Marshall Poe:
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network, and you're listening to an episode in Grinnell College's Authors and Artists podcast. Today, I'm very happy to say we're talking to George Drake, Emeritus President of Grinnell College. George graduated from Grinnell in 1956 and then became president of Grinnell in 1979, and he held the reigns until 1991. In addition to being Grinnell's president, George is also a historian with years of college teaching under his belt, and we'll talk about that in, of course, the interview. And we'll also be mentioning his memoir, 70 Years in Academe. Welcome to the show, George.
George Drake:
Nice to be here, Marshall. Thank you for inviting me.
Marshall Poe:
Absolutely. My pleasure. I'm not sure we met when I was at Grinnell. I got there about the same time you did, and you got there in 1979. I got there in 1980.
George Drake:
Well, we would've laid eyes on each other.
Marshall Poe:
I think that's right. I think laid eyes is exactly right. So, you open 70 Years in Academe by saying that you read Jonathan Zimmerman's book The Amateur Hour, which is essentially a history of college teaching in the United States. We've actually had Jonathan on the New Books Network. And can you tell us a little bit about how reading Zimmerman's book prompted your reflection and then prompted you to write 70 Years in Academe?
George Drake:
Well, yes. In the first place, that's a sort of piquant title, The Amateur Hour, describing college teaching, but I think Jonathan Zimmerman's right on. Those of us who become college teachers usually receive very, very little, if any, training in graduate school about teaching. It's virtually all about scholarship. That may have changed since my time in graduate school in the 1960s, but according to Zimmerman, not very much.
Marshall Poe:
No, it hasn't changed.
George Drake:
And reading that book, which I found fascinating and I certainly would be glad to give a plug for the book because anyone who's interested in colleges and college teaching would gain a lot from it, I realized that I had either seen or tried most of the techniques that he lays out. He, of course, gives a lot of emphasis on personality involved with teaching, and I think that's been true in my observation as well. Over time, some people, not a lot, have suggested that I write a memoir and I hadn't been inspired to do that, but after reading the Zimmerman book I was inspired to do it, so I did it. It's far from a complete coverage of all of my academic experience, but that would be extremely boring to do it that way [inaudible 00:03:11] a lot highlights of it from... But the book begins with my undergraduate years at Grinnell. By the way, 70 years is a bit of a fudge. It's 69 plus, if you will [inaudible 00:03:26].
Marshall Poe:
We will allow you that. Let's actually get into your years at Grinnell. My first question is, Grinnell is kind of an out-of-way place, and I'm always interested to tell people how I got to Grinnell, which was by a completely strange connection. How did you get to Grinnell? Why did you choose to go to Grinnell?
George Drake:
Well, first of all, I was interested in small liberal arts colleges. I did not seriously contemplate going to a major university, though I was a runner and a successful high school athlete. I had the fastest time in the half-mile in Illinois my graduating year, and our team won the state championship and I was second in the half-mile, beaten by a guy I'd beaten twice before. Anyway, so I was recruited by I think Northwestern Wisconsin, and Michigan as a runner, but I actually made some visits because I was curious about it but I never had much of an intention of going to one of those major institutions, partly because I questioned whether I was of that caliber as a runner. But mostly I just wanted to go to a liberal arts college.
My dad had been president of a small liberal arts college in Nebraska called Doane, and so it was founded by the Congregational Church, as was Grinnell and as was Carlton. Those were the two colleges he recommended to me, and my high school counselors also recommended them to me. They didn't recommend any Ivy League or East Coast schools. They didn't think I was up to that kind of competition. I was not what you'd call an outstanding high school student. I tested pretty well, but I didn't do much work in high school. So anyway, it came down actually three colleges. Beloit, Carlton, and Grinnell were the ones I was looking at and visited all three. Grinnell and Carlton had a thing called a Baker Scholarship, which was a nationally endowed scholarship which had competition on campus. You came to campus, took the battery of exams, were interviewed by one faculty member and one administrator. I went through that at both Carlton and Grinnell.
