SRU ORAL HISTORY
"SLIPPERY ROCK UNIVERSITY IN THE SIXTIES"
INTERVIEWEE:

DR. HELEN A. KNIERIM

INTERVIEWER:

LEAH M. BROWN

24 MAY 1993

B:

Usually we start by asking a person why you're here.
you come to Slippery Rock?

When?

How did

After that you're on your

own.
K:

Okay.

Well, I came to Slippery Rock in the fall of 1973, twenty

years ago this coming fall.

I came here because I was teaching

at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, and they had been
through very traumatic times.

The University raised the out-

of-state tuition, and they dropped a couple of thousand students,
and they released all non-tenured faculty including myself,
including the men's head basketball coach who had won the state
championship.

It was a clean sweep, and so we were all released.

We had one more year to go, but I knew it was not going to be
a fun place to teach.
for a job.

So I really was not looking energetically

But Anne Griffiths and Pat Zimmerman called me

because I had been in graduate school with them at Iowa, and
Namiko Ikeda was teaching here and she had returned to Japan and
they needed somebody to teach in the biomechanics and anatomy
area, and they wanted to know if I was interested in changing
jobs.

So, of course, all these

(2)

K:

things happened at the same time.

I said, well, I really

wasn't looking for a job yet, but I was going to be the next
year, and I might as well come out and find out what it's like.
So I came out, and checked up on Slippery Rock and came here
to teach.

Ironically, I had been here to visit because I had

known Namiko for many, many years.

I had been to graduate

school with her back in the early 1960's and I had been here
to visit her.

So I had been on this campus before, never realiz-

ing that I might come here to teach. And when I did come here
to teach, I really did not expect to stay very long.

I thought

I might stay about three or four years and then go back to
the midwest which is where my family's from, and where my home
roots are, but I stayed like a lot of people. A lot of people
did not intend to stay where they were in the 1970's, but the
jobs sort of shut down, and people stayed where they were, and
then after a while people didn't move.

I think that's the

story you will hear from a lot of faculty who came here in the
early 1970's.

Especially those who came from another part of the

country other than the east.
B:

And things were getting better here, at least as far as benefits
and income.

K:

That was the first year of the contract, I think.

It had been

negotiated the year before I got here so, it was the first year
of the contract.

The University had been through some trials, I

(3)

K:

think, from the stories I heard.
to Slippery Rock.
kid me.

So anyway that's how I came

In fact, when I took this job, people used to

They said, is there really a Slippery Rock?

I hope so.

I signed the contract.

laugh about Slippery Rock.

I said,

so the midwesterners still

They're not sure that it really

exists.
B:

How was the department when you came?

K:

When I came here, well, I think the physical education
department at Slippery Rock has always been known nationally for
being a very strong department.

It still is known nationally for

being a strong department, and we have gone up and down here.

We

know how weak and how strong we are, but externally the people
out there in the profession have always thought of Slippery Rock
as a very strong professional school in physical education.
it was at that time, too.
here.
people.

There were some really good people

There still are good people here.
So it was a powerful program.

exercise science area.

And

They're different
Very strong in the

Very good labs at that time, and of

course, we're a hundred times better right now.

But even in the

early 1970's we had good equipment, good people, good curriculum.
It was a good professional move to come here, I think.
department has changed a lot.

The

When I came here, the whole

emphasis was teacher education, as it was in most physical
education programs around the country, but in the middle 1970's
the physical education jobs began to disappear in the public

(4)

K:

schools because again the teachers weren't moving.

The teachers

were hired into jobs no different than at the university level,
and so they were all just staying put.

In fact, those are the

teachers that are getting ready to retire right now.

so we're

about to go through another one of these cleansing times when
there's a large group of people that are going to retire. But
it kind of runs in cycles.

So we could see the handwriting on

the wall, and there were a few of us who decided that we had
better expand our curriculum to get into some of the new
emerging fields that were tangentially related to physical
education teacher ed.

One of those was the exercise science

area, and at this same time there was the increase in interest in
fitness, and Y.W.C.A.'s and Y.M.C.A.'s were developing strong
exercise programs.

Corporations were beginning to develop

wellness and fitness programs. Hospitals are more so now.
Hospitals were a little bit later in that development.

We were

one of the first schools in the country to really develop alternate tracks for physical education people. We started the
exercise science program and the sport management program that
were two alternate tracks that were developed in the late 1970's.
And it was a good thing because it saved our department.

Our

enrollment was dropping rapidly in teacher ed., and the enrollment in these other fields then began to pick up because students
could see that they could get jobs in those areas.

A lot of the

(5)

K:

other physical education departments around the country did the
same thing and many of them put athletic training in there, but
athletic training at Slippery Rock grew out of the Allied
Health department, which is a little bit unusual.

Many of the

other physical education departments in the country have
athletic training as part of physical education.

And in

the 1970's, in fact, a student could go either through physical
education or through allied health into athletic training which
is not really real smart, I think. So it's wiser now to have it
focused into one department which is allied health.
expanded the curriculum.
programs.

So we

We also developed a lot of outdoor

Outdoor adventure programs strted in the late 1970's.

Marie Wheaton was one of the ones that really helped get all of
those going.
B:

Did you have support for these programs?

K:

For the expansion of the programs?

B:

Yes.

K:

Yes, we did.

We had support for it, I think, internally and

within our department. There were a few faculty who said, oh,
this is going to mean the end of teacher education.

But we

progressed ahead and did it with the majority of the faculty
supporting it.

The top administration was not supportive.

When

Reinhard was president, there are all kinds of stories about how,

(6)

K:

in fact they have been verified, he really was almost embarrassed
that he was president of a university with such a strong and
nationally known physical education program.

And we have

documentated the fact that he told the admissions people not to
distribute brochures on the physical education department
because he did not want to recruit more people.
to see this program grow.

He did not want

We didn't know this for maybe seven

or eight years, and I didn't believe it when I first heard it.
And then it has since been verified that in fact he did this.
So there were some problems in the development of our program,
not so much because we were being innovative but because the
top administration did not want physical education to grow.

But

he didn't succeed in holding it back because it continued to
grow.

The fact that we broadened our field turned out to be a

good thing.
that.

The whole profession nationally has done precisely

And every major physical education department in the

country has expanded to do that.

And, in fact now, twenty years

later, there are some schools, some of the big universities, the
big ten universities for instance, some of them tried to split.
The exercise science became so strong and so large and so very
scientifically oriented, it has in fact moved away from being
a support unit for teacher ed.
oriented.

It has become very much research

What they tried to do for instance at Michigan was to

split physical education teacher ed. into the education college,

(7)

K:

and left exercise science in whatever college it's in.
work.

It didn't

They couldn't stand alone because they needed each other.

And about three or four years later, Michigan brought them back
again into the same department.
bad times at Slippery Rock.

We have been through several

Because of the friction among the

faculty and the size of the department, it was perceived by the
dean that if the department was divided that we would be a
smaller unit and we would be able to focus more on what we were
doing, and we would therefore get along with each other a
little bit better.

And the faculty, the core of senior faculty,

have argued very strongly opposing the division of the department. I totally agree with this group that dividing up the
faculty and putting them in small groups is not going to get
some of the people to work together. That's not how you get
people to work together.

So we have really been opposed to

the division of the department, but that's something that comes
back to haunt us every once in a while. About every three or
four years we have to face it again about this department's
too big.

For a long time, it was the biggest department on

the campus.

Elementary ed. has sinced passed us, I think, now.

They passed us maybe a couple of years ago.

Allied Health

passed us maybe last year when they added all the pre-P.T.'s
(pre-physical therapy).

But bigness is not our concern.

more interested in quality.

We're

So anyway, I don't know how I got

(8)

K:

off on that tangent, but the department changed a lot in the
1970's. We changed in curriculum.
include these other four areas.
We have exercise science.

The curriculum expanded to
First, we have teacher ed.,

We have sport management. The fourth

area was kinesiotherapy, and in the late 1970's, early 1980's,
Dr. Aebersold actually is the one. When he was department chair
he brought kinesiotherapy to Slippery Rock.

Another faculty

member who has since retired was supposed to be developing the
kineseotherapy program, and he didn't really get it done.

So

there were students in it, but the program wasn't developed.

so

they came to the department curriculum committee which I was on,
and they said, okay, we've got to do something.
develop this program.

Who's going to

So and so hasn't done his job.

Somebody

else is going to have to do it, and they all looked at me
because kinesiotherapy is closely related to gerontology and I
had started to work in that area. And it's also strong in
exercise science which was my other background.

So it was

a natural for me to step into. I didn't even know what kinesiotherapy was. I had to go look up the word.
B:

Tell us what it is.

