Smith Society Final with 2021 01 28

“An Intergenerational Community of Friends”: An Oral History of the Page and Eloise Smith Scholastic Society/Smith Renaissance Society with Bill Dickinson and Gary Miles Interviewed and Edited by Sarah Rabkin Santa Cruz University of California, Santa Cruz University Library 2021 This oral history is covered by copyright agreement between Bill Dickinson and the Regents of the University of California; and Gary Miles and the Regents of the University of California. Under “fair use” standards, excerpts of up to six hundred words may be quoted without the University Library’s permission, as long as the materials are properly cited. Quotations of more than six hundred words require the written permission of the Head of Special Collections and Archives, and a proper citation, and may also require a fee. Under certain circumstances, not-for-profit users may be granted a waiver of the fee. For permission contact: [email protected]. Bill Dickinson. Photo by Jim MacKenzie Gary Miles Contents Introduction 1 Bill Dickinson: Early Years 7 Moving to California 10 “These Are My People”: Transferring to UCSC 15 “Five or Six Careers”: After Santa Cruz 23 “A Healthy Cross-generational Community”: Launching the Smith Society 28 The Guardian Scholars Program 44 Keeping the Spirit Alive 47 Splitting from the Renaissance Scholars 61 Development Philosophies 65 “Founder’s Syndrome” 68 An Uncertain Future 79 Intergenerational Relationships: “Witnesses to Our Lives” 80 “My Inner Eloise” 88 Gary Miles 90 Becoming Involved with the Smith Society 93 Making Connections: Matching Mentors and Smith Students 96 Remarkable Students 106 Institutional Relationships 110 Research Fellowships 126 “Change Happens”: The Future of the Smith Society 127 Appendix 142 About the Interviewer and Editor 177 1 Introduction This oral history documents the Page and Eloise Smith Society, which offers support, advocacy, and fellowship to UC Santa Cruz undergraduates who come to the university with little or no family backing: former foster children; orphans; former juvenile delinquents; homeless and runaways. The society is the brainchild of alumnus Bill Dickinson, a member of the pioneer class who transferred to the campus in 1965 after having lived on his own since the age of sixteen. At a class reunion in 1999, Dickinson appealed to fellow pioneer alumni to help him build a scholarship fund for former foster children. Out of that initiative grew a volunteer-driven organization—the first of its kind in the US—that has, in the ensuing two decades, served hundreds of students, setting them up with mentoring, financial help, and a collegial community that many have come to think of as a surrogate family. Dickinson and his Smith Society associates learned early on, by scanning financial-aid applications, that the campus hosts a surprising number of students who fit the society’s membership criteria. The organization soon began making a marked difference in the lives of these undergraduates. Smith-affiliated students—also called “Collegiate Fellows” or “Smithies”—not only boast excellent retention rates; they are more likely to finish college than those in UCSC’s general student population.1 Whereas fewer than two percent of former foster youth nationwide graduate from college before the age of twenty-five, nearly all Smith fellows complete their bachelor’s degrees.2 Stories about Smith alumni published in the society’s annual newsletter testify to its impact on 1 Smith Renaissance Society News, Summer 2016: https://news.ucsc.edu/2016/05/smith-society-storycruz.html 2 https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/04/smithanniversary.html 2 individual lives, describing careers of distinguished service, scholarship, and professional accomplishment. As a result of the Smith Society’s successes, the California Homeless Youth Project gave UCSC the highest rating of any UC campus for its services to homeless and foster students.3In 2012, Dickinson’s “distinguished and sustained service” on behalf of these students earned him the Fiat Lux award, presented by the UC Santa Cruz Foundation “to alumni and friends who have demonstrated outstanding achievement, dedication and service in support of the University’s programs and goals.”4 In founding the society, Dickinson aimed to carry on the spirit of its namesakes, Page and Eloise (Pickard) Smith, who cultivated a vibrant community at Cowell College, where Page was founding provost. That community provided Dickinson with a cultural and intellectual home when he was a young man, he says, and launched him into happy adulthood. He cites Page Smith, a historian with an interest in educational philosophy, as an important mentor. He continues to espouse the pedagogical ideals he shared with Smith, who insisted that loving students is central to the art of teaching them well, and that a small, intimate community of students and teachers provides the best college education. “True learning is clearly incompatible with immensity,” Smith wrote in a passage that Dickinson has been known to quote. “Formalism, lifeless routines, bureaucratic obtuseness, coldness of heart, impoverishment of spirit are the inevitable consequences of excessive size.”5 3 Smith Renaissance Society News, Summer 2017: https://cahomelessyouth.library.ca.gov/docs/pdf/collegesupportsreportpdf4-27-17.pdf 4 https://foundation.ucsc.edu/awards/fiat-lux-award.html 5 Page Smith, Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America, 1989. 