William & Mary

Interviewee: Cam Walker

Interviewer: Carmen Bolt

Date: November 15, 2017                             Duration: 01:50:45

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Carmen:           My name is Carmen Bolt, the oral historian at William & Mary. It’s currently around 10:00 a.m. on November 15, 2017. I’m sitting in the Alumni House with Cam Walker. So can you start by telling me the date and place of your birth?

Cam:                I was born August 11, 1942 in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Carmen:           And what years did you attend William & Mary as a student? And we’ll return back to when you taught at William & Mary in a little bit.

Cam:                I was a student from 1960 to 1964.

Carmen:           Okay, great. So can we backtrack a little bit before jumping into your time as a student and talk a little bit about where and how you were raised, and some maybe about your family?

Cam:                Mm-hmm. Well, I was born in the Midwest, and my mother was born in Canada but came down to the States when she was quite young, so she didn’t ever have to be naturalized, actually, because her father was, and so when she turned 21 she could just go declare she wanted to be a citizen.

00:01:00          But when she got a passport, for example, she had to have his papers to prove she had gone through that. And my father was born in Cincinnati and had lived in different places, but they met in Cincinnati and that’s where I was born. And I was the oldest of six children, one of whom had Down Syndrome, so now there are only five of us left, but anyway.

We moved to Baltimore in about 19…sometime in the ’50s, 1956, maybe, or ’57 for my father’s job and then we moved to New Jersey, to South Jersey in 1959 at the beginning of my senior year of high school, so I actually graduated from high school in New Jersey, in Moorestown, New Jersey.

00:01:55          My parents gave me the choice of staying with friends in Baltimore if I wanted to finish high school there, and I considered that, but then I thought, well, I would probably be leaving home for good the next year, so I did go to New Jersey.

Carmen:           Wow. So when was the very first time college crossed your mind then?

Cam:                Well, we assumed we would go to college, I guess, all of us, as we were growing up. But in probably the summer of maybe my junior, before my junior year in high school I can remember collecting a lot of college catalogues, just writing for all sorts—because of course in those days you had to write for them and they had to mail them—and looking at them and being attracted to William & Mary just through the catalogue, thinking well, that sounds like the kind of place I would like. It wasn’t too big, but it wasn’t a tiny little place. And since we were living in Baltimore, it was relatively close, but still not in the state or anything.

00:02:59          I definitely wanted to…or I just assumed you would go away from home for college. And then when we moved to New Jersey I had already decided that’s where I was going to go, so that’s what I did. I remember the college counselor in Moorestown said oh, my gosh, William & Mary is hard to get into for out of state women, so you must have a backup. So my backup was Douglas, which then was the women’s part of Rutgers. Now it’s just all Rutgers. But those were the only two places I applied.

Carmen:           So in addition to kind of the size of the school, what were some of the contributing factors to deciding on William & Mary?

Cam:                I guess the historic part, although I hadn’t really been to Williamsburg at that point. We hadn’t gone as a family or anything. And I came down to see it, I guess it must have been…I guess it was the fall of my senior year that my father and I came to Williamsburg.

00:04:02          He had some business in Richmond and so we drove over and talked to the dean of admissions and looked at Ludwell, because in those days all out of state women were going to live at Ludwell. And it just seemed like a good fit.

Carmen:           Do you remember the very first memory of stepping onto campus—what it looked like, what it smelled like?

Cam:                I’m not sure about the campus. I remember riding on the bus through CW, and it was foggy that night, and it really looked romantic, you know, it really looked colonial because you could just see the street lights through this fog and I thought, oh, this is really cool. As for the college, I don’t really remember. I do remember going out to Ludwell and thinking, well, it’s all right, and meeting, actually, a student coming out of the dorm and talking to her for a minute.

00:05:01          It turned out she was from New Jersey also, so that was funny. But yeah, that’s all I remember about that.

Carmen:           Okay, great. And what did you choose to study? Or did you know what you wanted to study when you came here, or did that develop as you were here?

Cam:                I think I thought at first I would probably major in English, but as I went along I discovered I wasn’t interested in all the English requirements, so then I thought government. In fact I actually declared a government major at the end of sophomore year. But then over the summer I thought no, I’ll switch to history, which I did.