K:

Kinesiotherapy is a four-year degree program, national
certification program, national organization.

It's very much

similar to physical therapy and occupational therapy except
that, it's easier to say what they can't do.

A kinesiotherapist

(9)

K:

is not qualified to use modalities.

Heat therapy, water therapy,

electrical therapy, and things of that sort.
training in that area.

They have no

It's not a whole lot different than

teaching physical education, because what you're doing is teaching people how to walk again.

Somebody who's had a stroke and

has to learn how to walk again, you develop strength and flexibility programs for people who have bad backs, bad knees, or
whatever it is, whatever their disability.

It's a rehab kind of

a job, but you're working with large muscles in strength and
flexibility development and movement capabilities.

So they may

take somebody who has Parkinson's disease, and they have a
shuffling walk, and they'll teach them how to walk better again
if they can.

It's primarily, the jobs are primarily located in

the V.A. hospitals. So anyhow, Dr. Aebersold got the program
started, and then it floundered, and then I was given that task.
So then we built the program up. About two years ago we had 70
students in it and then the pre-P.T.'s started to come to this
campus in droves.
B:

That's pre-physical therapy.

K:

Pre-physical therapy.

They all wanted to jump into the K.T.

program because it was a natural lead-in to this program.

But

as in many other things in our department, nobody else gave a
hoot about it, and nobody else really understood it except for
Bob Gandee who we had since hired about three years ago in
gerontology.

He was very interested.

He could see the benefits

(10)
K:

of it. And Bob Arnhold who works in adapted P.E., he also could
see it, but his hands were full pretty much with the programs
he was running.
it.

But the other people really didn't understand

They are not supportive of the program. And so about two

years ago I said I was going to retire, and we had to make
a decision on who was going to take over this program because
we were continuing to admit students, and the program was growing
and growing rapidly.

So I was on sabbatical for the semester,

and while I was gone, off campus, the department voted to drop
to program.
So they did.

Phase it out.

They voted to phase out this program.

We are phasing it out right now.

There still

are students. One talked to me today as a matter of fact.
She's in exercise science.
still a kinesiotherapy.

She said, I sure wish there was

That's the program I really want.

I talked to her a little bit about how she can do this.
all of the K.T. students have found jobs.

So

But

As long as there

are V.A. hospitals there will be jobs for kinesiotherapists.
Physical therapists in Pennsylvania have furthered developed
their P.T. practice act which really limits not only K.T.'s
but it also limits athletic trainers, and they are trying to
control the job market, and keept it for P.T.'s in Pennsylvania.
B:

Which means a master's?

K:

No.

They just have spelled out that the person has to

be a physical therapist to do all of these rehab jobs. In

(11)

K:

reality, there probably won't be enough P.T.'s to fill these
jobs. Only time will tell.

History will tell.

listens to this tape twenty years from now.

When somebody

But in Ohio there

are a lot of kinesiotherapists and they all are able to find
jobs.

The way the demographics look there are going to be so

many older people who some type of therapy.
to do it all.

P.T.'s don't have

P.T.'s are desperately needed to do the evalua-

tions and to do all the paperwork and do the modalities and
all that sort of stuff.

The teaching of the basic motor skills

are things that the four-year degree person certainly can do.
You don't need a master's degree to do it.

So it's our feeling

that there are jobs for people at each level.

That's a big

disappointment to me that the program is being phased out.
But anyway it's done.

It's past.

about five students left now.

It's over.

We have only

In the spring of 1993 we only

have about five students, and two years ago we had 70.
that tells you what's happened.
groups of them.

So

We have graduated very large

But it had grown so much it was out of hand.

It was more than I could handle.
else was interested in helping.

I needed some help and nobody
So that's why we are now in our

department down to three tracks, exercise science, sport management, and teacher ed.

The teacher ed., when it used to dominate,

we used to have five or six hundred teacher ed.

Now we have

about 250 teacher ed. and we have 250 to 300 of the others.

So

(12)
K:

you can see they have really filled in and the department has
maintained the same size, between five and six hundred students,
undergraduate students. But it's a totally different emphasis.

B:

How has it worked out in those programs?

Has there been a

problem with women getting an equal break?
K:

I think the women, as far as our department goes, the gender
conflicts were in the seventies and the early eighties.
was a lot of gender conflict.

There

There was a lot of misunder-

standing, and historically around the country that's true for
physical education departments.

In the sixties, physical

education departments were separated, men and women, and
philosophically they were separate.

They weren't only

separated physically, they were separated philosophically.
The women tended to be much more, even in athletics, what
we called athtletics then, women were much more educationally
focused.

Far more focused on the learning aspects.

The men's

athletics tend to be winning, high achievement for a small
group of people.

Women tended to try to emphasize more

participation for a broader base.

That led to a lot of

philosophical conflicts which were gender related.

I don't

know if it was because it was the way we were raised.

The

way we the women, came up through physical education programs,
ourselves.

Now we have a new generation of young people

coming into the field who have gone through the co-educational

(13)
K:

physical education department so you don't see that big
difference.

So there was a difficult transition time for all

men and women in physical education where we were all coaches.
That's another big difference now.

Not everybody's a coach.

But in the sixties and seventies, we were all coaches, men and
women alike.

Nobody went into physical education without also

being a coach, and so we had to coach and we had to teach, and
we had two different philosphies.

And in the early seventies,

these were all forced to meld into one department, and it was
major conflict.

Because in all cases, very, very few exceptions,

men were put into the leadership role, and men dominated then
the programs.

So the women became sort of second class

citizens and our philosophy, we mumbled about it in the back
ground, but it was sort of lost.

At the time, the early seven

ties, when AIAW was developed as the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, it was to try to maintain the
women's athletic educational philosophy. AIAW lasted until the
late seventies until NCAA took over, but the fascinating thing is
that now, with the pressure of the Presidents Commission connected with NCAA, NCAA is coming back closer to the educational
philosophy that AIAW developed in the seventies. It's a fascinating thing to watch.

So it's being forced upon the men because of

(14)
K:

all of the bad stuff that's happened related to recruiting and
the win at all cost, and the terribly high expenditures in
athletics. It's beginning to take on a more sensible view which
is what AIAW proposed back in the seventies.

B:

Now what caused that change in the NCAA?

K:

The Presidents Commission is the one that's supposedly
causing the change.

The presidents are saying, whoa.

You

know, these are educational institutions running athletics.
We are not professional teams.

We have to get some more

sense into athletics, and so the presidents are blowing the
whistle.

Just in the last four or five years, the presidents

of the institutions have taken a more active role in NCAA.
They weren't very active for a long, long time, and NCAA
ran wild, from a woman's perspective they ran wild.

I was

fortunate to be a part of the AIAW national board at the
time we had to close our doors, and it was a very sad time,
but NCAA had all the bucks.

We were one year away from a

national television contract for women's basketball. If we
had gotten it, we would have had the big bucks to fight NCAA in
the courts, and keep them from taking over the women's athletics,
but we couldn't do it. We just did not have the money and the
time.

So it's fascinating to watch that whole evolution of

sport, and how it has changed, and how maybe it's going to begin

(15)
K:

to come back again.

But it was exciting being a part of the AIAW

in the early days when it was developing and watching it
grow.

Unfortunately, I was on the last executive board

that had to sit there and say, guess we're going to have
to close.

If NCAA starts to run women's competition, we

can't run women's competition too, because the presidents
and AD's (athletic directors) are all men. They will go
with NCAA and they won't go with AIAW and therefore we won't
have anybody competing in our championships. They'll be forced to
go to the NCAA because most institutions couldn't belong to two
organizations.
time.

So the women's athletics really lost out at that

The NCAA promised all kinds of things for women, and they

did not deliver, and the major sports were the only ones that
really benefited. Women's athletics took a big downhill slide
after NCAA took over.
B:

That was about when?

K:

That was in the late seventies, early eighties.

Now things

are beginning to come back again although it's still not
equitable.
optimistic.

It's still bad.

There are some people that are

I tend to be the eternal optimist.

I tend to

think we've come a long way since the early seventies, but
we've got a long way to go.
B:

Give some examples.

A long, long way to go in equity.

(16)
K:

I'll give you one.

I use this in class a lot because the

students just can't believe this.

I was coaching tennis

at the University of Wisconsin, and it wasn't any different
at Slippery Rock I'm sure, in the early seventies, 1971,
1972. If I needed any athletic training supplies, I would
go to the athletic training door which was kept shut.
Women were not allowed inside the athletic training room.
I would knock on the door.
inches.

The door would open about two

Yes, they would say.

I'd say, please may I have

tape or something, whatever it was I needed.
door would shut.