3 Over the years, in Dickinson’s efforts to sustain a spirit of collegial intimacy at a growing campus with an increasingly complex bureaucracy, he has raised a few hackles. He has little regard for institutional power hierarchies, preferring to go straight to the top when he wants something done—a strategy he learned early in a childhood overseen by judges and public agencies. He disdains the tangles of red tape that have proliferated at UCSC over the years, preferring to circumvent rules in order to serve students as he sees fit. As a result, he freely admits, some of the campus staff and administrators he worked with over the years came to see him as “obstreperous” and “a pain in the ass.” As Dickinson relates in the oral history, the embattled outlook he brought to those encounters stems in part from his sadness and frustration at the dismantling of the UCSC college system as the founders originally envisioned it—a system that gave him a sense of belonging, dignity, and agency during his three years as a member of the pioneer class—and in part from the mistrust of institutional authority that his childhood experiences engendered in him. In retrospect, he expresses regret for having antagonized some campus employees who, he came to realize, were merely doing their jobs. Yet while he can be blunt and outspoken, Dickinson is also—as his longtime friend and Smith Society colleague Gary Miles observes in the oral history—“this wonderful, welcoming, engaging, charismatic person,” whose warm enthusiasm, effective fundraising, and tremendous devotion to the wellbeing of UCSC undergraduates are clearly responsible for a great deal of the Smith Society’s success. In 2016, Bill Dickinson handed over responsibility for the Smith Society to its board of directors; he has since moved on to other initiatives, though he continues to support the society financially and through ongoing volunteer efforts. When Regional History 4 Project director Irene Reti suggested creating this oral history, Dickinson expressed a strong desire that it include not only his own perspective, but also those of fellow Smith Society volunteers. Because budgetary constraints prevented RHP from conducting a more comprehensive slate of Smith-related interviews, he offered to solicit written commentaries from several colleagues; these are provided, along with other supporting documents, in an appendix. Happily, for the third and final interview that I conducted for this oral history, we were able to bring in one of Bill Dickinson’s core colleagues, Gary Miles—an emeritus professor of history and classics who created and ran the Smith Society’s mentoring program, beginning shortly after he retired from his faculty position. A beloved teacher, Miles shares Dickinson’s enthusiasm for undergraduates; his decision to retire arose partly, as he notes in the oral history, from disaffection with UCSC’s growing class sizes, which had begun to impede his ability to interact meaningfully with individual students. Working with literature professor John Jordan, Miles built a highly successful program in which every one of Smith’s Collegiate Fellows who requested an adult mentor has been matched with one. At the Smith Society’s tenth-anniversary celebration, Miles—along with Cheryl Perazzo, a Financial Aid staff employee who has served Smith students from the society’s inception—received a Founder’s Award in recognition of his service to the organization and the campus. The award was presented to Miles by Scott Page, his own first Smith mentee, whom his family has come to see as a “second son.” Page flew out to California for the event from Massachusetts, where he was finishing up his studies for an electrical engineering PhD at MIT. Like Dickinson, Miles emphasizes the close mentor-student relationships that have been at the center of the Smith Society’s extraordinary success. He describes the thoughtfully 5 designed program he developed in order to cultivate such relationships, sharing stories of his interactions with mentors and students. His narrative and reflections convey both his loving engagement with this

Load more