{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/fn10p0xf68/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Abell, Penny, 2010 March 25"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/013/original/yale-blue.png?1678220072","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Preferred Citation"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eAbell, Penny, 2010 March 25. Oral Histories Documenting Yale University Women (RU 1051). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/2559.\u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Source Metadata URI"]},"value":{"en":["https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/archival_objects/801849"]}},{"label":{"en":["Publisher"]},"value":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library."]}},{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eAccess to the materials is partially restricted. See Collection Contents for details. Original computer files may not be accessed due to their fragility. Researchers must consult access copies.\u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Identifier"]},"value":{"en":["mssa.ru.1051 (EAD ID)","RU 1051 (Call Number)","ru_1051_2012-a-035_abell_penny_audiorecording.mp3 (Digital Object ID)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Minnis, Florence (Interviewer)","Abell, Penny (Interviewee)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2010 March 25 (Creation)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThe materials are open for research.\u003c/p\u003e (Accessrestrict)","\u003cp\u003eMillicent (“Penny”) Demmin Abell was born February 15, 1934, in Wichita, Kansas. In 1945 her father died suddenly and her mother immediately moved the family to Colorado. The family was peripatetic for several years, but finally settled in Colorado Springs when Abell was a junior in high school. She attended Colorado College on a scholarship, and took a B.A. in 1956 after having dropped out for a year owing to illness. She had hoped to become a doctor but was dissuaded by her teachers on the grounds that it was too difficult for women to succeed in medicine. Instead, Abell went to Columbia University for a master’s degree in student personnel work. She worked first at Duke University and then Arizona State University, where she was Assistant Dean of Women for two years. In 1962 Penny Abell married Julian (“Buck”) Abell, a career military officer, and from that time she assumed that her career would fit around her husband’s. When he was posted to West Point Military Academy, she worked there as a reference librarian, and, in 1965, took a Master’s in Library Science at SUNY, Albany, in order to give her a portable career. When Buck Abell was sent overseas, she resigned and joined him in Bangkok. There she found work at the Institute for International Education and took the opportunity to travel extensively in Southeast Asia. The Abells returned to the U.S. in 1966. Abell took a job as Reference Librarian at Penrose Public Library, Colorado Springs, where her husband was then based, but she soon decided that she wanted to enter academic librarianship. This led her to complete a Master’s in Political Science at the University of Colorado in 1969. During this time the Abells had a son. The family moved to Seattle in 1969 when Julian Abell, having left the army, returned to graduate studies. Penny Abell was hired as Assistant Librarian in the Business Administration Library at the University of Washington, Seattle, and in 1971 was promoted to Assistant Director of Libraries at the University of Washington. In 1973, she became the Associate Director of University Libraries at SUNY, Buffalo. From that moment, her career became the primary one in the Abell family. In 1976, she was sought out as University Librarian at the University of California, San Diego, where she remained until 1985, when she was appointed University Librarian at Yale University. She retired from Yale in 1994. Penny Abell was active in national and international library organizations. She was a founding member of both the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Digital Preservation Consortium. She was on the Board of Directors of the Center for Research Libraries, 1979-1986, and its chair, 1984-1985. Abell also served on the Board of Governors of the Research Libraries Group in 1985, and was a member of the executive committee, 1986-1991. In addition, she was a consultant prior to and following her retirement, advising university administrators and libraries at many institutions, including Columbia, Harvard and Toronto universities, and the New York Public Library. In 1998 she was called upon to serve as interim director of the University of California Berkeley Library.\u003c/p\u003e (Bioghist)","\u003cp\u003ePenny Abell begins her interview by looking back on her childhood and the effect her father’s early death had on the family and how it continued to reverberate in her own life as a young adult. She then briefly discusses her education and career aspirations, describing her college education and early professional life in student personnel management. On a number of occasions throughout the interview Abell explores how she and her husband negotiated their careers within their marriage. An explanation is given of why she decided to switch careers and become a librarian. The greater part of the interview traces her subsequent career as a senior administrator in academic libraries, first at SUNY, Buffalo, then University of California at San Diego, and finally and in most detail, her years as the University Librarian at Yale. A recurrent theme is the challenges women in senior management faced in the academic environment, with many examples given from her own experience. For example, she describes how her senior male colleagues responded to Title IX, the role a pregnancy may have played in compromising her first major promotion, and what it was like for much of her professional career to be often the only woman at meetings. She examines how feminism from Betty Friedan onwards informed her life and her ambivalence towards second wave feminism. Reflecting back on her career at Yale, she discusses the challenges of being the first female University Librarian at Yale, and her relationships with Yale faculty and administration. She recalls how she got the job, and her relationship with Bart Giamatti, then president of Yale. She addresses specific issues in the library wherein gender (and sometimes race) was to some extent a complicating factor. These included many budgetary and personnel challenges, including: the management of the Walpole Library; the aftermath of the 1984-1985 ten-week strike by clerical and technical workers belonging to the Local 34 union (which ended shortly before she took up her position at Yale); gender relationships within Yale Library, which had the largest concentration of women employees within the university (in managerial and professional as well as clerical positions), and the sources of conflict between her and her senior management team. Further, she discusses her relationships with other senior women at Yale, including Provosts Judith Rodin and Alison Richard. Abell recalls the regular informal meetings she had with Richard, when she was Director of the Peabody Museum, Mimi Neill (now Gates) who then was Director of Yale University Art Gallery, and Stephanie Spangler, the Director of University Health Services. The purpose of these meetings was mutual help, support, networking and mentoring, as well as political strategizing. She also pays tribute to Diane Turner and her contribution to changing labor relations within the Library. Continuing with the theme of mentoring, Abell acknowledges the support and mentoring of a number of men at Yale, especially Charles “Chip” Long in the Provost’s Office, and Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History. Abell concludes the segment on Yale by talking about what she regards as her greatest achievements as University Librarian, her commitment to changing what she terms the cultural dynamics of the Library, and why she left Yale. Finally, in the course of the interview, Abell talks at length about the evolution of her own management style, her views on the qualities required for effective leadership, and how these may be best nurtured in women.\u003c/p\u003e (Scope and Content Note)","\u003cp\u003ehttps://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u0026amp;979b8d61-5fab-4c90-bf6f-e2c59c95a7a8\u003c/p\u003e (Other Finding Aid Note)","\u003cp\u003eThis 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.\u003c/p\u003e (Processinfo)"]}}],"summary":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThe materials are open for research.\u003c/p\u003e","\u003cp\u003eMillicent (\u0026ldquo;Penny\u0026rdquo;) Demmin Abell was born February 15, 1934, in Wichita, Kansas. In 1945 her father died suddenly and her mother immediately moved the family to Colorado. The family was peripatetic for several years, but finally settled in Colorado Springs when Abell was a junior in high school. She attended Colorado College on a scholarship, and took a B.A. in 1956 after having dropped out for a year owing to illness. She had hoped to become a doctor but was dissuaded by her teachers on the grounds that it was too difficult for women to succeed in medicine. Instead, Abell went to Columbia University for a master\u0026rsquo;s degree in student personnel work. She worked first at Duke University and then Arizona State University, where she was Assistant Dean of Women for two years. In 1962 Penny Abell married Julian (\u0026ldquo;Buck\u0026rdquo;) Abell, a career military officer, and from that time she assumed that her career would fit around her husband\u0026rsquo;s. When he was posted to West Point Military Academy, she worked there as a reference librarian, and, in 1965, took a Master\u0026rsquo;s in Library Science at SUNY, Albany, in order to give her a portable career. When Buck Abell was sent overseas, she resigned and joined him in Bangkok. There she found work at the Institute for International Education and took the opportunity to travel extensively in Southeast Asia. The Abells returned to the U.S. in 1966. Abell took a job as Reference Librarian at Penrose Public Library, Colorado Springs, where her husband was then based, but she soon decided that she wanted to enter academic librarianship. This led her to complete a Master\u0026rsquo;s in Political Science at the University of Colorado in 1969. During this time the Abells had a son. The family moved to Seattle in 1969 when Julian Abell, having left the army, returned to graduate studies. Penny Abell was hired as Assistant Librarian in the Business Administration Library at the University of Washington, Seattle, and in 1971 was promoted to Assistant Director of Libraries at the University of Washington. In 1973, she became the Associate Director of University Libraries at SUNY, Buffalo. From that moment, her career became the primary one in the Abell family. In 1976, she was sought out as University Librarian at the University of California, San Diego, where she remained until 1985, when she was appointed University Librarian at Yale University. She retired from Yale in 1994. Penny Abell was active in national and international library organizations. She was a founding member of both the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Digital Preservation Consortium. She was on the Board of Directors of the Center for Research Libraries, 1979-1986, and its chair, 1984-1985. Abell also served on the Board of Governors of the Research Libraries Group in 1985, and was a member of the executive committee, 1986-1991. In addition, she was a consultant prior to and following her retirement, advising university administrators and libraries at many institutions, including Columbia, Harvard and Toronto universities, and the New York Public Library. In 1998 she was called upon to serve as interim director of the University of California Berkeley Library.\u003c/p\u003e","\u003cp\u003ePenny Abell begins her interview by looking back on her childhood and the effect her father\u0026rsquo;s early death had on the family and how it continued to reverberate in her own life as a young adult. She then briefly discusses her education and career aspirations, describing her college education and early professional life in student personnel management. On a number of occasions throughout the interview Abell explores how she and her husband negotiated their careers within their marriage. An explanation is given of why she decided to switch careers and become a librarian. The greater part of the interview traces her subsequent career as a senior administrator in academic libraries, first at SUNY, Buffalo, then University of California at San Diego, and finally and in most detail, her years as the University Librarian at Yale. A recurrent theme is the challenges women in senior management faced in the academic environment, with many examples given from her own experience. For example, she describes how her senior male colleagues responded to Title IX, the role a pregnancy may have played in compromising her first major promotion, and what it was like for much of her professional career to be often the only woman at meetings. She examines how feminism from Betty Friedan onwards informed her life and her ambivalence towards second wave feminism. Reflecting back on her career at Yale, she discusses the challenges of being the first female University Librarian at Yale, and her relationships with Yale faculty and administration. She recalls how she got the job, and her relationship with Bart Giamatti, then president of Yale. She addresses specific issues in the library wherein gender (and sometimes race) was to some extent a complicating factor. These included many budgetary and personnel challenges, including: the management of the Walpole Library; the aftermath of the 1984-1985 ten-week strike by clerical and technical workers belonging to the Local 34 union (which ended shortly before she took up her position at Yale); gender relationships within Yale Library, which had the largest concentration of women employees within the university (in managerial and professional as well as clerical positions), and the sources of conflict between her and her senior management team. Further, she discusses her relationships with other senior women at Yale, including Provosts Judith Rodin and Alison Richard. Abell recalls the regular informal meetings she had with Richard, when she was Director of the Peabody Museum, Mimi Neill (now Gates) who then was Director of Yale University Art Gallery, and Stephanie Spangler, the Director of University Health Services. The purpose of these meetings was mutual help, support, networking and mentoring, as well as political strategizing. She also pays tribute to Diane Turner and her contribution to changing labor relations within the Library. Continuing with the theme of mentoring, Abell acknowledges the support and mentoring of a number of men at Yale, especially Charles \u0026ldquo;Chip\u0026rdquo; Long in the Provost\u0026rsquo;s Office, and Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History. Abell concludes the segment on Yale by talking about what she regards as her greatest achievements as University Librarian, her commitment to changing what she terms the cultural dynamics of the Library, and why she left Yale. Finally, in the course of the interview, Abell talks at length about the evolution of her own management style, her views on the qualities required for effective leadership, and how these may be best nurtured in women.\u003c/p\u003e","\u003cp\u003ehttps://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u0026amp;979b8d61-5fab-4c90-bf6f-e2c59c95a7a8\u003c/p\u003e","\u003cp\u003eThis 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.\u003c/p\u003e"]},"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eAccess to the materials is partially restricted. See Collection Contents for details. Original computer files may not be accessed due to their fragility. Researchers must consult access copies.\u003c/p\u003e"]}},"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/48976/file/122281","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - open-uri20210828-32762-1r0dlcx.mpga"]},"duration":15335.62776,"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/48976/file/122281/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-yalemssa.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/122/281/original/open-uri20210828-32762-1r0dlcx.mpga?1630147630","type":"Audio","format":"audio/mpeg","duration":15335.62776,"width":640,"height":40},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["ru_1051_2012-a-035_abell_penny_transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tOK, I'll just mark it first of all.  Just make sure it's -- yes, it is working.  It's the 25th of March, 2010.  It's Florence Minnis doing an interview [for the Yale Women’s Oral History Project] with Penny Abell, who was the University Librarian at Yale for many years, at her home in Del Mar in California, 351 Serpentine Drive.  Is that right?  It's great, Penny, that you've agreed to do an interview because I haven't done a university librarian before.  Also, I think you were the first female to occupy that room at Yale.  I'm sure you have plenty to say.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tLet me say one thing.  What I was just starting to say.  It sort of epitomizes the experience there.  What I want to say is thank you.  I mean, this is an extraordinary gift you're giving me, to make it my responsibility to talk about myself and my career.  And also, since our first contact, to give me stimulus to reflect on many of the experiences that, at the time, were simply experiences to be lived through.  And now they're experiences that I can cherish or pick apart or dismiss with much more equanimity than I could at the time.  The epitomizing story has to do with my time at SUNY Buffalo.  I was there from approximately 1973 to 1976, not incidentally when Title IX was passed by the US Congress.  I would occasionally substitute for the University Librarian -- I was the Deputy then -- at the meetings of the administrators.  I will never forget two things.  One was the first meeting of the administrators -- this is all the deans and the provosts   when Title IX had been announced.  And the extraordinarily crude jokes that were bandied about the room.  I was the only woman in the room.  I was, you know, a substitute.  And I was appalled that not only was this legislation not taken seriously or thought about seriously in terms of its background and its implications, but that it was such an occasion for locker room jokes.  I was shocked; I was deeply disappointed.  The other thing I was going to mention was a phrase that I picked up in Buffalo.  When deans or department chairs would talk about graduate students or younger faculty, they would talk about bright young men and sharp little cookies.  And that -- there it was.(laughter)  It's a story I told Buck, which we remind ourselves of from time to time as we went.  So that's where I was going to start.  Now where would you like me to begin?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tGendered language.  It so often comes down to language, doesn't it?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThe words we use.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tExactly.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWe damn ourselves out of our own mouths.  That's a really good place to start because I think it pulls in to very, very sharp focus so many of the things that we need to address in the course of the interview.  I've done this with everyone.  I've asked everyone to give me a little bit of a sense of background.  Your growing up, your family.  Very specific things like where you were born and brought up.  And also, in amongst all of that, trying to get a sense of what it was assumed that women in the family would do.  I mean, for example, when you were growing up in and around World War II and coming of age just after the war -- it would be interesting for me to know whether you were aware of or \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=0.0,300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"witnessed the kind of social and cultural pressures that were on women to, as it were, get married young and raise a family.  The sort of suburban life that Betty Friedan and many other second-wave feminists would articulate and indeed the critique in the '60s.  That's a long -- as we say in England -- a long run up to the wicket. (laughter) But what I'm trying to do is to listen to your sense of those sorts of things, so we have something then to build on.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tWell let me jump right in.  I was born in February of 1934.  I have an older brother, about two years older than I.  My father worked for a printing and publishing company for most of his life -- printing, primarily -- and was an amateur graphic artist.  And one of the mementos we have that reflect the time was that he designed a birth announcement for me, which was a picture of my brother, then maybe about three, with some newspapers under his arm.  And he had -- like a newsboy -- he had the newspaper out and the headline was, \"Demmin Expansion Defies Depression.\"  I mention that for the art and also for the fact that both my father and my mother were very witty and really enjoyed humor.  That's one extraordinary, important influence on me.  The development of sense of humor has really been my salvation.  Not always was it as ready as I had would have hoped, but being able to laugh at the things that happened was important.  And that's been important in my marriage as well because my husband can help me laugh at these things, and I can help him laugh to meet some of these difficulties.  At any rate, 1934, Kansas.  My mother tells me of the dust storms.  Both my parents had been born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, so this was a relatively small town experience for both of them – it was in Wichita, Kansas.  There was great clarity about gender roles when I was a child.  There were things that men did and things that women did, and there were things that boys did and things that girls did.  I always resisted that.  I can even show you the chip in my lower teeth that I got playing football.  Because I wanted to play football.  I chased my brother around endlessly, wanting to do the kinds of things he did.  I hated dolls.  I loved games.  I loved physical activity.  So I knew, in that respect, I was not a typical girl of my time.  Although tomboys have existed since history began, so I didn't feel that odd.  I just knew I was a little different in that regard.  The first public event that I remember was the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  And I remember it extremely clearly.  I have a picture in my mind and I can see the phone ring.  My parent's best friends had called to give them the news and the radio went on.  From that point on, I was very interested in the war and followed what as happening.  Let's see, I would have been about seven.  Followed what was happening through the course of the war.  My father was too old to serve.  In fact, he had joined the Army for the First World War.  Just as he was going off, the armistice was declared and he and all those men were dismissed.  So he was between-the-wars generation.  My mother was beautiful, an ideal homemaker, a good mother.  Our family life was very traditional.  We would go off, Mom and the kids, to church on Sunday morning and then come home and pick up \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=300.0,600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Daddy, who never went to church, and we would go out to the rivers near Wichita, and it would be a day of fishing and playing in the river and that sort of thing.  It was just an extraordinarily happy, and, in my way, adventurous childhood.  One other memory I have of that time, which I think played out as important later, was I began to be aware that I was smart.  Smarter than a lot of people around me, including my brother.  I remember my mother making a very big deal about this not being something that I was to display or talk about.  So a lot of my identity surrounded the sense, especially since I wasn't girly, a lot of my identity, right away, came around my intellectual sense.  