Okay.

The

I would have to stand in the hallway

and wait, and then they would bring me whatever it was I
needed.

Open up the door two or three inches.

I never

saw the inside of the athletic training room for the three
years that I was there.
the United States.

I think that was common all over

So it's very refreshing now.

Then I

came to Slippery Rock and then in the late seventies I
was coaching tennis and I could go in, actually, physically,
walk into the athletic training room. So the women were not
allowed to have anything like that.
discriminated against.

In schedules.

more schedules than we did.

Very, very greatly
The men played far

We did not have uniforms.

I

remember one time we borrowed a bunch of sewing machines,
and we made our own uniforms.

Men's teams, the University

(17)

K:

was buying uniforms for the men's teams.

We made our uniforms.

But we had to do that. If we wanted to put a team on the field we
had to do that.
B:

And that was after Title IX.

K:

Well, this was right at the time of Title IX.

Now when Title IX

came, that's why I said in about 1973 things started to change,
but isn't it a shame that it took legislation to get people to
change.

That's what's so sad.

people change.

It takes legislation to make

Because the attitudes didn't change, and a lot

of the men resented the fact that they were forced to give
women some money for athletic teams, and they were forced to
let women be on some of the key committees.
want to do this.

So the attitudes.

but the attitudes didn't change.

They did not

The legislation was there

There was a lot of bitterness

in the physical education departments and Slippery Rock was
no different than that at all.

Many of the women were very

professionally active, and not very many of the men were.
The men were very active at a local level, but not at a
national level in the seventies.

There was a lot of

resentment from that standpoint.
B:

Men resented what?

K:

The activity.

The professionalness, I think, and the activity

of the women, and how dare they advance, and how dare they do
all these things.

It was a real problem.

With Reinhard

(18)
K:

as president, during the time he was president at Slippery
Rock, it was very much a down time for women and minorities
in my mind.

I can still remember one faculty meeting when

Ann Bicknell, who was a feisty lady here, in fact she helped
start the gerontolgy program, and was really a great lady,
I think, she tried to ask a question.
terribly in front of the whole faculty.

He put her down
Then a young black

man down in front tried to follow up with another question
and he wouldn't even talk to him.

Wouldn't recognize him.

Any women who dared speak up, and I did speak up at some of
the athletic meetings.

It reached a point where he wouldn't

talk to me, and he wouldn't even speak to me in a group.
had an athletic advisory committee at that time.

We

We were raising

some questions about the club sports, and were they legally
covered with insurance, and who was looking after these club
sports.

He was a difficult person to be working under if you

were a woman or a person of color.

It was not a pleasant time.

Fortunately we've had some good presidents since then who made
up for Reinhard, and he is soon forgotten.
B:

You said earlier that when the women's and men's programs were
integrated here, that of course men got all the top positions
because those were appointed by the administration?

K:

I'm not sure if they were appointed or elected but the men
dominated so they could elect anybody in that they wanted to.

(19)
K:

There were fewer women, and so the men could outvote the women.
When I first came here, quite often the votes were along gender
lines, almost always. You were voting for committee people.

I

remember one meeting we tried to get some women on some committees, the key committees, you don't care about social committees,
but the tenure committee and the promotion committee.
one meeting very distinctly.

I remember

We tried to nominate some women,

and we were outvoted, and they were all men that were put on
there.
B:

Has that changed?

K:

Yes, that has changed now.

B:

Because there are more women or because the men have changed?

K:

The younger people have come in and have changed.
change now in the, I think, in the attitudes.

There's been a

I think we're

past the gender conflict, and now I think there are new factions
within the department. We are not without problems. In fact,
some of the internal personel problems as department chair
were probably, they are absolutely the most difficult things
to deal with.

I've tried to figure out exactly what it is.

I'm not sure I know yet, and I tend to agree with some department
members that the differences are not so much with age. Although
some universities are showing and The Chronicle of Higher
Education points out that some of the internal personnel
conflicts are with age.
younger people.

The older people versus the

But in our department I don't think it's

(20)

K:

age.

I think it's the professionally active people versus

the inactive people.

One department chair workshop I attended

a couple of years ago down at IUP [Indiana University of Pennsylvania].

They called it RIPPS.

The retired in place people.

I think that's a good way to explain it.

There are a group of

people right now who seem to be very resentful of the people
who are very professionally active. The professionally active
people are of different ages, and they are both men and women.
So there isn't the gender conflict.

I guess I'd like to think

that we're past it. There's a group of people in the physical
education department that are very active. They're doing very
exciting things.
even.

They're active nationally, internationally

And there's another group of people who are content to let

the world go by.

That's okay. They do their job.

job at what they do.

They don't change anything.

They do a good
They're not

change artists at all. And they just keep plugging along and
teaching their classes. They do a good job of teaching their
classes.

Then there's another smaller group of people who appear

to be resentful. Theye disruptive whenever they get a chance.
They are working against these professionally active people, and
it's created some real tensions in the department. It's very
destructive, instead of working together.

At least the people

that are over here in this other group who are content to teach

(21)
K:

what they're doing, those folks at least are not destructive.
They do their job. Leave me alone. Let me teach my classes.
Let me do my job. Don't rock the boat.

Let's not do anything

too drastic.
B:

Don't change too much.

K:

Don't change too much.

The paradigms are not going to shift

for these people unless it's made very palatable and very
easy, and they don't have to worry too much about it.
will stay like that probably until they retire.

They

I've come

to the conclusion there's no way to change those people unless
you can find one simple little motivating fact to get them
going.

But they're going to be very happy over there doing

what they want to do.

And the movers and shakers over here are

going to move ahead and they're going to be the change artists
in that department.
B:

The ones who really resent and resist, is that an older group?

K:

Some of them are older, yes.

They are older.

They are.

It's

just we're talking about three or four people, and they are
making it very difficult for some of the people.
B:

So eventually they'll be gone though, and the new people that
you're recruiting and searching for, are they more, I hope, more
research oriented, more professionally active?

K:

I hope so. I really hope so. But we are losing positions rapidly ,

(22)

K:

and part of the problem is that they are going to the
Allied Health department.

I'm not supposed to say that.

None of us has these jobs, you know.

So when somebody retires

from Slippery Rock then that position becomes open for
Slippery Rock, but because Allied Health has brought in all
the pre-p.t.'s, when they come in they come into Allied Health.
Then once in Allied Health they decide they don't want to go
there, then they spread out across the University.

Allied Health

looks like they've got this huge enrollment of students which
they do on paper.

It looks wonderful.

B:

So they get the position?

K:

They get the positions, and we're losing them.

We haven't

dropped any students, but yet we're losing positions.
not a happy situation.

So that's

So we have not hired anybody for four

or five years in our department.

Four years maybe.

have now one position for next year.

Nobody. We

One precious position.

We

have one faculty member who's left to go to another job, and we
had one faculty member retire.

We had another faculty member

retire three years ago, whenever Joannie McKeag retired, so we're
down three and we gained one.
forward.

That tells you we're not moving

And our student enrollment has not decreased, and our

activity classes that are required for the University requirement
have not decreased.

They're still there.

So as long as the

student body stays the same, we still have the same number of

(23)

K:

activity classes to teach.

B:

And larger classes.

K:

Oh, absolutely, we've gone to larger classes.
anatomy this spring.

I had fifty in

So we're teaching very big classes.

Seventy-five were in kinesiology.

That's very difficult to

teach major level difficult courses with that many students
in them.

It's just really difficult to do.

Here's another situation.
We have two Black women in our department.

One of them I really

worked hard to recruit myself, and brought her here.

Both

Black women came here and worked very, very hard the first year
they were here, very hard.
ideas.

They brought in all kinds of new

They're both very active nationally.

been invited to Eygpt to help run clinics.

One of them has
They are both

resented by other people in our department, and I cannot figure
out if they're resented because they're Black or because they're
professionally active.

The same small group of people that

treat them terribly, in my mind, treat some of the rest of us
not very nicely either.

So I don't know if it's a racial problem

or if it's professional activity versus inactivity.
to think that it's the latter, and not the racist.
two now have withdrawn.

I prefer
But these

They have been treated with very little

understanding and so they have now withdrawn.

They have both

been here, well, one has been here five years, and the other has

(24)

K:

been here four years, I guess, maybe I missed a year.

But

anyway, one of them is president of a national organization.
other one is on the U.

s.

The

Olympic Committee, to just give you

an idea of their stature nationally.

But they have withdrawn

from our faculty, and hardly talk to anybody, even in the hallway
now.

So they started out like a house afire.