I have to say, I felt a little more comfortable at Grinnell. When I visited Carlton, they talked Grinnell down. They said, "You don't want to go there. [inaudible 00:06:01] right through the middle of campus." Whereas the Grinnell folks, when I'd mentioned Carlton, they said, "Oh, that's a good school. I can understand why you'd choose them." And so, I liked that attitude better. Anyway, I got offered the Baker Scholarship from Grinnell, take it or leave it with a few days to decide, and I decided to take it. Then I got a call from Carlton maybe a week later saying, "Had I accepted a Baker from another institution?" And I said, "Yes." And they said that, "We can't offer you one." So it was partly a matter of timing, but I think partly Grinnell was the right choice for me. There's no question about it in terms of the field of the campus and so on.
Marshall Poe:
It was for me too. I didn't know it at the time and I won't go into the details, but I'm very glad that I elected to go there. I'm very interested in hearing about, and you talk about this in the book, undergraduate teaching at Grinnell when you went there, this is between 1952 and 1956, and how it is different than the teaching you did later. What was teaching like at Grinnell?
George Drake:
Well, in the first place, this is all just on the cusp of the paperback revolution. So most of the reading was textbook reading. By my senior year, we were beginning to get assigned paperbacks, so shorter and more varied reading as time unfolded. Most of the teaching was by lecture. The faculty had heavier teaching lows than they have today by a considerable margin. We did write papers, but mostly it was term papers, not short papers as we do today. For example, in my tutorial, which I taught up until a couple of years ago, I had six one-page paper assignments. So multiple assignments, much shorter, much more focused on deconstructing the writing of the student and almost sentence by sentence, word by word kind of analysis that you could do when you have just a single page in front of you. Whereas when I was a student and there was just by the fact that we had Christmas break and then had another two to three weeks of the semester when we got back, so you could do some research and writing during the Christmas vacation and the process of signing a 20- to 25-page paper.
So there were less reading, ultimately less writing, but when you wrote, it was usually a longer paper, mostly lectures. So I describe in the book one particular professor John Kleinsmith, who taught according to a kind of Socratic discussion method. And I don't know, I guess it's worth repeating the story. The one course in high school that I worked hard at really hard at just to survive and I got a C in the class, was studying French. But when I got Grinnell it turned out my high school French was the equivalent of college French because I crawled out of the first two years of French. So I was able to take a lot of French literature courses, which I did do as a freshman in with juniors and seniors. So that was a heady experience. And this was actually my freshman year in a French drama class with John Kleinsmith.
And we'd had an exam and we came into the class ready for the exam to be handed out and Professor Kleinsmith said, "Mr. Drake, why did you write such insulting comments at the end of your exam?" And I'm just dumbfounded. I said, "Professor Kleinsmith, I didn't write anything of that type." And he said, "Now you're compounding the felony by lying to me." It seemed to me and interminably it was probably about one to two minutes, but it seemed like five to 10 minutes. And then all of a sudden John stops and he says, "What was dramatic about that?" So that was the way he launched us into a discussion of the nature of drama that was John Kleinsmith. So that's at least as interactive as any teaching that going on at Grinnell now. So it wasn't all lecture discussion, but of course, the great master of the lecture discussion was Professor Joe Wall.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I wanted you to talk about Joe Wall because you go on at some length about Joe in the book.
George Drake:
Joe was remarkable. He a great historian in his own right and Bancroft Prize winner for his own writing and a master teacher. He could create an atmosphere in the classroom narrative with discussion and interspersed with the narrative. And it was just totally engaging, partly because there was a great moral force at work. It wasn't just an intellect at work, but a great moral force. And he didn't ram his morality down our throats, but it was evident where he stood and he invited us to challenge that morality. But I would say the great genius of Joe was narrative. He could just weave a narrative in class. It was just spellbinding.
Marshall Poe:
Well, that sounds wonderful. So let's move you past Grinnell. You graduate in '56 and then you got a Fulbright to go to Paris. And then if I understand correctly, you didn't get a Rhode scholarship and then you did.
George Drake:
Well, that's an interesting if not peculiar story. The way the Rhodes was decided in those days and for many years thereafter, there were different regions in the country and six states would be a part of each region. We were the Midwest region and there would be two candidates from every state that would survive a state competition and then come together in one location, all 12 of those candidates, two per state and six states. In this case, it was in Des Moines at the Banker's Life Building. And it's a very interesting and tense process because you're all interviewed, you come the night before and have a social interaction over dinner, and of course the committees there judging you during the dinner whether you can hold your fork right or whatever they're looking at. And then you have these interviews the next day, each interview probably a half hour to 40 minutes and then at the end of the day you all come together and it's, "You, you, you, and you are the Rhode scholars." Four of the 12 will be selected. I was not one of them. Riding down the elevator with the secretary of the committee. He leaned over to me and he said, "Mr. Drake, you might try again and next time be a little more self-confident."
