So it was an ironic sort of reflecting back.  Did you become a fellow during your time as an instructor?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, we were fellows in the sense that we had an office --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Right.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- in the building and that we could, and eventually did, teach a seminar within the college system --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- as opposed to the university system.  But not in the sense of belonging, largely because, you know, if you're not alone in the dining hall -- and my husband was a member of, I think it was Seabrook, and he was invited to all sorts of dinners, and at those dinners there was endless conversation about how terrible it would be if women were ever made members of colleges and all of the special culture and bonding would disappear.  And also how appalling and unendurable it would be to have a wife who earned more money than you did.  And my husband finally just stopped going, but I think that was one of the points where I began to get it, that there was something that was very frightening to people about women coming into male institutions.  And I think it was partly that these men had had no experience at all of professional relationships with women who weren't hierarchical like a secretary.  They had no notion, not only how to relate, but that there was a way of relating to women that wasn't either familial or flirtatious.  And that's why they were so sure that you couldn't let women into a group of men without it becoming a social situation, and I understood perfectly well by what they meant by saying, we don't want a social situation, but the idea that the mere presence of women would make it one --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- I think is extraordinarily revealing.  And I think, come to think of it, that that was one of the points when I began to realize that there was more involved here than just would be appropriate.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Some of the things that my husband reported men saying to each other on various occasions were just really revolting.  And, I recognized it in retrospect \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=5700.0,6000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"when I started reading the documents in the Lamphere case at Brown, the things that men say to each other about women are beyond a feminist's most paranoid fantasies.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And that was clearly seen in the Yale colleges for dinner.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I suppose.  I mean, I wasn't there.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:But according to your husband anyway.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, according to my husband.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I mean, there was some attempt to have a fellowship at Helen Hadley Hall for the women in the graduate, but you never --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:No.  I was never involved in that.  I don't know whether -- I mean, I was just married when I came and I was -- so we were -- and we were originally living in the Divinity School dormitory, married student dormitory, and I didn't -- I think I just never assumed that I would belong to a community any more than I had in junior high.  And I did get to know a couple of people, but not very many and I really was never a joiner --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- I don't remember setting foot into Helen Hadley College, and my husband and I both enjoyed cooking, and we fed a lot of meals to a lot of people, but it wasn't part of the English department culture.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And I think any entertaining there was in the English department was probably pretty formal and pretty much among the higher ups, and if it is anything like what Providence was, the higher ups remembered an era when entertaining was much more formidable and expensive, and they felt like they didn't have time or money for it any more, and there wasn't an alternative, like you'd have a culture of entertaining in restaurants and -- so, basically, they weren't doing that.  And it used to be in the dim days of -- at Brown and probably at Yale, too -- when new faculty arrived, if they were deemed to become visible on the screen, then the wife of the chair called upon the wife of the new person and invited her to teas and things. \r\n\r\nOne thing I was invited to join was the Faculty Wives Club.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I was going to ask you that.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And that was just appalling.  I had just -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So what kind of women were the faculty wives?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, I think that -- I think the fair answer is to say that this was a subset of -- but, it was very much a matter of having nice little teas and then sitting around and telling, you know, stories about their husband's dirty socks and things.  I mean, just very much sort of girls together kind of thing, but a very old fashioned sort of.  And I just felt totally -- I mean, for many years, I just assumed that I didn't really like women very much and I didn't have much in common with them, and I think one of the places where the women's movement really infringed on me was I started discovering that there were all sorts of really interesting groups of women that you could have conversations with.  And I wasn't being perceived automatically as some kind of freak who would probably get over it when I was ready to have kids or something like that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Because a lot of the faculty wives were actually -- had PhDs or things like that.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, you wouldn't have known it from these occasions.  And also, I didn't have -- well, that wonderful gift that Mel and Beth have of just somehow reaching out in such a way that the next thing you know people are talking and telling you about themselves, so I just sat there thinking, I don't know what to do, I don't know what to say, I'm probably invisible.  I probably have a funny hat on my head.  I don't belong here.  I've got to get out of here as soon as possible, which is not of course the way to make anything of the situation.  So my mother's “might as well be hung for sheep as for lamb” clearly did not apply in this context.\r\n\r\nSo I think the first time I began to put my mind on \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=6000.0,6300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"how women were treated at Yale was after I had been involved in the Lamphere case at Brown and Marie was appointed chair of a committee to look into the status of women at Brown -- I mean, Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So that would have been in the ‘70s?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, I think it would have been probably ‘76 --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- or later.  And she got in touch with me because she heard that I was involved in such things at Brown, and that was the first time that I think I had a real sense of her as a person, as somebody who -- although, I was, of course, terrified of her still, but who was doing stuff that I was really interested in and who might be companionable about.  And I talked to her at some length about what we were finding out through the Lamphere case.  And then I began to realize that there was a larger picture at Yale that my idiosyncratic experience put an end to and, again, how extraordinarily lucky I had been in my mentors.  It's just the number of people who have mentors that are even decent to them, let alone really train them intellectually with any seriousness, plus don't immediately want to go to bed with them, it's just very small.  I had no idea how rare this was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And to have a mentor of Talbot's extraordinary abilities and knowledge and charm, too -- I mean, he was just the most engaging person, just to take you seriously.  Not in a way that ever spread out of his office, and he was -- had a meticulous code about not dating students and not having any element of the erotic enter, except in the most subliminal way.  So, and I had no idea, of course, that that was unusual.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I have just known women who were absolutely mangled by the process, of being picked up and then dropped --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Really?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- by male mentors.  So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:At Yale or elsewhere?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Elsewhere.  I didn't know about Yale to know whether it happened there.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So you couldn't say apart from Sunny that there was any kind of sisterhood?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:No.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:No.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:But, I think that that was probably -- I probably would have fallen outside of it even if there had been one, because I was just inept at an incredibly fundamental level about making connections with people.  So I had on the one hand this hunger for community, and then on the other hand, absolutely no idea of where to look for it or how to look for it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:So, there was the Quaker meeting, but I didn't feel very close to that one.  And John and I were going through various issues about how Quaker we wanted to go on being.  So, that complicated things.  And, John was a person who lived his aesthetic commitments, you know, 24/7.  And whenever I wasn't doing something that was absolutely required for graduate work, we were doing his stuff.  That is, we went antiquing and we -- what he was learning, I learned too.  And he did not have any kind of traditional intellectual formation, so when he hit the Yale Art History Department, he was really not at all prepared for it, and fortunately, some friend of his told him that he should buy a first year art history textbook, and he discovered that if you said fenestration instead of windows, and so on, you were taken seriously.  But he didn't really know how to write papers at that level.  So I was constantly being a copy editor for him, and later, when he started writing, he became a very good lecturer, but when it came to translating that into writing, he was just so uncomfortable with the medium.  So he took to recording lectures \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=6300.0,6600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"and having somebody type them up and using them as a rough draft, and I used to go through everything over and over again as it went through different revisions.  And I think looking back on it that I really was, in a very fundamental way, co-author, but it was his field, and he was the one with the standards and ideas, although, very often, he didn't really articulate what those ideas were until I asked him lots of question of the kind that my mother had asked me about the issues.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And he had been -- he was very self-conscious about the fact that he had learned to read late, and I think he was probably dyslexic, but they didn't know that at the time.  And he had been brought up by a very patriarchal father who thought that he would never amount to anything because he was -- wanted to build a drop-leaf table at the age of eight and was interested in aesthetic things, and that, from his father's point of view, was not enough to make you amount to anything in the world.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So you saw in your personal life that your husband's job and career would inevitably come first?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, I didn't think of it that way in the traditional sense of a wife must always support her husband, although I think there was a lot more than that buried in it than I realized.  But I thought that I had made a choice to marry somebody incredibly gifted, incredibly idiosyncratic, who needed to be healed and midwifed and helped to communicate with his world and discover himself, and that there was nothing more fascinating than doing that.  And I didn't have, at that stage, a great independent sense of vocation about my own work.  I knew I loved it and that this was what I wanted to do, but not to the extent of sacrificing what had become our life, which was -- I mean, he had -- he was subject to what we call house disease, and he would fall in love with a wreck, and we would mortgage everything and buy the wreck and move into it and live in it and work on it and just as it was becoming really habitable and totally gorgeous, he would fall in love with another, better worse wreck, and sell that wreck to someone, and each of them got better, but it meant that just living there was a vocation.  \r\n\r\nI would keep diaries of the stages of the restoration and scraps of the wallpaper and the paint chips that he would mix paints from and write a narrative and, in fact, after we had separated, we had been thinking that he might write a book called the Impecunious House Restorer, that -- he had written a book called the Impecunious Collector, so we -- he had taken a lot of photographs while we were working, and he had my journals, and every time the old man who had lived in the house came by and brought us snapshots or told us things about the history of the house, I would write them all in, and after we had been separated for quite a while, I got a letter from him out of the blue that said, I'm finishing the Impecunious House Restorer.  