They were doing

all kinds of exciting, innovative things for at least a year,
a year and a half, but after a year of being or after being
resented, and treated, they just have withdrawn.
me a lot.

That bothers

I don't know what's going on around the rest of the

campus when it comes to the Black people, but to see people who
are quote, "different'' discriminated against, this is of great
concern to me, and I think that's a predominate attitude in our
department right now.

That fits in with this small group that

resent the active ones because they are, quote, "different''
because they are active. They're professionally active. So
anyway, that's probably one of the biggest problems that we have
at this point in time, the two Black women. I don't know why they
stay here. I really don't know why they stay here. They could
their jobs. They could go any place in the United States. One
of them is from Pittsburgh, and I think she wants to remain
close to home.
left.

The other one, I wouldn't be surprised if she

Yet our department, our University, needs good, Black,

professionally active faculty.
need them.

We need them.

We desperately

(25)

B:

We need them for role models.

K:

Absolutely.

B:

And the support that I'm sure that they get from people like you,
and some of your colleagues can't make up for this.

K:

Not the way they are treated in meetings. I've listened to
them be put down in meetings. They come from a different
perspective. And you see we don't try hard enough to figure
out where they're coming from.

One of them told me one time that

"we have to learn to live in two worlds.

We have to learn to

live in the Black world, and we have to learn to live in the
White world. And those are two totally different worlds. All you
have to do is learn how to live in the White world". The other
one, one time I was talking to her and she said, "you know, I've
got two problems. One is, she pointed to the color of her skin,
that I'm Black; the other is that I'm a woman. I've got a double
jeopardy".

So they're very much aware of the discrimination

against them here. Their perception is because they're Black.
I'm not totally convinced that that's the only problem.
don't want to believe that.

Maybe I

I want to believe that the other

part of the problem is this is professionally activeness.

But

all I know is that we need to learn about their Black culture.
We need to learn where they are coming from, and try to understand them a lot better than we do right now.

The door's been

(26)

K:

shut, I'm afraid, and I don't know if we can ever turn this
around. It's become a very tense, very difficult situation down
there.

B:

Who's chair of the department now?

K:

Okay.

There's a new generation corning in.

is Catriona Higgs and Bob Arnhold.

The new generation

They're both two young, very

professionally active faculty doing lots of research, giving
papers around the country, and doing really neat things.

Bobbie

Braden will be another assistant chair, and she is kind of in
the borderline between an old timer and a new timer.
the middle-aged group of people.

She's in

At the graduation this spring,

Catriona and I were talking, and I told her, she was asking about
my retirement. She said, well, this is really the end of an era.
I said, yes, I guess it is, and it's time for the new generation
to take over.
B:

Is she chair?

K:

Yes, Catriona is the chair.
very positive about it.
to take over.
point.

She's the new chair.

And I feel

I think it's time for a new generation

You know you have to pass the torch at some

And they've got lots of good ideas, and they're all

professionally active people.

We have some really sharp people

in our department, and I think the future looks bright.

If

they can get past some of the problems I had as department
chair which were these inactive people.

They gave me such a

(27)

K:

hard time.

They're beginning to have the same problems with

these people, but they will handle them differently I'm sure.
So we'll see what happens.
B:

Talk about your time as chair a little bit.

K:

I became chair at a very difficult time.

When was that?

The department was

very split, and there was some gender conflict, and this was in
1987.

The man who had been chair kind of backed himself into a

corner and said to the dean, I won't run for chair unless you do
this and this and this and this.

And the dean said, well, I'm

not going to do those things, so I guess you won't be chair.
then nobody else would run for chair.

And

Nobody wanted to try to

run this department because of all the internal personality
conflicts.

Mechanics.

The rest of the mechanics of running a

department like that are not so bad, but the internal personnel
conflicts were just mind boggling at times.

So according to

the contract, the president or his designee has to appoint a
chair.

So I was appointed chair for six months from June to

December.

And I was, of course, highly resented because I was

number one, appointed by the dean, and most of the men did not
like Dr. Griffiths who was the dean.
They were adamantly opposed to her.

Did not like her at all.
They were convinced that

she was running the department and all of this.

So the very

first faculty meeting I said, I realize that you people don't
trust me.

The men did not trust me at all.

You think Dr.

(28)
K:

Griffiths is running this department. My job will be to
make sure this department moves ahead and at the same time that
I will have to work pretty hard to gain your trust because I
realize that I'm in an appointed position, and it's a difficult
situation.

So we moved ahead.

I sent lots of memos.

everything up and out on the desk.

I kept

Basically I made sure nothing

was done behind anybody's back, and my whole goal was to try to
get people to communicate with one another, to not hide anything,
and to try to gain the trust of the faculty.

That went on for

six months and then in December it was, who wanted to be department chair?

I was coordinating gerontology at the time. I

couldn't do two things.

I'd given up gerontology for one semes-

ter to do this, and I really enjoyed the gerontology work because
that's such an exciting program to work in.

So I went back to

gerontology, and Torn Lambert agreed to be department chair, and
after about four or five months he said that the stress of the
job was too much on his health.

He couldn't handle it, and he

really did not think it was a job anybody could do.
difficult.

So he quit basically.

what would have been 1988.

It was too

This was in the summer of

So then because there wasn't time

to get a person elected we went to three people that ran the
department.

We divided the jobs up.

us, and I was one of those three.

We did it, the three of

Then that went on for a year

and then I decided one chair would be a lot better.

I didn't

{29)

K:

really like doing it with three because it was difficult.
almost easier to run it yourself.
I'll run for chair.

So then I decided, okay,

Nobody else would do the job.

the competition for department chair was nothing.
nobody there.

It was

So really
There was

So I ran for department chair, and then was the

chair until December of 1992.

I had one more semester to go

to finish the three year stint, but actually some of these people
who are being very difficult to work with, but were running
around the chair to the dean and having the dean approve of their
action was what finally did me in.

That's when I stepped out and

I decided I would teach full-time before I retire. There are some
very challenging people to work with in that department.

You

have to stay focused on the strong people because there really
are some good people out of that group of 30. But the few
difficult ones you end spending ninety percent of your time
with about five or six people and their folders are very thick
of all the memos you have to send them.

And as long as the

dean supports you, that's what's critical.

And in talking

to other department chairs I've discovered that that is probably
the real key to whether the department chair can continue is
the dean or the vice-president. If they run to the vicepresident it would be the same thing.

I know there's another

department where one person was circumventing the chair and
going to the vice-president.

In my case they were going to the

(30)

K:

dean.

If that administrator doesn't send those people back to

the department chair, then it eliminates the role of the chair.
It makes it very, very difficult.
B:

It undermines it.

K:

It undermines it, yes, absolutely.

It makes it tough.

So I was

department chair until December and that's probably the biggest
problem.
union.

Some of the other problems might be related to the
I was a department chair at another institution that did

not have a union contract.

In that instance, the department

chair had much more power.

I hate to use the word power, but

I don't know any other way to describe it.

At Slippery Rock

with a contract, the department chair is in the middle, is in
a no-man's land situation.

The faculty think you've got all

this power, but you really don't.

What you can do is you give

them a schedule. You make a difference in their office location.
Those are two very important things to faculty. But other than
that, you just simply right a letter of reference or approval or
disapproval for promotion and tenure, but there are about three
other groups of people that are going to rule on top of that.
So what you say sometimes is approved and sometimes it's not
approved.

So there really is very little that a department

chair can do when you have people who are very difficult to work
with.

(31)

B:

Who should deal with difficult people if the chair doesn't
have the authority, and it's well known this is a difficult
person who should be reprimanded?

K:

The chair is the one who should do it, but the dean has to
support them, has to support them, and in my case with two or
three of those difficult people the dean has supported, in two
cases the dean did not.

B:

Supported you?

K:

Yes, supported me.

In two or three of them, the only way the

chair can deal with it with this present union contract is to
document all the things that happen.

Let's say you get a

phone call from a school district and the school district is
saying so and so on your faculty has been here and has done these
things we consider this unprofessional. Now what are you going
to do about it?

So I say, well, I'd like to have that in writing

if you would please.

So they send you a letter.

You call the

faculty member in and you sit down and you say, this is what
we have been advised.
going on.

Can you help us understand why this is

The faculty member usually denies it, and says, oh,

that's just a few people and they don't like me and they're
doing this and this and this.

You say, well, we need to be sure

that this never occurs again, and I will be documenting this
conversation we're having right now, and so then I write another
memo that describes our conversation.

That goes in that person's

(32)

K:

file.

Now after a while with one of our faculty members, for

instance, that file has grown and grown and grown.

I mean there

are quite a few of those letters almost one every year of some
kind or another.