Well, that told me that the committee had taken a long time and actually they'd taken a long time over their fourth choice, a man named Truman Schwartz from McAllister, myself and Truman. Truman, we got to know each other quite well at Oxford after that because we were in the same college. So I took a Fulbright and went to Paris and then I get a letter, excuse me, a telegram from this committee member asking me if I was going to apply for the Rhodes again. And my response to him was, "Yes, I would be glad to apply that I could just reactivate my material, but I couldn't." This is 1955 and getting home would be expensive and slow by boat. And so I said, "I just can't come for the interview." So I thought that's that. They'll have me in the pool, but I won't get the rose. Well, without getting the interview I got the rose and the other three that at that time thought I was some sort of God who could not even have to show up for the interview to get the scholarship. So it was probably a strange appointment to the Rhode scholarship as I'm aware of. Probably some other strange ones as well. So that's how I got it on myself.
Marshall Poe:
That must have been a good day when you got the telegram explaining you got a Rhodes and didn't have to interview.
George Drake:
In fact, I hadn't even told my parents that I was reapplying. They read it in the paper.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Did they really? Wow. So then you go on to Oxford, What was it like being an American Midwesterner in Oxford in the 1950s?
George Drake:
A little overwhelming. It was Oxford. I had a romantic view of Oxford and that romantic view turned out to be reaffirmed by being there because it is truly a medieval university. The way it is structured, these buildings and so on. And you might say maybe in some of the ways it approaches education. It was overwhelming in some ways because British undergraduate life, at least at a place like the Cambridge and Oxford is different from the US. For example, in the US, and you would, I think, recognize this Marshall, you can be as smart and get good grades as you want and no one's going to put you down. But if you talk like that, if you show off your intelligence in dorm conversations and so on, that's not going to be very popular at Grinnell. So your academic, at least in my day, certainly your academic life and your social life were quite a bit separated.
Whereas in Britain, the British undergraduates never do any work. They never admit to any work. They're just naturally brilliant. So in conversation Americans are overwhelmed by the brilliance of the conversation. We're not used to that kind of informal conversation. But as you know, you can complain all you wanted at Grinnell about how much studying you're doing and how much work you're putting into your courses. That's fine. Just don't show the results of that study very prominently. I think students are a little better today in talking about serious matters, but they certainly weren't in the 1950s.
Marshall Poe:
That's fascinating. That's fascinating. Yes. When I was at Grinnell, all we could talk about was how much we had to study. But then when we weren't studying, well, we did sometimes have serious discussions. So then after Oxford, you go on to get a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, 1959. And one of the things that stands out to me as somebody who also got a Ph.D. is that you got it apparently in five years. It took me eight.
George Drake:
Well of course I had a year of work in Paris where I was working sort of on my own on French Protestant history. And then at Oxford you do a single subject. So you are going to graduate with another bachelor of arts degree, which by the way, you can convert to a master of arts degree if you pay fees for five years, show you are interested enough in the university to become a master of the university. So I do have a purchased MA from Oxford on top of my BA. So I did the single subject modern history, which is really British history and a special subject with some research on Oliver Crowell and his period in the Commonwealth and Protectorate. So every one of those courses had a special subject with it so he could do something akin to research. And so with that background coming back, actually I entered divinity school and got my divinity degree, which in those days was a bachelor of Divinity. And they gave a master's of divinity these days and then went on for the Ph.D.
Now here's where the Chicago system is different. At Oxford for example, virtually nothing changed during my two years there. And in many years afterwards, with respect to the curriculum. At Chicago, anything that was in print about the curriculum was probably out of date. Chicago was a cutting-edge kind of place and you were assessed according to your examination results, not the passage of courses. So you could cut out courses if you had some background and could work it up on your own just as long as you could pass the exams. And that's part of the reason why I was able to move it along, particularly after I got my divinity degree and got into the graduate work. The graduate work I'd had previously, the three years previous to arriving in Chicago came into play at that point. And then did church history.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. And then you go on, and this was fascinating to me as somebody who got a Ph.D. and went out on the job market and went to the AHA a lot for many years, you got your first job which was at Colorado College. Maybe you could tell the story of how you got that job because it's so different than the way jobs are distributed today.