And I ended up taking probably mainly English, history and government classes throughout, and in a way constructing almost what would now be an American Studies major, but there was no such thing then, of course. But I took a lot of American literature with Carl Dolmetsch and others, and a lot of American government and American history.

00:06:05

Carmen:           And were there any professors, maybe in addition to Dolmetsch, that stood out to you or that were particularly influential?

Cam:                Yeah, well, Ludwell Johnson, who, in those days, or my years anyway, was teaching the Survey of American History. And he was a very funny, witty lecturer, very good. And then of course later I took his Civil War class and so on. And then Dick Sherman was my honors advisor, and he taught modern American history, and so those two were certainly influential.

In the government department, well, I had at least one class from Margaret Hamilton and also one class from Joyce McKnight, and then Warner Moss, who was like the old…I guess he was probably chair of the department. I had an interesting class with him about, I guess it was, Southern politics.

00:07:10

Carmen:           Were there any other advisors, or mentors, or just key figures that you came into contact when you were on campus, or even in the broader Williamsburg community?

Cam:                I don’t think so. I don’t think we thought a lot about mentoring. I mean, obviously Dick Sherman, who was my senior honors advisor, was very important, but I just don’t think there was that much emphasis on the whole notion of mentoring in those days.

Carmen:           Okay. So I noted that David Paschall I guess started at William & Mary the same year you did, or around that time. Do you recall anything notable about his presidency during the time you were here?

00:07:51

Cam:                Well, he was very conservative. And actually his daughter was in my class, Tish was in my class, and I remember they had an enormously fat cat that lived in the president’s house. I mean, it was enormous and everybody on campus knew that cat. So we heard all the stories about how Paschall had become president as a sort of reward for having presided over the end of massive resistance in Virginia. He had been state superintendent of education.

Maybe we talked about this before, but somebody told me—no, I guess I talked to Terry Meyers about this. Nobody can really pin that story down, but it was a very common story. And I guess the other key figure when I was an undergraduate was Dean Lambert, who had a sort of fearsome reputation, I guess. I remember I broke my leg…was that junior year?

00:08:58          I’m not sure what…I guess that was my…maybe that was my sophomore year. Anyway, I broke my leg, but I had a walking cast on it so I was sort of swinging it and walking all around campus. And I remember heading over to the Caf and Dean Lambert was coming the other way, and he just said to me, “Oh, hello, crip.” I was so shocked. [Laughs.] I mean, he was just being funny. But in those days we didn’t really talk to deans very much so it was like oh, my gosh, that’s strange. But anyway. But he was funny.

Carmen:           Yeah, that would be a memorable interaction with him, I think.

Cam:                Yeah, yeah, right. And of course, well, Birdena Donaldson was the dean of women, and we did have some interaction with her. I think we all thought she was…well, just the stereotype of the dean of women, I guess. And she taught one…I think she used to teach sections of the basic Western Civ class for a while. But I don’t think the history department was terribly fond of her or had much respect for her. But she was the enforcer of women’s rules.

00:10:08         

Carmen:           Right. Could you expand a little bit on that stereotype of dean of women, what that was?

Cam:                Well, I guess sort of rigid and—I mean, the rules, especially my first couple of years, were very rigid about the curfews, and needing permission to do anything. You had to have these signed cards that the house—and of course we had house mothers who kept… And I guess she must have handled a lot of the discipline and that sort of thing. And her name was Birdena, and that just seemed, I don’t know. She seemed sort of birdlike or something, I don’t know.

Carmen:           I wanted to bring this up in a little bit, but I think this is a good kind of segue into it, these social norms, and dress codes, and curfews and whatnot. I’m wondering if you could go a little more into detail about what those were, and then after maybe ways in which they were subverted, or if they were subverted.

00:11:06

Cam:                Well, the dress codes, let’s see, we were not…I guess we weren’t allowed to wear pants, even. And when you had gym class, which was required, you know, we had to have four semesters of some kind of physical activity, you weren’t supposed to wear your shorts or anything on campus except when you were actually in the class.

But of course that was ridiculous, so people just wore their raincoats over the shorts of whatever we had. And I can remember wearing pajamas to 8:00 classes because I’d overslept, and you just rolled up the legs and put on your raincoat again. So it was pretty convenient that London Fog raincoats were one of the things to wear in those years, so everybody dressed in raincoats.