I've used your journals and I hope you don't mind.  And I discovered that I was furious.  I mean, I had a huge investment in that.  And he said, oh, and my editor thinks that we should take all of the “we”s out and make them “I”s.  And, that sense of being totally erased out of -- that really hit me very hard and revealed a lot that I just hadn't been aware of.\r\n\r\nSo, in typical devious Quaker manner, instead of telling him I was furious, I wrote him a letter in which I said -- I thanked him for letting me know, because it would have been a shock to find a book in a bookstore without knowing, and that I'm sure from all of the work that he had to do to get all of the releases for all of the photographs in the other books, that Knopf would need a release from me because there were not going to be lawsuits about women's work on -- so I enclosed a witnessed statement releasing him \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=6600.0,6900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"from any interest I might have in this material.  And I didn't really understand that it was a very angry document, and I don't know if he got it or not.\r\n\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yet, I don't think your story would be unique in that respect.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:No, I don't think so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:No.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:There are so many books that say, “and to my wife without whom,” and I bet they really were co-authors.  I even wrote an appendix on the fact that the derivation of early American dialects from British dialects corresponded with the areas of influences of English design on particular regions in America.  There was an overlap and I don't think I even -- I don't think I even put it on a resume at Brown.  \r\n\r\nBut, you see, I thought I didn't care about any of these things.  And I thought -- I really thought I didn't.  And I think I wouldn't have if I'd felt heard in other ways.  For example, I was just the original dowdy bookworm, and he started choosing my clothes and making a lot of them.  He is a wonderful designer.  Knit my wedding dress.  And, I didn't even think until after we had separated -- he used to ask periodically, do you mind, and I said, you care about this?  I don't.  And his mother would say, why do you let him do that?  And I'd say, it's because I don't care and he does.  And I realized later, when I was starting to do this for myself, that all of those years, anybody who met me met a sort of composite personality that I had only partly created, and I didn't mind and it was sort of fun not to be a dowdy mouse, and to wear a [cirvo lamaise?] sheathe to the Andy Warhol opening.  My part of the bargain was just to go on weighing 115 pounds, which did take rather a lot of work.  So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:But somehow you managed to carry on being a medievalist and researching and writing --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I think actually one of the reasons that this marriage survived 14 years and I think really paid its way during a good deal of that was that I did have something of my own.  And I remember, when we were in the process of separating, and I was just heartbroken and weeping around the house and all of that, that a friend of mine stopped me on my way across campus and said, you always look so happy walking across campus, and I suddenly realized that I was, because that was the one place where I knew what was happening, I knew it was my turf, I knew what to do, I knew I loved it -- it didn't present me with any of these insoluble questions.  And I think -- I think I would have stuck it out forever, because I just couldn’t imagine myself as somebody who would unpromise a promise.  I just couldn't imagine.  There's a wonderful line in \"The Last Picture Show\" movie when the basketball coach is having an affair with one of the players, and he says, why don't you leave him, and she said, I wasn't raised to leave my husband.  I think it just didn't appear on my horizon, but I think I would have stuck it out and probably ended up as an addict of some kind just choking down more and more the conflicting reasons.  But he fell in love with a wonderful man that he is with now, and that was so obviously the right thing for him to do, and I just came away from it with a great, really militant conviction that society has to be made so that it isn't too expensive for people to find this out sooner.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Let's stop there for a moment and take a rain check.\r\n[break in audio]\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=6900.0,7200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:  OK.  All right --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Are you sure?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I think we're recording you.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So you've, I think we finished up before our lunch with you leaving Yale and going to --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- your position at Brown, which had been somehow found when you knew you were having to move to that part of the world --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I think I was probably one of the first women to get a job on the Old Boy Network --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- and probably one of the last, also.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  Do you -- thinking back to that moment when you arrived at Brown as a woman assistant professor, did you form any impression of Brown, how it was different to Yale or how it was similar to Yale?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, what struck me was how enormously relaxed and informal and human it seemed by comparison with Yale, that Brown just didn't seem to have the, well, “we're Yale” kind of thing, and it was taken for granted that junior faculty were human and you said hello to them in the hall, and you might even ask them how they were doing, and everybody picked up their mail in front of the same mailbox, including graduate students, that wall mailboxes are in.  People talked then.  And it just seemed to be Brown was proud of the fact that it was really making it into the big leagues as a university with graduate programs, but it was also very proud of still being a nice homey undergraduate college.  And it's always stuck to the idea that it likes to call itself a university college and to talk about the fact that as a recruiting thing, that if you come to Brown because some bigwig in your field is there, you will actually get to be in the bigwig's classes and that, in general, Brown -- although it has been very clear about the same underlying commitment to “we don't keep anybody if they don't publish,” that just being a good teacher will never do it.  Just being a good scholar might do it if you were a Nobel Prize winner or something, but you have to meet at least the minimal standards of teaching, just because our undergraduate population has such a high proportion of women that people aren't going to come to Brown unless they have a sense of being taught by a faculty that care about them.  And the more of the faculty who -- there are not -- there are hardly any faculty that teach only graduate students.  That practically is a non-existent animal.  So that there are still faculty who really value their undergraduate majors and consider the work they're doing, whether it's an honors thesis or something just as important.  In fact, there was a period when Brown was definitely the second, third, or fourth, or something choice of graduate student, but first choice of undergraduates.  So there was a period when the faculty was sort of snotty about how comparatively boring the graduate students were.\r\n\r\nBut then we continued to build ourselves up, and we now tend to be the first choice of graduate students who come.  So I don't think there's the same different of quality that there used to be.  But, it's still true that undergraduates are more fun, because they're not looking at you and seeing their passport to real life staring at them and wondering what you'll think if they scratch their ear or whatever.  They just have to be so much more cautious and therefore they're cautious even when they shouldn't be.  People -- one of the hardest things in dealing with graduate students is the rumor culture, because graduate students are ready to fear the worst at all times, and they will therefore glom onto it and they will not go to the \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=7200.0,7500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"person who would really know and ask -- they just go around asking each other so that it gets worse and worse and snowballs.  We had several crises in the graduate department over how a certain decision about funding had been arrived at by the graduate committee meeting.  And, every single faculty member and graduate student representative who were at the meeting could have told them what happened --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- and that it didn't portend any of the things they thought it did, but they didn't ask, and now we found out that it had reached proportions of a maelstrom, so I remember saying in exasperation to a graduate student friend of mine -- why do graduate students behave like somebody who is stepping out in front of a bus without looking, and he said, because being a graduate student makes you feel like stepping out in front of a bus without looking.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Earlier on in the conversation you said that it was really working and observing what happened to your female students at Brown --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- because I'm assuming you didn't have any graduate students at Yale.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:No.  No.  No.  Years off.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  But that was the thing that really made you realize that there were things that seriously needed to be done --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- in terms of how do we make this system more friendly and more effective and more fair.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And I'd really like to know more about what you did and how you went about doing this.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Did you start to do that work while -- before you had tenure, or was this while you were tenured?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Let's see.  After my first contract (inaudible) I became Director of the honors program, and that was just wonderful.  It was -- at that point, the English department was huge, and it was sort of the major of last resort for people who weren't, you know, playing football or editing the paper or running for office or being in theater or something.  So the honors program was a real enclave of a real community and helping these women, good students, do what in theory is supposed to be the attraction of the Brown curriculum, that it really talked through with somebody what's an education and what do I want to get out of my education, how am I going to make these choices add up to something more than the sum of the parts.  That was just wonderful.  I just loved it.  It's always been one of the things I cared about, and I had the satisfaction of feeling like I was doing well.\r\n\r\nSo, that was, I think, where I learned, without quite realizing it at the time, what's involved in working out procedures so that you can check that they've been followed and so that you can explain them clearly to people, and you can call up the faculty and say, we have to have a report by a certain time because we're going to be deciding certain things and trying to match people with their aptitudes and make them realize that, if you're doing this in the English department, you might be doing the corresponding thing in French or -- you know, why not at the same time take a history course on the same thing or -- that was just great.  And they were wonderful kids and we had really good faculty, even faculty who kind of turned up their noses at teaching the big lecture courses, which some did in those days, taught honors seminars and loved it.  And people who went on to graduate school after taking one of Barbara Wollsky's Milton seminar used to say nothing, during the whole rest of their life, even in graduate school, compared to the rigor and also the excitement of that course.\r\n\r\nSo that was, I think, how I learned, and it was a small enough program that you could experiment and you could do things --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Did you bring in any of your experience from Yale to that?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Only in the sense that I could see -- I hadn't had very much to do with the upperclassmen.  I think I only taught one upperclass seminar.  And it was on Shakespeare and it was not really on the best ground, so I didn't find it that exciting.  But, I think that taught me, in retrospect, what is missing if you don't have somebody thinking about how the pieces in an undergraduate's education are pulling together and also the ways in which it's possible to do something interdisciplinary, just by the way you choose your courses, so that you're not just \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=7500.0,7800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"intuiting in a vacuum but can put pieces together.  And then that, in turn, gave me a sense of when I became the Director of graduate studies, that it was doable.  