George Drake:
I have to back up.
Marshall Poe:
Okay.
George Drake:
I'm of a very fortunate generation, born in the sort of the middle, the tail end of the depression, 1934. The impact of the Depression on families was severe at that time and people were not having as many children. They could not afford children or very many children. So my generation was always the so-called depression generation, not as many of us as in other generations. We were a sparse generation with respect to population. And so that opened up a lot of doors for me, getting into Grinnell with a major scholarship with a... Well, I graduated 79th in my high school class. I managed to graduate first in my college class. So I did become a student while at Grinnell.
So when I got out of graduate school, the baby boomers are beginning to arrive. This is 1964. So the demographics of college attendance is going up and there are fewer people looking for jobs. So it was possible for me to do what I did and actually get a job. My wife and I... I need to back up. The only pastoral job I ever had was a summer church in a little teeny community called Marble Colorado High up in the Colorado Rockies town located at about 8000 feet. And I did that for two summers. In the first summer, we bought a little bit of land and didn't cost very much. And then the second summer we started on our own building this cabin, and we had people around us who knew about buildings. So we could ask questions. Actually I'd spent the previous year at Grinnell as a sabbatical replacement. This is during my graduate work.
And excuse me, Ed Bowers, who was a football coach, was from a construction family. And so I had him sitting in Darby Gym for two hours giving me the basics about building something like a cabin. Anyway, the second summer, Sue and I got that cabin framed in and on the way back from Marble to Chicago where I was a graduate student, we stopped... I had not written to Colorado College to the president of Colorado College who was, fortunately for me, a very open-minded person. And I said, I introduced myself as a Rhode scholar and said I was very interested in teaching at Colorado College, a place like Grinnell, but at base of the Rocky Mountains. So we stopped off at CC on the way back to Chicago, and I met the president and a member of the history department and quite a bit later, several months later, received an appointment at Colorado College to be director of their freshman honors program called Selected Student Program. As I point out in the book, I wasn't savvy enough to recognize there was no departmental appointment attached to there.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, that was interesting.
George Drake:
I assumed I was in the history department, but when I got to CC the following fall, I found out that I wasn't in the history department. I had a little bit of work to do to ingratiate myself with my history colleagues which fortunately I was able to do. So that's how I ended up at Colorado College.
Marshall Poe:
That's different than it's done today. One of the things I found fascinating in the book, and I had forgotten this because I knew people that went to CC, is that they have a different method of teaching than a place like Grinnell. They used the block plan and that actually came about while you were there. Maybe you could describe the block plan, what it is, and how it came about at CC and whether you like it or not.
George Drake:
Yeah, I have to back up a little bit. After I'd been at the college only three years as an assistant professor. By this time, an assistant professor of history, as well as running the Selected Student Program. After I'd been there that amount of time, the dean contracted cancer and the president asked me if I would be willing to be the acting dean for a year while the real dean struggled with his cancer. And I said, "Yes." So I mean, I was a little older than someone recently employed into a college. I didn't get a full-time job till I was 30 years old. I spent so much time in graduate school. So a what, 33 years old assistant professor untenured. I'm acting as the dean for a year. Then it turned out that the dean did not sufficiently recover to resume the job.
So I became the dean for six years. And that was during the time that co-college SW shifted to the block plan, excuse me. The president sort of initiated the process saying, "We're going to enter our second 100 years, we should actively review our curriculum and see if we might not do it with some change, some major changes." And so a political scientist, a real genius, a man named Glen Brooks was appointed as special assistant to the president. And his job was to investigate and come up with ideas about how the college might enter his second 100 years with something new and refreshing. And Glen did this exactly the right way. He talked to person after person, talked with faculty, talked with staff, talked to the administrative assistants, talked to the athletic department and so on. And there was a psychologist at CC, a man called Don Sher who had the germ of the ideas. Said to Glen, "You give me my 25 students for one month exclusively, and I'll show you what education really is." And that was the birth of the idea of the black plan.