00:12:03          The other restrictions were—well, there was one when you were a freshman you weren’t supposed to talk to men on campus…was it after 7:00? I mean, it was really strange. And people could actually get in trouble if they were caught. Now I think it was pretty rare that people were turned in for that, but…

You know, and we had to be in, I think, by 10:00. And because those of us who lived at Ludwell always had to catch the Ludwell bus, and so there was always a dash for the last Ludwell bus. I mean, if you’d been studying at the library or something you had to get back home by that time. I think on weekends it must have been 11:00 or maybe even 12:00, but they locked the dorms and, you know, as I say, there were house mothers.

00:12:58          I think I usually had pretty good house mothers. We had a pretty nice one out at Ludwell. And I don’t remember the ones in Chandler. And the sorority had a house mother, too, and she was quite nice, so…

Carmen:           Did anyone ever articulate why, to the women of the school, why these rules were in place or what the intention was behind, say, not allowing freshmen women to talk to men past a certain time?

Cam:                Well, part of it was just the stereotype of needing to protect women, I guess, and the notion that you were away from home and so the college had to step in for your parents. And that was pretty common everywhere, I think, at that time. And then just the gender stereotypes. The men didn’t have any of these restrictions at all, so they could stay out as late as they wanted, do whatever they wanted.

00:14:00          So that was the other aspect. So it was a combination of the in loco parentis and particularly, I think, protecting the women. I’m not sure what year, but I’m pretty sure before I graduated they had done away with the stuff about talking to men after 7:00 and all that for the freshmen. And that may have been only first semester, I’m not sure. And I think part of it, again, was this business of, well, you’re here for education and you shouldn’t be having a social life or anything like that.

Carmen:           Interesting. But for the women.

Cam:                Yeah, for the women. The men, fine.

Carmen:           Was there any individual or collective backlash to that, either on your part or the part of others that you recall?

Cam:                There were always people who sneaked out and stuff. I mean, I don’t recall anybody in particular. But there were people who, you know, would figure out ways to come in through a window or whatever, be late. So yeah, I mean, people did subvert it.

00:15:02          But there wasn’t really an organized effort. I mean, that came much, much later. Back when I was teaching was when they finally had the famous dorm-in and stuff and got the rules removed. But it took a long time.

Carmen:           Yeah, wow. Well, did you ever arrive after the doors were locked?

Cam:                No, I never did. I think I was fairly good, so I was usually…no, I’m sure I never had any problem with that.

Carmen:           No climbing through the windows for you.

Cam:                No. [Laughs.] 

Carmen:           So you were, even though there were curfews and restrictions and certain times you had to be back, during the days you were very active in organizations and different things on campus. I mean, just naming a few, you were part of Kappa Alpha Theta, a member of the Women’s Dorm Association, the Mermettes, the Colonial Echo. These are just naming a few. So what motivated you to be so engaged?

00:15:58

Cam:                Well, I don’t think that was an unusual level of engagement. But the Mermettes I remember wanting to join right away because I had worked in summer camps when I was growing up and was an okay swimmer, I mean, not a competitive swimmer, but I liked swimming, and so I thought okay, Mermettes will be a good activity. And I was never one of the really good Mermettes, but I did do that all the way until, I guess through the fall of my senior year. The second semester I didn’t because I was trying to finish my honors paper and Mermettes just took too much time. So I did that all along.

And then in those days sorority rush wasn’t held until second semester. And I guess I went through rush just because, again, I had a pretty conventional view of what people did in college and so I did do that.

00:17:02          The Dorm Association—well, I was the Ludwell house president, and I guess got into it through that. And then the Echo, I don’t remember doing anything much with the Colonial Echo, but maybe I did. But anyway.

Carmen:           Well, for a couple of these things—well, for the Women’s Dorm Association I’m wondering what your role was in kind of enforcing, or upholding, or challenging those rules that were in place.

Cam:                Yeah. We didn’t do any of that. Let’s see. When I was the Ludwell house president we of course had to enforce them. And again, there wasn’t a lot of trouble about it, I don’t think. But mainly we had to be…there would be two of us, you know, there’d be roommates who were sort of in charge and we had to take turns being there on Saturday night or something like that. You had to be around.

