Simon's Rock Institutional Oral History Project

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Pete Baumann

Pete Baumann

“I said one day, when I retire, I’m going to get myself a lawn chair, and I’m going to come over here, and I’m going to find myself a spot in back of Blodgett, just sit there all by myself and look and say, ‘Son of a gun.’”
Ba Win

Ba Win

“I’d been here all of two weeks at the time, and [Doreen Young] had a talk for the incoming freshman class. [There was] a slide of a Japanese painting. Kind of characteristically, it was not a painting filled with stuff, it was a spare looking painting. She knew how to elicit a response from the group. And then she said, right towards the end, 'Do you know, if the painter had added two more lines, the painting would not have been this good? It would have spoiled the effect.' She said, 'The painter had to exercise restraint.' And it was like a bomb. She was telling young people, sixteen year old people, who are just filled with life, that there is virtue to restraint, to not doing the next thing.”
Ba Win and Pete Baumann

Ba Win and Pete Baumann

“We have more than a piece of chalk now to do the sciences, and that’s how it should be, when you recruit the most talented people that you can find you owe them the appropriate facilities but the tradition of really teaching, not just using bells and whistles, has persisted.”
René Biber

René Biber

"There was no grading system at the beginning... This was the idealism of the late sixties... The compromise was, we are going to give secret grades."
Danae Boissevain

Danae Boissevain

“I invited a meeting with the AP writer, the educational AP writer: how am I going to get people to hear about Simon’s Rock? He was wonderful. He said, “You’ve got to figure out how you’re going to interest an older lady in Wichita in what is happening here. You have to figure it out. You just told me Simon’s Rock is so many years old-- that’s not news. You have to find a way to interest that lady.” So I did. And it was the first story I got on a national level. We did an interview, and the headline was ‘Skipping High School, Goes to College.’”
Nancy Bonvillain

Nancy Bonvillain

“People who struggle and don’t give up, those are the people I most admire. Whether they’re 52 year old social activists or whether they’re 16 year old college freshmen. That’s what really counts. Not just what you’re given or what you have easily, but what you struggle with. You know, and nobody struggles 100% of the time and nobody achieves what they wanted 100% of the time, but that’s a quality in people that I really admire.”
Joan DelPlato

Joan DelPlato

“In the end, it was community that I found here. It’s hard to give up community once you know you’ve found one that you can fit into. So over time, I think my own sense of what I wanted to do with my professional life changed, and the fast track became less appealing, particularly considering the payoff, which is working with young students, young people who are fabulous. [...] I was able to do the high level stuff I expected to do, but I had to learn to teach in a new way.”
Bill Dunbar

Bill Dunbar
Sue Farnum

Sue Farnum

“It doesn’t matter what letters are after your name, and what your particular role might be. We need to be needed and we need to hang on to each other, and reach out and care.”
Peter Filkins

Peter Filkins

“It’s not what you’re reading, but how you’re reading it. And that, to me, is the essence of the Simon’s Rock education. It’s not the canon, and it’s not not the canon; it’s how you’re reading any of those works and how you’re engaging with them.”
Eileen Handelman

Eileen Handelman

“Why did Simon’s Rock make it? It had a real reason for being, and it clearly knew what it was. With all the difficulties, it knew what it was about.”
Arthur Hillman

Arthur Hillman

“If somebody’s photographing every week, and you look at their contact sheets, you know a lot about those kids! Their hang-ups, their romantic interests, their families. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen photographs of parents before I actually see the parents, and have a sense of who they are.”
Jamie Hutchinson

Jamie Hutchinson

“I’d had eight years of experience in the classroom. Nothing prepared me for Simon’s Rock. The contentiousness, the disputatiousness, the outspokenness, the critical eye that students would turn on you. I never felt so vulnerable, so exposed.”
Jan Hutchinson

Jan Hutchinson

"I just love the way Simon’s Rock makes people think on their feet, the way there’s so much conversation in the classroom, there’s so much writing done. People come out of here with this amazing ability to speak and to communicate."
Ruth B. Ide

Ruth B. Ide

“The story goes that it was a wet, wet, wet, windy night on the Mass Pike, and [Betty Hall and Doreen Young] saw this dog racing along beside the Pike, and they couldn’t bear to leave her there. So they picked her up. Gypsy went everywhere. At the time that the ARC was being renovated, she drove the carpenters crazy, because she climbed the ladders. They would find her up in the rafters with them, and that was just no good.”
Bill Jackson

Bill Jackson

“It was because of the close proximity [in the ARC] for classes, students, consultation, cross-pollination, swapping ideas, people walking by somebody’s project and asking what they were doing and that would give rise to something else! It was a lot of spontaneous development as a result of that kind of community. It was a community within a community.”
Anne O'Dwyer

Anne O'Dwyer

“I just can’t imagine that I could have found such an interesting group of people, and I often talk about this with new faculty, I think it is such a great advantage here that you are not just talking to people in your discipline. I think if I were in a big psych department somewhere and all I ever talked to were other psychologists, I think that would be really boring. And I don’t think that I would be as good a thinker. I might have known more about all the specific debates in the field but I don’t think I would be an as broad a thinker as I am because I don’t just talk to other psychologists.”
Bernie Rodgers

Bernie Rodgers

“Where else could I ask people to read a novel a week and they would actually do it?”
Don Roeder

Don Roeder

"[In 1979] I remember this big meeting in the ARC. And Betty Hall was the best I’d ever seen her. She got up and said, 'Well, we’re going to have this merger between Bard College and Simon’s Rock.' The analogy she used was brilliant. She talked about the chicken called the Barred Rock."
Bob Snyder

Bob Snyder

"The school is still such a wonderful place. It’s still a wonderful physical location. It’s still a lot of community. The students are interesting. The classes are interesting. I think the program is interesting. Things will change a little bit, but the school will remain the school it’s been."
Maryann Tebben

Maryann Tebben

“I remember when the library hours were going to change and the students were very upset and filed a protest. [Dean] Anne [O’Dwyer] was travelling and she came back from wherever she was to talk to students to reassure them that we would put back the Library hours that had been taken away, those are the sorts of things I like to remember. This is what’s important to us: library hours.”
Larry Wallach

Larry Wallach

“Simon’s Rock students are excited by doing interdisciplinary work. They always have been. They continue to have a big appetite for ‘I’m not just going to take pictures, I’m going to take pictures and tell my life story, and I’m going to put a soundtrack on it.’”
Judith Win

Judith Win

“The first person in the Simon’s Rock community to get a computer was Livy Hall. He would send these little notes and memos that he would type on his word processor and print out. He kind of shamed everybody into-- 'If I’m almost 90 and I can do this, you can do this.'"
Nancy Yanoshak

Nancy Yanoshak

"I’d like to be remembered as someone who was very dedicated to the college and to my students, who would go the extra mile for them and my colleagues. And I’d like to be remembered as someone who told good Soviet jokes!"