A little pompous for an eight year old. (laughter)  Then the next really significant event was that in 1945, between surrender in Europe and the surrender of Japan, my father died suddenly of a heart attack.  From being an idyllic childhood, as I remember it, it went to one of great sorrow.  My mother was devastated.  Within four months, she had sold off our house and we had moved to Boulder, Colorado, which was a place where she had a couple of friends, because she had to get out of Wichita.  We lived in Boulder for a year and then we lived in Iola, Kansas for three years.  And then finally she moved to Colorado Springs because my asthma was so bad and hay fever.  So we moved to Colorado Springs.  By that time, I was a junior in high school.  It was very unsettling --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid your mother work?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes, she had to.  My father left virtually no insurance.  She sold the house for a song.  If she had held onto it for another three months, with the post-war housing she would have been fixed for life.  But she didn't.  So she worked.  In Boulder, she worked at the University of Colorado bookstore.  My spinster but worldly aunt came to visit while we were there.  My mother had been offered the job as managing the Colorado bookstore.  My aunt said, \"No, no, you can't do that.  You have two young children to raise.  You can't take a job like that.\"  And so she didn't to her great regret.  So then she worked mostly as a secretary, which was what she had been in Chicago before she married.  She was very good and she became the executive secretary, finally, in Colorado Springs of the man who owned one of the most important legal publishing firms, called Shepard's Citations, and had that job for many years.  So going back to where I was, my brother was 13, I was 11.  I remember being told that losing my father was much harder on my brother than it was on me because it's harder for boys to lose their fathers, and being shushed when I started crying.  So there was a whole lot of that kind of stuff that I experienced around my father's death, including, and I think this is probably fairly common, denial.  For probably six to eight months, I believed that he was on a secret mission.  That it was very cruel to not to have told my mother, but they had to do those sorts of things.  And once everything settled down after the war, he would reappear.  Which he didn't.  So it was, you know, early teens, all that sort of stuff, so there was a fair amount of turmoil within me at that time.  But the one thing that was clear to me was \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=600.0,900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"that I was going to do something and I was going to be the best at it. So I was [emph.] going to have a career.  For a long time, I thought I would be a physician.  And I was going to be the best.  It didn't matter what the career ended up being.  I would not settle for anything less than being the best.  And that was a notion that has been more or less in my mind ever since, although it didn't drive to particular career decisions.  So when I was in college, I started out as a Chemistry major with the intent of --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhere did you go to college?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tColorado College, which is a private liberal arts co-ed school in Colorado Springs.  That's where we were living and I got a scholarship, so it was what we could afford.  It was a good school.  It's much better now, but it was a good school and I'm very grateful for the liberal arts experience.  About my sophomore year --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tJust thinking a little bit about your mother, given that she had always had at least an ambivalent attitude toward your being a smart young woman, was she positive about you going to college, especially since you got funding?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tShe was.  She was.  There was no question about being positive about that.  The idea that I would have a career was not so attractive to her.  But she had always wanted to go to college.  And she had her eye on -- I can't remember -- Sweet Briar, I think.  You know, exclusive women's college?  She wrote away for the catalogs and she always wanted to do it.  It was just out of range for them financially.  Excuse me. [coughs]  So she had that ambition, and certainly was very encouraging of my ambition to go to college.  Around my sophomore year, there was a couple on the faculty, oddly enough.  I mean, in those days of nepotism being so horrible.  I think maybe, looking back, that she was like a lecturer and he was actually a professor in the Department of Biology and they were both geneticists.  They double-teamed me to talk me out of going into medicine because it was just so difficult for a woman to go into medicine.  I'd run into all this stuff and -- whatchamacalit -- all the harassing that I would get in medical school and all this sort of thing, so I should go into research.  And why not genetic research while I was at it?  So I listened to that and I went on with the chemistry with an idea of going on to research.  Then I had [pause] an attack of depression and I had to drop out of school.  And did.  My mother reluctant, but I went to Chicago to live first with relatives and then separately, and worked for about a year, and then I came back to school and finished up as a Psychology major.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat do you think precipitated the depression?  Did you feel under a lot of pressure?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI think that it was -- I think it was -- now, I believe that it was a product of the turmoil following my father's death.  It was the loss of my father.  And the loss of my mother, because she was then no longer my special buddy.  She had too much other things to go on. So that, rather simply said, and that I had tendency to depression.  And it was the pressure of the work that just precipitated it.  And it wasn't cool, from anybody's point of view, to get help in those days, to get psychiatric help.  So off I went.  I did this other job, and I came back and switched to an easier major.  And I finished and \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=900.0,1200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"by this time, I had developed a real interest in student personnel work because I was pretty active in student organizations.  So I checked around and found that Columbia had the best program.  I went off to New York, finished that program.  Went first to Duke for two years and then to the University of Arizona for two years.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd this was pursuing this --\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tStudent personnel, yeah.  In those days, they had deans of women and I was an Assistant Dean of Women at the University of Arizona, which was a trip in itself.  I mean, that was one of the world's great party schools.  I used to be, at all hours of the night, at the hospital, checking up on people who had been in drunken driving accidents and that sort of thing.  It was terrifically good for weight loss.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo Dean of Women was like nannying?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYeah, they called it -- the term was in loco parentis.  In those days, we were.  It was up to us to call the parents and tell the parents that this had happened and come along.  Students had curfews.  They had to be in by a certain time.  A lot of it was really interesting and fun, working with the student organizations and helping with leadership development programs and that sort of thing, which was just sort of really beginning to get going in those days for women.  So that part was fun.  It was really interesting, but I was really burned out.  And happily, I met Buck while I was at the University of Arizona.  I was old.  I was 28 when I got married.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat date was that?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tThat was 1962.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you managed to survive the 1950s without --\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause I remember somebody telling me that the big thing was to have the ring on your finger for graduation.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAbsolutely.  Absolutely.  I would say 80% -- studies will tell -- but I bet over half of our class did.  So I felt a little awkward, and I felt my mother getting a little nervous.  And then off I went to graduate school and then off to the career, and my mother is still very nervous.  My brother married -- he had been in the National Guard and it was the time of Korea.  He lost a couple of years and then he came back, so he and I were in the same class in college.  He married the year before he graduated, and had a baby when he graduated.  He did all the expected things.  And his wife, who was an airline stewardess, did all the expected things and never did finish college, although all three of her children did.  But it was that time when Betty Friedan hadn’t hit the news yet.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause her book was published, what, '63?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.  And so awareness had not been tickled yet.  I was still career-minded.  Our first assignment after we were married was West Point.  Buck had gone to school in order to qualify to teach at West Point -- which is a common practice at West Point, that officers make up the bulk of the faculty, all of whom have graduate degrees by the time they come back.  He taught there.  Women had not yet been admitted to West Point.  So there was nothing to do.  So I taught -- one of the worst six months of my life -- I taught math because that was the only job I could get.  It was at the time that the new math had been introduced and I was only barely one page ahead of them, ninth graders.  (laughter) But at any rate, I hated it.  Then Buck saw an ad for library school.  I said, \"Sure.  I mean, that is a career I could take anywhere you're assigned.\" \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=1200.0,1500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tSo you were thinking in terms of you'd have to always follow him?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.  And I could get a job anywhere.  That was fine.  I had sort of lost this idea of I'm going to be the best at everything by this time.  Life had changed and I was in a different place.  So I went to library school and really got turned on because I discovered it was --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhere did you go to library school?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tState University of New York at Albany.  They had some off-campus classes that were halfway between West Point and Albany.  Summers, I would go up and live up there to finish the degree.  The other choice was Columbia, but it was too expensive.  I could get financial aid at Albany.  In retrospect, Columbia was the better degree, of course, but I wasn't thinking in those terms at that time.  And I did have a very good experience.  One of my first classes was in the politics of librarianship.  My eyes opened wide.  I came to realize, of course, that any job where you're trying to accomplish something is political.  Any job [emph.].  Because you're competing for resources and attention and all of the rest of that.  And then I just loved things like reference work because finding the answers to things was just a great game.  I've had a wonderful time and really learned to love it.  I got a job, even before I got my degree, at the West Point Library and thoroughly enjoyed that.  Then Buck was sent off to Thailand.  Am I going on too long?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNot at all.  No, no, this is great.  It's all grist to the mill here.  I'll just interrupt when I want to point you in a certain direction.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tSo Buck was sent to Thailand and I stayed at West Point and kept working.  After four or five months we said, \"This is silly.\"  The Army had sent him on what's called a short tour, which means dependents -- which is what wives were -- dependents were not allowed.  So I just upped and got a visa and moved to Bangkok.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh my goodness!  You hadn't Fred by this time?  You didn't have your --\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tNo.  No child.  And he had one name of somebody I could talk to about getting a job there.  Buck met me in Hong Kong and we flew back to Bangkok.  I found an apartment in a Thai family home.  I did get this job at the Institute for International Education.  It's an organization that still exists.  Its function there was to vet graduates of colleges and universities in southeast Asia for admission to American graduate schools.  So it was interesting -- very interesting work.  I learned a lot about education in Southeast Asia.  So I had this job.  It was about half time.  The guy was desperate for somebody could speak English and knew the American scene.  I just had a great time; I mean, just wonderful.  I was able to get into Cambodia.  Buck couldn't go because of his military passport, but a friend had come to visit so we went to Cambodia together.  I went with the same -- no, I went with a different friend up into Laos where, again, Buck couldn't go butI was able to.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThe Vietnam War hadn't started yet, had it?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tOh yeah.  It was in full --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas it right?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tIt was really going strong.  And yet it was before the Khmer Rouge and it was going on in Laos as well.  We flew from Vientiane into Luang Prabang which is still on the Mekong, and met there hill people, tribes people, who considered themselves American soldiers because in their regular life, they were led by Americans in the kinds of work that they were doing.  Of course, there were legally no Americans in Laos.  Lots of interesting stories and tales and drama.  I loved every minute of it, as I did \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=1500.0,1800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"in Angkor Wat and Cambodia.  And then I got pregnant when we were in Thailand.  We came home -- took a long time coming home.  Came down the Malay Peninsula and crossed Borneo and up through the Philippines.  Had a gazillion adventures then, too.  It just was a wonderful time in our lives.  Buck's next assignment, by strange coincidence, turned out to be the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs, which is where my mother lived.  My brother was in -- well, he was at Colorado Springs at that time.  He had moved several different places but was in Colorado Springs.  So we had family around for a while, fortunately while Fred was born.  But I was still -- I knew I couldn't be a stay-at-home mother.  I just couldn't.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBy the time you came back to America and Colorado Springs -- what was that, '64, '65?  Something like that?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tThat was '66.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.  Betty Friedan -- I always come back to Feminine Mystique -- it was well and truly published.  Feminism was just about --\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tThat was an important piece of this.  Because when I was at West Point, most of the wives were traditional, but we had a couple who were friends and Arden was a feminist.  Oh my goodness.  Such a creature.  She introduced me -- and it must have been '64 -- she introduced me to Feminine Mystique.  My antennae sprung up.  I mean, here was  someone here talking about things that I had felt.  I had no idea that I was not alone and no way to express it.  So Arden was very helpful to me in learning.  And she was learning at the same time.  She followed a much more traditional path.  She was two, three years older than I, already had children by that time, and through her life, subordinated her career interests to her husband.  Although they both ended up, after he got out of the Army, teaching at a private school in Albany.  They were pretty much on the same level.  So anyway -- thank you for bringing that up.  So I get back to Colorado Springs.  I got a job in the public library there and I also decided I wanted a Master's Degree in Political Science because that was my first love.  In libraries, I really wanted to deal with -- you know, a subject librarian and not just general.  And I wanted to be an academic librarian.  So I was pregnant, working, and getting my degree.  And had my baby.  Took off very little time from work and went back to it and did get my degree by the time I left Colorado Springs.  And my husband was very much distressed by the Vietnam War.  He didn't believe in the war.  That was a very awkward position for a West Point graduate.  And he loved teaching at West Point.  He went to graduate school while we were there.  What he really wanted to do was get out of the Army and go to graduate school, which he did.  Applied at the University of Washington, Seattle.  So we went to Seattle in 1970 -- no, wait, '69 to '73.  I got a job as a university librarian -- as a librarian in the university.  Buck was a graduate student.  We found just the most wonderful childcare.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat's the obvious question that comes up.  You were carrying the financial can [i.e. burden] while your husband was in graduate school?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.  He had, you know, teaching assistantships and research assistantships.  But still, I was the breadwinner.  And \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=1800.0,2100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"of course childcare was always -- I mean, one always felt guilty.  Always.  Practically ignoring my husband.  Not giving enough time to my child.  Not giving enough time to my job.  When I was there about a year and a half and an administrative position opened up, an assistant director position -- big deal.  The power in the library, who was a deputy director, had decided he wanted me in that job.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhy do you think he wanted you?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tBecause I was showing a lot of leadership.  It was a newly established librarian's association, a professional association.  Trying to raise the professional standards and I was extremely active in it.  I think that's what he wanted.  And at this point, I should stop and say that -- I would say clearly from this point on, I had many men in my career who helped me.  There were no women to do it.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause one thinks of librarianship as a female profession.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tIndeed one does.  And indeed the largest percentage of people in the profession are women.  When I got my administrative position, I was one of the few in the country --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAs a woman.  And every single director of a major library in the country was a man.  And in fact when I finally became a director of an ARL [Association of Research Libraries] library – that was the elite of the library groups -- I was the second woman out of 60.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tGosh.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tIt was just -- my boss at the University of Washington had been a sharp young man, so he was hired right out of library school as an assistant to a director someplace, and the next thing you know he's a director.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tGoodness me.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tIt's just the way it worked.  So there were no women around as guides, as role models, as mentors.  This man who had picked me out turned out to be nuts.  Not such a great guy.  But there was another fellow in administration there who was closer to my age and who really did take me under his wing.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid this cause resentment among your female colleagues?  \r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI didn't notice. (laughs) I guess I was too busy.  I had no awareness of that.  And I had already been elected president of this librarians’ group, so I was fairly well-thought of amongst my colleagues.  So, I have no idea.  But I almost didn't get it because I got pregnant again.  And suddenly -- his name is Ken Allen, distinguished only because he was the father of Paul Allen, who was Bill Gates' buddy in high school and worked with Bill to found Microsoft.  In fact, we met Bill and Paul at a party at Ken Allen's house, pestering our technical person with all kinds of questions when they were still high school age or junior high.  At any rate, Ken Allen just turned on me in a minute.  But my candidacy had already been fairly far advanced.  He insisted on going out -- this was a national search --he insisted on going out on a whole --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas this because you were pregnant?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYeah.  Well I mean, that's all I can think.  It's the only thing that changed in my life.  So out he went, renewing the search.  Somewhere along -- I can't remember the sequence very well -- somewhere along the line, I lost the baby.  And I was magic again.  After I recovered and came back to work, I was OK again.  Not as OK as I had been before I got pregnant, but still OK.  By that time, everybody else in the search \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=2100.0,2400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"process really wanted me to have this job.  So I became an Assistant Director of Libraries, having had no -- and I can say this.  Through most of my career advancement, I never thought of myself as the University Librarian.  I just always knew that I could do the job my boss was doing better.  I just -- if they would only do such and such, such and such, such and such.  And I was also right on the leading edge of the movement to reform the hierarchy in libraries.  The same thing was kind of going on in corporations.  There were issues around it, like participatory management, and some of that was driving our forming of this library association.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo what date are we talking about here?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tWe are talking about '71.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo it's before the HEW regulations and everything else?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tRight.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you're still very much before the sex equality laws?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tRemember that it was the height of the protests, the Vietnam protests.  And women were now beginning to really assert themselves on college campuses.  And the women's movement was coming into very self-conscious flower.  I was very ambivalent.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere you?  I was going to ask you what your relationship with that was.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI did not want to be identified with those crazy women who were screaming and shouting.  I did not want to be identified with them.  They made a lot of demands that I thought were extraordinary.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tFor example?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\t[Pause] Let me think about that a little.  I just remember that I didn't want to be associated with the bra-burning.  And I didn't want to be one of those loudmouths.  And I profited so much by the fact that those loudmouths were out there and doing what they were doing.  Because it was that period in which things began to change and universities started seeking to make more female appointments.  I think a little bit of my edge in getting my job at UW was that they were beginning to see that pressure, and I looked like I would be OK doing that.  In the totality of my career, I have absolutely no question that I profited from the women's movement and women's affirmative action.  