UC Santa Cruz Other Recent Work Title "It Became My Case Study": Professor Michael Cowan's Four Decades at UC Santa Cruz Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3j5438d7 Authors Cowan, Michael Reti, Irene Publication Date 2013-01-11 Supplemental Material https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3j5438d7#supplemental eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California University of California, Santa Cruz University Library “It Became My Case Study” Professor Michael Cowan’s Four Decades at UC Santa Cruz Interviewed and Edited by Irene Reti Santa Cruz 2013 This manuscript is covered by copyright agreement between Michael Cowan and the Regents of the University of California dated December 3, 2012. Under “fair use” standards, excerpts of up to six hundred words (per interview) may be quoted without the Regional History Project’s permission as long as the materials are properly cited. Quotations of more than six hundred words require the written permission of the University Librarian 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. To contact the Regional History Project: [email protected] or Regional History Project McHenry Library, UC Santa Cruz 1156 High Street Santa Cruz, CA 95064 Phone: 831-459-2847 Table of Contents Introduction vii Early Life 12 Yale University 23 Senior Thesis on the Boy Scouts of America 34 Graduate Work in American Studies at Yale 37 Teaching at Yale University 43 Coming to the University of California, Santa Cruz 61 Teaching Community Studies 74 The Santa Cruz Housing Study 76 Merrill College 83 The Climate at UC Santa Cruz in the 1970s 93 Reaggregation 101 The UCSC College System in the 1970s 106 Cowan’s Teaching and Research in the 1970s 154 Chair of the Advisory Committee on Circulation, Parking, and Transit 158 Chairing the Ad Hoc Committee Revising the 1971 Long Range Development Plan 161 Inaugural Lecture: “Space as Value: A Reading of the UCSC Physical Plan” 165 UCSC’s Enrollment Crisis of the 1970s 174 Ethnic Studies in the 1970s 189 The Founding of American Studies at UCSC 196 Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer 207 Reorganization 212 Chair of the Academic Senate 219 Dean of the Humanities and Arts Division, Helene Moglen 237 Chairing the Humanities Division for Six Years 243 Linguistics 259 Literature 261 The Language Program 264 The Writing Program 267 History 270 Philosophy 273 History of Consciousness Board 274 Legal Studies 278 Women’s Studies 279 American Studies 281 Boundary-Crossing Enterprises at UCSC 285 The Oakes College-American Studies Story 297 UC Santa Cruz in the 1990s 336 Chair of the Academic Senate (Part II) 349 Diversity and Ethnic Studies 358 Chair of the UC Academic Council 387 Faculty Advisor to Chancellor MRC Greenwood 414 Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood 428 Oliver Johnson Award 433 Thoughts on Leadership 434 What Sort of a Story is UCSC? Reflections on the Past and Future 436 “It Became My Case Study”: Professor Michael Cowan’s Four Decades at UC Santa Cruz vii Introduction Michael Cowan arrived at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the fall of 1969 as an associate professor of community studies and literature and a fellow of Merrill College. By his retirement in 2004, Cowan had achieved a reputation as an outstanding campus leader who filled a variety of positions during his four decades at UCSC. These include two years as provost of Merrill College from 1978-1979; six years as dean of the Division of Humanities from 1983-1989; and multiple terms as chair of the departments of literature and American studies. Cowan is the only professor in UCSC’s history to serve two (widely separated) terms as chair of the Santa Cruz Division of the Academic Senate, from 1979 to 1980 and again from 1994 to 1996. In 1997, he received the first Dean McHenry Award for Distinguished Leadership, given by the UCSC Academic Senate to acknowledge outstanding service. Cowan was also the founding chair of the American studies department and a national leader in that field, serving as president of the American Studies Association from 1984 to 1986. In addition, Cowan served as vice chair and then chair of the (UC Systemwide) Academic Council and Assembly from 1999 to 2001. In 2006, Cowan received the Oliver Johnson Award, which biennially recognizes a member of the UC faculty who has performed outstanding service to the Academic Senate, an honor he shared with former UCSC Chancellor Karl Pister. “It Became My Case Study”: Professor Michael Cowan’s Four Decades at UC Santa Cruz viii In this substantial oral history, Cowan brings this breadth of experience together with an intense personal and scholarly interest in the institutional culture of higher education and the singular, and sometimes experimental history of UC Santa Cruz. This intersection of experience and intellectual study infuses Cowan’s oral history volume