My role as Dean was first of all to get on board and I definitely was on board. I was excited by the prospect and then from an administrative point of view to help it along as well as possible. But the idea was not mine. The driving force behind it was not me, it was Glen Brooks. The president had exactly the right attitude. He said, "Anything that is educationally valid, we will make administratively possible." So yeah, you had a very open and encouraging point of view from the president, which was absolutely key. So anyway, that's how the one course at a time, the block plan came about.
I would say the only original contribution I made was during one committee session. The committee that was focusing on this question was, "How are you going to get from one course to the next over a weekend?" Winding, as we know, if you winding up one course and starting the next is the most stressful part of teaching and just not enough time over a weekend. So I said, "What's magical about the course being four weeks? Let's make it three and a half weeks and have a thing called the block break from Wednesday noon and until the following Monday to give the faculty a little bit of breathing space." So that's how the block break came about. Made lots of sense out in Colorado at the base of Pike's Peak. Kids could go skiing in the winter, hiking. And so they didn't, because the CC students come from all over. Most many of them, if not most, had a hard time getting home just for a short time.
So I've always wondered about Cornell here in Iowa, which picked up on the block plan from CC and how they make of the block break in Iowa isn't quite as good a location for the block break as Colorado College. But anyway, this started in 1970 and all kinds of logistical problems. Each class had its own room because so you are not tied to an hourly schedule. So how to find enough rooms on campus. They were using fraternity and sorority lounges, almost any available space in order to find enough classroom space, things like that. Registration. Registration is going to be a lot different. And so Glen got cadre as the students together, faculty were put together a schedule, and then the students would practice registering. One of the things that came out immediately was most of the introductory work was early in the year and more advanced courses later in the year that had to be reshuffled. Things like that, that had to be tried before you actually got into the block plan itself. So it was quite innovative, quite exciting. And I enjoy teaching under it. Teaching is a little bit different. You can't sign long papers, getting readings [inaudible 00:31:08]. Imagine trying to teach Victorian literature in three and a half weeks. A lot of adjustments had to be made.
Marshall Poe:
Well it's a fascinating story and as I say, I don't know a lot about the block plan, so thank you for describing it for us. So then, to move forward, in 1970, you become a trustee member on the board of trustees at Grinnell. And then in 1979 you were appointed president. How did that come about?
George Drake:
I was demoted.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, you really were.
George Drake:
[inaudible 00:31:42] chair of the trustees at that time, said, "Now George, remember you're working for us." So I moved from being a colleague to being an employee. Well, I was on the board because of my academic experience, not because I was going to be a major financial contributor to the college. And I was surprised when Dick Turner resigned when several board members approached me and said, well, was I ready? Because I had been mostly a mouth in trustee meetings and I had not been the most faithful attender at trustee meetings. I made most of the meetings, but I did miss some. So I was surprised that some of my colleagues saw me in that light. Anyway, soon after that, I got a call from Bob Nois who was chairing the search committee and he said, "George, I have two questions. Don't answer the first until you answer the second."
The first question was, would I be willing to be on the search committee? And then the second question was, would I be willing to be a candidate? And I thought for just a minute or so, and I said, "Well, I'll put it this way, Bob. Don't put me on the search committee." So that's how I became a candidate and turned out I was a successful candidate. I think there were three of us invited to campus. And of course, in some ways I had an advantage over the others because I'd been tracking the college very closely from my position on the board of trustees. When I got the job, as probably this is a good thing, I was not ecstatic because I had a pretty good idea what faced me and whether I could survive. What faced me was another question.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, yeah.
George Drake:
I could not turn... Now, excuse me, I'm getting hiccups. I could not turn down the opportunity to be president of my college. So I accepted it with alacrity and with hopefulness, but not with ecstasy.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, yeah. Well it must have been quite a transition from you were a dean at the time, but still running a college. That's a big job. I talked to Anne Harris the other day and it's a very serious undertaking being a college president.
George Drake:
And in fact, I had already resigned from the deanship of Colorado College because I wanted to teach full-time on the block plan. So I've been teaching full-time for several years. So actually my appointment came to Grinnell was from a faculty position.