And the faculty member still thinks that he

is doing everything right, and he's doing what he should be
doing, and he's okay.

But yet as the new people come along

they'll be writing the same kinds of letters.
You know.

It will continue.

Now some department chairs in the past have ignored

these.

Oh, that's okay, you go ahead and do what you're going

to do.

The problem with a union contract is if you are a

conscientious department chair then you try to get people to
run professionally. If you get the program to run professionally,
and the people to act in a professional manner, then you're
going to be in trouble because you're a faculty member.
not an administrator.
an administrator.
a faculty.
member.

You're

In the eyes of the faculty, you are

In the eyes of the administration, you're

In the eyes of the contract, you are a faculty

You are a peer among peers. There's one fellow on our

faculty who I did not recommend for promotion.

There was no way

on this earth he had any of the credentials that met the qualifications for promotion. No way, in a clear consciense could I have
recommended him for promotion to a full professor.

He doesn't

speak to me.

That's okay.

I did what I thought professionally

I had to do.

It turned out he was not promoted, but it's things

(33)

K:

like that that I can handle as a department chair.

That goes

with the heat in the kitchen.

You know, if you can't stand the

heat, get out of the kitchen.

But it makes the job a little

bit more difficult.

And I was supported in that case from the

dean, but if the dean didn't support you in those cases, then
you'd be in real big trouble because you've got to have the
support of the dean.

Without it the department chair is in big

trouble. If you're running a department the size of the physical
education department, with the different personalities that exist
in that department, it's a challenge.

It's a challenge to get

the group of people to work together.

We tried just about every

little bag of tricks we could try.

We did one whole retreat

using the Myers-Briggs trying to get people to realize what
different types we were, and how some people could be strong in
some areas even though they are, quote different.
We need everybody.

We need them.

Everybody has to pull their part of the

wagon, and they have to figure out how they can best contribute.
Doing that, it might have helped for about two weeks, and then
people soon forgot, you know. How we're going to treat people.
We're going to try to get the best from each person, and then we
ran into trouble.
B:

You can't have a retreat once a month.

K:

No, we can't.

And it's something, I think, that's going to

require patience in the physical education department to pull

(34)

K:

them together.

I'm optimistic that it will happen because of the

new people coming, and as some of these other folks retire I
think it will happen.

I know other departments, I have a lot of

friends around the country, and a bunch of them are department
chairs, and some of the schools are four and five years ahead of
us. The older people have retired, and they have a lot of new,
young people who are use to the co-educational programs, and
they're much more professionally active and they're off and
running again. So I think Slippery Rock will come through this
cycle, and we'll be in good shape.
programs in the country.

We're still one of the best

That's what's remarkable.

know about our internal problems.

People don't

We've done a real good job.

One of my goals as department chair was to keep our dirty laundry
inside. Dr.

Foust even stopped me one day and said, I haven't

any bad things from the Field House, things must be going okay? I
said, what you don't know won't hurt you.
hard at keeping the problems internal.

So we've worked real

Keep them in the Field

House not putting the dirty laundry out on the line, and, you
know, I think people across the campus generally think that the
physical education department is running a little more smoothly
than it did five and six years ago.
B:

I think five and six year ago you couldn't have kept it quiet.

(35)

K:

No, we couldn't. There was an outright attack from some
of the men in our department on the dean, on Dr. Griffiths,
and that was a known factor.

It was publicized.

Everybody

knew it and they were doing their best to get rid of her.

So

we've come through that, and we have survived and moved ahead.
Our labs are growing.
B:

You mention Dr. Griffiths quite a bit.
influential people?

Is she one of the

Someone who has impacted you.

Can you

talk about some of those people before we forget?
K:

I would say that the people, she has been in the administrative
position, but I would say that the people that have impacted,
she has impacted me positively or negatively depending on whether
she supported or didn't support me as department chair.

I think

the people that have impacted me the most would be people like
Martha Haverstick and Marie Wheaton.

Working with Marie in the

development of the outdoor programs.

Pat Zimmerman.

McKeag.

Joannie

Those are all people who I have worked with more

closely in the department, and who were very supportive.
Griffiths.

Anne

We are very opposites on the Myers-Briggs, and so

doing the Myers-Briggs has really helped to understand why we
have great difficulty communicating sometimes.
type that is very creative.

She is of the

She's probably the right type of

person to be in the dean's job.

I am very structured, organized ,

and like to have everything laid out in front of me when

(36)

K:

I'm going to do something.
insane.

She jumps all around, drives me

I drive her crazy because I want things structured.

She doesn't want things structured.
flexible so she can change her mind.

She wants it to be real
Well, we're going to do

it this way, and then we go the next meeting and well, we're
going to change it and that's what drives me crazy.

So that

makes it very difficult to work with somebody like that.

But

I also recognize that that type of a flexible, creative person
is an important one to have in that position as long as there
are some of us along that can come along and get some organization, and carry out some of those ideas that she has in the
creativity because I'm not creative at all.
that standpoint that it makes a good team.

So I think from
The more recent

problems have come by her allowing people to run around the
chairman, but those other people that I mentioned have been
really philosophically the people that have been neat to work
with.

The Haversticks, and the Wheatons, and the Zimmermans

and the McKeags. Joannie McKeag was a wonderfuld person to work
with.

Ann Bicknell was another person who was wonderful to work

with in gerontology.

All of the gerontology faculty I would

say are a unique group of people, but we'll talk about gerontology later. Some of the new people that have come in, I've learned
a lot from them.

They're very good, very knowledgeable in their

(37)

K:

field like Nelson Ng is in computers, and Bob Arnhold's in the
adapted area. So I think those are all some good people that
we have here.

B:

Give us some stories about Martha or Marie or Joannie to illustrate their influence.

K:

Martha is probably one of the most solid, professional persons I
think I've ever met.
respect that.

She's professional to the core, and I

She's also a very organized person, and so coming

back to the Myers-Briggs, we're the same on the Myers-Briggs,
and therefore, it makes it easier to work with somebody like
that. Pat Zimmerman is the same as I am, too. And so we kind
of chuckle about it because we like to be organized.
to be planned ahead.
like that.

We like

So it's a lot easier to work with people

We recognize we need the creative souls like Anne

Griffiths, but when you have to develop a project, and you have
to finish a project, it's nice to have somebody like Martha to
work with.
somebody.

Martha's standards are high, and I respect that in
Her standards are high, and she sticks to them and

she doesn't waiver, and I really respect that in a person.

She's

probably one of the best teachers I think I've ever known. A good
student would love her.

A poor student would hate her, because a

student that wanted to get by and not learn anything would not
like Dr. Haverstick. But the good students would, and I always
wished that I could be like Dr. Haverstick as a teacher.

Same

(38)

K:

is true from the respect of the faculty.

I think the faculty

who are the hardworking, professionally oriented people would
respect Martha, and Martha would work with them.

But if you

were a lazy, non-worker putting in your time, Martha probably
would not have the time of day for you, and they would drive
her crazy, just like they drive me crazy.
B:

When we were putting together the new, at that time, promotion
standards, Martha and I were working together, and her professionalism was just admirable. And she was the only person who
in an evaluation of an applicant from her department had put
in negative recommendations.

The committee was amazed, but

she justified them, and the committee respected it.
K:

Sure.

That's absolutely right.

See, you can believe

and trust anything that Martha would tell you.
play games.

She would not

Therefore, her judgement would be highly respected.

Other people will just gloss over a problem because he'd be
afraid to say something negative about somebody.

It's very

difficult to not promote a member of your faculty.
difficult to do.

You have to be able to justify it.

It's very
I think

I've learned a lot from Martha about how to do that, and I
felt comfortable in not recommending people. I've recommended
more for promotion than not, but the one individual that I did
not recommend, I felt comfortable doing that because I think
I learned from Martha a lot about holding certain standards and

(39)

K:

sticking to those standards and I think that's important.

It's

the only way we can raise the quality of education is to do that.
We need a lot more Martha Haversticks.

I think we have some

young people that are like Martha Haverstick coming along.

I'm

obviously very hopeful with these young people. Now, about Marie
Wheaton, I had a fun experience this past weekend.

Marie was

taking two of her neighbor boys down the river canoeing.

She

asked for some help, and I went with her. Marie retired from here
probably a good ten years ago or pretty close to it.

Eight to

ten years ago now. Marie's always believed in the merits of
outdoor activities. The canoeing, the backpacking and all that.
So in the seventies she developed these course outlines.