There's just no question in my mind.  Look where I landed.  I mean, I was the first woman here, I was the first woman there, I was the first woman here.  The road had been paved for me.  This sort of takes me into Yale, too.  The relationship with men, particularly once I was in an administrative position at UW, SUNY Buffalo, at UCSD, and at Yale -- there were classes of men who were very superficially resistant to a woman, and then would settle down and go to work.  And there were classes of men who superficially were welcoming to women and fought them all the way.  One of the classes of men who I got to know well at UW were the plumbers.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally important people.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI moved us into a new building.  It was the building with an open entry and it's three stories high.  The air conditioning problems were amazing, difficult.  Little did I know, this was going to be a -- I spent a lot of my time learning about air conditioning and learning about how to talk to these guys and learning how to get the thing right.  \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=2400.0,2700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Had no idea that administration involved plumbers.  So again, they were very resistant, but once we really got to know each other, we were really good buddies.  It didn't matter.  And they took care of me.  So the other side of the coin -- I think in a lot of instances, being a woman meant you allowed yourself to be taken care of, and the men wanted to take care of you.  So that in situations where it wasn't a matter of, \"I am a man and therefore I know from birth everything there is to know about plumbing.\"  I wasn't.  I was a woman and obviously wouldn't know everything there was to know about plumbing.  Therefore, we worked out a very interesting and mutually helpful relationship.  That persisted.  That persisted through to the fire officials and the architects and all those folks at Yale.  Through every one of my jobs, this sort of suspicion that was easily dismissed or overcome.  It was simply open, whereas so much of the other kind of resistance was hidden. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd of course the trick is to spot it.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tHm?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThe trick is to spot the difference.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tOh, absolutely.  Absolutely.\tAnd pretty soon, you learn.  You learn.  You learn.  I mean, I began to learn it at UW.  And there, for most of the men, having a woman in a responsible position was a problem.  It wasn't yet politically incorrect to say it was a problem.  The hostility or resistance -- I guess more resistance -- was open.  The few precious people, like my colleague in administration at University of Washington and a history professor who later became a dean, became my buddies.  They became my support group,   because they got it on a gut level.  They didn't have a problem with a woman in a decision-making position.  We used to have administrative meetings in a conference room next to the office of the university librarian.  My office was over in the undergraduate library, so I was not really caught up -- because we had administrative meetings.  And from the first day, I went (laughs) into those meetings -- somebody in the group -- both assistant directors would always make the coffee.  I never [emph.] made the coffee.  It was my little way of rebelling -- I never made the coffee.  I was sometimes dying for the coffee and wondered when the heck those guys would get on it.  I wasn't going to. (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you learned something else from those women who were out there?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes, I learned a lot.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBusting people's chops.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI mean, I was learning all the time.  In my generation, women were inferior.  Women had a place and men had a place.  The men were in charge.  When I was a child, and I was growing up, and really except for this internal desire to be a real person, I had no clue as to the extent of imbalance between the status of men and the status of women.  Until I got to West Point, of all places, and I was introduced to Betty Friedan and I began slowly, slowly, slowly to open my eyes.  It really wasn't until the next generation \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=2700.0,3000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"that had grown up after the women's movement was fairly well established who -- it wasn't until I met women who assumed that they were going to have careers and that that's what their life was going to be -- who assumed that they would keep their own finances separate.  I remember really being startled when I suddenly realized, this young woman knew she was going to be a lawyer.  It wasn't going to be a struggle and it wasn't going to be a decision.  It wasn't going to be an enlightenment.  She just knew.  And we didn't know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo there was a paradigm shift somewhere in the '70s?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAbsolutely.  Just amazing.  Then I just kept learning from these younger people and realizing.  The other thing that was very interesting that time was what as happening with men.  My husband was very supportive of me, very admiring of me.  And I should talk about how our paths developed after the University of Washington.  They just didn't stay at this same point for a moment.  Whereas with our friends, we would see the strangest things happening.  Like one fellow -- nicest guy -- been married, had several children.  One day his wife left him because he had been responsible for her being repressed all those years.  He didn't know what hit him.  He didn't know.  He would have done anything not to repress his wife.  He didn't know.  He was just doing his thing and thought she was doing her thing.  All of the sudden, he's really a bad guy in her view.  It happened so many times.  It was so sad because they were so caught in something not of their making.  Anyway, I should go back to the University of Washington.  Buck finished all but his dissertation – the famous stage.  When I was in the hospital losing my baby, the students at the University of Washington had closed down the interstate and were marching on the government offices in downtown Seattle.  There were buildings blown up on the campus.  There were riots on the campus.  It was one of the real hotbeds and Buck was trying to steer his way through this as a 33 year old Army veteran.  And everybody knew it.  So here he is, a white guy, a middle-aged guy, and an Army guy.  He was given a hard time by his fellow graduate students.  When he was ready to look for a job, no one wanted to look at a 30-something white male, because by this time, they were really going after the women, the young people.  Certainly nobody had anything to do with the Army, because in academe at that time, anything having to do with the military was just disgusting.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt's interesting you bringing up the military because you've obviously got a very, very personal take on that.  I think a lot of women in that period, in the late '60s and early '70s, came to feminism via the anti-war movement and civil rights.  I wondered if that maybe also added to your ambivalence, because of your own personal situation.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tIt could well be.  It could well be.  It could well be.  Because I really resented the way my husband was being treated.  At the same time, neither one of us believed that the war was the right thing.  That's a very interesting observation.  We're sort of caught in a funny place.  It was especially funny because we were the age group, we grew up in the time that we grew up.  Buck’s father was gone through the entire war.  \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=3000.0,3300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Because he was a West Point graduate as well.  He would occasionally come back and get different assignments, but mostly he grew up without his father at those crucial points.  So he had his baggage; he was carrying around all of that as well.  Anyway, he was finding it very difficult and he was totally frustrated by his dissertation, a not unfamiliar situation.  (laughter)  And meanwhile, offers were coming at me from everywhere.  Finally, he had one offer from the University of Louisville.  He just didn't want to go there.  He didn't want to live in Louisville.  He didn't want to go to that school.  His sister lived there.  He didn't want to be anywhere near her.  He was missing West Point teaching.  Going from a West Point classroom to going to a classroom at the University of Washington in 1969 was like going from the peaceful garden to the gates of hell.  An entirely different experience.  It really turned him off.  So he was sort of ready to give up all that anyway, and these offers were coming to me. So finally, I did accept an offer at SUNY Buffalo.  The whys are peculiar, but it was the guy who went to SUNY Buffalo as the Director of Libraries who recruited me that I had great admiration for.  I really, really wanted to work with him.  At that time, they believed that the State University of New York, in particular Buffalo, was going to be the Berkeley of the east.  That was before the bottom fell out of New York state finances.  All the hype -- and what I didn't pay attention to was they said, we have a remarkably good modern art museum and an excellent symphony, and Toronto is only 90 minutes away.  It was that “Toronto is only 90 minutes away,” that I missed entirely.  Buffalo is just an awful town. (laughs) So I was there six months in, the budget cuts hit.  I learned all I would want to learn more about managing in a state of declining resources.  It was just a very depressing place.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid Buck get a job?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tHe did.  Not much and not for long.  I mean, he got a series of sort of technical writing jobs and consulting jobs, but he mostly was a stay-at-home dad.  It was the perfect time for him to be a stay-at-home dad.  It was great for Fred.  I think it was actually good for him.  Although, I mean, there's all that self-image stuff.  He was certainly flying in the face of what a man does, and I was flying in the face of the image of what a woman does.  But, you know, he never was angry at me.  He never did anything but encourage me in the next move and the next one.  He really didn't find an alternate career until he came to San Diego.  I'm sort of -- I think I'm wandering.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNot at all, no.  I was just thinking that a question I had down to ask you was – were you frustrated by all these moves but you've actually put it into perspective now.  There were moves early, when you were first married to Buck, and then all the moves after that, of course, were down to you.  \r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tFor my career.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou've actually clarified that.  Because that would have been a conventional question to have asked -- a woman follows her husband's career. \r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tRight.  And then he followed me as many times as I followed him in the final analysis when we added it up.  I went where his career took him, and then he went where my career took me.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSomething else just occurred to me.  You very quickly, after graduating library school, moved up to management.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI graduated and I spent two years as a \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=3300.0,3600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"reference librarian at West Point.  Then, when we were in Colorado, when I had Fred, I was a reference librarian in the public library there.  It wasn't until I went to the University of Washington -- and then it was quick.  I was Assistant University Librarian there for two years after two years as reference, then Deputy University Librarian at Buffalo, and then the top job.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, that is actually pretty quick.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tIt was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou would of course have a lot of female colleagues, not necessarily in management but certainly a lot of female colleagues in the general library staff?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tBut the problem was -- it certainly was true and strong support when I was a reference librarian.  Once you become an administrator, it's not as possible to have colleagues among subordinates.  I mean, to have friends, relationships.  One of the most supportive people I have ever worked with in my life was Karin Trainer [University Librarian, Princeton University, 1996-], who was an Associate University Librarian at Yale when I got there.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tShe's now at Princeton, isn't she?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYeah.  Even though one tries to not -- it's too compromising, as far as everybody else on the staff is concerned, to develop too friendly a relationship with a subordinate.  We had a very close relationship.  She was just super.  But most of my peers were people at the university outside the library.  And that became increasingly the fact as I changed jobs.  Or people with the same kind of job I had at other universities.  So that my closest friend was Elaine Sloan [University Librarian, Columbia University, 1988-2001].  We've never lived in the same town.  We're very close friends and spent a lot of time rooming together.  We've traveled together.  We used to pick up the telephone and within the first two minutes could tell the other person was having a terrible day and let them talk about it.  Because also -- at a place like Yale, it was very dangerous to show vulnerability anywhere because here was always someone who would be ready to jump on that.  Because it was such a history of close relationships that shifted and changed over time, it was very difficult to believe that you could really trust anybody by sharing some of your concerns or your vulnerabilities.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, we definitely, when we get to Yale, will talk more about that because I want to talk very much about the culture that you encountered there.  But yes, Yale is a small community and it is, by and large, a very stable one.  People have been there for a very, very long time.  I think it must be quite difficult for outsiders coming in.  Of either sex.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAbsolutely.  And that's the point that I really wanted to make with regard to what a distinguished historian had said to me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Tell me about that.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tHe is a very distinguished professor of history.  I wouldn't say we ever became friends but we were comfortable talking to each other.  I was talking once with him about this sort of perennial outsider status that some of us have when we haven't been of [emph.]Yale from practically the beginning.  He said, \"Oh, I know.\"  He said, \"I still feel it.\"  He said, \"Because I wasn't of Yale.  I came \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=3600.0,3900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"here from --,” he said, \"I still run into it all the time.\"  I thought, my gosh, of all the people who should be the most secure in their position and status at Yale -- it's not that he wasn't secure, but he was aware that he was different because he didn't practically grow up there.  In contrast to people like Bart [Giamatti], who did grow up there in every sense of the word.  And there were lots of others who were of the same ilk.  Most often, they'd either been Yale undergraduates who'd gone away for graduate school and end up hiring, or the occasional person who had gone on to graduate school and --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHad stayed on, yes.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tBut it was... And then of course there were so many subcultures amongst the faculty at Yale.  One of the interesting things about being the University Librarian was that one had responsibilities for all of the academic players on campus.  For the undergraduates, for the graduate students, for the faculty, for the research associates, for the English department folks, for the physics department folks, for the arts department folks.  Many of those subcultures had no awareness, appreciation, or understanding of each other.  I'll just come to sort of what, for me, was a kind of crystallizing moment and then we'll go back and talk more about that.  Because I think that was one of the most important dimensions of trying to lead the libraries and trying to provide the kinds of services people needed at Yale.  The extraordinary diversity of needs, demands, cultures, etcetera.  I was gone a year and Alison [Richard] and I had been friends.  She was not in --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThis was Alison Richard?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.  She was not in the provost job long enough for us to have any conflict.  So the first couple of times I went back, I had lunch with Alison.  The first time I went back, we were sitting there at lunch and she said, \"Well, it hasn't taken me very long to conclude that the two most difficult jobs at Yale are the job of the Provost and the job of the University Librarian.  And it's because we have the same constituency concerns.\"  Now obviously, the Provost job is extremely much harder than a University Librarian's job.  And Alison, I think, was very in [emph.] that role, although, as I say, I never served with her.  But it was the same thing.  The scientists would say, \"What do we need?  Throw all that old stuff out. You can’t come fast enough with the computer stuff.”  And, \"Why are those old journals over there?\"  One of my favorite stories was about -- it was at UCSD, was about the time the medical library was getting really crowded.  So one summer, they took dozens of years of back issues of the Journal of the American Medical Association off the shelves and put them in storage.  And the day the rest of the faculty came back, a sociologist came screaming at me because the stupid people in the medical library had taken that all out and she was focused on the development of women's role in medicine in those early years, and her primary research material was now stuck away.  It's just, you know, a beautiful little example of the -- again, when I went to Yale, it was essential that we embrace the technology.  It was not a choice.  It required major investments and it required \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=3900.0,4200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"strong political support.  Some of the faculty from the search committee would say to me, \"Don't let those technical people get in here.  We don't want anybody to take the card catalog away, because we know it.\"  It was almost conspiratorial, but it was very clear that nothing should happen to that card catalog.  And at the same time, you had the other people over there who never had any interest in the card catalog.  One of my favorite, favorite, favorite experiences -- people on the search committee, I always told them and it was -- you know, like in China, if you save somebody's life, you're responsible for them.  They brought me to Yale and they had a responsibility for me to succeed.  People like Ed Morgan who is just -- did you know Ed?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tJust a wonderful colonial American history scholar.  Wonderful man.  He said, \"Don't let them do anything to the card catalog.\"  I think it was five years later, I was coming out of my office and he was clear down at the other end, almost by the circulation desk.  \"Penny!  Penny!\"  So I waited and went to meet him and he said, \"Susan Steinberg has just shown me a --\" and he thought for a minute and he said, \"A key word search.  And I found the book I've been looking for for ages!\"  And it was wonderful.  It was one of those wonderful moments.  But, oh, getting from there -- getting from where we started to that point was a fascinating political and financial struggle.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, we’ve got to the point where you’re at SUNY and you’re not entirely enamored with the environment in which you’re living.  And at that point, you made really the leap to the top job in the academic library world.  How did that come about?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tWell, again, I was peppered with questions about when I was going to take a University Librarian job from the time I went to Buffalo, and I was there for three years, because it was the expectation that women would start moving into those top jobs.  And I used to hate to go to conferences because I couldn’t cross a hotel room lobby without people asking me if I was looking at such and such or such and such a job.  And, you know, I had to get a few years under my belt.  I was not -- that wasn’t -- my primary concern was that I was still learning a lot.  But I knew at Buffalo that I would very soon be destined to be at another job, particularly because they thought that I could do a better job than this wonderful man who had recruited me did.  So one thing that he did for me was counsel me about what jobs to look at and which not.  I was being recruited by three campuses in the University of California system.  And he said the only job to look at is -- he had come from Berkeley -- is the University Librarian job at San Diego because San Diego is already in the ARL.  And they’re in the American Association of Research Universities.  They’re a class act and the best outside of Berkeley and Los Angeles.  Some exceptions here and there, but they were really the only other class act at UC.  And that’s the track you want to get on.  So along came that offer.  No, it didn’t.  Along came that search.  They closed down the search and recruited again.  I had a friend on the search committee who kept me informed about what was happening.  \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=4200.0,4500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"A number of faculty on the search committee wanted a scholar.  And eventually, it reached the point where [Paul Saltman], the irreverent, magnificent, wonderful Provost [of UCSD], said, “When I got a scholar’s job, I hire a scholar.  I want a librarian.”  So eventually he wore down the search committee and everybody else, and I was hired.  Going from Buffalo to UCSD was just amazing because at UCSD, they took women’s rights, Title IX, respect for women and their abilities seriously.  It wasn’t a joke in Paul Saltman’s meetings.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.  So that was ’77?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.  And everything about it was wonderful.  I mean, we came here to this house.  In Buffalo, my drive to home in the winter would be sometimes as much as 40 minutes over icy, snowy, rutted roads.  Here, it was 10 minutes and I would go out here and go down along Torrey Pines Beach, up the hill, and to my beautiful library.  And it was like dying and going to heaven.  And the staff was young, excited.  A lot of them had come from the UCLA library school, which was one of the very best in the country at that time.  They were full of beans.  They believed in professionalism.  They believed in really making the library work for students and faculty.  There was none of the deeply entrenched, old habits of libraries that one sees in so many of the older libraries because it was a new school.  I was only the second University Librarian.  There was only the third Chancellor when I came.  The humanities were -- UCSD was built on a science base.  It was built on the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and they started with graduate programs, and they started with graduate programs in the sciences.  