I would have been sure I just couldn't do it and -- but the department had -- was increasingly developing a culture where the older and experienced faculty were just tired of doing any of these jobs, and they were very happy to pawn them off on somebody.\r\n\r\nSo when I got tenure, they made me Director of graduate studies, and I was lucky in that respect because there are departments at Brown who, the minute a junior faculty member, especially a woman, arrives with an unfinished dissertation, they make her Director of graduate studies or something and work her to death and teehee, funny about you not finishing your book.  Anyway, so I was really ready to step into it, and one of the truly lucky things that happened was the summer before the first school year, I was sitting in my office thinking, how am I going to learn how to do all of this, and two older graduate students, one of which became a very good friend and still is, came in and said that they had heard a rumor that I was going to be Director of graduate studies and that this was so, and they said that they had been thinking that there really ought to be a handbook where graduate students could find out, not by gossip and rumor, but somewhere in black and white, what requirements there in fact were and how you went about -- what the steps were you went about, including how do you ask an advisor to direct your thing and, you know, how do you get permission, and what's the general procedure for preparing general lists for your prelim exams and, you know, all of that kind of stuff.  And how was evaluation done and what were the criteria and so on.  So, I said I needed to learn exactly those things because I didn't know them.  And so we spent a wonderful summer -- there were two very remarkable women, and I don't think it's at all a coincidence that they were women.  One of them is a nun in a very Avant-garde religious -- one of the sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet that just went out to Iowa.  One reason why my arthritis is acting up at this moment was it was quite a trip for her inauguration as President of St. Andrew's University.  It was just a wonderful event.  But anyway -- and she -- I don't know if you're familiar with Myers-Briggs classifications of personality --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yes, I do.  Yes.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:She is an incredible, off-the-wall, extrovert, sensate wedded with the observer, thinker, judgment person.  And I'm incredibly off-the-wall opposite to that, but both of us have learned to pass, in a way, through -- religious orders are just packed with the introvert, intuitive types, and so she had had to learn to live with that and how -- what the care and feeding of them is.  And I had learned how to pass for a coherent thinker in order to work in my department.  So, instead of hating each other, we just complimented each other perfectly.  And we went on to direct three inter-faith colloquiums at Episcopal [Divinity?] School together and all kind of interesting stuff.  And she lives -- whenever I've gone to see her, she lives in the most exciting women's communities that you can imagine.\r\n\r\nAnyway, we kept writing drafts of this.  We would go around and ask faculty how they did things and they would say, well I sort of think -- and none of it was written down, so we would write drafts and take it around and circulate it to everybody and say, have we got it right and, of course, partly because it was summer and most people didn't actually bother to correct us.  And so by the end of the summer, we had a very coherent, clear, plain sort of officially sanctioned document that explained how we do all of these things.  I mean, how is scholarship money given out.  When is it decided.  How is it decided who gets to teach what courses.  All of this stuff.  And it was a wonderful handbook, and the atmosphere of utter paranoia \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=7800.0,8100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"which was very bad in the department at that point because the previous director of graduate studies had been a real Eeyore and not happy doing it and not good at it, and then there was somebody in between who, for one year, who just believe in terrifying graduate students and telling them that they were no good and would never measure up. \r\n\r\nSo, this seemed, I think, to everybody like an error that was getting a new lease on life.  So I had this tremendous support from the beginning by the older graduate students, who were really prepared to take responsibility for the new incoming ones and take them under their wing, so we really shepherded that first class through, but it still took, I guess, that original generation of graduate students graduating before they got over the combination of the Eeyore and the bully, but that was the beginning of what I think may have been the thing I'm proudest of at Brown, which is the creation of one of the few really constructive humane graduate communities that I know, and it took a huge amount of work and a constant upkeep and you know, there are always -- it's always going wrong and graduate students are always prepared to believe the worst, and there are times when I used to tear my hair and say, how much better than the real world does this place have to be, and then they would go out and get jobs somewhere else and they would come back and say, we didn't realize that [laughter] -- but that was good, and I had learned with the undergraduate honor students how to get them to think cohesively about what they were doing and to realize that it wasn't just us judging them -- as I always said to incoming ones, one of the most important things you can do is to have something going this year that has nothing to do with the English department that will take you out of this hermetically sealed thing, and the other thing is to remember that we may be looking at you to see if we think you're a good fit, but you are looking at us to see if you think you are a good fit.  So remember, it's going both ways, and that it's simply not worth doing this if you aren’t basically having a good time that's worth it.\r\n\r\nAnd, the first real crash in the job market came when that group of students and the next year's group hit the job market, and suddenly the handwriting was on the wall, and that was a terrible shock, and that first year we had two nervous breakdowns, one by a guy just going off his meds thinking he could do without them and being picked up wandering around in a woman's dorm banging on teenager girl's doors.  And one who had just had a crack-up, and two suicide attempts, and one -- I've never seen a case of plagiarism before, which was the classic clinical instance of somebody asking for help, that is, she plagiarized a piece that had been published in a journal edited by Barbara Wollosky and submitted it in the seminar with Barbara Wollosky, and she was a working-class girl who just worked like a dog to get here, and I think she was just trying desperately to say, this has got to stop.\r\n\r\nI found that there were a lot of women graduate students, and I didn't seem to encounter this among men, although there may have been some of it, and there may have been more of it in the days when the class was a more conscious preoccupation, but a lot of women who were in graduate school because they had done well and been enormously encouraged by somebody, and been unable to believe that they were good enough, but because of the encouragement had gone ahead and kept straining, and never knowing when they handed in a piece of work whether it was good enough, having no practical sense of what good enough means, and so having their hearts in their mouths every time they got a paper back, and when it's an A, having a mixture of relief but also a sense of \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=8100.0,8400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"like they'd received a death sentence.  I have to go on doing this, I have to go on crawling up this hill.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:It's almost as if you're talking about your own graduate experience when you talk --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.  The -- except I didn't have the feeling of having to do it, whereas the ones, particularly the ones from working class backgrounds, had families who were opposed to them being there in the first place.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yes.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And kept saying, why aren't you married and living next door with five babies, and one of them had a brother who made a suicide attempt, and her mother said to her, if you hadn't tried to make something of yourself, he would never have done this.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Was this -- was this in the ‘70s?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.  So, I think that she was just trying to get off the escalator, and she later pulled herself together and did very well, but -- and I was really proud of Barbara Wollosky.  She -- she would have headed it off if she had seen the paper ahead of time, but this paper was distributed in class, and Barbara just waited for a minute and then she said, isn't there something that you'd like to tell us about this paper, Jessica.  And Jessica said, I guess it's kind of overinfluenced, and so Barbara said. we can't read it, but she didn't exactly call her a plagiarist in front of the class, so we had complicated decisions about what to do about this.  I think she was really almost temporarily insane from the pressure.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Did you feel working with the graduate students to create this graduate handbook which would help allay fears and encourage transparency in the whole process for men and women both, did you feel that maybe that was the first time in your professional life that your private ideals and your Quaker background and your scholastic interests were kind of coming together?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.  I think I had actually felt that way about the honors program, but that was just so congenial that it just felt like something that I'd like to do and something that was already in place.  Whereas this time I really knew that we desperately needed something to be done, and that there were things that might be done and that worked, and I later sent this handbook to the Dean of the graduate school just thinking he might be interested in what we'd been up to here and some other Directors of graduate studies might be interested, and I ended up getting a lot of things from this, and one of the things that we worked on a lot was the question of how to give students help in developing as teachers without making them feel like they were being spied on and that their mistakes would be used against them and so on.  And eventually, Harriet Sheridan, who was the Dean of the undergraduate college, started a center for teaching and learning, which tried to do some of these things for junior faculty across the board.  And I did a lot of work with that week in and week out.  And we kept revising the handbook as we went along, and periodically we would hit a stonewall with -- we were trying to achieve the next level of transparency, and some people would just dig in their heels and say, I'm not going to have a relationship with my graduate students impinged by -- and I found myself in the position where, on the one hand, I was this soulless professional who was asking them to live up to and question the standards these kids were going to have to meet, and thinking about what they really needed if they were going to do that, and whether they should be encouraged to stay or whether that would simply be a kind of dishonorable thing to do, and on the other hand, I was the do-gooder who wanted them to love their graduate students and spend twice as much time with them and so on.\r\n\r\nSo there was a kind of conflict I felt in myself.  I think also it was apparent in the department and, depending on what the person was like, they believed more in the one or in the other.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So that was really the beginning of your kind of tackling systemic --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, exactly.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- injustices.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.  And I think --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Would you say it radicalized you?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Would you say -- \r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I think so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- would you use that word?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.  And I would say that the ","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=8400.0,8700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"other thing that sort of coincided with it and really radicalized me was seeing what happened to my women graduate students when they hit the outside world.  I don't think that Brown -- the Brown graduate program was unsexist, but I think on the whole it had been pretty good about giving women as much financial support, partly because most of the financial support was teaching, and we needed it to be done and we had a number of mostly very good resumed ed. graduate students, women who had been out and doing something else for a while.\r\n\r\nI remember one, in that awful year, one of the older women seemed to be weathering it all much better, and I said, you always look like you know what you're doing and how are you weathering this?  