Marshall Poe:
I see, I see. So now we're getting into my time because you arrived in '79 and I arrived in 1980. And you mentioned a couple of cases, one of which happened when I was there in 1981, and I was absolutely fascinated to learn that at the time when you arrived, and I may get this wrong, there was a, I believe the way you put it is a tenure quota that is only a certain percentage of professors in departments could be tenured. And I believe the figure was 60% that all the other less...
George Drake:
[inaudible 00:35:07].
Marshall Poe:
Is that right, 60%?
George Drake:
Well, 66. Two-thirds for the full faculty.
Marshall Poe:
Okay, yeah.
George Drake:
No department was to be fully tenured. Well, no single department.
Marshall Poe:
And then there were some tough cases in 1981 of which I remember a philosophy professor, I won't mention any names, but I do remember that it caused a huge hubbub on campus among people that I knew. I had just arrived, I didn't know anything about it, but it was controversial. Can you talk a little bit about how that tenure quota changed?
George Drake:
Well, as a trustee, I had voted against the tenure quota policy. This is initiative of Dick Turner coming from Middlebury. And I think Middlebury had a tenure policy. Grinnell was not overly tenured at the time, but that's all obviously a fear because if you get something like 85 or 90% of the faculty tenured, you're not going to get much new blood. And you've got a heavy financial commitment to people who are associated and full professors who are being paid a lot more than assistant professors just coming in. So there's a reason for it.
But for my attitude was that in a small college community, this could be absolutely corrosive. People are so much closer to each other on the faculty than you are in a major institution where there's so many faculty members and to have to make these decisions in a somewhat arbitrary way. In other words, we were bumping up against the tenure quota, and so no one can be tenured or very few can be tenured. Actually, the first decision that was made was an exception to the policy. There were four people in physics and a young physicist who was as good as anybody in the department, if not better, who came up for tenure and they tenured him. So immediately there was a physics department was totally tenured.
So when I was appointed president, I asked a list of about a dozen things that I wanted for sure to do. One was to bring Joe Wall back, one was to save Mers Cottage. One was to overturn the tenure quota of policy. So early on in my meetings with the trustees, I proposed overturning it and we had a long discussion, and finally they agreed to overturn it. And they rebuttal to me was, "George, how can we be sure we won't get over tenured?" And I said, "You're going to have to trust frankly the administration to make these decisions." Now the problem up until then was that the tenure decision was not made until the fifth or sixth year. You can't enter your seventh year without being tenured if you're in a full-time appointment.
So the decision point comes after this person's been at the college quite a while, and a number of us recognize that that's too late to make the initial crack at tenure. So a third-year review was instituted. Now I have to back up. You refer to the philosophy professor. One philosophy professor and one anthropology professor came up to the administration with mixed votes as to say they were not unanimously approved for tenure, but they were approved by the faculty for tenure. And so the Dean, Katherine Frazier and I decided that we would overturn that, both of those cases. And as you pointed out, all hell broke loose. I remember running one afternoon and students stopped me and said, "You better get over to the forum. The students are talking about firing you." So it was quite a crisis year. But ever after that, we've just instituted third-year review where people who are in a shaky position, it's a lot easier to let them go after three years. Then after five or six years when your kids have gotten to know each other. You've socialized together and so on. So it's worked much better since then.
Marshall Poe:
So there's another case that you talked about. I was gone from Grinnell in 1989, which I found fascinating. And if I recall the incident correctly, that is from reading the book, a first-year student asked if she could move off campus to live with her partner. And the issue was that the partner wasn't a student. And so there must have been some policy against that. And then the other issue was these two folks happened to be women. And this all got very complicated. I didn't ever really understand the policy toward married students when I was at Grinnell. I never understood it, but maybe you could talk about it.
George Drake:
They were going to get married and if we had approved that, we would've been the first institution.
Marshall Poe:
I would say, yeah.
George Drake:
So that was part of it. But the real issue was, as you would know, a lot of heterosexual students wanted to move off campus and live together. And we thought, if we allowed that, it would just open up that floodgate. And so was related to the whole issue of marriage policy. Now I back up and say that one of the good things about Grinnell is that we have an obligation to live in the dormitories the first two years. And the only way at that time you could get out of that was if you were married. And we have a non-discrimination clause prominently featured in our catalog. We did not discriminate according to gender or affection. There's a lot of verbiage there. And so we were hoisted on our own petard because it didn't distinguish between heterosexual marriage and homosexual marriage. And so the way the deans were adamantly opposed to allowing same-sex marriage, and the students who were the first year able to move off.