Then they moved to the social sciences, and the humanities came last.  So the new humanists, bless their hearts, were accustomed to demanding a library much richer than the one it was possible to build at UCSD.  Because there, you know, the music was modern music.  It was using computers to develop music, and the traditions and the material that supported the music department was that sort of thing.  We developed an archive of modern poetry.  But there is never a way we could have had a deep collection even like UCLA, to say nothing of Berkeley.  I mean, there wasn’t a way to do it.  And some of the faculty who came in later from graduate schools at Yale or Cornell or wherever would be deeply disappointed when they arrived at UCSD and discovered that we didn’t have the richest of collections.  We had just achieved the millionth volume, you know, two or three years before I got there.  And the library was built very smartly and very quickly.  But just the kind of stuff you buy when it’s current in 1802, it was not available. (laughs) So it was an entirely different set of expectations.  Much higher sense of self and the quality of the place at UCSD than there was at SUNY Buffalo.  Just, you know, we’re really good and we’re number one here and we’re number one here and we’re number one there and we’re going to be number one everywhere.  And when Dick Atkinson became the Chancellor, that just really exploded.  He just was tremendously visionary and effective in developing the campus.  \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=4500.0,4800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And meanwhile, the library was trying to catch up with those who needed a richer collection and trying to find alternatives for them, and then also trying to keep up with the fact that technology was coming down the pike.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo would you say that was the biggest challenge when you went to UCSD?  The smallness in some ways was an advantage, but also it was a huge challenge to get beyond that to move into another -- I suppose into another league?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tTo move into another league.  And it never could in those traditional terms.  So we had to be better at supporting students in learning how to use information.  We had to be better at supporting faculty in learning how to use the new sorts of things that were coming along.  And always through my career, I guess from Buffalo on, I always believed that the graduate students were the key; that the graduate students were the ones who most needed the library.  And they needed it because they had to do the exhaustive searches of whatever was out there in a way that no undergraduate ever did, and in a way that the faculty didn’t need to anymore.  I mean, that’s a kind of gross [exaggeration], but if I could stay tuned to what the graduate students had to have in terms of our collection development and our services, then I figured we were responding to the most crucial -- and the weakest -- demographic in the institution.  So that’s what we set out to do.  And I think we were very successful in that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou’ve spoken very warmly of the new Chancellor at UCSD when you came and sort of the general dynamism of the pace.  I wonder what the politics were like when it actually came down to the nitty-gritty of trying to get things done, i.e. get money to do things.  \r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI made some mistakes.  I’ll tell you the mistake I’ve made, since I’ve mentioned it.  At one point -- so much less was at the discretion of the campus administration at UCSD than Yale, obviously.  And at the time, library funding was being looked at across the University of California and some attempt was being made to systematize the funding.  And that was based on, you know, the size of the graduate programs and all this sort of thing.  A formula was being developed for the allocation of funding.  And UCSD, top to bottom, fought that formula because it was on this route -- growth trajectory and quality.  And it didn’t want to be a second cousin to UCLA and Berkeley.  And I’m a fighter.  And so the faculty really, I think, appreciated very much the way in which I fought the system although the system didn’t appreciate it all.  I think the Chancellor sort of liked it because what a primary administrator of the college or university --- this is a gross overstatement, OK?  What the president or chancellor really most wants is to keep the faculty quiet about the library -- I mean, in terms of what they most want in terms of the library.  It’s for the faculty to stay quiet about it.  So I was able to enlist as allies many of the key people in the faculty.  It did reach a point where there was some discretion on campus, and one of the decisions was to cut back the library acquisitions funding.  And I protested through the usual channels to no avail.  “No, Penny, this time, this really has to happen.  This time, you’re going to have to take this hit.”  And so I shared \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=4800.0,5100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"my concern with some of the faculty.  And it wasn’t 24 hours before the Chancellor called me -- and the chancellor never called me -- and said, “Would you please call these people off.  Enough already.  You know I never would have gone through with that cut.”  Hell, I did. (laughter) He was really angry with me.  And I say it was a mistake, and I never did anything quite like that again.  But it worked.  So... there you are.  The Librarian is in such a peculiar position because we don’t really have a primary constituency like a dean or a department chair does.  And we aren’t faculty, so we’re subject to the sort of administrative hierarchy in a way that no faculty ever are.  And yet our primary responsibility is to serve that faculty and those students and to give them the resources that they have to have and that we know they have to have.  And the faculty doesn’t understand that we have a boss, because they don’t have a boss.  And they also don’t understand why we couldn’t make it happen if we just wanted to and if we just understand how difficult the situation was.  And now I’ll go back to Yale for a minute.  One of the techniques I learned was to quit trying to deal with issues of allocation of resources on a one-to-one basis.  And one of my most interesting experiences was when there was a move afoot to establish at Yale a separate East Asian library and a separate Middle Eastern library.  So in both cases -- particularly I remember this with the Middle Eastern -- I brought together the principal scholars in those fields.  And the principal scholars included a German who was very, very deeply engaged in the history and the religious philosophy for the particular area that he was studying.  And then we’d have, like -- I’ve forgotten his name now, but I think he was a Classical Arabic language expert -- and he wanted to build a Near East library.  Well at Yale, the Near East collection then, and I suspect still is, was inter-shelved in with the rest of the general collection in the library.  Well, the German thought that was just the best thing in the entire world: the only way to go.  And this [other] guy just thought it was the worst thing in the world.  So I let them talk.  And there were other people around the edges of this, and it was clearly a stalemate at the end of the conversation.  But I wasn’t the one standing in the way anymore.  They began to see [that].  And the same thing happened, really, in the East Asian field.  It happened in a number of other -- I remember one time a group of anthropologists together -- they were really good people for the most part.  But they had a couple of particularly difficult people who were harassing all the time about something that just wasn’t possible to do, so I brought them together and that worked well.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen people who live and breathe a subject are at odds in that very kind of fundamental, structural way, how on earth do you negotiate that?  To actually get a result.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tWell, there are -- let me take the Near Eastern people -- everybody from the Babylonian collection to this guy who I think was Greek.  Dimitri?  Is there a Dimitri [Gutas]\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=5100.0,5400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"somebody who's prominent in that?  The whole Near Eastern area had been pretty much neglected by academic decision-makers.  Long story.  What you do is you try -- what I did was try to figure out, with the help of people in the library who worked with people in the field, what we could do.  Whether there could be some kind of mini segregation of some of the collections.  I knew there was no way in hell that Yale was going to build a separate building for a Near East library.  I mean, they barely were beginning to add to their faculty.  There was no way that was going to happen.  So part was just trying to gain the credibility with the people who were trying to make it happen by helping them to see that they as a faculty were not unanimous in wanting this.  And it was very hard to get anything done unless there was consensus among them.  And then part was trying to negotiate a way to make some part of what they wanted possible.  One of the things we did when I was there, for example, was to try to revive and upgrade some of the reading rooms so that American Studies -- and that was a clear need expressed on the part of the graduate students.  They didn’t have a place.  So we took one of the rooms and made it into an American Studies reading room and bought some of the collections in and some of the research and computers in there and all the rest of it.  And Judaic Studies, we brought some of that together.  And some of the Near East had a little bit of a home in the Babylonian collection, you know, so you just try to give them something better than what they have.  And of course one of the things you’re always dealing with is status versus genuine need.  I mean, the math department considered the math library to be the crucial status symbol, and no, we could not fold their library into the science library because they’d always had a math library.  And every good school had a separate math library.  Now I’m not saying it wasn’t useful for many of them.  But, you know, in truth, most of them worked on their own blackboards.  So the status issues were very interesting.  I began to learn that at the University of Washington and then through Buffalo and San Diego and especially at Yale.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThe one thing that you’ve made clear when you started to talk about UCSD was that there were very few women at that time in the mid-70s in the top jobs in research university libraries across the nation.  \r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tOr in universities.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOr in universities.  Right.  \r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tSo I was often the only woman in [meetings].\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?  Let’s talk about this.  I think it’d be a good point then to have a break because then we can come on to Yale.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tOK, should we break now or after we talk about it?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, let’s talk about this first.  It would just be good to have a picture of what it was like for you as a lone woman in so many cases, both in meetings, I dare say, at UCSD, but also in the wider professional world that you inhabited.  I’m just wondering what that was like and what it felt like and what sort of issues you were encountering in respect of your gender because of that.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI think this is true and I’m going to think about it a little more and come back and correct it if it’s not.  But I think by and large, making my way in the larger professional community was by far and away the easiest thing to do, even though I was like, only the second woman.  I mean, there was a (laughs) certain courtesy among male librarians.  Not all, but many.  \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=5400.0,5700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"It was that old \"let’s take care of her” kind of... And then getting taken seriously when you spoke was a little bit harder but not much, because you picked your places.  I mean, your issues and your role in those issues.  And I’ve always been a consensus builder.  I’ve almost never gone into potential conflict without being sure I had allies going in.  And so at the beginning I kind of picked off areas that weren’t the central power positions.  And then inevitably, you know, just moved into those central power positions.  Inevitably both because I was around and I developed a lot of friends.  And because I had ideas.  And I could be articulate when I wasn’t stumbling, which is my other mode.  (laughter) So, I was just really fortunate to be in the right place at the right time.  I can’t say that I ever had -- ever -- a woman as a mentor or champion.  And I’m sorry, you know.  And I’ve tried to be one myself, for both men and women.  But I had a number of men who really respected me and really cared about me and who really helped me make my way in national, not just library circles but the really important things that were going on nationally, things that brought scholars, university administrators, librarians, and foundations together, and that I was ushered into by somebody who took an interest in me.  A man.  So the professional side of it was relatively easy.  And then women began coming in until, at this point, there are more women than men as library directors at the major research libraries.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.  Because I think I remember you saying that when you started UCSD, you were only two women out of 76.  So that ratio has completely changed.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tCompletely changed.  Completely changed.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you ever encounter at that time -- because that was, in a way, a cusp of history, the ‘70s as far as women in the professions was concerned.  I’ve heard women on faculty talk to me about this, that here were occasional extraordinary women who managed to get on the faculty at places -- not necessarily Yale, I have to say because it was the early ‘60s before there were the first tenures there.  But at other places, there were women -- if you like the old-fashioned kind of blue stocking women who’d made it and had faculty positions of some sort or another, who was actually quite antipathetic to the feminist movement and framed this idea as a way of privileging women.  “Why should they be privileged?  I did it myself.  I was able to do it despite [emph.] the difficulties, and I don’t see why we should change it.”  And I wondered if because women have always been in libraries whether that was an attitude that you might have encountered.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYou know, I didn’t, simply because there were no women in those positions.  \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=5700.0,6000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"There were none.  So I didn’t run into that kind of resistance.  There were women on the next level -- and you were really trying to get at this earlier in your question about my colleagues when I received the administrative appointment.  There were certainly some women who thought I was grabby.  You know, that I was excessively aggressive.  That I was excessively ambitious.  And certainly ambition -- I will say for myself - ambition as really I was going to be the best in the world at whatever I did.  When I was 11 years old, I decided that.  That means that ambition was always there, but as I said before, in terms of my moves, there was a kind of inevitability about them.  I mean, I could just do that next job over there probably better than somebody else, and I didn’t, until I was actually in administration, ever imagine myself in a top job.  And part of that was because there was nobody there.  And, you know, there wasn’t much of anybody there in the faculty either.  Marvelous women were few and far between.  I mean, Eleanor Roosevelt, for heaven’s sakes, she was marvelous and she didn’t let anything stop her.  She was much hated by my parents because she was part of that Roosevelt business and they were conservative Republicans.  I just thought, “Wow.  She’s really amazing.”  And then any other -- Madame Curie always excited me.  And anybody else who came along who seemed to have this -- women who became doctors in spite of everything, in spite of people trying to talk her out of it -- were always role models, if you will.  I mean, I just thought how courageous that they had gone through medical school in the 1930s and been successful.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you were always negotiating in a man’s world?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.  Yes.  Always.  Always.  Except for those first couple of years at Washington when I was trying to put together that professional organization, working with other people, and I worked with both men and women.  A lot of women were prominent in that.  And the other thing that happened -- after I became the Assistant University Librarian at Washington, a new program was developed by a group in Washington [D.c.] called the Council on Library Resources that made a lot of differences in libraries over the years.  And the council came up with a plan to strengthen leadership and management within research libraries called the Management Improvement Program [Management Review and Analysis Program], I think.  And they started out with three pilot universities, and then the second group was six.  And the University of Washington was one of those that applied and that was accepted as one of the externally funded pilot \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=6000.0,6300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"projects.  The idea was to put together a management team and then to explore various aspects of the environment and the vision and the internal dynamics.  It was really sort of Management 101, which of course was totally foreign to universities.  I mean, was totally foreign to universities in those days.  Still is.  For odd reasons, the libraries over time became the best managed and led parts of a university because of the kind of training that was initiated then.  Well, the Director of Libraries at University of Washington was a man named Marion Milczewski.  The Deputy Director was Ken Allen.  Ken Allen was all bluster and yell, and he was the one who picked me up.  So Marion called me into his office one day - this was after I had taken on the assistant directorship - and said, “Well, you know we have this management improvement program.”  And they told us a lot about it.  “We have to put together a team.  We need to have a leader, a chair, a leader of that team.”  And he said, “I would very much like you to be a leader of that team but you have to go to Washington once a month for three days.  With your baby and everything, is that going to be possible for you to do?  I know that won’t be possible for you to do.”  And I said, “Oh, I do think it would be possible for me to do.  Let me talk to my husband.”  And hence, I was selected to do that.  Elaine [Sloan] was another one of the leaders of the teams.  She was at the Smithsonian Institution then.  And so the six of us would come together, and it was maybe half men, half women, and led by a man out of the CLR [Council on Library Resources] and inspired by a man at the CLR.  But that turned out to be an extremely crucial element in my education, both learning about management leadership and having the opportunity to practice it in a big old place like the University of Washington.  And it’s called MRAP, Management Review and Analysis Program.  Met with a lot of resistance from old guys like Ken Allen who thought the delicate -- he once used the term at an ARL meeting.  He got up and he said, “This MRAP program is going to rend the delicate fabric of the library.”  (laughter) Thereafter when I would talk to Elaine, I would tell her, “There’s another little tear in the fabric!”  You were asking a question --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI was asking you about what it was like to work in those groups, professional groups.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAh, yes, it was easy on the national level.  That was not a problem.  The problems were always the problems of the local institution and the cultures and expectations.  The other thing I was going to say, and now I should probably tear my shirt off and beat my breast and tear my hair -- one of the difficulties was that women were second-class to men.  That librarians are second-class to the faculty but apart, different, from the other kinds of staff functions because they’re part of the academic function.  So I always felt -- or often felt -- like I was shouting from underneath the table.  You know, that experience that everybody has had in one way or another where you’re in a meeting and you say something and nobody pays attention.  Somebody else says the same thing two minutes later and everybody says, “Oh, wow.  That’s really an interesting insight.”  You know?  I mean, it happened a lot.  It happened a lot.  That’s the kind of subtle gender difference that I encountered more often, almost, than anything else.  And that’s what made me really concentrate on picking my moments and sharpening my comments.  Because it had to be the right time or it was just thrown to the wind.  So, you know, in that way it was a learning experience. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd being part of that MRAP must have helped you hone your skills in recognizing how to pick your moments and how to pick your fights and which fights to pick?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes, absolutely.  And how to build coalitions.  And how to build consensus.  Because it was absolutely essential that we developed consensus every step of the way or it would have been resisted by one or another down the road.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI’m wondering \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=6300.0,6600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"if the fact that you were a woman as the Director of the Library at UCSD -- that in itself was isolating.  That if you’d been a man in that position, that there might have been coalitions or accesses to power and all sorts of other things that get things to happen, simply by the virtue of being a man.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tWell I saw that at a number of places.  I saw that in Buffalo.  My boss -- the associate dean of the dental school was his best friend.  And so they crossed the library-faculty divide because they played racquet ball together or something like that.  And my predecessor at Yale played poker with the dean of the medical school and sundry other folks like that.  So there was a male connection that -- what’s the word?  It overcame the differences of being a librarian or being a faculty member.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOpportunities for male bonding?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.  Yes, of course.  And precious little opportunities for female bonding, but that can be part of what we come back to when I talk about Alison and Stephanie and Mimi and me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  And indeed I have a load of questions about that.  I think that would probably be a good time to stop because it’s nearly half past 12.  And have a little break.  And then we can come back to Yale.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAll right, good.  [Break in recording]\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOK.  I think we’re recording again.  So we’re back.  Yes.  Yes, we are recording.  So we’re back again after a very nice lunch for round two.  Before we broke for lunch, Penny, you were talking about your experience of being a librarian at UCSD and also your experience of being one of few women in the wider professional area.  