And she said, well, I've done other things before and I could do them again, and I figure if the time comes when I shouldn't be here, I'll know.  And that kind of balance is just not achievable by, you know, brilliant first-year students who have done nothing but go to school and succeed and who suddenly hit something that really strains them.  So, I mean the first year of graduate school is just hell.  It really is.  Even if the faculty is trying to be supportive in the interval.  \r\n\r\nSo, anyway, when these women hit the job market and they came back talking about the way they had been treated, the stuff they reported was just so overt that I couldn't nestle behind my notion that there are a few bad eggs in any situation and -- well, that was tactless, or he really shouldn't have said that, but -- and I realized there just was really something happening to women because they were women.  And one of the things was that I often saw the brighter, more original women not get the interview, and the more conventional and perhaps less threatening women get it, and I suppose sometimes it was calculated, that is, the person felt, well, I'll be able to say we interviewed a woman and that this was just the best of a bad lot and that we just couldn't hire her.  But I think more of the time it was just that men were semi-consciously afraid of, we used the term lippy the other day -- the ones who spoke up for themselves and who were not -- and following on the beaten track, and who were not socialized in the sort of male hierarchy of I will do submissive behavior until I get to the point where you will include me in the club.\r\n\r\nOne of the things I found was that many of the women appeared to do much better than the men up until the dissertation point.  And when they hit the point where they were no longer following directions with perfect facility and great imagination, that had to themselves decide what project was worth doing and when it -- when a chapter had reached the point when you should show it to somebody -- that it was much harder for the women, because they were used to not being the one who decided whether what they were doing was good enough, and that that was very hard for a number of them to do, especially some of these same women who semi-dreaded getting an A on the paper, that this sense of taking responsibility as a grown-up for why you were doing this and whether it was worth doing.\r\n\r\nSo I had an awful lot of people who were suffering from writer's block, and so -- I'm convinced that writer's block is not solely a female disease by any means, but it is very heavily a female disease and I keep thinking, it would be wonderful to get together a conference of women who have dealt with writer's block in one way or another to talk with younger women about it.  I don't -- I really don't see why this should be so, especially as a lot of women undergraduate write felicitously and comparatively easily while their male counterparts are kind of floundering around sometimes.  I don't know where this --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:That's an interesting thought.  Maybe it's -- you know, some people say that one of the problems that women have \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=8700.0,9000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"is that this is not so much a fear of failure but a fear of success.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, I think that's true.  I think that's very true.  But also there is, I think, women are socialized from a very early age to tell whether they are successful by supportive cues from other people.  That's how you know that this was good enough or that this was the right thing to have done, and often, of course, it isn't and it wasn't, but when you suddenly get that mat pulled out from under you and you have to decide if this is an original idea or you have to decide whether to go in and fight to persuade your advisor that you should go in this direction instead of that, whereas, I think for men, there is something of the Oedipal conflict with the father thing in there which leads to a more open kind of combat and a kind of respect, and I think it's harder for some women to take that instead.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  You got involved with a very famous affirmative case at Brown and again, I know Brown is not Yale of course, I'm really curious to know a little about the case and your involvement and what you were attempting to do in the way that you got involved, because I think it has significance and resonance for women who want to be in the academic life anywhere.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yeah.  Yeah.  And I think Brown was in a rather crucial position at this point, because it was in the upper elite of the graduate universities in the prestige league, but it was, in a way, the least pretentious and in some ways more vulnerable of those so that although they still had -- they had the same idea that Yale always had, that it could walk on water and there would never be any consequences and you could just say, well, it's Yale.  It's entitled to do whatever it thinks it needs to do, Brown was not so solidified in this. \r\n\r\nSo when five quite remarkable women brought a case -- four of them had been denied tenure and one denied contract renewal -- and it was based on Title IX --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:What date was this?  What date was the case?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I think they -- I think Louise Lamphere started working on it, trying to use internal appeal mechanisms, which turned out to be quite flimsy and inadequate -- by the time I came into it, I can't remember, ‘76 -- no, it must have been longer than that, but it was finally declared a class action after a whole series of legal maneuvers.  And the thing that finally broke the case was that it turned out that the chair or the former chair of anthropology, which was Louise Lamphere's department -- and I can only talk about the aspects of this case that are actually on the public record --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yeah -- this kind -- this stuff is, there was a correspondence between these two gentlemen, one of whom was away doing research, and they mixed in personal letters with all kinds of departmental business, and it they talked really explicitly about how they were going to get Louise Lamphere and how they were going to get rid of her and how this one should do this and that one should do that, mixed up with a really awful, sexist, contemptuous language like you've got to look out for lesbians, they are the ones with the big knees, and I remember one that just stuck in my mind was, the new graduate students have arrived, but none of them have boobs worth discussing.  You know, stuff like that.  And, this -- at one point, they -- the plaintiffs had found some correspondence, enough to convince the judge, Judge Patine, to issue a sort of search warrant for the university as a whole, and that took a long time to implement because the university would come in and say, we have now turned over every scrap of paper in the entire university that could possibly bear on this, and then the womens' lawyer would get up and say \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=9000.0,9300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I have in my hand a thing called Report on the Condition of Women at Brown University which does not appear to be in the materials disclosed, so in the process they discovered these papers.  And it was really like the Watergate tapes.  Just, they said everything you could have possibly invented in your wildest imagination, and the university kept -- they did all of the Nixon things.  Well, first they said we couldn’t possibly disclose these because they are private and confidential, but then it turned out they were kept in the office and they were made a part of business.  Then they said, well, we will give you a redacted form, in which we will not have omitted anything pertinent, but a few little embarrassing details, and then they turned those in and the judge still wouldn’t accept it.  And finally, it was a wonderful day in court and the university’s lawyers approached the judge and said, we are prepared to disclose these if your honor really requires it, but here is a list of the kind of personal remarks that we think no good purpose will be served by disclosing and that they’re embarrassing, and this is why we would like to not include some of these documents.  And he looked at it and said, I’ve been called worse things in my own court.  So, that was what really cracked it open, and the university was finally persuaded to settle after years -- I don’t know how many years off the top of my head, I can’t remember the dates -- but finally it was -- alumni started writing in and said, I’m not going to send any more money as long as you’re spending it all on court fees.  So they finally entered into one of these consent decrees where they said they never did it and promised to stop, and one of the places where I think Louise Lamphere and her group were just miles ahead of some of the other people -- they were not -- the goal in the cases was very explicitly not to -- just the personal damages they might get individually, but to set up a system that Louise and the others found by their experience that any vestiges of a due process thing at Brown were just non-existent and useless.  And so they wanted to start a new system that would really work, so they were involved in drafting a lot of legislation.\r\n\r\nAnd one of the provisions of the settlement was that they would be a hearing panel of faculty to hear the cases of the women who would have been part of the class if it had gone forward in court.  And it was to be one faculty member appointed by the administration, one by the plaintiff, and one by the other two, and I was the one by the other two.  And, it was just the most extraordinarily education summer, just reading these cases one after another, ranging from the silly -- I’ve applied for every job in the English department for the past 28 years and surely I must have been qualified for one of them, to really heart rending cases, and we discovered that they were clustered very markedly in certain departments, and one case, when my colleagues and I went over to go through the department records and to see what happened to the men who were promoted instead, and we discovered that something really nasty tended to happen to them, too, just not yet.  They’d get rid of the most disempowered and then they’d go to work on the next ones, and there were women who had been promised by their former mentors that surely they would be offered the next opening and kept dangling for years and years and years, and then we’d find the letters that the guys had really been writing.  \r\n\r\nAnd there’s another case where we were asking for the files about some particular case, I forget what, and it was an issue of why the very highly qualified wife of a Brown faculty member had not been hired.  And, they wouldn’t give us the file, they wouldn’t give us the file, and finally we found enough pressure and the file arrived and it had a memo in it from the provost to the chairman of the department saying, while \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=9300.0,9600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"in theory Brown has no nepotism rule, in practice -- and there was a case where there was an actual memo in the search committee’s files saying, I think we should hold some pro forma interviews and then hire Mr. So-and-so.  And there was a hearing where we had a pathologist who had written reports on some of his lab track faculty who were men who got transferred to a tenure track, and women who weren’t.  And you could do one of those double columns where you had -- you were talking about the same quality and you have a favorable adjective for it if it’s a man and not if it’s a woman.  Like, real go-getter, self-starter; not a team player.  Or, on top of everything; nosy.  And so on.  And we finally laid these out for him and he had to see that he was using different criteria and he said, well, I guess there should be different criteria for male and female scientists.  \r\n\r\nAnd there were a lot of things we couldn’t do anything about because the issue, like maybe a plagiarism accusation or something, had occurred before Title IX, but in that case, we had to look at where there were persistent inequalities.  And one of the problems with it was that we had no discretion on what to reward.  If we found for the plaintiff, we had to award the difference between what they would have earned at Brown and what they were earning, or what they did in fact earn during that period.  So the size of the awards was kind of askew to some of the more serious, systemic problems that we found.  But we wrote -- there were about 86 cases and -- of about 60 of them were substantial enough that you could really write a judicial opinion.  And we wrote opinions, and we only found for the women in about eight cases because of -- some of it because of the technicalities, like things having happened earlier.  And, we had had a meeting with the new President, who was the one who had finally taken the decision to settle the case, and we said we would undertake this for him, to get his Presidency off, because it was a tremendous commitment of time and energy to make.  And after it was all over, the university appealed all but one of them.  And, every decision we had made was absolutely a consensus decision.  No question about it.  Not a fudged, well, I’ll give you this if you give me that, but real agreement among everyone on those cases.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And what was -- the committee you were working in, was it men and women both?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Two men and a woman.