She

said, some of them I didn't even know what I was talking about,
but I knew we needed these courses here on our campus and all
these outdoor activities. And I like these same activities.
Because she developed those course outlines, about six or seven
years ago we were able to hire Tim Ramsey to take over and start
teaching those things in our department. And this weekend down on
the Allegheny Rive, Tim Ramsey had a class and he was camped at
the same site we were camped at, and so at long last after all
these years Tim's been here, I finally got him to meet Marie
Wheaton and the two of them hit it off beautifully. And I said,
now Marie, here is the legacy that you started and Tim is now
carrying it out. It was just a beautiful thing to see happen

(40)

K:

because she wrote the course outlines that really started it.
Then I sort of kept things going for a couple of years after
Marie retired until we hire Tim. But Tim is highly skilled in
this area and has taken it to greater heights than ever, the
whole outdoor adventure program. It was just exciting to have the
two of them meet each other. We're going to try to get together.

B:

It just happened?

You didn't plan it?

K:

Well, I knew that Tim was going to be at that campsite, and
we had decided we would use the same campsite.

It's a real

big area so we could be there, but I made sure that the two
of them met each other.

I wanted them to meet each other.

I've

wanted this to happen for a long time ever since Tim came here.
But we finally pulled it off. Interesting thing was that Marie
and Tim started talking about the problems that they had, and
Marie said, I betcha the canoe trailer still gets flat tires. And
he said, you know what, we just had to change the tires two days
ago because the tires were flat. And she said, I bet there's
still a hassle with where the equipment's stored after ten or
fifteen years.
you ever saw.

He said, yes, it's the biggest pain in the neck
And so the problems that they were sharing, I just

chuckled because they were identical. Almost nothing has changed
with the problems associated with that whole aspect of that
program.

The program has grown and expanded, but the problems

are still there.

Getting people to help you drive the shuttles,

and all that kind of stuff. So some things never change, never
change after 15 years.

(41)
B:

But it's wonderful to see that it's continuing and progressing.

K:

Marie must have had to feel good about the fact that Tim had this
group out there.

They were doing everything right.

All the

things that she would approve of, they were there and it was
happening.

Then the program she started is still going on and

it has grown beyond that.
B:

It's even better.

K:

It's even better.

B:

She could see what the students were doing.

K:

Oh, yes.
going.

She could see.
A nice wood pile.

well organized.

She could see they had a nice fire
They had nice tents put up. All very

Everything done correctly, and that had to have

made her feel good about the program she started.
B:

That's a great story.

K:

That just happened this weekend.

I said to somebody last night,

that was the best part of the whole trip as far as I was concerned, having those two get together and meet each other.
B:

So she really had an impact that's continuing.

K:

Yes.

I think so.

Her big contribution was that.

She also

was a great people person, as was Martha, as was Joannie.

They

all were really concerned with the students and there was
always time for students, and I'm not sure that's true so much
anymore with a lot of our faculty.

You know there's no such

thing as a bad time to sit down and talk to students when it

(42)

K:

comes to those faculty.

I'm not so sure. You know, we now have

our answering service and all this kind of stuff, so a student
can always get ahold of you, but it's almost been made too easy,
and faculty don't go out of their way necessarily to help the
students like this group did.
care for students.

They just bent over backwards to

And that caring is one of the things that

was a hallmark for this University.

I'd like to think that

there's still a majority of faculty that do, and that we still
are a caring institution as Dr. Aebersold says we are.

But

I tell you these people that I've mentioned are the ones that
were the epitome of the faculty who really cared about the
students.
B:

What special qualities did Joannie McKeag have?

K:

I think she was a master teacher.

Absolute master teacher.

Again her biggest thing was caring for the students.

She

probably wore herself out, totally exhausted herself, because
she spent so much time working with individual students.
was no such thing as a stranger to Joannie McKeag.
the students.

She knew them very well.

all loved her dearly.

There

She knew

They knew her.

They

She's a rare person. Not too many

people like Dr. McKeag around.

We never replaced her either

physically, as we didn't even get a replacement for her, and
even if we had, it would have been difficult to replace that
kind of a teacher.

(43)

B:

I was surprised when she retired.

I thought she's so young.

K:

She retired, I think she would be an interesting one for your
interviews.

B:

I think we really need to know the background of gerontology,
how it started, and what's happening to it now.

K:

Okay.

This is our twentieth year.

this is our twentieth year.
this year.

It's hard to believe that

We had our twentieth anniversary

Gerontology started back in the early 1970's when

Ann Bicknell in the psych department came here.

She was the

only one in our whole program who was educated in gerontology.
She was a gerontological psychologist, and she decided she
wanted to get a gerontology program started.

At that time,

I was involved with a future directions committee for one of
our professional associations, and so I had been reading up
on the direction that physical education was going to go. And
it was pretty obvious in the early 1970's that gerontology was
the field of the future.

At that point in time, you could see

the change in the demographics.

The young children, the people

had already been born, the baby boomers were in place and
they were growing older, and so it was predictable how the
charts were going to change.

And that when those baby boomers

hit the sixties, we were going to go out of our minds trying
to take care of this older population.

So I thought everybody

in physcial education is focusing on school age people. Nobody

(44)

K:

is worried about older adults, somebody better do it, so why
not me.

So I got involved in it.

In our national association

there used to be 20 or 25 of us that in the 1970's we'd meet at
national conventions and share ideas.

We started a little

substructure within our national group called the Council on
Aging.

We'd sit and talk with each other.

Now you go to

national convention there would be between 150 to 200 people
at those meetings.

So it really, really has grown which is

exciting to watch.

At Slippery Rock there are about four

or five of us that used to meet with Ann maybe once every other
week, and she'd have a little educational session.
started teaching psych of aging.

Then she

That was the first course.

Then we had a little minigrant and we went up to the University
of Michigan, and we looked at their program, and we decided we
would make our program interdisciplinary.

We would keep it out

of a department because the programs that went into departments
became very much focused in that department.

So if it were in

health, it was a health gerontology. If it was in sociology, it
was sociological gerontology or psych.

And that was the way a

lot of them were, but we decided we'd be like Michigan, we'd
keep it interdisciplinary. And so it's been an upstream battle
all the way because at Slippery Rock interdisciplinary programs
just don't exist. They're orphans, that's right.
have a home.

They don't

They don't belong to anybody, and they have to

(45)

K:

pretty much survive on their own which is what we have done.
So along came Ted Walwick in the middle 1970's and the big
planning session we went through.

That was the neatest thing

that ever happened to us because we said to Ted, can we join
this planning process, and can we plan a gerontology program as
a part of it?
So we did that.

He said, why not, Ted being very futuristic.
We pulled together.

The group had grown now

to maybe ten people, ten faculty, from different disciplines.
Carolyn Rizza, Larry Upton, and Charlie Bish were some of the
pillars of the group along with Ann Bicknell, and Paul Rizza.
So we did the planning document, and as a part of that we set
up what we were going to do.
program.

We were going to have a gerontology

We are going to call it a program, and we are going

to have a coordinator who was really the chair of the interdisciplinary university-wide committee, and we were going to
ask for three hours of release time to coordinate this program
etcetera.

Well, it was all approved.

Then we had to decide

what college we were going to go into.
sion.

That was a tough deci-

We went under the College of Human Professions, but we

could have gone either direction because we had just about
equal number of faculty from Liberal Arts, Liberal Studies,
as we do from professional studies.
to grow.

The program has continued

Ann was the coordinator for a long time, and then

when Ann retired, I became the coordinator, and I was the

(46)

K:

coordinator until I became PE department chair. And then we
hired Bob Gandee who's come over from Akron, retired from
Akron, and he is now the coordinator.
grown and grown and grown.

The program has

Now we have a committee of probably

twenty some people and it is organized around working committees.
So there's a group that runs Elderhostel.

Elderhostel is going

on right now on China, right here on our campus.

We have

international Elderhostel which goes all over the world now.
And we run a sportsfest, and we run a symposium and all kinds
of things are going on.

We just completed a self-study and

we received very high marks.
throughout the United States.

our program is now well known
We were one of the host schools

for AGHE which is the Association of Gerontology in Higher Ed.
that was held in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago.
good job.

We knew it was important.

We did a

We all worked together

and we did a good job of running that national convention and
so now people recognize Slippery Rock for the fine group of
people we have working in gerontology.

Carolyn Rizza is the

president-elect of this national association, so we are known
in the educational circles.
It's difficult.

We have tried to write grants.

That's one of our problems, trying to find

time to write grants. There's plenty of money out there if we
just had the time to go after it. But we're all full-time
faculty in our own departments, and therefore, everything we

(47)

K:

do in gerontology is volunteer.

There's a neat feeling

among those people. The people care about the program and
we've always worked hard at that.