And you’re about to make the leap to Yale -- you’d been at UCSD for I suppose seven or eight years?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tSeven years.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSeven years, yeah.  \r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tEight by the time --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you feel at that point it was time for a move or did the Yale business come out of the blue?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes to both questions.  (laughter) I was bored and yet my son was in high school, my husband was happy with his job.  They both loved living here because they’re sportsmen and they’re outdoors.  I thought it was a pretty nice way of life, too.  So I was bored but not looking.  And one day I’d been away at a meeting and I came back to my office and there on my desk was a pink slip about a phone call.  And it said, “President Giamatti of Yale has called.  Please call back.”  And I knew that the job was open.  But that’s all.  I never thought of myself in terms of the Yale job.  They had always had men librarians and it was still the norm in the Ivy Leagues and most other schools.  Virtually all of my career had been in public universities.  No private university experience.  And just, you know, it seemed like, culturally, another world.  So it had never even crossed my mind.  But there is something about the words, “President Giamatti called and would like you to call.”  And I had never been approached by Yale.  Nobody had ever asked for my resume.  Nobody had ever, you know, called me about anything.  And that was a blow-away recruitment tactic right there.  So I looked at it and I didn’t call him back.  I came home when the time had come.  We had dinner.  Then I told Fred and Buck that I had had this phone call, \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=6600.0,6900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"confident that they would say, “We can’t leave.  Don’t want to.  We can’t do it.”  And our son Fred said, “Go for it, mom!”  And Buck had a great big grin on his face.  So they betrayed me.  (laughter) To make a long story short, he [Giamatti] wanted me to come and talk.  The search committee had apparently done its magic without letting me know.  There were other candidates and eventually -- I think I met with Bart three times.  And I have to stop here and say that Bart is one of my heroes.  I loved him very much just for his integrity and his vision and his values and his articulateness, and his support.  And so I cried when he left Yale.  He brought us all together in the Corporation room, the deans and directors, and told us he was leaving.  And I couldn’t get out of there fast enough because I could feel the tears coming.  And then I cried again when he died.  I mean, I just loved him.  And I thought his -- he had flaws as a president, which I think had to do with the fact that he was inside and there was lots he couldn’t see because he had grown up in those circumstances.  But he was one of the most inspiring human beings I have ever known.  And I value inspiration a lot.  At any rate, President Giamatti called, I called, I went back several times, and eventually I accepted the position.  I started in January, leaving my husband Buck and our son Fred here in Del Mar because Fred had one semester to finish high school.  I lived in an apartment on Hillhouse Avenue.  When I was talking with the president and provost, separately, about arrangements, the president said, “You can take your time finding a house.  We’ve got this carriage house apartment on Hillhouse.”  And then when I told Bill Brainard when he asked what I was going to do, I said, “Bart said something about a carriage house.”  “Oh,” he says, “The garage apartment.” (laughter)  And that was just so, you know, so perfect.  And it was perfect for Bill, who used to always work on his car on the weekends, up to his elbows in grease.  I mean, that’s just -- do you know him?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tThat’s just the kind of guy he is.  Bart wasn’t at all pompous.  He was very down to earth, too, but in a much different sort of way.  So I ended up in this garage apartment with the provost’s house on one side of me and the vice president for developments on the other side of me; which is not a bad place to be sitting if you’re new in the administration of the institution.  So I was there for six months and it was a pretty dreary apartment, but it was so convenient.  I mean, it was wonderful and convenient to everything - and plenty comfortable.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tJust remembering what you were saying before lunch about UCSD, that it was new, that it didn’t have a big collection, and it didn’t have all these traditions which meant it was a very positive and forward-looking in that respect because of its newness -- it’s hard to imagine a place more different, in a way.  I’m not criticizing Yale, but in terms of Yale -- it’s got a huge amount of tradition, one of the biggest research libraries in the world. \r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tPrecisely.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhy? \r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tThat’s why it never occurred to me because I was fully aware of all of this.  I mean, I wasn’t the right person.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat did you think they saw in you?  That they pursued you, obviously quite strongly?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI think it was a combination \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=6900.0,7200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"of evidence of leadership, strong backing by the administration and faculty at UCSD.  They liked me, and that showed in the -- and there were lots of, you know, the Econ departments were almost interchangeable.  There was a lot of conversation back and forth between the two schools.  And beyond that, you know, I just don’t know.  I was viewed as one of the most effective people in the business at that time.  But the cultural gap was huge.  I mean, the contrast that you pointed out was huge.  For a while that bothered me, and then after a while I tried not to think about that until I got there and saw how huge it was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou said you came out two or three times to speak to President Giamatti and --\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAnd the search committee.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd all of that.  Before you accepted the position, what impressions did you form of Yale, if any?  Any substantive ones that you can recall?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI liked the search committee a lot.  I liked the people on the search committee.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere any women on it, can you remember?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI don’t remember that there were.  I don’t think so.  And I would be hard-pressed to name them now, except that Ed Morgan stands out.  I loved the idea of Yale.  I mean, always I have been attracted by the first-rank of quality.  And here it was.  And in some ways, it was -- oh, what did they see in me?  I think probably they figured it was time for a woman and that -- there were no other woman in the pool.  And the other people in the pool were sort of tried-and-true guys.  Older than I, been around for quite a while.  I won’t say they were eager for change, but I think they were looking for energy, maybe.  And my predecessor had been forced to stay on for two years beyond when he wanted to stay because of the difficulty in closing a search.  And then they finally made the deputy director the acting director for about six months because Rudy just refused to continue any longer.  So there was a kind of sense of urgency.  And it may have been another situation where Bart, where the administrator -- the chief -- just decided, let’s knock off all of this Sturm und Drang about a scholar, and let’s get somebody in here and move on.  There also was the strike, which was so much on everyone’s mind.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere you aware of -- because the strike must have been going on while you were visiting.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI was aware of it.  And I suspect they saw me as someone who could do a reasonably good job of steering the library out of that awful labor mess.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat’s something I’d like to come to later, to deal with the whole issue of the strike and the aftermath of that.  I’d like to come back to that, if I might.  But at the moment I’m just trying to garner your impressions of what you were letting yourself in for.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI think, in fact, they felt that I would probably -- and there was the MRAP background and all of the rest of it -- that I would probably be very good with staff.  And, by and large, that was true.  There’s a lot I didn’t know.  There was a lot I didn’t know.  And it, you know, it hit me full in the face when I got there.  I didn’t even know that some \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=7200.0,7500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"of the libraries I was responsible for existed.  I didn’t even know, for example, that there was a library in Farmington, Connecticut.  Which turned out to be a real time sink.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat was the Lewis Walpole?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.  The Board of the Lewis Walpole Library was the worst bunch of male chauvinists I have ever encountered in my entire life.  I mean, it was terrible.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere they -- the people on the board -- were they all --\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tOld grads.  And certain specified officers of the university, including the head of the Yale Art Gallery and the general counsel of the university, who, at that time, were both men as well.  Let me just go on with Farmington because it’s another kind of interesting tale.  OK?  There was this board of governors or whatever for the library that Mr. Lewis had designated in his will when he left his house and land and library to the Walpole Library, to Yale.  And it was cleverly worked out that there was this self-perpetuating board of governors, which, in the final analysis, had no power whatsoever, but didn’t know it.  And my job was to continue the charade that they had some say in how resources would be allocated, and who would be hired and fired, and all that sort of thing, while trying to keep the Lewis Walpole Library from sinking, because it had practically no patronage and it was an extremely expensive old house.  One of the first things that happened -- this was reported back to me -- was that some of the people on the board of governors decided that there was no way a woman was going to be the chair, in spite of the fact that the University Librarian had always been the chair.  So they tussled that out behind the scenes and eventually, in fact, I was nominated and elected the chair.  The next thing was that the head of the -- I can’t remember the order of this -- but the general counsel left Yale and acting in his stead was Dorothy Robinson, who later became the General Counsel.  Ah-ha!  Another woman shows up.  And then the head of the Yale Art Gallery left, and acting in his stead was a very distinguished member of the art history faculty whose name was Anne and I can’t remember --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnne Hanson?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.  Anne Hanson.  So it was Dorothy and then Anne.  OK.  So this was the third meeting, at which Anne shows up.  One of the traditions of the group was that after they met over sherry to do the business, they then adjourned to a local steakhouse for their martinis and their steaks.  So after this third meeting -- I think I was leaving -- one of the members of the board said to me, “Next time, they’re going to send us a big fat black one.”  Meaning large African American woman, because they’d already gone through with a skinny one and then a larger one.  And now it’ll be skin color.  I just -- I did not respond to him.  I just turned on my heel and left.  And I heard other comments like that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd that was in the mid-‘80s?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tThat was 1986, ’87.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tGosh.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI mean, they were totally -- they just hated the fact that I had been appointed.  They couldn’t -- I mean, they couldn’t stomach that women had been admitted to Yale.  But then to put a woman in the librarian’s position was just unbelievable.  So I’ll just turn this story around to wrap it up.  After a while, we managed to get along fairly well and I managed to get done what needed to be done, in spite of the fact that they thought they had all the authority.  And then \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=7500.0,7800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"some other of the designated trustees resigned.  And President Schmidt, by then, appointed a replacement who was very much a -- he was an attorney and booklover, and unlike anybody else around, had read Walpole.  You know. (laughter)  He was that kind of guy.  And Benno invited him and he accepted.  He walked into the first meeting at the library in Farmington.  We sometimes had our meetings in New York.  And he was a tall, handsome black man.  Conrad [Harper] something, who later became the General Counsel to the Secretary of State and he was also the first African American President of the New York Bar, a litigator, Cyrus Vance’s firm [Simpson Thacher \u0026 Bartlett].  You know, really sophisticated.  It was just fascinating to see the looks on their faces when he walked in.  And then of course he sat -- and he’s sweet.  Sweet.  And not pompous.  And he sits down and he’s so gracious to everybody.  And he starts talking about Walpole really excitedly because he’s interested in Walpole. (laughs) Unlike most of the rest of the people in the room!  So at the end of the meeting, he invites -- he said, “If it’s time to come to New York, please meet at my firm’s offices.  We’d be happy to have lunch for you there.”  So we all trekked down.  His offices were across the street from Grand Central.  You know, people came at different times, but pretty much the same time.  Trek across the street; take the elevator up to the top; uniformed waiters taking the drink orders.  Uniformed waiters waiting on us at this fabulous lunch in this big conference room with views of the entire New York skyline in every direction.  And Conrad, his own gracious, quiet self, you know, never a peep, never another peep about race from that particular group.  I talk about different classes and different forms of expression, of gender bias, and they were certainly a class on to themselves.  They were the most rude -- and this is not all of them.  Half of them -   rude, blatant, self-centered, entitled bunch of guys I met at Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat’s a good start!  We’ll just break for a moment because I need to change the disk.  We just had a brief intermission there because of a coughing fit.  So we’re back recording.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAll right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOne of the things that we were talking about was the difficulties, the challenges of trying to earn -- I think, principally, earn -- and then maintain respect and authority when you weren’t, as you said earlier, an obvious choice for a top research university because your background had been in a very, very different kind of library.  That must have been a real challenge and I think your story about the Lewis Walpole Library does illustrate that to some extent, that some of it was to do with your gender, certainly.  And some of it was to do with a perception of lack of substance in some way or another.  \r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI certainly was not a scholar.  That was clear.  And the faculty who were really, really dependent on the library genuinely didn’t feel safe with someone who wasn’t one of them making decisions that affected them.  And so there was a lack of trust. \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=7800.0,8100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Not only lack of respect, but lack of deep-down trust.  And that kind of problem, that kind of challenge, can only be overcome by building -- in my view -- by building a network of colleagues who did learn to trust and respect.  And then they would bring on other colleagues on your behalf.  There were lots of ways to do it.  Some ways, I completely dropped the ball on.  For example -- and I know Alice [Prochaska, Yale University Librarian, 2001-2010] talks about this -- the simple device of throwing a cocktail party, which I never did because I was so overwhelmed by everything else I was doing.  And I knew I should be entertaining.  I knew it.  Another thing I knew was I should never become allied with any particular subset in the university, because that automatically brought enemies.  But I knew I should do more entertaining.  I just really didn’t have the strength for it, even though it would have made my life a lot easier.  But when I first got to Yale -- I mean, the messages were delivered in fairly clear ways.  For example -- about how I was on trial.  For example, the wife of one of the college masters.  Let me just take a step back.  During the strike, the faculty was divided and a lot of faculty very openly supported the poor, downtrodden clerical staff with coffee, donuts, and encouragement against the big, mean administration.  And others had a somewhat more tempered view of what was going on.  And one of the strong supporters of the strikers was this master.  He used to invite the strikers in out of the cold for tea, you know, when they were picketing the library.  And talk about the big, bad library administration and the rotten deal they were getting.  As it turned out later, my heart was really with a lot of the strikers!  (laughs) But that’s another story.  At any rate, this woman who’s the master’s wife -- and the master invited me to dinner with a group of people.  The campus was still in turmoil, and the tensions within the library were just extraordinary.  There were some clerical staff who had gone on strike and some who had not.  Some who had and then had eventually gone back in before the rest of them went back on.  Everybody -- there were people taking sides with regard to the clerical staff who were on the professional staff, so they were at odds with each other and at odds with some of the clerical -- I mean, it was a mess.  It was angry and hate-filled and really. [Pause] And the morale was in the basement.  This is like three months after I arrived.  I go to the dinner party at the college master’s house.  And the master’s wife says to me, “Well you know, you’ve got a real mess in the library, don’t you?”  And I said, “Yes.”  She said, “Well, people give you six months to turn it around.”  And I said -- I was extremely startled.  And I said, “For what?”  “Well, that’s as much slack as they’re going to cut you.”  And off she went to some other discussion.  And I thought, to say that to me really was about as insensitive as it can be.  And of course it can’t be true because they don’t have the -- there are going to be people out there who have that point of view and there are going to be people out there who don’t.  I remember even Chip [Charles H. Long, Deputy Provost 1987-2010] saying to me maybe six \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=8100.0,8400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"months down the line, “You know, there’s still some bad feeling in the library.”  And I said, “Yeah, there is.”  And he said, “But I guess the library is sort of like a big ship.  And you just can’t turn it around on a dime.”  I said, “That’s absolutely right, Chip.”  It couldn’t be turned around on a dime.  What had to happen included a lot of replacement personnel, and that doesn’t happen in a minute.  It completely included changing the culture and the attitudes and the vision and the values.  I don’t think anybody outside the library realized how great a task that was.  Because when I got there, my predecessor had done an amazing job of modernizing library practice.  As simple as getting a budget officer so that the library’s multi-million budget wasn’t being calculated on the back of an envelope.  I mean, really important, basic infrastructure stuff.  But he left me lots to do.  And when I left, I left my successor lots to do because we’re talking about 500 people in 32 different locations of all ages and generations and history and connection with the faculty or not connection with the faculty and ex-wives and girlfriends.  I mean, the whole thing was just a sea of relationships and attitudes that had been around a long time.  Technically, I found practices, technical practices, within the library that were literally 19th century.  And we were coming up on the 21st.  And that had to change because of what we saw ahead was going to come down the line.  So I will say -- and I would say it at some point or another, but let me take a minute out -- my tenure at Yale was filled with challenge.  Was extremely stressful.  The hardest job I could ever imagine having.  One that kept me working all hours of the day and night and kept me awake and da da da da da.  But number one, I faced some amazing challenges.  The deterioration of the Sterling Library and the collections in it, and a number of the other libraries.  Running out of space.  The whole technology thing coming like a steam train toward us, and resistance among the staff and faculty of monumental proportions to doing anything about that.  A hierarchical system within the library that was extremely repressive to any young, new talent.  A siege mentality in the library administration office, I mean, literally, because they’d had to come through the Beinecke Tunnel to come into work so they wouldn’t have to go past all the yelling strikers outside.  I mean, they were in there.  In the time I was there, we changed personnel on the top and the bottom.  My theory was that you had to change the leadership in many instances because the leadership was very much a part of the problem.  A library that’s bound up in its own bureaucracy is just the worst possible.  I mean, the most conservative of all possible animals.  So you had to change the top.  You had to change the department heads as well as the administrators in many instances.  And then I started insisting on interviewing every candidate for a new job, \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=8400.0,8700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"professional job, including the beginning jobs.  Because I figured if I could get decent leadership and I could get decent new folks coming in that they could create a kind of pressure for change in terms of how we did things and how we made decisions and all of that sort of thing.  And it worked.  It worked.  And so that organizational development, the aggressive and widespread adaptation of technology once we got past the initial barriers, the launching of the renovation program for Sterling and for some of the other libraries, the professionalizing, the building of relationships between library staff and faculty in focusing on collection development and services -- those are all things that were challenges that we met well, and that I’m very, very proud of.  So that in spite of all the stress, I feel like we accomplished a lot that was critically important.  And in spite of the fact that I would get disgusted, angry, depressed every day, I was so proud to be a part of Yale.  The people I met, the scholars I met, the students I met, the kind of work that was being done, the aura of the place was terrific.  And how could you not be proud to be a part of that even though a part of it was sort of killing you everyday?  So it was worth it.  But it was tough.  So what part -- what role did gender play in that?  I think there’s no question that I felt extremely isolated because there were very few people around I could have formed a bond with.  