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And, as a result of this, my friend Annie and I were both elected as representatives of the women faculty for the continued negotiations.  So we were drafting all kinds of legislation to try to make this really work in practice, like how do you have transparency and notify junior faculty each year of whether they are or not falling short of what would be expected of them.  And, what happens when there has been a negative review by the department?  There’s got to be a university place where it goes to next.  And what about a case where a man gets tenure, but you know that the department has some women coming up.  How do you legislate all of these different things?  So I learned and I got so sometimes I felt like I was drafting legislation in my sleep.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Do you -- did the case have a ripple effect beyond Brown?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I think so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I think this was what made, you know, Harvard, Yale \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=9600.0,9900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/34","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"and Princeton realize that they were not going to be able to ignore this forever, and I think there was a direct link in the sense that -- I’m pretty sure it had something to do with that committee that Marie was the chair of, and it certainly had to do with why she called me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:That she wanted to know all about what had actually gone on.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Did you get any sense from the conversation you had with her that what she was really searching for -- what sort of information she wanted or needed?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, I think -- my guess is, and this may not be right at all -- was that she was still at that point where she was realizing that there were really bad things and something should be done about them, but she hadn’t quite started to think fully systemically about it.  And when I started listing all of the kinds of things we’d found, and she realized that she knew of cases like that and that it wasn’t just a set of coincidences, but that it was the same animal -- stripes, check; hooves, check; horns, check.  And that we were both talking about the same thing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And I was just electrified to see her getting involved in something like this.  It was just a new side of her that I had never encountered.  And it may have been a new side, period, that -- but I never found out what happened at Yale after that.  But, another of the things that happened, which I think affects Yale, is that -- in fact, I know it does -- as a result of all of this, many of our best women candidates wanted to come to Brown because they thought there was a support system that they could count on.  And also because Brown jobs were advertised as real tenure track jobs and not sort of glorified three-to-eight year fellowships.  And so we found that our first-choice women candidates were accepting us and turning down offers from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.  And also that because, well, there were such good women being hired that when departments chose not to hire a woman and to put forward a male candidate instead, they were perfect -- it was not that there was any quota and there was no sense that they couldn’t do this, but they had to make a case for why this guy was really that much better than the, I think, the top-three female candidates.  So, the result was that the quality of the male faculty shot-up, too, and that even the die-hards who had said, well, this will be the end of standards at Yale, I mean at Brown, had to say, yes, the quality of the Brown faculty has just been wonderfully affected by this.  And I think probably -- I know of specific cases where candidates who came to the English department turned Yale down in order to have what they called “a real job.”  I suspect that has helped to make places like Yale realize they have to do something.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Well, certainly they have taken a decision on the tenure --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- these last few months.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yes.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I think that’s remarkable.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And there is a story about the hiring in the Harvard English department just after Barbara Wollosky got here, which may be neither here nor there, but remind me to tell you some time.  Along these same lines.  So, I think it was happening everywhere, and the problem is that it’s one thing to let women in and it’s another thing to make them a functioning part of the chain, and that this comes especially hard in fields like the sciences where research is a team effort and you still have those men who simply have no idea how to relate to a woman except familially or erotically and who are just uncomfortable being around women.  They don’t know how to say, you want to do this piece?  OK.  I’ll do this piece.  Or -- and, to see the adjustments that were required to balance a career in sciences with a baby -- there was just \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=9900.0,10200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/35","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"a whole flock of women, including several, three in my department, who got tenure and proceeded to have babies immediately, and of course that meant they used up their sabbaticals having the baby.  \r\n\r\nI remember one woman in history calling me up and saying, I’m sitting here with a baby in my lap in front of the computer and I don’t think I’m ever going to write again.  You know?  I mean, to be that much older and have a little less energy and suddenly be facing trying to do these two things.  And it was not possible, as you were saying, without husbands who were much more committed to this.  So I would say part of the change in the psychology of the university has to do with all of those husbands who were suddenly becoming fathers in the sense that the older generation never was, and I think a lot of it is, and I was telling you about it when I was at the Pontifical Institute with all of these celibate Brazilian fathers, feeling like I was some sort of strange animal and they were wondering if I would jump on the table and take all of my clothes off or eat raw meat or something, that a lot of people who sort of felt that way, once they had a couple of women on committees and that had been on an exam committees of other women or had, you know, drafted something with somebody, suddenly realized that it was just normal.  So you still had a proportion, and I don’t know what proportion it is, who were still unreconstructed and hadn’t been taught anything except to not say nigger in public.\r\n\r\nBut there was that whole middle ground of people who hadn’t been very helpful before but who were well-meaning and who suddenly got used to it and forgot there was a problem.  But what that takes is a critical mass of women.  It doesn’t work if you only have a couple, so that everybody is terribly self-conscious about it and by the time I left, the English department was 50-50.  And I just remember that extraordinary sense of relief of not having to be exemplary all of the time.  It just -- it made me realize how exhausted it had made me for years.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  Or the exception that proves the rule.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, exactly.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  I imagine, I hope Marie will speak for herself, but I imagine that must have been such a responsibility for her.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Oh, I’m sure it was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:For so many years.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And she had never had, for years and years and years, she had no back-up at all.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:No.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I just don’t know how she managed it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Well, I hope I find out.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I hope you will, too, and I hope I’ll find out.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Well, if her record is open, then you’ll be able to know.  Or she may even tell you herself.  One of the other things that I picked up from the first draft that was written in your honor, that you also helped to lead and shape a medical program.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:That seems to me to be an extraordinary thing for an English don to do.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, we had had a medical education program, which tried to counter the -- well, it was based on concerns about two things.  One was doctors who are so narrowly scientists that they may know, you know, something chemical about what to do for a patient, but they can’t get them to tell you what they just swallowed, or who are so over-developed on the science end and not part of the humanities on the other end.  People who would quote somebody who said, you know, the sciences are part of the humanities and, so, the idea that it was important for doctors to have strong training in the humanities as well as in the sciences, and I think some of the faculty thought -- a lot of scientists are very contemptuous of doctors as being not real scientists.  They’re just people and they don’t do the hard stuff.  So I think they -- some of them wanted a chance for bright undergraduates to be going ahead and doing research with senior faculty at Brown.  So there was that.  And then there was -- I think everybody has to do a pre-med education and is aware of the awful problem created by the problem of admissions to medical school, that it somehow tyrannizes over the whole undergraduate process.  They make every choice to try to look perfect when they apply to medical school and get high scores on the LSATs and their advisors will say to them, well, of course you could take a course in American literature, but you could take another chemistry course and that would make much more difference.  So, they thought, \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=10200.0,10500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/36","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"if we could get rid of that crisis in the middle, where you have at least two years sort of destroyed in your real intellectual, emotional development by this admissions crisis, how about admitting students for a five-to-six year program leading to a MA in -- a BA and a MA in medical studies, and then you would be on a track to go into a medical school in the later years.  And you would have been able to take humanities as well as sciences all of the way through. Or you might decide to do an original research project with the extra time.\r\n\r\nSo we had set that up, and so that being the goal, they wanted to have some people in the humanities on the committees that were drafting all of this stuff and try to get it through the faculty, and then later, it was enough of a success that they decided to expand it into a full medical school, so there was more curriculum discussion.  And a lot of the non-medical faculty were very concerned that the presence of a medical school might skew the budgeting of the university toward the sciences and away from other things, or might mean that the sciences themselves were distorted by too much of an emphasis on stuff that fields directed toward human biology.  You know, no ornithology, but lots of human anatomy.\r\n\r\nSo, there was a lot of, again, drafting of legislation.  And I think by that time, I had been on a number of committees that were sort of inter-departmental and inter-disciplinary.  So, I ended up on that.  And we had these meetings with the heads of surgeries and all of the hospitals in Rhode Island and all of that kind of thing, and it was really very illuminating.  And everybody was in favor of adding humanism and humanities and sociology until it meant actually dropping something.  And then we would have people coming in and telling us that that particular kind of chemistry course actually has little or no connection with what you do in the medical school and that they would rather have somebody who could read.  So, that was all very interesting.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Did you find -- you’re starting with the Lamphere case and doing all this sort of thing that your life was more and more taken up with policy?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Rather than teaching?  Did you feel that you had lost something --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, I did.  Very much.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- in doing that?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And I had slightly cynical friends who used the expression, I teach in my spare time.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And you’re not rewarded for this.  There is, I mean, I think there may be some -- service is a hypothetical component to be considered in promotion and salary and that kind of thing.  But basically it’s a long way third behind scholarship first, no bones about that, teaching second, and service is a long way third.  So I was doing a huge amount of service, which I felt much more congenial with and really thought was in many ways more important than what I might have been writing.  