00:18:00          And I don’t actually remember any particular drama at all. Maybe we just had very good kids. I’m trying to think even how many people at Ludwell. There would be two units together and maybe three floors. It wasn’t a huge number of people that you were responsible for, maybe 30 overall, something like that.

And one incentive for doing that was that you did get your room free, so that was a nice benefit of that. And then in the association itself I think I was in charge of editing the little booklet for the next year. But again we really weren’t doing much about trying to change the rules that I remember. I think we just sort of accepted them and thought well, this is the way it is.

00:18:58

Carmen:           Okay. And you mentioned being part of Greek life was really…and I think just in doing some research in the “Flat Hart” and just knowing what the campus culture was like at that time it was a really major thing at that time. What was the experience of just being part of Greek life here?

Cam:                I think what was good about it is that because the houses were so small and you only lived there senior year, you had a lot of friends across other sororities or people who weren’t involved at all, so that was nice. I think when I talk to people who went to school on much bigger campuses where they moved into the house right away, it seemed for them that the sororities loomed much larger than they did here. I wouldn’t say it dominated life at all.

00:19:56          But made some good friends. And it, you know, so I enjoyed it. I was not terribly active in terms of being an officer or anything. I think I was assistant treasurer one year and then I did not want to be treasurer because that was a lot. So I forget. Maybe I was secretary or something. But I was not one of those people who was really, really involved and made it a big center part of my life. But I did enjoy it.

Carmen:           It definitely sounds like it was a good way to meet individuals and form a cohort.

Cam:                Mm-hmm, yeah. But again, they were small, fairly small in those days compared to now. I mean, you could have a…the meetings were in the house. And now I think…I don’t know where they meet. Around campus, I think, because they’re just much, much bigger.

Carmen:           And I guess the population of William & Mary has definitely grown.

Cam:                Oh, yeah.

Carmen:           Since the time you were here.

Cam:                Yeah, tons, yeah.

00:20:56

Carmen:           So what are some of your very favorite memories or experiences from your time as a student at William & Mary?

Cam:                Oh, boy. Oh, dear. Well, I don’t know. Well, I enjoyed some of my classes, I have to say. That was a good memory. I’m trying to think. I don’t… We pretty much were confined—not confined—but we pretty much lived on campus. Very few people had cars, so you weren’t ranging wildly. And of course Williamsburg was much smaller, too.

We would go down to Corner Greeks once in a while. I don’t know. I don’t have any great emotional, or else I’ve forgotten them, I must say, it’s been so long. But, you know, good friends and sort of, I guess, just goofy things that college students do, but nothing really stands out.

00:22:08

Carmen:           What sort of goofy things?

Cam:                Well, I don’t know. I mean, I remember…let’s see. When we were…when my roommate and I were Ludwell house presidents, I mean, we would have sort of gatherings for people’s birthdays and stuff. And we had some sort of colorful people who sang or who played ukulele—ukuleles were big for some reason, I mean, bigger ones, not teeny little ones. And things like that. And I guess in the sorority, too, there was as sorority sister who was a pretty good singer and people who would make up songs and stuff. I’m trying to think.

00:23:00          We must have had some costume things, too, like on Halloween, but I don’t really have any, again, very strong memories of it, but I think we did.

Carmen:           No memories or photos of things you dressed up as back in the day?

Cam:                No. Now we…for homecoming, those were the days of the floats where you stuffed them with crepe paper and Kleenex and stuff. I’m pretty sure we dressed up as something one year, but… And there are probably pictures somewhere, but I really don’t remember. Because I think one year maybe Theta actually won the float competition.

Carmen:           Yeah, I think in one of our previous conversations, it was right before homecoming and we were talking about how homecoming is very different or the way they do the parade is very different now.

Cam:                Oh, yeah.

Carmen:           Can you talk a little bit about that comparison?

00:23:53

Cam:                Yeah. Well, the whole thing was actually a pretty big deal. And there was a big Southern emphasis because of the KAs. And they would actually say they were going to secede from the college for the homecoming, and so they would dress as Confederate soldiers.

And maybe the Thursday before homecoming they would actually go around to the dorms and deliver the invitations to the homecoming dance to their girlfriends by standing outside the dorm, and maybe they even had a bugle and stuff, and they would sort of deliver the invitation. And then on the day of the parade their dates would actually try to dress as Southern belles. So I think there must be pictures of that in some of the old yearbooks.