This past week I was at

a conference at Edinboro, and the speaker, an excellent
speaker, spoke on developing values in the University, and
what he called the sense of community.

And he said that

he's done research on hundreds of universities, and he said
that there are only three groups that seem to come out that
develop a sense of community in their programs in their
departments.

Two of them were academic departments.

was sociology. I don't remember the second.
was interdisciplinary programs.

One

But the other one

So I never knew what to call

this feeling that we had, but this feeling is a sense of community, using that new language. He said that is what we have to
work toward with all of the universities is developing this sense
of community, and the gerontology program has had that from the
day one, and I hope that we keep that.
B:

Isn't that neat that you have that, as opposed to how
sometimes things have been in your department.

K:

Yes, absoulutely, it's made all the difference in the world
for me.

It's a retreat area.

I can go there and work and I

know that it's a strong support system, real strong support
system among that group of faculty. And I think the other thing
that we've learned is to appreciate each other's discipline.

(48)

K:

I've learned a lot about counseling and ed. psych. amd sociology
and geography that I never thought about.
be interested in gerontology?

Why would a geographer

Well, they're demographic people

you see, and it plays a big role in their area.

So we all bring

our areas of expertise to one common focus which are older adults
and we've learned a lot from each other.

It's made it really

exciting, and it's growing. It's continually changing and so you
have to go to conferences and you have to keep reading, and keep
learning the new stuff. So it's been a real exciting area in that
the whole area of physical activity and rehab which is my special
interest area has grown right along with the other disciplines in
working with older adults. And so I have a real strong network of
friends around the whole country that are working in this area
too. There are any number of people I can get on the phone and
call and say, hey, what do you know about this and this and this.
So we have really supported each other. If one thing leads to
another, it's led me into working with the senior olympics,
for instance, the national board of the senior olympics which
was a natural to bring together my interest in sport and older
adults.

So that's where I'm putting my energies right now is

into that.

Moved away from intercollegiate athletics which is

where I was in the 1970's. Now my focus is more on sport for
older adults which is natural. Just seemed right to happen.
B:

I remember being impressed a class of yours that I was working
with and you had them thinking about how will it be for older

(49)

B:

people in, say, the year 2020.

What will their lives be like?

Of course, all of these twenty year olds having to think ahead
to that was a real challenge, and one student said, they're all
going to be taken care of.

There are going to be places for

everyone, and there are going to be homes, institutions if they
need them, and I thought quietly, you're wrong, nobody is going
to care.

But now I see glimmers, and I think maybe some of that

will happen, and I thought that was so great to make them not
only think of what is now or what was, but predict and think and
be creative.
K:

Yes. Thinking is what I've always tried to get students to do.
That's always been one of my goals.

The interesting thing about

this whole gerontology and aging education is that most young
people think very negative thoughts about older adults.

When

I go around the class and I say, tell me the very first thing
that comes to your mind if I said aging or elderly.
every one will be something negative.

Almost

The only positive might

be grandparents, but they'll say grey hair, they'll say wrinkles,
they'll say frail, they'll say handicapped, senile, all of these
things that are perceived as negative.

So there's a very

negative feeling about growing older. But what we're trying to
do is to help people grow older and still maintain their
activity level, maintain their independence, maintain a very
positive attitude about life.

If we can get the older people

(50)

K:

to think that and then get the younger generation to think
that also, that these older people are not people who have to
be cared for, but they still can contribute in some way they
can contribute.
hard toward.

So that's kind of the attitude that we work

Look at yourself.

doing working here?
B:

See.

You're retired.

What are you

You're contributing things.

One thing is an older person still needs to feel important
not only, especially for himself or herself, but someone else
has to recognize that importance.

K:

That's exactly right.

They have to allow them to be useful.

They have to allow them to be useful, and they won't do that
unless their attitude is positive about that older person.
That's why we're trying so hard in our gerontology programs
to educate these younger people to think that way.

That's

why I try to get them to think about what life will be like
for them.

What do they want their life to be like when they

are at that age.

Okay?

Because none of them are going to

want to be, I don't think they want to be, dependent at that
point.

They're going to want to remain independent.

So how

can I get to be 40 years older than I am right now and still
remain independent both physically and monetarily, and every
way.

Actually the motto of the AARP is to serve and not be

served, and I think that's the way most older people want.
And, of course, those of us in physical activity areas, we

(51)
K:

believe our position, our contribution is to keep people
physically active. Then they will remain independent.

The

minute they quit moving is when they become dependent.
know that.

We absolutely can prove that.

We

So we have a very

important role to play, and I'm disappointed that not more
of the physical education faculty are interested in it.

But

I've resigned myself to the fact that that is their problem,
not my problem, and the more people that we can get interested,
the better off, and if they don't want to get with the times
then I'm not going to worry about them anymore.

See, my

attitude has changed a little bit.
B:

You're realistic.

K:

I'm becoming more realistic as I get closer to retirement.

B:

So students can take a minor?

K:

They can minor in gerontology or they can get a certificate.
There really isn't much difference.
recommend that students get now.
level, too.

A minor is what we

We have it at the graduate

See we have developed also the graduate program

in gerontology and now we have graduate students going into
it.

And that's where we begin to have more physical education

being part of the graduate level, for which I'm pleased.

The

exercise science people, the ones in cardiac rehab should
be really studying older adults.
going to be working with.

They're the ones they are

Actually at the undergraduate level,

the sport management people should be studying gerontology,

(52)

K:

because who's got the money to go play golf?

Who's got the

money to go participate in the sport facilities as spectators,
etcetera?

It's going to be older people.

And they have

special, unique characteristics that need to be addressed
if you're going to run a program in any place.

You need to

address those characteristics.
B:

What are the graduates doing?

What are they doing when they

leave the program?
K:

If they're in physical education, they may go work in a
hospital setting, for instance, and run an exercise program
in a hospital setting.

Greenville Hospital, for instance, up

the road here, they run a big fitness center that's attached
to their outpatient clinic.

It's a huge fitness center and

one of our graduates is helping to run that program.

During

the day, they have a lot of people over the age of 60 corning
there because the younger people work.
B:

Have you see attitudes change among the young people? More
tolerance or interest?

K:

I haven't really seen any.
bigger changes.

Maybe it's because I want to see

The numbers are slowly growing in gerontology,

but most of the students don't find out about it until they're
seniors which tells us all that the faculty are the ones that
haven't changed, and the faculty are not recommending the
gerontology or they're not aware of it.

Because if the faculty

(53)

K:

would tell the undergraduates, many more of them would get into
gerontology.

So we are continually trying to educate our

colleagues on that.

But our colleagues are not tuned into it.

They're just simply not tuned into the need for a gerontology
minor.

In fact, our gerontology group has discussed this, and

we are going on a major campaign to recruit faculty.
sort of like computer use.

It's

The students will never be taught

how to use computers until faculty learn how to use them. When
the faculty use them in their classes, then the students will use
them.
B:

Well, now everyone's using them.

So maybe that will happen.

K:

It might have to happen with the students with the gerontology.
See, we may have to just forget or bypass the faculty advisor
and go straight to student groups, and recruit the students
themselves.

B:

Oh that's good.

K:

See we have recruited.

We've talked about that, going to

orientation, for instance.

We have been working through

advisors, through department chairs and faculty.
working.
students.

It's not

So we may have to go another route to get the
I did an interview of two students who are finishing

gerontology, and they said they both got into the program late.
And one of them said, I figured out that most of the older
people, most people, that I am going to be working with will be

(54)

K:

older than I am, and I ought to find about these people, and
minor in gerontology.

She figured that all out on her own, and

not all of our students are sharp enough to see the demographics
and realize that they need to do that.
program.

We have good courses.

opportunities for students.

So we have an excellent

We have a lot of experiential

We have a graduate assistantship

funded by the Lutheran Service Society, and that graduate
assistant helps to run the program and all the senior centers
in Butler County.

So we're tightly connected to the Butler

County Area Agency on Aging, and all of the other aging
networks.

We have tight connections with those in Mercer

County and other counties in our area.

We've been able to

stretch out and connect with all these aging groups, and
therefore, our students are welcome for internship and field
experience sites. And the agencies and the nursing homes,
senior centers, you name it, we can work with any type older
person from very frail to very active, and that's exciting.
The senior center in Slippery Rock is one that we helped get
started, and it's about ten years old now, and it has grown
and grown and grown, and now we have permission to go to aull
service senior center, and that's a big step. If we can
get the community people moving on this, our goal is to have
a full service center in a self-standing building all by
itself, without using the Methodist Church.

So there are

a lot of exciting things happening in gerontology.

(55)

B:

What would a full service center provide?

K:

The present center is called a satellite.
eleven to one.