But also knowing at the same time that I couldn’t have graduate students and not be coming up to snuff on the other stuff.  So the conflict was there, not only at a psychological level but at a very practical level.\r\n\r\nAnd the result was -- since also I was trying, on the one hand, to be the kind of faculty you are in a small college, where you are nurturing all sorts of students and being open to them all of the time, and on the other hand trying to be -- to teach in tune with the supposedly rigorous standards of -- I mean, the school -- I kept feeling I had to do all of the Brown things to justify, I mean, coming there in the first place.  And then I had to do all of the Quaker college things, because what I wanted to do myself -- and the result was that I just became \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=10500.0,10800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/37","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"a workaholic and more and more could only flog myself through all of there was to do by the sense of crisis about, you know, I will be shot tomorrow if I don’t get this one done.  And then I will be shot the next day if I don’t get that one done.  And the point where I realized that this had become very serious was when I decided to really try to address this question to cut back on what I was doing to a more reasonable teaching level, and then I discovered that if I did that, I couldn’t do it, because I wouldn’t have that fear galvanizing me into --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Do you think -- did senior male colleagues find themselves in a similar position?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:A few of them.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:But most of them just were quite happy to and took for granted what other people would do or -- this was sometimes referred to as emptying the ashtrays and --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- you know, I remember -- well, actually, one woman who was being very bitter about what she had had disclosed to her about her salary from the Lamphere investigation, and I remember pointing out to her that one of my male colleagues and the one I had worked with the most, Roger Henkle, had had the same -- exactly the same salary at that time as she had, and she said, well, if Roger does women’s work, he must expect to be paid like a woman.  So, I think there was a general assumption that women are people people, women will be cozy with students, they’ll be sort of bleeding hearts and spend too much time with them and that’s kind of sweet of them but maybe not kind of smart.  And they really should write their book, and it’s too bad if they don’t, and then we’ll fire them.  And that happens over and over again.\r\n\r\nAnd you sometimes see a pattern in the department where a -- two junior faculty are hired at the same time.  One is a man with a finished dissertation and one is a woman with an unfinished dissertation.  And then they give her lots of housekeeping and handholding to do.  And then when they come up for review, the man has finished revising his dissertation into a book and the woman has maybe just finished her dissertation or maybe not quite yet, and then they come up for tenure in a few more years and she’s still trying to decide whether she should be revising her dissertation into a book or writing something else.  And maybe she is also raising a family, and the man has a second book.  So, and it’s hard to say sometimes if there is any intentional element in it.  I think probably more often it’s not really intentional.  It’s just I don’t know.  Some kind of underhanded emotional protection of some kind.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:How do you think a young faculty woman in that -- in what’s a common enough situation that you described -- how would you advise her, if she’s been told that she has to do all of this housekeeping, and yet she knows that that’s against her best interests in terms of getting on.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:How would you as head -- as her head of department or as her mentor, her friend --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, I used to take them out to lunch and talk to them about this pitfall, and that I understood it because I was very subject to the same disease and always had been.  But -- and that the thing that had actually gotten me through it was to say, I cannot spend so much time with my beautiful undergraduates because if I don’t finish my book I will be fired and I will not have any beautiful undergraduates, and that if -- that if there is -- very often, it’s somebody with a special constituency among the students and they really feel that they’re the only person that’s looking out for these Latino students or working class students or women’s students of some category or other.  And if they don’t do it, nobody will do it, which is usually, unfortunately, true.  And, I tried to talk to them about the fact that if they have a mission toward this constituency and a vocation about it, they have to remember that continuing to be at Brown is going to be one of the really crucial things they can do for these students.  Because if they get fired and leave \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=10800.0,11100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/38","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"then not only will there be -- will their services not be there, but the next time the faculty hires, they’ll say, well, we can’t hire somebody who does this kind of thing because they won’t finish their book.\r\n\r\nAnd, they usually understand it in theory, but you can tell that it’s just going to be a daily and hourly fight, especially since you get such wonderful and positive reinforcement from your students.  I mean, I would get just addicted to being loved by my students, just needing that emotional high that comes from that, and that is terrible and affects on your teaching.  You start pirating yourself, and you can find yourself addressing a classroom of people who actually haven’t been there for five years because you’re not listening to the ones in the present.  So that’s a -- one bad side.\r\n\r\nAnd also I think a lot of charismatic teaching dries up if you’re not getting renewed from somewhere.  And I don’t see why the somewhere necessarily has to be scholarship, but it certainly is a jolly good and natural place and somewhere where you are at the other end of an evaluation process.  You’re not evaluating them.  You know that you’re accountable to somebody else’s standards, and so that you get jolted out of that rut.  And that you want to, you know, even if you place a higher priority on the teaching, that your own sanity and the long-term sanity of your students and the institution depend on your achieving a better balance in yourself, because you can’t imagine that you’re going to burn out, but that you do.  You really do.  And even if you don’t crash in some conspicuous manner, there just gets to be less and less of you, and you wonder why nobody is excited about you anymore or there aren’t as many students in your classes or, you know, something like that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You were the head of a department as well, weren’t you?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, I was the first woman chair of the department.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And when was that?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:That would have been in ‘98 I think.  Something like that.  One of the really wonderful moments because I had -- because I had been doing a lot more administrative work through the office for the graduate program, I had gotten very fond of it and feel a friend with a lot of the clerical staff, which, of course, most of the male faculty people do.  And when they heard that I had been elected -- the one I worked with in the graduate program thrung her arms around me and said, it’s going to be one of us.  And it was just a great moment.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I wonder if that happened to Pat Spacks when she became head of department at --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I wonder.  You should ask her.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I will ask her.  Yes.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:But, I think it does --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Absolutely.  Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- deal with and not everybody treats the women staff differently if they’re a woman.  We had some very heavy-duty women candidates for some senior positions who, you know, I knew all I needed to know about her from the way she breezed into the office and threw her weight around and expected cow-towing and instant gratification from her work staff.  And who didn’t even think of being courteous.  I mean, she was worse than your stereotypical businessman.  But, at Brown, I think --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Excuse me --\r\n[break in audio]\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:OK.  We’re up and running again.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:All right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So, do you think, looking back at your tenure as head of the department or chair -- I keep forgetting, at Yale it’s always chair --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, it used to be chairman.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yes.  Yes.  \r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And I don’t like chair, personally, because that suggests that chair isn’t intrinsically --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Although chairman, most chairman had been male, it’s the sort of “m’n” that means person.  But I decided that I wanted to be called chair.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  Do you think that your style of chairing was very different from your predecessors?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Oh, totally.  \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=11100.0,11400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/39","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And how much that was a Quaker thing and how much of it was a female thing I’m not sure.  But, it certainly was enormously more collaborative and consensus-seeking.  And, in fact, at least -- I don’t know if this was true everywhere, but, at a place like Brown, there is very little a chair can just unilaterally do, but a lot of what your impact can be comes from helping your department to set an agenda and to keep looking a step ahead at what they’re immersed in at the time and to get people thinking forward about what may turn into problems or what needs to be legislated or what it would be exciting to do.  And that’s fine.  \r\n\r\nSo, the first thing I did, and I don’t know if -- I don’t know if nobody else did this, but I never heard of anyone who did it -- was I went -- I divided the department into sub-groups, and I went around and met for about three hours with each sub-group and said, I just don’t know very much about your field in the department.  I need to know, you know, what you think is working well, what you need, what the problems are, what the gripes are, and I just kept taking notes, and I think it was the taking notes that just made people decide that this wasn’t a ploy.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Right.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And that was fun.  I mean, what I discovered about the department.  And then I also had to write -- that first summer, the summer after I was appointed and before the school year started, the provost office sent out some kind of a question about, you know, evaluating how the profile of work and budget and staffing and so on had changed in the department.   So I spent quite a lot of that summer getting all of the figures about how many courses we used to teach and how many we’re teaching now with so many fewer faculty and, you know, all that kind of thing.  And how the -- what the cost of the English department programs is sort of per capita compared to -- well, in a form that they would then compare with other groups, some of which we had figures on.  And, if I do say so myself, it was a very impressive document.\r\n\r\nAnd one of the things I learned about administrators is that if you want them to listen to anything, you have to find something about it you can count.  It may be that the thing you’re counting is not at all important or not at all central, but if you can handle figures, they suddenly -- you suddenly swim into their focus.  And I think it partly may be because so many of them are scientists for reasons I don’t terribly understand, except I think maybe scientists are --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Geographers seem to be very -- in England --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, often --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Often, geographers are senior administrators.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.  And I think some of them are because, often, I think some of us peak earlier, and they reach a point where they suddenly realize that they’re not ever going to get more acclaim for their work in their field than they’ve already gotten and that they’re ready to branch out.  Whereas people in the humanities tend to mature much more slowly.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Do you think -- do you think there is a gender aspect to administration as well?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Oh, I think so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:In that some people may actually see it as a kind of second best?