Carmen:           I’m sure.

Cam:                And they would stand right there at college corner by the wall. And there used to be, until really just a few years ago, there was a kind of stand at traffic island right in the middle there, and Dean Lambert actually would stand there and he would accept their secession.

00:25:04          They would actually present him with some little piece of paper saying we’re seceding from the college for this day, and he would accept it, and then the parade would take off down to the capital and then come back. And they used to bill it as the only homecoming parade you could see twice because it would go down and back.

But that was the most distinctive thing I think about the parade in those days. And it wasn’t until…I’m sure it was back when I was teaching that there were finally a lot of protests against the KA secessionist thing and so on, and the black students said this is not really what we think the college should be condoning, and so then Dean Lambert didn’t take part anymore. Nobody from the college took part. And gradually the KA thing died out, I guess.

00:26:00

Carmen:           Right.

Cam:                Under protest. But yeah, that was colorful.

Carmen:           Yeah, I would say. Yeah, that was going to be one of my questions about that because while there wasn’t an African American presence on campus while you were a student here, I was wondering just regionally, there were students coming from out of state, of course, and being one of them, how that was received.

Cam:                Yeah, yeah. It seemed, you know, it just seemed very different to me. Although my father had Southern relatives and Southern roots, so we had certainly…and so I’d heard sort of positive things about the South. But having been born in Cincinnati, of course, and lived there till I was about 12 or 13, we’d heard a lot about the Underground Railroad and so on, so I definitely identified with the Northern side of things. But yeah, so this did seem pretty exotic. But yeah, that…

00:26:57

Carmen:           And it was an actual part of the whole parade process.

Cam:                Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we would go watch. I mean, you would be down there and you’d see them march up and do the secession business, and you’d see all the women. I don’t think I knew anybody…I don’t remember any of my friends ever dated KAs or had much to do with them. But anyway, they definitely were a presence.

Carmen:           Yeah, a spectacle you could definitely go and see, for sure. So thank you for sharing those memories of things you all did for fun. But I want to shift gears and talk about any difficult experiences that you recall and how they affected you, whether they were academic or social.

Cam:                Except for breaking my leg, I don’t really remember anything very difficult. But that, it was a hairline break down by my ankle, and I did it playing intermural softball out on Barksdale Field, which wasn’t really Barksdale Field then because Miss Barksdale was still around.

00:28:10          In fact I had a class from her. But I just fell a little distance. It was just a little incline, and I just fell. And I thought it was just a bad sprain, you know, because it hurt, but I could move everything because it was a hairline break. So I went back to the dorm and I kept my foot up, but by the next day it was really swollen and really painful, and I thought I’d better go to the infirmary.

So I went to the infirmary and they didn’t X-ray it or anything. They just sort of looked at it and said yeah, it’s a bad sprain. And the joke in those days was that they would give you these little pain pills that were…were they green or yellow? But everybody said if you go to the infirmary they’re just going to say yeah, take these pills and you’ll be fine. So that’s what they did.

00:29:00          But it didn’t get better at all, so I finally went back and they sent me to…it must have been a local doctor who was a sports medicine person or something. So then they X-rayed it and they said oh, guess what? Yes, it’s broken. And so I had to get the walking cast, and I had to use a cane for a few days, but fairly soon I was able just to, as I say, swing around on it or something. It had like a rubber bottom so you could walk with it. But I remember that that happened to be a semester when I had all kinds of classes on the third floor of all kinds of buildings.

Carmen:           Oh, of course.

Cam:                And so it was like, ahh! And I guess it was sophomore year because I was living in Chandler, and I think I was on the third floor there. There were no elevators. So I quickly learned to sort of swing up there. So that was a pain.

00:29:56          But meanwhile, I guess I had told my parents and my father was furious. He said I can’t believe how bad that infirmary was. And we did think the doctor was not very good. I mean, you didn’t expect much from the campus infirmary. And so I remember he wrote a very angry letter. And at some point I must have gone to have it checked or something and the doctor said, you know, you ought to try to calm down your father. I thought I can’t calm down my father.

Carmen:           Oh, my goodness.