If they'd been both been students, we'd say, "Room together." And we don't care under what circumstances you're rooming together. But this was not possible because this was a non-student. So all hell broke loose. The TV cameras were over from Des Moines, students pounding on the walls of Nolan house and so on. Me out there trying to explain what we were doing to the TV cameras. But what we did was withdraw the privilege of moving off campus in the first two years, even if you were married. And one of our best basketball players had already been approved to move off campus to get married. And he was the second year, and we rescinded that. I felt very badly about it, but we had to be consistent. He left school in order to get married. So that was the issue. It was called a housing issue, but it was really a [inaudible 00:42:50].
Marshall Poe:
I remember when I was there that there was on a floor where I lived, there was a married couple that lived in the dormitory in [inaudible 00:42:57]. Am I remembering correctly, if you were married, you could live together in the dorms?
George Drake:
I guess you're right. I forgot about that. Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I remember it very well because there was a couple and they were very nice and they lived a couple doors down for me and they were married and they lived in the dorms and never really thought anything about it. But once again, Grinnell College on the cutting edge. So we've taken up a lot of your time. I don't want to neglect what you did after you stepped down in 1991. But could you briefly tell us a little bit about what you've been doing since then? That's a lot of time.
George Drake:
Well, when I stepped down from presidency in 1991, my wife Sue and I joined the Peace Corps. And we were in a small southern African country called Lesotho. We were both teachers. Sue who had a background as an elementary school teacher, went out to six, well, one was located where we lived up in the mountains of Lesotho. And then she went out to five other schools, sometimes riding horseback, working with the teachers. She was a resource teacher for the Lesotho teachers. I, on the other hand, walked about 200 meters to a classroom where I was an English teacher on the campus, it was a girls high school. And so I taught English too for two years to these Lesotho girls, which was a very interesting experience. Then we returned to Grinnell, and when I became president, I bargained about one thing. I didn't bargain about salary. I figured they'd pay me fairly. But I bargained to get tenure in the history department. Now, my naivety was that I could assume that tenure almost under any circumstances. Fortunately, my presidency had been successful enough that the history department welcomed me. If I'd had an unsuccessful presidency, it might have been a little harder to make that transition to the history department. And my history colleagues were extremely generous in helping me to assemble a teaching load. I was an extra hand with the department. So Don Smith, who taught British history...
Marshall Poe:
I remember Don Smith very well.
George Drake:
[inaudible 00:45:18] and wonderful teacher. Don preferred the second half of that class, which began after [inaudible 00:45:25] and I preferred the first half of British history. So we divided that, and then Marcy Sawyer who taught early modern European history, helped me share her load. And then I came back prepared to start a course on Southern Africa, and which I did, which was a successful course. So with Tutorial, Southern Africa course, and the British history and a little bit of Modern European history, I managed to assemble a good teaching load. And I taught for 10 years full-time and then assumed that senior faculty status. And then retirement, but kept on teaching the Tutorial, which I regard as the most important course in the Grinnell curriculum. Until age 85 which was a couple years ago when everything went online because of the pandemic, I filled out, because I can't imagine teaching the Tutorial which was an introduction to the college experience online. And I would be terrible at doing it online.
Marshall Poe:
It's good you mentioned the Tutorial because when I came to Grinnell in 1980, I was very lucky to be given a Tutorial with Dan Kaiser. And Dan Kaiser, as you know, is a Russian historian, and I became a Russian historian, largely because of that Tutorial.
George Drake:
I feel that I know you, because Dan talks about you a lot.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, well, Dan has been my mentor for decades now, and I always think to myself, "What would Dan do?" Whenever I have to make a decision? So that freshman Tutorial is really very significant part of every Grinnell experience. I know mine really changed my life. So George, as I say, we've taken up a lot of your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Let me tell everybody that have been listening to the Grinnell College Authors and Artist podcast. We've been talking to George Drake, who's the Emeritus President of the college and a long-time teacher at the college. George, thank you for being on the show.
George Drake:
Well, its been very pleasant, Marshall. Enjoyed your questions, enjoyed talking to the folks. So thanks a lot.
Marshall Poe:
All right. Thank you. Bye-bye.