And those I might have, I really didn’t for one reason or another.  I mean, Sheila Wellington, when she became Secretary of the -- did she?  Yes, Secretary of Yale.  I don’t know, I think I may have just been too buried in where I was.  And again, it’s a matter of trust.  I mean, you’re just not going to share your vulnerability, your anxiety, your self-doubt, your puzzlement with someone if you can’t trust them.  Because somebody will get you!  You’ll get bit. (laughs) So it turned out that although I had to be careful, Chip Long was always supportive on a kind of an emotional level.  I never asked for that, per se, but I felt that in ways that I didn’t about any of the other people in the provost office, from the provost on down.  Jerry Pelikan [Jaroslav J. Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History], for reasons known only to himself -- you know, the scholar’s scholar -- used to love our fireside chats.  I’d consult him about things.  He became a staunch supporter of mine in difficult times.  People in the anthropology department -- not all of them by any means -- when I was going through -- I think it was my first review -- Alison [Richard] was on leave -- \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=8700.0,9000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I know that the anthropology department, as a group, stepped forward in support of my reappointment, and vigorously.  Alison picked that up when she came back.  So when Alison came back, we were both horribly busy.  But we did have some time together.  And I found in her the first person I had found who really kind of got it.  I think it was in part because she was the Director of the Peabody, and the curators there were in the same sort of limbo status that the librarians were in.  She saw that and she saw the way the faculty -- the attitudes of the faculty toward them -- and she thought it was unfair and unreasonable and not right.  Not only is she who she is, but she had an opportunity to see how that worked out.  So I told her what we did and it wasn’t -- you know, it wasn’t a close relationship, but I spent a lot of time with Mimi, too -- Mimi Gates, who was the then-Director of the Yale Art Gallery -- Mimi O’Neill.  Mimi Neill.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, Mimi Neill.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tMimi was having her problems not only with the university administration, but Teresa Heinz was probably her most important donor.  It drove her crazy, because Teresa was, and is, an overbearing sort of person.  She insisted no [private] money should come unless the university put a share in.  And the university insisted that the Yale Art Gallery ought to be able to support itself on its own.  So here was Mimi between -- she was very unhappy.  She was in a very difficult situation.  Alison, somewhat less so.  And then there was Stephanie [Spangler], the Director of the -- what do you call it?  The Health Service.  And there was one other director, who was Ed Woodson, the Director of Athletics.  This, I thought, was really funny.  I don’t know if it was Alison and I or Mimi and I -- were talking and we said, “Yeah, we really should get ourselves together.  We’re in the same situation.”  So we invited Stephanie, and Stephanie and Alison and Mimi and I met together for lunch.  And Stephanie looks around and says, “Where’s Ed?”  “Well, Stephanie, it’s not just that we are directors in common, which is a very difficult position at Yale, but it’s also that we’re women in common.”  Well Stephanie didn’t want any of that.  Stephanie was not at all interested in maintaining any kind of woman-to-woman support system.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut it is interesting that, as it were, the Cinderellas of the campus were all being looked after by women?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes, isn’t it?  And you know, in every case their predecessors were men.  Every case: mine; The Health Center; The Peabody.  I mean, I’m sure that in the anthropology department, being Director of the Peabody was a duty more than an opportunity, but for the rest of us, we were, in a way, kind of all swept in by the same wave.  I landed first, but the others came in behind.  Yale was doing its best to get women in visible and significant positions.  Alison, bless her heart, after a while began introducing me to other people on campus as her mentor,   because here I had this great, big, huge operation and yet I would take time to help her with this little, teeny-tiny operation.  That had always warmed my heart.  Again, Alison is, I think, a very \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=9000.0,9300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"specially talented person.  So anyway, going back to my point, even if you made relationships with other people, they were very careful relationships.  You could not be fully open.  And that’s probably true in most organizations.  You know, that there are certain levels or places in the organization where you can’t be.  One of the other people who was an immense help to me was a woman named Jan, and I’m trying to remember her last name, who was the Budget Director.  The University Budget Director.  And Jan [Jan Ackerman, Associate Vice President for Finance] had sort of insecurity issues of her own.  It was tough for her because she was, again, surrounded by men.  We never talked about that.  What we would talk about were things like the library budget.  And this, I know.  That Jan helped me out in a number of budget discussions where I wasn’t present, and where she said, “But, you know, the library has such and such and really shouldn’t take that more.”  And I know impact, but she fought for the library.  And I think that was a women together kind of thing.  So I think it’s another instance where it really helped me to be a woman in that circumstance.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThere are other women that you haven’t mentioned, senior women at Yale at that time.  One of whom of course would have been Judith Rodin, who was in the provost office, wasn’t she, at your time?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tJudy was Provost.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tShe was?  During part of your time?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tDuring part of my time.  And she was on the budget committee with me before that.  I don’t think anyone can ever accuse Judy of being supportive of anybody.  Maybe her child.  I don’t know.  That wasn’t what she was about.  What she was about -- and I always found this fascinating -- was professionalizing the job of provost.  She was like the fourth -- let’s see.  There was Bill Brainard and Bill Nordhaus.  And Frank Turner.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, Frank Turner.  I think you had four or maybe even five provosts during your time?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYeah.  Well, Alison by the end.  So I had five provosts.  Judy was the fourth.  I had five provosts and four presidents while I was there.  It was fascinating.  And the provost, of course, is the one that needs to understand what’s going on in the library.  And so you start from scratch with each one of them.  You know, why is it that we don’t throw out the old books?  And each one of them had to be educated.  The odd difference about Judy was, even in contrast to Bill Brainard and Bill Nordhaus, was she really took, for example, the budget seriously.  I mean she took the job to a completely different level.  Being Provost wasn’t just something that she had to do and get through, which was true of all the three previous.  It was their duty and they did it.  And boy, were they glad to be back in the faculty when they were done.  Judy would, I think -- I’ll say it clearly -- had her eye on a university presidency and as quickly as possible, so she had to be crackerjack at this.  But she took on issues, like how to organize for technology development on the campus that no other provost fully addressed.  I mean, they put somebody in charge of it and if it didn’t work then the put somebody else in charge of it.  She really got in there and did the job.  I don’t think it was because of her style.  I think it was in spite of her style, because she was very harsh.  Very. She came down hard on people, in public and in front of their colleagues.  And \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=9300.0,9600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"she made an awful lot of people unhappy in the process.  But part of me -- and I felt the whip, too.  But the thing is that I knew she was working from an understanding of the universe of the problem.  I was very impressed with her.  I was very impressed with her.  Never, ever close to her; nowhere even approaching the kind of real affection I felt flowed between Alison and me.  And she was really crushed when Rick got the presidency and she didn’t.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHearing you talk about how people think what the library’s job is or if they think about it at all, I have heard from other people who have been present at faculty meetings that there is this perception that the university librarian is merely an administrator.  Somebody who can get the books on the reserve shelves on time.  And that if you go into the library because you’re working on a piece, the book will be there.  Whatever.  It’s that kind of very short-term, needs-based thing without necessarily having a vision of what the library should be doing in the world of the university and in the world of education.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAnd scholarship.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd scholarship generally.  Do you think it is fair that sometimes academics just don’t get it?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tOh, absolutely.  And I don’t think the library is actually alone in that.  At UCSD there was a gathering of chancellors.  There were five of them.  One of them said it stunned him how quickly he turned from a colleague into somebody to spit on when he left the history department and went into the administration.  And I think that is a not uncommon view.  And that was at UCSD.  Well, you can imagine at Yale.  Unless, you know, you remain very much a part of the faculty while you’re dabbling over here in this administrative thing, and then quickly go back to them.  Anybody who seems to be headed in a different direction, I think, is just not to be valued.  Management is not valued.  Management skill is not valued.  Consistency in following certain kinds of personnel guidelines is considered small-minded.  Forget that you have 500 people sitting here in this organization, many of which are furious with each other.  And if you’re not careful to follow some kind of consistent, fair pattern, you’re going to have a mess on your hands.  “In my department, when Joe got sick with AIDS, we just let him go off.”  You know?  “And now -- what are you doing?  You’re telling this guy in the library who’s sick with AIDS that he’s got to” -- you know.  “He’s got only a certain period of time when he’s able to do this and then he’s got to go on to some other insurance program.  You’re prejudiced against gays.”  I was told that.  I think \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=9600.0,9900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/34","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"there’s a total lack of understanding, respect for administration, per se, and a real lack of appreciation for the fact that people in administrative leadership positions have to be thinking all the time about the vision, the bigger vision.  How do you align the pieces so that the university will do what it’s there to do? The education, the research, and so on.  You know, Bart was wonderfully eloquent about all of that, which is one reason why I loved him.  Because he said things that I would have been embarrassed to say, and he said them with some conviction that I would just go, “Yeah!  Yeah, that’s why we’re here!”  I remember once being asked if I were a scholar.  And I said, “No, I’m not.  But I treasure scholars.  I work for the scholarly interest.  That’s what’s really important to me.”  You know, I thought that was good enough.  But for many people, it was not.  Yale is one of the places where there has been a real push - - and I’m sure exists again now -- and one of the reasons why I think my successor had a Ph.D.  But he was more of a bureaucrat than I was.  So he lasted, what, five years.  And then Alice [Prochaska] came along and she had the scholarly credentials.  She knows how to give a party.  She’s had the support of one of the most difficult people, in my judgment, in the English department coming in.  And she had her hands full.  So you can meet certain of these criteria and you’re still trying to steer a very big ship through very murky waters.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tActually, you saying that -- I came across a quotation in an article I read by somebody who I think was your deputy for a time.  Mike Keller?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tOh, yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI could only find it --\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tHe was one of our Associate Librarians.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  Let me see if I can find it here.  I did write it down.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tHe has been a stupendous success at Stanford in every meaning of the word.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  It was actually an article he wrote about leadership.  I can’t believe I can’t find it.  That’s really annoying,   because it was in my notes here.  I think it is fair to say that being a university librarian -- I mean, it’s a very complex and nuanced position within the university.  Yes, here it is.  Yes, it was Mike Keller [Michael Keller, University Librarian, Stanford University, 1993- ].  An article he wrote in 2003.  And this is the quotation.  “Penny Abell at Yale was dealing with enormous strategic problems in complex, often hostile political environment.”  That was quite a job description!  Would you agree with it? (laughter)\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.  Yes.  Yes.  And some people were hostile just out of habit.  I mean, I think a lot of people in the history department were hostile just out of habit.  And you have to go back about three librarians before me to find the one who was himself a book collector, and he collected collectors of books.  And he took the special collections beyond what they were.  And he was one of the guys.  Ever since then, \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=9900.0,10200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/35","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"whoever’s been in that office, whoever’s been in that chair, has been found wanting because we weren’t one of them.  Being found wanting by an historian is different than being found wanting by a physicist.  The physicist is far more interested in the information delivery.  The historian wants the psychic connection.  And also, as I said earlier, I think really many historians do believe that they can’t trust someone who doesn’t do what they do.  And therefore knows what they need on a gut level.  So it has -- but I do think a lot of -- I mean, I can name names and what’s the point?  But there are a number of people there who would find the Librarian unacceptable no matter what.  Unless, maybe, it were themselves.  And there were several who aspired to do that.  They believed that they would have been not only happy but excellent in leading the library even though they didn’t know anything about it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo are you implying, then, that many of the difficulties that you experienced as the Librarian at Yale were intrinsic to the position rather than attributable to your gender?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tOh yes.  Yeah.  I mean, yes, there were people who had their problems with the fact that I was a woman.  Yes, there were a lot of people who had problems that I wasn’t a scholar.  Again, because the Library was critical.  It was the heart of the university.  But it had all that administrative stuff that went with it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMike says in the article -- and you’ve also talked about it in a wonderful way here and now -- about the complexities that you faced when you came into the position.  I imagine that one of the most pressing things had to have been the fallout from the strike?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThe clerical and technical staff strike and -- because I think the Local 34, the union, had only been formed a couple of years before that.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tThat’s correct.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd you came in on the back of a 10 week strike over pay and conditions for mostly female staff, so there was a very, very strong gender component, I think, in the strike, from what I understand of it.  And many of Yale’s C\u0026T staff of course also worked in the library.  So it was a big baby for you.  That can’t have been an easy introduction into the job, particularly since the management team that you inherited in the library was implicated --\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tExactly!  Precisely the right word.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd how the strike progressed and was resolved.  And I think from what I’ve read of the accounts of the strike that it was a very, very bitter one and left a very bad taste in everyone’s mouth.  And so you were inheriting that.  You inherited C\u0026T staff who were, in many ways, disaffected.  You inherited a middle and senior management team who had been at odds, clearly, with the C\u0026T staff farther down the food chain.  How did you even begin to untangle that one?  Were there any changes, for example in the management structure, you felt had to be done almost at once?  \r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tThere was nothing I could do at once.  There was nothing I could do at once.  I felt there was nothing I could do at once.  That everyone was too entrenched --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tToo dug in?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tFor whatever reason.  And that the immediate challenge, for me, was not to succumb to the \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=10200.0,10500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/36","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"attitude that persisted throughout the administrative group in the library.  Or that persisted throughout the administrative group in the university.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhich was?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tThat the union was all wrong; that those people who struck were all wrong; that they had no legitimate grievance;  that they, for god knows what reason, were just trying to make trouble.  There were people coming from the outside to help them make trouble.  34 and what was the maintenance union?  35?  35, of course, was maintenance and largely men.  35 tried to kick around 34, too.  I mean, they were out on strike and their leadership was primarily men, and 34’s was primarily women.  So 34 was getting it from the university administration guys, from the 35 guys.  They weren’t getting any respect.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI suppose faculty and students to some extent --\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tSplit.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThey were split.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAnd that’s why we had a lot of faculty supporting 34.  There was just sort of a need or tendency to support union action against the administration because the administration is not really respectable and that’s not a respectable way to spend your time.  You know, the things that we were talking about earlier.  So I thought, you know, the first thing was to make as clear as I could without undermining the rest of the library administration and the university administration, as clear as I could, that I was open to communication in a way that they weren’t.  I’m sorry, I just have to go back to one point.  There were even people in the publishing projects that were housed in the library and administered by the library -- scholars without tenure, if you will, who were working as editors on those projects -- who identified with the C\u0026Ts because they hated the administration so much.  And they were very much a part of this whole boiling mess.  Anyway.  That was one thing.  The second was to try to find -- this is with regard to the union -- to try to find opportunities for training that really focused on opening up opportunities for the lower-level clerical staffs.  So that it was apparent that somehow, someplace in the system, somebody cared about what was happening.  One of the best things that happened for everything I tried to do was the advent of technology.  Because that required people to look at the way they’d always been doing things and clean it up.  It required people to work together in different kinds of ways.  It required people to do much more training.  And it just became the vehicle we used to raise the common sense of purpose throughout the library.  But that wasn’t done in the first six weeks.  That wasn’t done in the first six months.  I don’t remember any immediate changes.  I started working on some of the changes I knew needed to be made.  Because I came in this notion -- and I’d done it other places.  I mean, some of the top administration has to go, and we’ve got to be real careful about who we give permanent status to, and we have to be really careful about who we hire.  Then I got a really lucky break.  The woman who had been head of human relations \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=10500.0,10800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/37","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"for personnel office for the library left.  And the person who was number two successfully competed for the job.  Diane Turner.  Who is herself an African American.  Her husband is a judge in one of the areas around New Haven.  Diane knew how to work with people.  Diane became my partner in helping to completely change our relationships with the union leadership to the point that when we were -- I can’t remember what stage this was.  And again, we’re talking mostly women in the union leadership, in the library.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  I should have also asked this.  In fact, I don’t know.  Was there a high proportion of African American [staff in the library] --\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tSignificant.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, significant.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAnd the administration of the university considered the library to be sort of the worst of the worst as far as the strike was concerned.  Well, hey, they had the greatest number of C\u0026Ts on the campus that made just a little bit of a difference.  So there was all this kind of --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd also geographically, the library’s right in the middle --\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAbsolutely.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt’s very visible.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAnd so when people demonstrated around the library, it was perfect.  Anybody going between the Provost Office and the President’s Office walked right past them.  I mean, it was just -- it was all right there.  Jack Siggins, the Deputy [Librarian], was the hero because he would escort the non-striking C\u0026Ts into the building and help protect them from the mean striking people.  And they were mean.  So you were very right on in terms of the -- and here again, a man representing the strength of the administration and keeping the lid on and keeping the library open.  All of it was quite an accomplishment, actually.  But it was an accomplishment achieved without a hint of empathy for the other side.  Diane had the empathy and the skills.  