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John P. Lynch: Campus Citizen, Community Educator, Classics Professor Interviewed and Edited by Cameron Vanderscoff Santa Cruz University of California, Santa Cruz University Library 2015 This oral history is covered by a copyright agreement between John Patrick Lynch and the Regents of the University of California dated April 21, 2015. Under “fair use” standards, excerpts of up to six hundred words (per interview) 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: Irene Reti at [email protected], Oral Historian, Special Collections and Archives, McHenry Library, UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064. Phone: 831-459-2847. Contents Interview History 1 “It was Run by My Mother Like a Boarding House”: Growing up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts 7 Early Faith, Education, and Introduction to Classics 15 Undergraduate Education at Harvard 20 Reflections on Vocational Directions and Education at Yale 37 “In This Country, You Need a Degree”: Reflections on Family Expectations and Reactions 44 From New England to Athens: Studying in Greece in a Time of Revolution 46 Reflections on the Sixties, the Study of Classics, and Mentorship 51 Coming to UCSC: Early Cowell College and the Classics Program 60 “They Decided to Tear Up Our Reading List”: Early Educational Experiments at UCSC 71 Reflections on the Narrative Evaluation System and Ideology in Classics 77 College-Board Dynamics at Early UCSC 82 Reflections on Reaggregation and Reorganization 89 The Role of the Staff in College and Department Life 93 Interdisciplinary Experiments at UCSC 95 Cowell Provostship: Student Protest, Student Life, and Being the “Model of the Slug” 98 Promoting a Community Education at Cowell 112 The Three Worlds of Maria Elena Gutierrez: A Student at Cowell and the Study of Literature Across Cultures 122 Closing Reflections on College Culture and Helping Individual Students 128 The Bacchae: Arts and the College Environment 131 The Function and Evolution of the Core Course and Writing Education 135 The Evolution and Growth of the Classics Program 143 Internal Conflict and Receivership in the Literature Department 157 Campus Citizenship: Academic Senate and Educational Abroad Program 167 Leaving Rigor for the Coroner: Philosophies on Teaching and Education 171 Jack Kevorkian for Chair of Literature and Acting Deanship of the Humanities 178 Determining Personal Priorities 179 Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and the Contemporary University 180 From Mr. Chips to the Grant-Getter: Changes at UCSC and in the Values of the Professorate 189 A Personal Retrospective on a Career in Santa Cruz 193 “Opportunities to Contribute:” Retirement, Health, Study and the Soup Kitchen 196 Home in Great Barrington, Home in Santa Cruz: Closing Reflections on Family 213 John P. Lynch: Campus Citizen, Community Educator, Classics Professor / page 1 Interview History John Patrick Lynch is a professor emeritus of literature and a formative figure in the classics program at UC Santa Cruz, as well as a former provost of Cowell College. Lynch expands on these roles in this account, providing their larger context in his work and philosophies as an educator, and discussing his hopes and priorities in his 37-year career at this institution. He makes sweeps through the personal as well as the professional, and in doing so, affirms a core vocational identity as a teacher above all else, a campus citizen above a researcher. In his work at UCSC, Lynch sought to instantiate a model of learning that is fundamentally shared between teacher and student, one that goes beyond the confines of the classroom to become an experience in community. This telling begins in the mill town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where he was raised in a home that, as he puts it, “was run by my mother like a boarding house,” with an abundance of relatives across generations from the Polish and, to a lesser degree, the Irish side of his family. In this setting, complete with a boisterous dinner table presided over by the speeches of his grandfather, and bustling with three to four family members per room, Lynch describes himself as a “reserved,” “bookish” kid. He charts one beginning for his interest in classics through his involvement with the nearby Catholic Church, where his father was janitor and his mother a housekeeper and cook at the rectory. Between the access granted by his father’s job and his own nine years of service as an altar boy, he became interested in old books, manuscripts, and Latin. This interest flourished through high school, where he took Latin courses and developed an enjoyment for school that extended to taking on extra reading. This passion for learning and John P. Lynch: Campus Citizen, Community Educator, Classics Professor / page 2 education is one of the key topics in this oral history. In Lynch’s youth it helped drive him—the first member of his family to attend college—from Great Barrington to a full scholarship at Harvard. In his career, it centered his professorial work not in research but in engagement with the questions, concerns, and welfare of his students. Lynch overviews his time at Harvard, where he was partially inspired to attend by W.E.B. DuBois, a boyhood icon and fellow product of Great Barrington. He goes on to explain the evolution of his classical study through his undergraduate years, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at Yale, a Rotary Fellowship in Athens during the 1967 military coup d’état, and his return to Yale to finish his doctorate. Through these changes, he details the cultural shift of the sixties as it politicized both him and the classics field as a whole. Lynch proves to be a thoughtful commentator on what has often been called the original UCSC experiment, starting from his decision to pick up and drive cross country, having never taught a class, to accept a position in classics at the young campus in 1969. He explains, “It had some of the same prestige in its newness that places like Harvard or Yale had in their ancientness or oldness.” He illustrates this character through his own experience teaching courses like pantology (“the study of everything”), anecdotes on what he terms the cultural (rather than political) radicalism of early Santa Cruz, and through his own involvement in the collegiate model of student engagement. Indeed, one of the core facets of the interviews is his reflection on his affiliation with Cowell College, which includes a tenure as provost in the eighties where he sought to engender a climate of “high expectations.” For an indication of the John P. Lynch: Campus Citizen, Community Educator, Classics Professor / page 3 depth of Lynch’s involvement with the Cowell and UCSC story, one needs look no farther than this: as provost, he was the original human model for the famous Plato-reading banana slug, now ubiquitous in campus materials, clothes, and branding.1 Lynch also comments on his own educational and pedagogical ideas, which provide insight into what has made him so beloved as a teacher and college figure over the years. The soul of this philosophy is his professional focus on students. Lynch defines himself as a teacher of students first, a campus citizen second, and a researcher third—an unusual sequence, especially in an era when tenure, advancement, and professional esteem have increasingly been reliant on a prioritized, robust publishing career. Drawing on his classroom experiences, and the inspiration of Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, he is an eloquent thinker on pedagogical approaches, “community education,” and orienting teaching towards not “gatekeeping” or maintenance of rigor, but the relative “growth” of the student and the teacher. Lynch is also an advocate of the now- dismantled narrative evaluation pass/no pass system, in spite of the fact he feels it was “not in the faculty’s interest” due to the extra workload required. It was, he feels, in the student’s interest, arguing, “There’s something about grades that 1 In conversation during the final editing of this oral history, Lynch told Regional History director Irene Reti a colorful story about the early days of UCSC. Apparently coffee was not sold anywhere on campus in the early days and neither was candy. Carob bars were available at the Whole Earth Restaurant. Perceiving a need for coffee, but also for the interactive community that a coffeeshop can bring, Lynch founded the Cowell Coffeeshop around 1974 and was its first manager. Coffee was five cents if you brought your own cup. Many faculty members as well as students, and John’s wife, Sheilah, worked in the coffeeshop as volunteers. A beautiful mirror from the Cowell Ranch was discovered in a barn and hung near the counter. Professor Al Johnson designed the interior of the coffeehouse. After a few years later when coffeeshop began selling food as well as coffee and managing a restaurant became too much of a job for volunteers and the first paid manager was hired—Irene Reti. John P. Lynch: Campus Citizen, Community Educator, Classics Professor / page 4 just cuts off growth, whereas a narrative evaluation can be a beginning of a developmental process.” Thematically, Lynch tracks the development of the classics program, which has remained in keeping with his vision: small, intimate, close-knit, but part of the diverse umbrella of the larger literature department. Towards the end of our sessions, he also comments on the long move of UC Santa Cruz away from its original collegiate structure towards a traditional research university model.

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