with deep insight and remarkable historical detail. Michael Cowan was born in 1937 to a working-class family in Kansas City, Missouri. His father’s family was of English and Scots-Irish background and was part of the great historic migration through the Cumberland Gap. His mother was of mixed Irish and Cherokee roots, although her family was no longer connected with their Native American heritage. Both of his parents were active in the Disciples of Christ Church. A scholarship from a food-processing magnate enabled Cowan to attend Yale University, where he found himself, in the fall of 1955, a working-class student amid mostly white and Anglo-Saxon, wealthy prep school boys. Personal experience with class, religious, racial, and regional differences in the United States would inform Cowan’s future perspectives on diversity in higher education. At Yale, Cowan enrolled in English courses, which taught him foundational skills in close reading which he later used in contexts as varied as teaching autobiography and analyzing UCSC planning reports as utopian documents. At the end of his sophomore year, he entered a relatively new undergraduate major in American studies and Yale’s Honors Program. American studies offered the young Cowan an intellectual framework in which to “It Became My Case Study”: Professor Michael Cowan’s Four Decades at UC Santa Cruz ix understand the somewhat alien culture of the East Coast. A Woodrow Wilson fellowship and a Danforth Fellowship enabled him to enter Yale’s graduate program in American studies, during which he spent a year studying abroad in Cambridge, England, coming to understand the American political system and culture from the British vantage point. Cowan accepted a temporary position as an instructor at Yale in 1963. He married and he and his then-wife, Anne, moved into an apartment above the library, where he wrote his dissertation entitled Emerson and the City. He also accepted a position as dean (equivalent to UC Santa Cruz’s academic preceptor) at Branford College, one of Yale’s residential colleges, an experience which he later drew on when he served as provost of UCSC’s Merrill College. Cowan began a national job search in 1968. His former colleague at Yale, Harry Berger, had recently begun teaching at the new UC Santa Cruz campus. Berger suggested that Cowan contact Professor Dennis McElrath, chair of sociology and an organizer of a new program in community studies. Cowan came to Santa Cruz and met with founding community studies professors William Friedland and Ralph Guzman. After a follow-up meeting with Founding Chancellor Dean McHenry, he was hired as a tenured associate professor and arrived in the fall of 1969. Cowan was drawn to several aspects of the UC Santa Cruz vision, including the residential college system, the emphasis on undergraduate education, and an openness to interdisciplinary thought. The natural beauty of “It Became My Case Study”: Professor Michael Cowan’s Four Decades at UC Santa Cruz x the redwood-forested campus overlooking the Monterey Bay also appealed to him. “It just seemed like a wonderful fit,” Cowan recalled. Cowan’s oral history is chronological, thematic, and sweeping—moving from the 1970s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, and visiting and revisiting topics which reoccur in campus history such as affirmative action, diversity, the ongoing struggle for an ethnic studies curriculum, and the dangers of fragmentation on a decentralized campus. Oral history is a co-creation of the narrator and interviewer. Cowan immediately grasped the collaborative nature of this endeavor and was one of the most articulate, energetic, and organized narrators whom I have interviewed in my more than two decades at the Regional History Project. He provided me with a rich personal archive of materials for background research, including his curriculum vitae, articles, committee meeting minutes, presentations, documents, and references. During the course of the interview, Cowan generously began what is now an ongoing stint as a volunteer in the University Library’s Special Collections Department, assisting with identifying and organizing collections of archival material pertinent to UCSC’s history. This immersion in campus history refreshed his memory and enriched the interview. I conducted eight interviews for this oral history with Cowan in the summer of 2012. We began on May 15 and completed the interviews on June 29, speaking together for a total of just over sixteen hours. It seems most appropriate that the site for these interviews was the Gloria Anzaldúa Study Room in McHenry Library. Like Anzaldúa, whose work Cowan taught in his American “It Became My Case Study”: Professor Michael Cowan’s Four Decades at UC Santa Cruz xi studies and literature courses, Cowan finds meaning in the metaphor of bridges, borderlands, and crossroads, images he returned to throughout these interviews.