Diane served as the library’s representative on the bargaining -- on the administrative bargaining team.  And I don’t know this from direct observation, but I feel quite strongly that she must have been a very positive influence in reaching settlements.  At one time, we had to cut positions.  Just had to do it.  It was the only option left in that particular budget crisis.  So with C\u0026T positions, what we did under Diane’s leadership was ask the union leadership to meet with us.  We described the situation and we said, “Please help us figure out a fair way to find alternatives for the people who are being laid off within the library system.”  I won’t go into all the detail, but they did.  They worked with us very seriously and very carefully.  And so by the time I left, the head of human resources for the university complained to me that he was tired of the people from the library, union representatives from the library, always talking about, “Why don’t you do it the way the library does?” (laughs)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tGosh, that’s quite a volte-face, isn’t it?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAbsolutely, totally turned it around.  That’s what I wanted to have happen.  I was fortunate enough to have the right person in the place.  That has always been my great strength.  Was to know I needed people who were better at things or smarter about things or whatever on my team than I was.  Because that \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=10800.0,11100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/38","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"way we just multiplied our abilities.  So when I did go recruiting for these administrative positions, I went out and I really searched everywhere.  I used my network and I found really good candidates.  One, Don Waters, came from inside Yale.  He was a Ph.D. in Anthropology and didn’t want to go the research/teaching routine.  Taught himself about technology, became -- I mean, just a superb hard worker.  Became our technology guru.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIs he at Mellon?  Isn’t he at Mellon?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI thought I recognized his name.  \r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tHe’s now a Program Officer at Mellon.  And Bill Bowen called me about him when he was -- he had gone from the library to a consortium in Washington and was being looked at by Bowen.  I had lunch with him -- I don’t know, a couple of years ago.  And oh, he is just in seventh heaven!  He’s being sent off to China to help this scholar film the paintings on the interiors of caves in the far -- because this scholar came to Mellon and said, “I want you to help me film mine.”  And Bill Bowen said, “Let’s film as many as we can.”  So off Don goes on this -- he’s just one of the smartest -- he was one of Alison’s protégés.  One of the hardest working people I’ve ever met -- so I got really good people in to do the work.  They were also people who understood the importance of bringing along staff.  We really transformed the place.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you hire Mike Keller, who wrote the article?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you also hire Karin Trainer?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tNo, Karin was there.  Karin was there, Jack was there.  And older people there in a couple of other senior roles.  And then I hired in Jerry Lowell, who subsequently became the Librarian at UCSD and then the Librarian at UC Berkeley.  At one time, three of my associates were the Librarians at Stanford, Berkeley, and Princeton.  And that was another great source of pride for me.  Although I remember Rick Levin saying something to the effect of, “What are you doing wrong?  How come you can’t keep them on the staff?”  And I tried to explain to him that when one has an opportunity to be a University Librarian, then it does cause one to, you know, move.  Unlike the things that happen when people are appointed President at Yale.  (laughs) Didn’t exactly put it that way!  He was troubled because there was this sort of exodus.  I was trying to explain that it was a good thing, but I’m not sure --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat’s the downside of mentoring, isn’t it?  You send your babies out into the world.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tBut look where they’ve gone!  You’d rather they be here in a secondary position?  Well, some of the faculty did.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you still want your 30 year old living at home? (laughter)\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tThat’s exactly right.  But they were really talented, really smart.  At one point, one of my colleagues at another institution said to me something about how I hired these young, good-looking men.  And I said, “What?”  And she said, “Well surely, you know everybody talks about the fact that you hire young, good-looking men.”  And frankly, no, I didn’t know people were talking about the fact that I hired young, good-looking men.  (laughs) I hired good-looking women, too.  But somehow this combination of Mike Keller and Don Waters and Jerry Lowell and Alan Solomon, who is the head of our reference department, presented the view to the world -- and they were all active professionally, which most Yale people hadn’t been before I got there.  So they were out in the field and they were making a difference in things that were happening in the broader profession.  I was really quite stunned, but I have to say mostly amused \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=11100.0,11400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/39","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"by that.  I really was!  My young, good-looking men disagreed with each other so, you know, it wasn’t always as pretty and nice as it seemed to be.  \r\n \nINTERVIEWER:\tThat’s actually quite a funny kind of take on the whole gender issue.  Broaden that out a bit, and I’d really like to have your take on how gender, race, and class kind of intersected in the library culture.  Because I think it must have been a unique place in the whole of the university in that respect.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYeah.  I think I would say the only other place, you know, like it would likely have been -- there wasn’t any place like it.  I would have said would likely have been sort of the Medical School.  But there wasn’t as heavy a preponderance of people in the clerical positions as there was in the library.  There also wasn’t the same sort of working relationship, where in the library with our senior clericals, we were always trying to develop them and the salary structure and the job descriptions and the classification system, for them to take on more independence and more responsibility so that the librarians would be free to do the more direct work with the faculty and the creative work with the technology and all the sort of things you need to have a certain kind of professional background and education and opportunity to be able to be super creative.  To be able to jump over into what’s going to be needed down the line.  And there were a number of librarians within the Yale library, as there is everywhere, who really were more comfortable with these sorts of quasi-clerical tasks.  So there was a closeness and a kind of overlap.  Well, when you talk about the clericals, you do talk about a lot of African Americans.  Almost everybody without a college degree -- not everybody, but almost everybody -- almost everybody from a lower socio-economic status -- unlike UCSD, where a lot of kids graduated from college and went to work in clerical positions in the library because they were classed at a different level and it was an acceptable thing to do.  You didn’t see any Yalies going for a C\u0026T position in the library.  If it was, it was just for a temporary reason.  So you were in an institution that’s had its own struggles with gender and race and class and religious affiliation as the context.  Then you had this sort of mini world of the library inside it.  Yet I don’t think we saw the racial differences as fault lines.  Now, you know, I was not in the trenches.  But I don’t remember any instances of race being a divider in who got what or did what or that sort of thing.  Gender was -- I mean, certainly when I got there, anybody who had anything to do with anything mechanical or photocopy machine, was a man.  And darn, wouldn’t you be surprised to know that those jobs, by and large, were classed higher than the ones that \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=11400.0,11700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/40","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"the women typically took on.  In fact, I remember equal work for equal pay being a big argument when I was at Yale, and the senior administrators at Yale having nothing -- no way that they would consider that there ought to be some way of accelerating the wages and opportunities of women who were in lower-level positions.  I mean, they didn’t get it at all.  So back to class and --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut of course the other thing also -- and this would apply, I think, probably in other parts of Yale as well, like any university is that quite often people in clerical positions or secretarial positions were overqualified because they were the wives of faculty or had come in from eastern Europe with tremendous linguistic capacities, which were of course very, very important in cataloging and all the rest.  So that’s another kind of --\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tRight.  Now those folks tended to land in M\u0026P positions.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid they?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.  If they weren’t librarians, they didn’t land in librarian positions, but they tended to land in M\u0026P positions.  Which was burdensome in its classifications and all of that sort of thing.  But at least it wasn’t, you know, the bottom of the stack.  And they were, in many instances -- and we created positions to enable people with those kinds of special skills to perform at the higher levels and be compensated at the higher levels.  Because those are invaluable skills in libraries, as you’ve just pointed out.  To the horror of some of my colleagues, I hired people into librarian positions who -- ah! -- hadn’t been trained as librarians.  I mean, Don was one.  I mean, all the guy had was an incredible work ethic, a Ph.D. in Anthropology, one of the best brains I’ve ever come along, and a great background in technology.  Sorry, that was an aside.  But yeah, there were opportunities of those sorts.  I think more as time when on.  I mean, I remember some people who worked as M\u0026Ps like in the publishing projects.  That’s where a lot of those folks ended up.  The Franklin Project.  I’m trying to remember the name of the French woman who was caught by Yale’s nepotism rules early in her life.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tClaude Lopez?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.  Have you talked to her?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, I haven’t.  But I did write to her at one time.  I don’t know her, so I don’t know what her circumstances are at the moment.  I know she’s been retired a long time.  Yeah, I thought it might --\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tSuper example of that.  She was fully qualified herself, and the nepotism rules didn’t allow for her.  So within the library, I suppose that education and socio-economic class were the big dividers.  And it was true up through the ranks, too.  It was a clutch of librarian with Ph.D.s who looked down at the rest of the librarians.  I mean, Yale is a wonderful place for finding people you can look down on. (Laughs) When you’re not busy trying to hide from the people who are looking down on you.  It was amazing in that regard.  Well don’t you think -- I remember one fellow telling me -- excuse me if this is offensive \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=11700.0,12000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/41","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"to you or personal views and views of your husband and views of humanists in general.  But this fellow was in the management school.  And he said, “Face it.  Most of those humanists were geeks when they were in school.  They didn’t do athletics.  They didn’t do this.  They were looked down on all the time, and now is their chance.”  And, you know, there may be a grain of truth in that.  You know?  So this is their chance to be the top dog in the organization, and they weren’t going to lose an opportunity to let people know that they were -- that’s an overstatement.  And there are lots and lots and lots of exceptions.  But I remember there was a man on the English faculty who was a master of a college at that time.  And he used to go out and play baseball with the students.  Some of his fellow faculty members sneered at him as a jock.  “Oh, he’s a jock!  Look at him in that uniform.”  Shall we stop it for a minute?  We have a guest. [Break in recording]\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  OK, I think we’re recording again.  I think when we stopped a little while back before our break, we were talking about some of the ways in which you found yourself trying to manage the situation after the strike and the aftermath.  One of the things that strikes me about the way you talk about managing -- first of all, it’s very people-oriented rather than function-oriented or systems-oriented.  That’s the first thing.  And that you talk a lot about -- in managing situations, it’s about trying to bring people together, find consensus, trying to communicate, and to include people in some way or another.  Which I know is now often talked about in management as a much more modern way of managing generally, and a much more creative way of getting the best out of your workforce.  But of course it also is those skills which are traditionally regarded as female.  And I wonder if you yourself were aware that the way that your management style, your management technique, was something that came easier to you because you were a woman?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tWith regard to the last point, I think it was a combination of things.  I had done a graduate degree in Student Personnel Administration.  I had learned a lot about empathetic listening and about being able to imagine what the other person was experiencing and feeling.  I mean, that was just very fundamental to the kind of, you know, Carl Rogers kind of thing that was being taught with regard to counseling.  So that was one element of it.  Then the second was, with that background then, I got into the situation at the University of Washington where first I was involved in trying to lead a group of people to assert their own status and find their voice and understand better what their productive role could be in the university library.  Then, bingo, I get into the administrative position.  I’ve already internalized the empathetic style and approach.  And I get this opportunity to participate in the Management Review and Analysis Program.  And that, plus my own experience of success in leading people \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=12000.0,12300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/42","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"by these means rather than directing them, it just confirmed that at least this was the style that worked for me.  And frankly, it was the style I believed in; that I thought that this was the way that grownups ought to deal with each other.  To me, it was the idea of, you know, the quote that’s around -- “There go my people and I must hurry because I am their leader.”  That was always very appealing to me.  I loved to see initiative in the people around me, and that’s why I hired them and so on.  Yeah, I think women are generally more empathetic than men to start with, and I think these other influences really confirmed that for me.  Was it a problem for other people?  Yes, it was.  And I had two or three subordinates, men -- excuse me for using the word subordinates.  Two or three people who reported to me, men, hated it.  And most particularly it was, I think, one of the principal sources of conflict between me and the Deputy University Librarian, who was in his position of deputy when I took over at Yale.  The way the organization worked, everybody else, all the other senior library administrators, everybody else, reported to me through the deputy. [sudden noises in room]  Sorry.  Yes, sorry.  No, you’re absolutely right.  Reported to me through the deputy.  And that wasn’t going to work for me.  And he was not happy about that.  He felt somehow displaced, and he was.  You know, these people all reported to me now directly, and he no longer was in control central.  And I had to do that because I was trying to change the outlook, culture, da da da da da.  And he also wanted me to hammer people.  And I wasn’t inclined to do that.  I wanted to try to work things out.  There were two significant instances of that.  One was the head of one of the departments who was not nice, in any sense of the word.  Had temper tantrums.  My predecessor had tried to fire him, and his faculty friends rallied around him, and so my predecessor was unsuccessful.  So eventually it was my turn.  My deputy said, “You’ll never do it.  Can’t do it.  Can’t be done.  Don’t waste your time on it.”  Got quite exercised that I was going to be spending my effort on this.  I did.  I got the guy shoved aside and eventually he resigned.  Meanwhile, he had gone to the faculty and they said, “You can go to the well once but not twice.  This is the second person who’s tried to fire you.”  So it held up.  So that was one where we had a really significant disagreement -- we both thought the guy ought to go, but my deputy didn’t want to even make the effort.  In another instance -- instead of using third-party words, I’m just going to go straight at it, and then take advantage of opportunities to edit -- there was a man named Ralph Franklin, who was the head of the Beinecke Library.  And Ralph had taken over the Beinecke from a person who had been really, really, really close to donors.  Close to certain of the faculty. \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=12300.0,12600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/43","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And Ralph, who was himself a scholar, worked very hard to clean up what was happening in the Beinecke Library.  And a lot of what was happening was just plain -- I mean, it wouldn’t have withstood a good audit.  And then he wanted to do some personnel improvements, and did; and did even more at my urging.  I mean, there were a couple of professionals that drove him crazy and I said, “We’re going to have to figure out how to change the situation.”  Well, the Beinecke has an unusual and uneasy relationship with the central library because it’s all separately funded.  There was some question as to whether the Beinecke owed money to the general library funds or not.  And it was murky.  My deputy was very exercised about the importance of Ralph repaying this money that he saw the Beinecke owing the general library.  And Ralph was beside himself when I brought up the issue because of the fairness and this wasn’t true, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.  The truth was impossible to ascertain.  So in the end I said to Jack, “We’re just going to drop it.  It’s not worth it.  In Ralph, we have somebody who is a genius at opening up the Beinecke’s resources to the campus and programming in a way that opens things up and getting his curators more involved with the faculty.  The work the man is doing is invaluable and just because he’s more comfortable financially than the rest of the library system, we’re not going to pressure him.”  Really infuriated Jack.  So that’s another example of where -- you know, Jack being the Deputy.  Here’s an example of where he wanted me to use a hammer where I wouldn’t do it.  And he really thought it was a weakness in me, that I didn’t do it.  And it would have been a disaster.  So that was one man in one library in one situation.  There have been other instances where my effort to deal with a situation or deal with a situation in a particular fashion, generally more circumspect, let’s say, has really annoyed colleagues and particularly male colleagues in the administration.  Well, you know, I was the boss, and in the final analysis, even the most inclusive and consensual of us has to be the boss every once in a while.  And that wasn’t, you know.  That was a hard lesson to take.  Jack eventually left the library administration, and we were better for it.  He was never forgiven by the strikers and the striker supporters for the kind of heavy-handed role he had played during the strike.  He was never able to really sign on to having a more open kind of dialogue.  He didn’t bring -- I’m sorry.  I’m getting off the subject.  But at any rate, yes, there were times when I encountered that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere there any of your female senior management \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=12600.0,12900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/44","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"that you had problems with that your approach was something that they find difficult to handle?  Or did you find -- I remember you saying earlier that obviously you couldn’t have friends amongst your staff, but maybe you found allies?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tIn the first instance, let me say there were female administrators and librarians at other levels who I helped to leave the organization, for one reason or another.  I’d like to think, in all cases, for ineffectiveness.  You know.  And I really think that’s right.  But there were some -- I mean, one assistant university librarian at UCSD -- the night before I had to lay it on her, I was awake all night.  I cried.  I was devastated.  Because what had happened to her was that she had been moved too far too fast.  And it wasn’t her fault.  But she was way over her head.  Now your question was about relationships. Of course, there were people who were loyalists.  There were those wonderful people who were loyalists who kept telling me I was wrong.  Yes.  I mean, you do, in an organization of that size, you build a cadre of people who share your value and your visions.  They are the ones who are most helpful in moving it along.  There are some who are just over here, tending to their own business and doing fine and that’s OK.  And then there are the ones who disagree and who are vehement about it, but continue to carry their weight and be effective.  And then there are the ones who don’t.  I think it was much more often the case that when I helped somebody find another job outside the organization, it was much more often the case of -- well, it was really always a case of what I perceived to be ineffectiveness.  Of course, I could have been doing a lot of rationalization.  But I had a couple of -- three real toughies, in fact all men in this instance that I lived with and worked with endlessly because they were worth it.  They caused trouble, they da da da da da.  Direct to my face, behind my back, go and say, “That’s not part of the deal.”  But they really made, overall, a positive contribution to the organization and to what we were trying to accomplish.  I got tougher as I went along.  I was a kind of a bleeding heart when I first got into administration.  And I really did think it was possible to do my job and be universally loved.  Bit by bit, minute by minute, experience by experience, I managed to come to terms with the fact that I will never be universally loved, appreciated, respected, admired, and followed.  That was OK.  That was OK.  But it took a conscious adjustment to toughen up.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat’s really interesting.  Because I know when you read the literature, one always gets the sense that women find it harder to do that.  Whether it’s nature or nurture or whatever, there’s this sense of needing to be needed, needed to be loved.  Which doesn’t always work for effective management.