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Mm-hmm.  I also think that there is a sense that when it comes to the crunch of making hard decisions that are going to affect everybody, women are just too wimpy.  They’re just going to be too bleeding heart to really make the tough decisions.  But I remember, one of the things that really did an enormous amount of good for me was the provost asked me that summer where there were any particular small things that the department needed and I said, we hadn’t had our windows washed in 20 years, and I would like a small amount of money to do up the faculty graduate student lounge, so it’s really companionable to sit in there and have a cup of coffee and talk to people and have a few magazines available, the Journal of Higher Education and MLA and stuff like that.  \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=11400.0,11700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/40","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And he gave me, I think, $5,000 or something and that just had a huge affect on morale and people went around saying, I didn’t know Providence was so sunny, and then realizing that it was the windows.  And I think it just was very visible.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And anyway, one of the things that happened was we had put a computer room -- we decided that in order to have -- that the administrative assistant who was in charge of the office needed some more space of her own instead of being crowded in with all of the other secretaries, and also that therefore we needed to move the chairman’s office across the hall, and we also needed to have a computer room that the staff could supervise without having to run up three flights of stairs.  So that meant taking two retired faculty who still had offices on the ground floor and had kept them, not that one of them was especially in much, but -- and they both had heart conditions, so they couldn’t be put in any room where they had stairs.  And I figured out how to renovate one of the rooms in the basement that actually had nice sunny windows and was only as far down a step as the main building was up a step.  And then I had to persuade them to move into it together, and that was not easy, but I went to the one I knew better and explained the problem, and he was just a very nice man and he said he would do it.  And then the two of us worked on the other guy, who was almost never there, but who still in his retirement came in almost every day to have lunch at the faculty club.  He was the one who had to take his guest to Colonial Williamsburg.  And I think it somehow gave a shape to his day in retirement.  And he had piles and piles and piles of books and boxes of books in his office and he was just practically never there, but it was prime space.\r\n\r\nSo we talked him into going too, and I think without breaking either of their hearts, which was the part I was worried about.  And then somebody told me that some senior administrator had said to another senior administrator -- I didn’t realize that office apportionment is one of the terrific flashpoints for -- politically, so I had just gone in where angels fear to tread, and that one of these provosts, I think, had said to somebody else, well, I guess she has the balls to be a chairman.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Great.  That’s obviously what women need.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I think there is something, partly coming out of the feminist movement as such and partly out of how women are socialized, that makes women want to work more collaboratively.  I think this is where this particular line of thinking started, so it is much better to go around and find out what everybody is thinking and to have got them thinking about it before the meeting and find out what’s bugging the people who don’t like it.  And, by that time, I had -- had an awful lot of experience with this.  While I was Director of graduate studies, we went through a period when one section of the department was just up in arms against practically everything we might want to do, and that -- they were really awful in graduate committee meetings, or they would sit through the whole meeting and not object until you had laid the whole thing out, and then they’d say, well, we can’t decide yet, I haven’t voted.  We have to have another meeting.  And then the next meeting they wouldn’t come.  And they just said not very nice things.  I remember a colleague of mine saying, there, there, Elizabeth, at least we’re getting them to do it in public.  So I had been -- I had learned not to go home and cry into the dishpan when this kind of thing happened. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And we had had a very tempestuous senior search, which I was the chair of the committee for, and somebody said after the department meeting, never have I seen so much material laid before the department for their consideration.  Or so little attention paid to it.  And people had decided that there was some sort of conspiracy, and that they didn’t know what the conspiracy was, but there definitely had to be one.  And they figured out that this person \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=11700.0,12000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/41","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"was in favor of that candidate and that person was in favor of some other candidate -- all of which I happened to know was quite untrue when I found out about this.  So they were just not going to allow themselves to be shepherded through the doorway at all.  That was very painful.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:What led you to take early retirement?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I just discovered I had reached the point where I just couldn’t do this anymore.  It was like my camel’s hump was gone.  I came back from a year at the National Humanities Center, and it was a combination of having realized during the year I was away what a box I had managed to nail myself into.  And how -- and then coming back and kind of feeling the nails coming back in again.  But also I think the department had heard enough -- there had been a number of, at least while I was away -- we went through -- most English departments have had major crises over the theory invasion or the intervention or whatever.  And we had ours in two parts.\r\n\r\nAnd the first was due to the intolerance of the non-theory people, who just made fun of the theory and didn’t pay any attention to it.  And we somehow navigated that one.  And then after a brief respite, where I thought it was all over, we then had the intolerance of the theory people which, because it was much more ideological and intentional, you know, organized and conscious, it was just much harder to deal with.  I mean, it was quite painful.  So, and that had really -- those lines had really hardened up while I was away.  And then we had a -- I had told the American group who -- almost any department feel that they’re underfunded and under-respected and that there are people going around saying that American literature is really for reading in busses and stuff like that.  But I thought that we needed some -- several junior appointments and then I -- and that they needed to have one of theirs.  And their immediate reaction was that I must be up to something and that maybe it was -- in the first place, the administration wouldn’t do it and if we -- or if they did fund it, and it was just going to be a way of the theory people trying to plant a stoolie in the American lit program or something like that.\r\n\r\nI just said, look, we know what will happen if we don’t ask for this, namely, nothing.  If we do ask for it, we may very well get nothing.  But, in the first case, we’re sure of getting nothing and this might be worth trying and we actually got it approved and then we had search committees, which, there were horrible fights over who would be on the search committee and, you know, who -- there were fights over the quality of the candidates who came to campus and people stamping and saying, if this is your first choice, I don’t want to see your second, and, you know, stuff like that.  So that was all very painful.\r\n\r\nSo that had just built up to the fact where I just couldn’t deal with it anymore, and I had always found grading papers horrendously difficult.  I mean, when I’m dealing with a student, it doesn’t matter if I’ve heard all of this 50,000 times.  It’s new in the student -- but somehow they’re not good enough writers to sound like themselves thinking on paper and you’re writing the same comments, you know, year after year -- it’s new to them; it’s not new to you.  I just got to the point where I could not flog myself through grading papers anymore.  And generally I was just in a very bad place, and I think I was having what I now would say in retrospect was a nervous breakdown of some kind.  So I was working very hard with a therapist in making progress that was very exciting to me, but I didn’t realize that while I was making this progress, the rest of my life was kind of falling apart because that wasn’t where my center of gravity was.  And I didn’t know what to do.\r\n\r\nAnd then I came out here and fell in love with this place and realized that the decision was already made.  And that was very strange.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Looking back, what advice \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=12000.0,12300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/42","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"would you give to a young woman who was aspiring to work in the Academy given your own experience?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Oh boy.  I would say it is hugely harder than it ever was before because, certainly when I came into it, I was carrying around, partly just because I was a woman and kind of outside of this world, but partly because the Academy was different in those days, that at least the ostensible position was that we’re all doing this because it’s so wonderful and this is the life that we would want to have and we hope to get to live it.  And there may be all kinds of politics and stuff, but we can sort of pretend there aren’t and that decisions are all being made at face value, and that everybody is acting in good faith and it’s a civil community, you could perhaps say a community of leisure generally, and that that has just become less and less true, partly because the fields themselves have become much more polarized in various ways and there are probably a whole set of reasons for that.  But also because budgets are getting harder and universities that expanded hugely in the ‘60s and ‘70s and maybe in the early ‘80s, are suddenly retracting and there is terrific pressure to cut back on -- you know, get rid of all of the faculty, cut back on junior faculty and hire part-timers, that you don’t have benefits, and create more of a haves and have-nots system, and be much more bureaucratic about who is doing what they need to do to get tenure.  And just a less humane, less congenial world, and where people are very reluctant to say that they’re doing this because they love it.  They, I mean, especially if you’re a theory person, you feel -- you just feel embarrassed to tears to say I want students to read “Beowulf” and “The Faerie Queen” because I want them to become more fully people, whatever that is in each individual case.  And that by being more sensitized to language and to different world views that get you out of your 20th Century provinciality and make you realize that there are entirely different ways of being aware of experience -- that all of this is just a good in itself.  And it’s just -- well, one thing is that it used to be thought that either there would be scholarship money, or the parents of a person’s destined for this somewhat leisurely class, had the money to pay for it, so that it didn’t seem at least to those who felt like insiders, like a financial issue, even though you knew there were lots of people who were working their way through at the same time.  But, I think the financial crunch is really awful.\r\n\r\nPart of it is I think there is more -- maybe it has to do with more and more students going -- proportionate students going to college.  But more and more, liberal arts education is being paid for by parents who don’t really understand what it is that their children are getting, and who are at best puzzled and maybe also repelled by what their students are coming home and spouting off about.\r\n\r\nI remember we had, at the time of the Cambodia incursions, there was a big -- we didn't have a strike in the way that some other people did, but we had big teach-ins on campus and there were marches and rallies.  And, at one point, some students took over University Hall, although they didn’t do the kind of damage they did in some places -- grad students are just awfully nice, actually, when push comes to shove.  But, and several of us manned a hotline for parents to call just to make sure their chicks were all right.  And I had just assumed that what we were going to get were frantic calls for, you know, I haven’t heard from my baby.  Can you find out if she’s all right?  And instead we got these irate phone calls saying, I have paid for so many days of instruction, and if my child is not getting it, this is not fair.  And I just thought they -- this isn’t two cultures.  And I think we’re going to have more people getting their liberal arts education later in their lives, when they’re responsible \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=12300.0,12600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/43","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"for getting it and they know why they want to do it.  