It meets from

Although they just told me last week at

their anniversary dinner that they've been told they can
add a couple more hours on to the morning.
that they can add more programming.
might have a quilting group.
shop.

So that means

In a full-service you

You might have a wood-working

You'll have game rooms and lecture rooms where we

can teach classes, actually teach classes.

Down at

Passavant Retirement Center in Zelienople now we've helped
them to organize an education in retirement program.

A

faculty member or somebody teaches a class down there for
five weeks.
B:

I think Irv [Kuhr] taught there.

K:

Irv might have taught some of that, yes.

It's an exciting

kind of a program that's going on down there.
get that going in Slippery Rock, too.

We'd like to

Education in retirement.

Learning in retirement, I guess, it's called.

So that just

shows that older adults want to continue learning.
exciting to work with.
Enrich people lives.

It's neat.

They're

It's a neat program.

After they've worked so hard, I think it's

fun to help them continue to learn, continue to contribute in
whatever way they can.
program.

You can tell I like the gerontology

(56)

B:

You like the students that are in it, and you like the people
that they deal with.

K:

Exactly.

And I like the faculty that work in that program.

A dedicated group of people.
A sense of community.

They're just wonderful, unique.

I now have a title to put on that.

It's a wonderful sense of community in that gerontology program.
And that's why we've sort of hesitated.

People have said, don't

you want to have a department of gerontology?

We've sort of

hesitated to do that because then you have people who are just
dedicated only to gerontology, and we're afraid to upset the
apple cart.

We've got such a good thing going that we don't

want to change it.

Although we may change it.

that we call ourselves an institute.
It sounds a little bit better.
way.
B:

It was suggested

A gerontology institute.

We like it.

More grants that

so that's what we might aim toward.

And then you would keep the connections to the different
disciplines.

K:

It would be basically the same thing except they're now
calling it a program, not real fancy. An institute sounds
much better when it comes to getting funding.

I don't know.

outside evalutor suggested that we call it an institute.
might do that.
B:

Where do the funds come from?

Our

so we

(57)

K:

Dr. Griffiths has been wonderful in the support of the
gerontology program.

We have been treated like a department.

We have a department budget, and the coordinator of gerontology
sits on the advisory council with the rest of the department
chairs.

So it's a program that is treated like a department

but it is officially a program not a department.
B:

Is there any other program on campus like that?

K:

The Women's studies is the closest, but I'm not sure that it is
spread out as wide as ours.

Women's Studies has divided now

so that the Women's studies is an academic program, and then
they have the Women's Center which is their, I guess you would
call it, their outreach program.
they have two different groups.

So they've kind of split, and
I don't if they're connected

with one another or not, but we've kept all the gerontologies
together, the academic and the outreach program is all together
under one unit.

The same people do the same thing. We do both.

We teach and we reach out.
B:

What do you see for yourself in the future, now that you've
put these good things in place?

K:

Well, there's one thing. I have been very active nationally as
an administrator of different programs in leadership positions.
I have written a book or two here and there, but I have never
done much research, and I am a great experimenter.

I collect

all kinds of data and never do anything with it because I've

(58)

K:

always been too busy doing all this other stuff. on this board
and that board.

So now Bob Gandee comes along.

in gerontology and physical education.

Bob Gandee is

He is a great researcher.

He really knows how to massage data and make it look wonderful.
I mean all this data I've been collecting,I didn't know how
valuable it was.

And he's telling me that up in that gerontology

center there is so much good stuff now that we need to publish it
and we need to get it out. In fact, at home on my table as we
speak, there's a pile of stuff that I am to get it together
within the next week to get it into a scientific publication.
I've pulled together the data which I have, and it's in my head
how to write this, but then he'll take it and he'll reword it so
it sounds like it will be approved and it will pass the screening
of the juried publication.

And we'll get it published or we'll

get it in to a national convention program. So it's been exciting to have Bob here because he is good at the things I am so
weak at, which is writing up the research so it sounds researchy.
But I am good at doing the nitty gritty stuff of pulling together
the facts and he doesn't like to deal with that. Although he can
do it. So we make a good team.

Since he's been here, we probabl y

together have had three or four papers that have been approved
by juried programs, and we've had several published.

So

that's another whole new thing that I've gotten into, but I

(59)

K:

never would have done it if he hadn't come to Slippery Rock.
So for that I am grateful.

B:

That can certainly continue on into the future.

K:

Yes.

I'm not tired of teaching at all.

I love to teach, and

so when I leave Slippery Rock next year I will probably look
for another part-time job teaching.

Not full time but somewhere

in the midwest close to family.
B:

Close to the log cabin?

K:

Close to the log cabin or close to down where my mother lives
in Illinois and teach one semester.

That would be ideal, would

be to teach a couple of classes one semester and then travel
a lot the rest of the time.

Travel and see friends around the

country. That's what I hope to do.
B:

And around the world.

K:

And around the world.
world actually.

B:

A good program.

K:

I'm excited.

I'm lucky.

I have friends all over the

So it would be fun to go visit all those people.

Yes.

There are a lot of good things to be done.

I want to go to Elderhostel and learn like the people are doing
now.

I don't know if I will continue.

I was just reelected to

this board of directors of the senior olympics for another two
years.

I probably will continue that and then maybe will step

off of that board, but that's been fun.

So I will see it through

(60)

K:

this competition and then we'll see what happens with that one.
So that's what I'm going to do.

B:

I think it sounds wonderful and I know you'll do it well.

K:

Well, thank you.

B:

I'm so glad that with all that you've been through, that you

It'll be fun.

I enjoy it.

still have a cheerful outlook, a hopeful outlook.
K:

You have to be positive.

B:

But not everyone is.

K:

That's so true.

B:

It's so refreshing to find that you do.

K:

I always have believed that you have to make things work.
don't just happen.

You have to be positive about things.

Things don't just work.

at making them work.

Things

You have to work

That's what we've tried to do.

That's

what we did at the computer lab within our own department,
because if you just sat back and waited nothing would have
happened. We wouldn't have had anything, anybody in our department doing anything in computers. Now we have a whole computer
center and three-fourths of our faculty have computers and are
working on it. I wouldn't have bet on that two years ago.

I

wouldn't have thought that that many faculty would have finally
come around to wanting to use computers, but we worked hard at
it. We put computers where they'd stumble over them, and we just
kept talking about them, and finally, sure enough, they're
using computers.

So that's what I've always believed, that

(61)
K:

things just don't happen, you have to make them happen.

You

have to build up the situations and things like that.
B:

You keep your emotions under control and you don't show the
disapproval.

You just keep working at them, and that's a

wonderful quality, Susie. The department is so lucky, and
the University is so lucky.
K:

Well, I think you just have to do that.

Like I said, you have

to keep the dirty laundry hidden.
B:

Good for you.

Thank you so much.

K:

My pleasure.

B:

We can talk more when the opportunity comes.

K:

Okay.

B:

Tell me more about this expanded speech.

K:

Well, one of the things that I learned from Ann Bicknell is

Good school.

a technique called expanded speech.

She used to hold up her

hand with all of her fingers together and she'd say, most
of us when we talk, we run all of our words together, just
like I'm doing right now.

In expanded speech you spread your

hand apart and you speak that way so that you put some
space between each word which is the way I'm speaking right
now.

You really enunciate much better if you consciously

put a space between each word. And so when our students are
taught to do this, when they go to work with older adults who
may have some hearing problems, they are much more able to

(62)

K:

understand you if you use expanded speech. And you aren't
putting them down, you just are enunciating much more clearly.
Interesting story about this.

I have a friend in Belgium.

She asked me to speak to her students, this big auditorium
filled with Belgian students, about working with older adults.
I did for about a half an hour. I spoke in English and English
is about their third language, but I used expanded speech.

I

spoke just like I'm speaking now with space between the words.
After I was finished the students asked me a lot of questions,
and when we were totally finished this friend came up to me and
she said, I don't believe what I've just heard.

You are the

first person to come here from another country and speak and
have the students understand you well enough to ask questions.
And I said, that's because I used expanded speech.

So even

now with foreign students I use that technique because I
realized that in America we run all of our words together. And
when I've done workshops in Latin America on aging, I've done
several workshops in Latin America, in Spanish speaking
countries, and I can speak some Spanish, but when they run all
of their words together, I can't understand them.
always saying, speak slowly, please.
different at all.

And I'm

We are no different.

No

So when I've done those workshops, I've

used this very same technique.

So it's a wonderful thing that

I've learned from working with Ann Bicknell in the gerontology

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K:

program.

But it is a very useful technique to use with all

different kinds of groups of people.
B:

Thank you.