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tAnd it’s one of the things I really tried to mentor \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=12900.0,13200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/45","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"the women who came along after me.  One of the ways in which I tried to mentor them was to -- I mean, even as fundamental as trying to explain they shouldn’t smile so much.  Because, you know, in a lot of those settings, a smile was a sign of weakness.  So you want to go with who you are and the kind of management style that is comfortable to you, but at the same time, you know, you have to be conscious of the way in which you’re being perceived.  Make those decisions, at least.  Make those decisions as you go along.  It’s very hard to fire somebody when you’re smiling a big, broad smile at them.  Saying no.  I mean, a whole lot of administrative work, if you have any responsibility for any kind of resources, a whole lot of it is saying no.  Trying to say no in a way that leaves the person with a good feeling about themselves.  One of the things I learned fairly early on was if you’re going to say no to a department head about some resource allocation or promotion or whatever, you’ve got to help that department head develop a rationale that they can turn around and share with the people in the department.  If they just come back saying no, they look bad, they share their anger and resentment or they share the one that’s coming up.  There’s so much in management leadership and administration that is learned and it is a common fallacy that is common sense, because there’s a lot that is just plain -- for some people, it comes easier than others.  But there’s just plain a lot of skills that need to be learned.  And you learn them through friends, you learn them through experience, you learn them through classes.  You know, all the sorts of ways you do learn anything.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd learning though modeling?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tMm hmm.  Absolutely.  Absolutely.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt’s very interesting that you talk about how you would help people to learn these skills, as you’ve just said.  It just struck me how many of your senior team that you appointed over the years you were at Yale went on to bigger things; to being ULs like yourself in other places.  It is very, very striking how many of them did go elsewhere.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI think so, too, and that’s one of my great sources as pride as you can tell.  I mean, there was another person that I mentored very early in her career at SUNY Buffalo who came back to me again and again for help and advice who became highly successful University Librarian at Virginia.  I mean, Virginia of all places.  She developed a fantastic tech operation and scholarly texts and all this sort of thing in addition to just being very effective in her job.  So I also count her amongst my various successes.  And I’m very proud of that and always was thrilled by it.  It’s the nurturer, isn’t it, Florence?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWho knows.  Who knows.  I couldn’t possibly comment.(laughs)\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tSome men.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSome men do it, too.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tSome men are nurturers.  And I was helped by men like that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThis seems like maybe a sort of counter-intuitive question, but even as late as ’85 when you fetched up at Yale, there were very few women at the top, as you’ve talked about.  So that makes me wonder that \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=13200.0,13500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/46","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"if in some way your small number actually was an advantage,  because it was possible for you to get together, to bond together, and maybe to strategize as you did with the Director of the Peabody, the Director of the University Art Gallery.  When there are more women around and taken as a more normal part of the institution, that it might be more difficult for women to align with each other in that way.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tIt’s an interesting suggestion.  But I think... And maybe I saw a little of that in the professional world where there, you know, like three women who were university librarians.  That we would tend to come together.  I think so much of that is interpersonal dynamics.  That, as I was saying in my story earlier, the three of us were very different in temperament and background and experience and all that sort of the thing -- nevertheless, saw a common cause.  And the fourth did not at all.  So perhaps that’s the case.  I think Jan, the Budget Director, went out of her way for me because I was a woman.  And I spent time with her and cultivated the relationship.  She didn’t have many peers, many people to bond with.  You could be on to something.  I’m not sure.  I’m not sure because it feels still to me so personal.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tLooking back on your career at Yale, what do you think was your biggest challenge?  Of the many challenges that were put before you when you first stepped over the threshold.  \r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tOh, I think changing the nature of the organization.  I think changing the internal dynamic and freeing the entrepreneurs, opening up the decision-making process.  I mean, I can’t tell you -- I mean I could, but we’d need 17 more hours -- what it was like getting the provost office to finally agree to commit to the kind of expenditure we made -- we had to make to bring the technology in.  And that required, you know, months of work with faculty, with people all over the campus, to help people recognize the inevitability and the importance and the particularities of that decision.  That was the period when Bill Nordhaus [as Provost]was in place.  I remember he brought -- we’d had two faculty committees look at this and recommend it.  I can’t remember at what stage, but we had -- and I’m not answering your question but I’ll get back to it -- he had -- I remember Sid --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAltman?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tThe Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry.  Was it Sid?  Altman.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAltman, yes.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tHe was Dean of Yale College.  And he was there.  And he didn’t have a whole lot of patience with a lot of silliness.  Nor did Nordhaus, the assistant provosts, and some of the other deans who were there.  And so Nordhaus asked me for a justification.  And then what sort of commission ought to review this.  And Sid spoke up and said, “I don’t understand why we’re \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=13500.0,13800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/47","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"here.”  He said, “The whole proposal has been thoroughly documented.  It’s been vetted by two faculty committees.  What do you need us for?  It’s time to get going on this.”  He may be difficult sometimes, Sid -- and he always was my friend.  Sidney.  I mean, that was really a tough undertaking, and it changed the dynamic in the library.  But nothing is as hard as changing the way people think about each other and what they’re doing and why they’re working and what their role is in the organization.  And that they might just have more freedom and control if they reached for it.  Nothing was as hard as that.  Fairly early on, one of our department heads, a faculty child, and I encountered each other -- one of the library department heads -- in the parking lot.  And we had just sent him, as part of a new program for training, out to something that was a spin-off of MRAP.  We sent him off to Stanford to this training program.  I said, “How did it go?”  He said, “That was really interesting.”  He said, “Not just what we learned in the program, but what they’re doing at Stanford.  They have committees of librarians that are getting together to review policies or to talk about changing programs.  They have faculty and librarian committees looking at this and that.”  He says, “It’s amazing.”  And I said, “Well, you know, that’s what we’re trying to do here at Yale.”  “Oh.”  He stopped in his tracks and he said, “It would never work at Yale.”  But it did.  But it did.  And that was the big [challenge] because once you have the organization functioning in a whole different sort of way, then whether it’s the technology or it’s fighting the renovation fire or it’s the preservation or it’s the this or the that, you’ve got a much broader base of people believing in it and making it happen than you do, when you have that narrow, hierarchical structure.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you were fighting on all fronts, really, to try to change the institution in a very fundamental way.  That is a job of more than five years, so what happened when you came to your fifth year review?  It’s not a -- it’s a five year contract, isn’t it?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tIn effect.  Although we all know that it could be terminated by either side at any time.  In fact, I talked to Benno [Schmidt, President of Yale, 1986-1992] about this when I was reappointed for the second five years.  Whether I should just have an open-ended agreement or whether it should be this kind of five year agreement.  He, and I think wisely, wanted it to be a five year agreement because then that forced the issue once every five years instead of every day.  And when people were calling for the resignation of the university librarian, it was possible to say, “We’ll take this up at the time of the five year review” instead of “We’ll take it up tomorrow.”  So it was a series of five year agreements with a clear understanding that it could be terminated at any time.  (laughs) I had indirect lines -- I mean, you had to at Yale.  One of the ways I contrasted UCSD and Yale was at UCSD, you needed a plug changed in the wall, and you had to put in a ton of paperwork and wait for a long time, but you got the thing \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=13800.0,14100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/48","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"changed and you got the right piece in there. At Yale, you had to cozy up to the guy that had the piece of equipment.  It was run, the university and maybe still is, was run so much more on who you know and what your relationship was to them than by any kind of normal, fairly simple, fairly efficient bureaucratic process.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo it was a very personal place?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.  There’s sunshine laws [in California].  It had to be open, it had to be on the books, all that sort of thing.  Anyway, where was I?  I was trying to get something done --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWe were talking about the beginning of your five year review.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tOh, yes.  OK.  So, you know, as happens with everything, I developed my leaky channels to what was going on in the review.  The one that I liked best was -- one of our most distinguished professors was Peter Gay.  Peter Gay was extremely annoyed with the library for a whole variety of reasons, not the least of which is that we closed the cloak room where people could check their things.  He had to leave them out, generally, and someone had come along and stolen his muffler.  I was very sympathetic, but on the other hand I felt that we needed to invest our resources in different places.  OK.  So Peter Gay is one of the people who gets appointed to the review committee.  The people who were appointed to the review committee were not all together carefully vetted before -- but anyway.  So one of my sources told me there was a point at which Peter Gay said to one of the former provosts who was testifying, “Well now, was it this librarian who fired my wife or was it the previous librarian?”  Well, it turned out it had been the previous librarian and she had been on some contractual appointment in Manuscripts and Archives.  She kept taking things home for Peter all the time.  That was only one of the thousand and one things that were going on.  And they didn’t continue her contract there.  But this colored the discussion for some people as to whether I was the one who closed the cloakroom or I was the one who fired the wife or whatever it might be.  And then I was a little uppity.  I got the feedback about that, too.  I was a little uppity.  That I would sometimes argue with some of the faculty.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh.  So you weren’t assertive, you were uppity?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tI’ll tell you something that was unbelievable.  I once hung up on somebody because I was trying to have a discussion with him and he was shouting at me and he was rude.  And I’d had enough.  So the next time I see him, it’s in a faculty gathering.  And he prides himself on his charm.  He schmoozes over with charm.  Said, “You know what Penny did?  She hung up on me.  Can you imagine?”  You know, but with the sting in it.  I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to get distracted by that.  But, I mean, there just long knives out.  For certain people, for their own reasons.  I got through it, through the reappointment process, and I was invited to serve another five years.  But it was sort of understood that the president had a role in that decision.  [Noises] Excuse me, I’m clicking things again.  That it might not have been a unanimous recommendation from the committee. \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=14100.0,14400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/49","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So then -- it must have been Rick.  Five years later -- and I had a lot of allies by now, but I still had the same old, same old.  And Rick [Levin] called me in and said that it was time for my review and that he had understood from Henry [Henry Broude - adviser to Yale presidents from 1972 to 1992] that the appointment of the review committee had not really gone well the last time, had not been -- so he would like my recommendations of who are the members of the review committee.  I said, “I’m just going to have to think about that.”  By that time, both of my knees, which were arthritic, were so bad that it was all I could do to walk across campus to a meeting in the building across the way,   or to walk to the parking lot to get my car.  My back was so bad -- which I later realized was stress -- I could hardly move.  I went home and I said to Buck, “I just don’t think it’s worth going through” -- oh, and Rick had also said to me, “You should know that there have been some people complaining about you.”  Yes, I don’t doubt that for a second.  (laughs) So we thought about it and I said, “Let’s just stop it.”  So I went back to Rick and told him he didn’t need to go through this process, that I wanted to retire.  And I will say that within three months after I retired, all my back problems went away.  My knee problem didn’t until I’d had my surgery, but all the back problems went away and it was clearly the stress of what I was doing.  And it was time for somebody else to get in the fight, you know?  I had fought a good fight.  I had accomplished a lot.  I was very proud of that.  I loved the place.  I loved the people that I loved.  I was proud of it.  And it was just time to go.  And that was a very good decision, one I have never regretted at all.  Except that it would have been fun to work with Alison.  But, you know.  Alison would have had to be a Provost and I would have had to be University Librarian and we would have had our conflicts because, after all, the budget is the budget is the budget.  And my successor actually, in my view -- who is a man -- played the cooperative camper way too much and gave up resources that I never, never would have given up.  And that made it easier for the provost, but it wasn’t so good for the library and the people that the library was trying to serve.  So, you never know who’s going to be what kind of player on what kind of team.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou retired from Yale because, basically, you’d had enough?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou were tired, you were exhausted.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes.  I was in pain.  I was stressed.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt was literally a punishing time for you.  But you didn’t actually retire?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tNo, in the sense that I -- you mean that I took consultant jobs and went around on to Berkeley and so on?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tWell, you take consultant jobs because you happen to be asked and because you get to New York or wherever it was that I got to.  You know, little $25,000 additional seems worth it at the time.  So I did that for a while.  The big deal was when Berkeley called and they were in deep difficulty and needed someone to -- and there were all kinds of conflict with the faculty, and there were all kinds of conflict between the faculty and the library, and there were all kinds of conflict in the library.  And I said --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo it’s rather similar.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tHey, I know how to do that!  So I talked for a while, and they made it as lucrative as they possibly could.  You know, picked up all of my expenses.  Commuting -- weekly commuting expenses and car and apartment and all of that sort of thing, and paid me \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=14400.0,14700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/50","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"the max they could under University of California  regulations.  And I actually enjoyed it because, in fact, I didn’t need them.  They needed me.  Number one.  Number two, I had learned a lot about faculty relations.  And one of the things that I learned is that you really, really try to tell the truth and have your colleagues on the faculty understand the truth straight out, rather than trying to dodge it or fob it off on some other office or anything like that.  I must say, the faculty at Berkeley loved me,  more than the administration.  I mean, they were so blown away by somebody being direct and honest and collegial with them that we had a wonderful time.  I loved being loved by the faculty.  And I really enjoyed that.  I didn’t mince any words with the architect’s office or the personnel office or anybody else.  You know, “No, you can’t do that.  You’ve got to do this because.”  I didn’t have to worry about who was after my back, like I always, always had to worry at Yale.  Because what’s the worst they could do, fire me?  OK, I’m ready to go home!  You know?  So it was a kind of a little dollop of whipped cream on top of my career that I was able to[have] and I really had the skills to take into that situation.  So I really was able to make a difference even in six months, in terms of the way people felt about each other and themselves and what they were trying to do.  So that was fun.  That was fun.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo how did Yale change you?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tHow did Yale change me?  [long pause] Yale almost destroyed my confidence in myself.  And then enabled me, through no fault of its own, to rebuild it; to build it anew, so that I came away from Yale knowing who I was, valuing who I was because I’d been through this sort of fire storm of experience.  It deepened my -- I mean this is funny to say given all the things I’ve said, but it deepened my love of academe and a great research university and the aspirations which, at its best, it has.  And the kinds of people that are there.  And my goodness, what a privilege it was to spend time talking with, particularly, the older faculty, but many of the younger as well -- and the students.  Just to see those minds at work and one of the things the library can do is bring people together who don’t know each other.  Because they come together around what seems to be a library issue.  And they would never, even in the faculty senate or whatever, have came round.  And to sit there and listen to them as they talk about what they’re investigating -- and they find the common ground -- is just -- I mean, intellectually that’s just thrilling.  And you can see them sort of sparking off each other.  So it enlivened my appreciation of the whole process.  It aged me.  I managed to pop back, but I felt worn out when I left Yale.  So it wasn’t a permanent change, but it was a substantial change.  It’s really quite interesting to look at pictures of Bart when he took over the presidency and Bart when he left the presidency of Yale.  I mean, again, I’m not comparing my load to what \r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=14700.0,15000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281/transcript/31922/annotation/51","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"someone in the presidency had, but it’s those kinds of jobs that age you, take the snap out of your step at the same time that you glory in them.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you think that the challenges you had at Yale were peculiar or distinctive to Yale, or were they more general?  Sort of basically the same sort of challenge you’d find in any major academic library?\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tBoth.  There were some things that were very Yale, I think.  There were certain similarities between Yale and Berkeley.  The faculty [are] extremely sure of themselves as being the best in the field.  You know, that kind of thing.  But Berkeley is a community set within a much larger community, and people disappeared from campus, and the Yale community, as we had been talking about before, is so limited, so closely bound to each other, that you dare not gossip.  (laughs)  You’ve been around for a long time and know where all the bodies are; because you’re going to offend somebody’s ex-wife’s child or something.  So as a community, from a sociological point of view, I think Yale was distinctive.  As an academic community, I think the fact for me that the sciences, as important as they were, played a lesser role than the arts and the humanities, made Yale a different place from any place else I had known.  And yet, like I said, I went to Berkeley -- I waltzed in there because I had had all this experience at Yale.  And so I really recognized most of what I was encountering.  Well, I’d also been in the University of California system at San Diego, so I had both those experiences and was able to move in.  That all said, Yale will always be for me a one-of-a-kind experience and one that was worth it; was really, really worth it.  I wanted to be the best and I got an opportunity to be in what I thought was the absolutely best academic library position in the country.  Harvard is so convoluted that it really is not of the same kind.  And I did a good job.  And I left it stronger than I found it.  And I left it with a kind of an affection that I really had for no place else that I worked.  Probably because it was so crazy, you know?  You love your crazy relatives! (laughter)  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat’s a good place to stop.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tYes, I guess it is.  Crazy (inaudible).  That is a good place to stop.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThank you very much, Penny.\r\n\nPENNY ABELL:\tThank you very much.  I really appreciate -- as I said before, I really appreciate this opportunity to talk about it because I really haven’t talked about it in any kind of coherent way.  Haven’t thought about it.  This was not terribly coherent, but you kept it more coherent than I’ve been otherwise.  And now -- are we off?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh, just let me close down here.  \r\n[END OF FILE]\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48976/file/122281#t=15000.0,15335.62776"}]}]}]}