So many Brown students are so privileged already that they -- they want to benefit from it, but they don’t have the feeling that it’s a matter of life and death to really dig their teeth into it.\r\n\r\nOn the other hand, they are so bright and, in many ways, so self-directed, that you can get them to do any amount of work as long as they regard it as sort of optional.  And you can say to them, you don’t have to be in this class.  There is no requirement for you to take this class.  But if you are going to be there, you are going to do this and that.  Whereupon they straighten up and will do the most extraordinary things.\r\n\r\nSo, but I came to feel more and more -- I remember it said at a department meeting, where I was trying to explain why I thought -- we had always taught the course for  -- the sort of survey for English majors in small sections, taught by “real faculty.”  And a few of the most advanced and experienced graduate students had been mentored to that point.  So the students who were considering an English major were in very dynamic, small sections, with exciting people, and it was frequently their only intense close human experience during their freshman year.  And the department was proposing to substitute for this a big lecture course with TAs grading papers, and this would have of course freed up a huge amount of faculty time.  There was no question that it would have had a huge affect on the curriculum, but I was trying to say what I thought we would be losing if we lost the contact that students were having in the years when they were making big decisions with “real faculty.”  And I had found it just endlessly renewing throughout my whole career to walk my way from “Beowulf” to “Orinoco” --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:-- every year and bump my head along each of these things and have to say from scratch to a bunch of students why it’s important to do this.  And I had worked as hard as anybody to get alternative texts in, and we read “Orinoco” and we read Margaret Fell “On Women Preaching,” and we read Anne Askew’s account of her tortures, and all sorts of stuff.  So that it was a very different animal than survey used to be, but I thought there was a fundamental discipline about encountering this field as a whole, and I still had a feeling that if you were going to be a PhD in English, there was some comprehensive sense you needed to have about the whole thing, and it was just clear that everybody thought that I was just sort of blathering on about something that they no longer had any interest in.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:What do you think about the fact that especially in the arts and humanities that, I mean, Brown is kind of 50 percent in the English department, and I think that’s true in a lot of English departments now across the country -- so you could argue that there has been a kind of feminization of the Academy in the last 35 years.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And that that could be very dangerous.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And I just wonder what your view of that was.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, I think it’s still true that whenever you start to have a preponderance of women in a field, the men, especially the men outside the field, start thinking that that trivializes it.  A good example is if you see a man driving a woman, you say the driver is in charge.  This is the masculine, leadership role with a lenient wife.  If the woman is driving the man, then she is obviously a chauffer and following his bidding.  In the same way, if a driver makes a horrible mistake, if it’s a man you say, what a bad driver that man is.  And if it’s a woman, you say, what bad drivers women are.  And I think that it’s very quick for that to translate itself into the field lacking respect and then salaries go down.  I mean, it’s happened apparently with the Rabbinate, that as more and more women have come in, and there are more and more women rabbis, salaries go down and the respect in which some of them are held by their communities has had to be, at least, re-earned in a new way.  And when that comes on top of a society that is just increasingly not valuing the kinds of intellectual and humane qualities that we associate with a liberal arts education, thinking of it as a \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=12600.0,12900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/44","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"kind of luxury and maybe it doesn’t make you that much more money.  I mean, the argument used to be, and it still is, that college graduates earn more money than people from technical training on the average.  But the gap is nothing like as great as it used to be.  So you can’t any longer say to people, you have to give to Brown University, or you have to pay this gigantic tuition bill for your kids, because it’s just the right way to build a culture with people -- fewer people buy it anymore.  And fewer people who even mouth it really have any idea what they’re getting into. \r\n\r\nI used to find some of the most satisfying students to teach, and again many of them were women, were resumed ed. students.  We had a separate admissions advisory program for students who had been out five years or more.  And they were wonderful, and the university was originally very reluctant to do this.  They thought it would be all blue-haired east side matrons wanting a little culture on the side, and instead we just got the most exciting people who were at a transition point in their lives and some of them were, you know, ballet dancers who had reached the point where they needed to get the education they hadn’t gotten because they weren’t dancing and training to be, you know, administrators in the arts instead of dancers.  Or airline pilots or professional tennis players.  But also women who had passed the raising their kids point and who wanted really to go back and become somebody and not just be an appendage to somebody.  And then there were people who had just really crashed and burned.  And they were very iffy, because you had no way of knowing whether they were really going to survive.  But we gave them their own support system, but they went right in to the regular Brown classes.  There wasn’t a special curriculum.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Right.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And that the university put a ceiling of one percent on them.  And we never came close to that.  And many of them needed scholarship money, so it was expensive in that sense.  On the other hand, some of them had saved up a tidy sum from the tennis circuit or something or had made it in business and suddenly realized that there was more to life.  So that was wonderful, teaching those kids.  And when you’re teaching gilded undergraduates, and you have to explain to them why the first half of “Beowulf” is about what you can do and the second half of “Beowulf” is about what you can’t do, and you just have to jump up and down and work very hard and get them to see that the second half of “Beowulf” is at least equally important.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:But you don’t have to do that with these resumed ed. students.  They know all about it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:But you have to make sure that they’re not being pruned out by admissions boards and advisors and registrars that don’t understand that this is a different kettle of fish.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Right.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:So that was a good thing.  But I think one of the pieces of advice I would give is that I used to be a complete suck-up for the argument, “if you don’t do this, nobody will.”  I just thought that was -- I just fell for that one every time.  And I’ve gradually come to see that if it’s really true, that if I don’t do this nobody will, that means there is no support for this and don’t do it, unless you happen to fancy doing it for a year just to see whether it catches on.  But the idea that you are essentially blackmailable by the argument that there is a terrible hole here and if you don’t fill it, it’s going to go right on being a terrible hole.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:That must be --\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I think there are even more sufferers from that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And there still is a feeling, and I hope the younger ones won’t have this, but women of my generation -- deep down inside, you think it’s awfully nice of them to have let us come and play in their playpen with them and that we really should be nice and show that it’s really very nice of them.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Do you think you’ve had a price to pay for the direction that your professional life took?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes.  I think I lived with an unhealed, very deep division in my life all along.  And a lot of it \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=12900.0,13200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/45","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"has to do not with the structure of the profession and the conflicts in the Academy as such, but that I came into it with this sort of unappeasable kind of guilt that nothing you do will ever be enough to make up for all of the help you had.  I had a friend who grew up actually thinking the fact she had brains was a direct cause of somebody else being retarded.  And that is, of course, idiotic, and once she grew up and pulled it out and looked at it, she knew it was silly.  But she still had that feeling, and I think I had that feeling about an awful lot of stuff.  And sort of -- if somebody who has had it as easy as I have won’t stand up, step up to the plate, then who will or who could.  And that’s silly.  You know, I know it’s a spectacle of somebody who’s just had her 70th birthday saying, that’s silly.  But it’s very deeply ingrained.  But a lot of that, I think is not a generic thing.  It’s Quaker.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:That’s Quaker.  I think it’s also probably female as well.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, I think so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  \r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:I’ve been surprised.  I made a wonderful list of the myths I grew up with as a child.  I’ll show you if I can find it.  It’s really quite funny.  And, I have shown it to a lot of women who don’t come from the same background at all and say, you’re going to laugh at this, and instead they say, oh, yes, I remember this.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:How would you like to be remembered?\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Oh dear.  Well, I remember, when I was nominated for the [Harveson?] Award in Teaching, I remember thinking, maybe there is no way to say this, but what I think teaching is about is a particular form of caritas, a particular way of loving that isn’t all tangled up with sentimentality and do-goodism and feel-goodism but a way of trenchantly, lucidly loving, perceiving, reaching toward, fostering, whatever is really distinctive about each person, and that if I could enact that definition of love so that something that people often have not experienced, wouldn’t be – have happened in their life, that that would be it.  And that, in a sense, the teaching and scholarship are both secondary.  I think when I write something, I would like people to come away, and I know this is very old fashioned, but you know, loving this poem and wanting to read it further and understand it better, and I want my students to emerge loving life and seeing more possibilities in it.  And, the frustrating thing about this career is that I was spending more and more time trying to create the scaffolding to make this possible and less and less time doing it.  And I had just totally overestimated the role of willpower.  I just thought you could go on indefinitely, just cranking up the willpower and doing it more.  And I just was not being refed from somewhere.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And I just couldn’t do it anymore.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yes, there comes a time when you have to stop running on empty.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Yes, exactly.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Exactly.  And I was just very lucky that by the time I hit it, I had hit the period where Brown was willing to finance my retirement.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:And fortunate that I lived demographically in a period when they had too many senior faculty and they were just very happy to get rid of some on advantageous terms.  So it’s funny to sit here and say, Brown University paid for all of this.  Well, that plus the fact that the property in the historic part of Providence went up, and if you lived in a house and took care of it, let alone restored it some, you would really end up with a nest egg.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Well, thank you very much, Elizabeth.  That was great.\r\n\nELIZABETH KIRK:Well, thank you.  You’ve been a very perceptive questioner.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Thank you.  Thank you very much indeed. \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=13200.0,13485.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269/transcript/31933/annotation/46","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"End of Interview with Elizabeth Kirk","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48963/file/122269#t=13485.0,13538.61225"}]}]}]}