Cam:                Anyway, so… And I didn’t get it off until I went home, and then I guess my local doctor took it off and everything, and looked at the X-rays, and he said, oh, you’re really lucky, because there were some bone chips and if they’d gotten into the ankle, you could have had a lot of trouble. And I thought oh, I’m glad I didn’t know that.

Carmen:           Oh, my goodness.

Cam:                So it turned out, I mean, it all came out okay, but that’s about the worst thing I remember. I don’t remember any other great traumas or anything.

00:31:00

Carmen:           Yeah, I can see that marring an experience, having to—

Cam:                Yeah. Well, as I say, I do remember especially—again, it’s such a contrast to now, when they pay so much attention to health and wellness, and now they worry about the mental health counseling and all sorts of things. I mean, it was just not like that at all. I mean, it was… In fact the infirmary was over where, I guess where part of the Reves Center is now, those older buildings along there. It was very small and mostly people tried to avoid it because they thought, well, they’re just going to give you these little yellow pills and say eh, you’ll be fine.

Carmen:           My goodness. Was there ever a point where, at least during your time here, where that changed, or was that just the reputation of the infirmary all the way through?

Cam:                I think it was all the way through, yeah. Because one person I knew actually ended up with tuberculosis. They thought she picked it up from a little shop that was over on Prince George Street, a little place to eat.

00:32:01          So she had TB, and I guess she had to take a semester off. And I guess—well, there were people, certainly, who had mono. That was a big thing. But yeah, I don’t remember that they really improved the health systems at all.

Carmen:           Wow.

Cam:                And most of us, I mean, were pretty healthy, I think. We survived, anyway.

Carmen:           Yeah, no, that’s a good point. I’m thinking about walking around with a cast on this campus even now, how the brick pavers and just how inaccessible it would be even now, so I can—

Cam:                Yeah, yeah.

Carmen:           —only imagine.

Cam:                Now they, of course, use the golf carts for people.

Carmen:           Yes.

Cam:                And as I say, luckily it turned out, once it was set and so on, the pain pretty much went away, so it wasn’t painful, it was just awkward to be sort of, you know, you sort of swing your leg around and stuff. And as I say, going up and down the stairs. And I got pretty good by the end. I think I must have had it on for six to eight weeks, so yeah.

00:33:01

Carmen:           Wow. Well, and you had an interesting, if awkward, encounter with Dean Lambert to come out of it.

Cam:                Yeah, that was… [Laughs.]

Carmen:           Okay, so I’m thinking about whether or not there were any controversies among students or with administrators during your time here that stand out to you.

Cam:                Well, nothing too directly, but things I heard about. I knew somebody who was active in the theatre, and I’m pretty sure I remember that at one point the theatre department wanted to do a play that involved black actors, and they wanted to do something joint with Hampden, and Paschall said no.

00:33:53          And then there were also stories that he did not want to let black people go to the campus center even after…well, ’64, though. Well, anyway, after the Civil Rights Act it would have been illegal to bar people from that. But he was not happy with that.

And then I’m trying to think if there was anything else about race. Yeah, I don’t know. It was still just a very, very Southern place. I mean, virtually all the cleaning staff and so on were African Americans. The town was pretty segregated. In the bus station they had four bathrooms, so it was black, white, two for women, two for men.

00:34:55          I would say we didn’t have a whole lot of contact with the townspeople. You were just much more on campus, I think, in those days. I don’t remember too…anything else, really.

Carmen:           Did it stand, coming to William & Mary, even recognizing it was kind of a Southern school at that time, did it stand in contrast to your experiences living in Cincinnati and Baltimore, and just the difference in race relations or diversity?

Cam:                Yeah, a bit. I mean, when we lived in Cincinnati, I remember, I guess when Brown v. Board of Education passed I remember thinking oh, what’s the big deal. I mean, we lived in a white suburb, but there were, you know, you didn’t see a lot of overt segregation.

00:36:01          Now, Baltimore, I mean, that was much more Southern, obviously, and there they had legally desegregated the schools, but what you had was one of these emerging patterns where such-and-such school was simply known as a black school and such-and-such was a white school. So I think my junior high there I don’t remember any black people.

When I went to high school, and there they had…you could go anywhere in the city. But of course, again, there were schools that were known as predominantly white and those that were mainly black. But I know there were black people, black women in my high school. And there also the high schools, the public high schools, were gender separated. They still had two main women’s high schools and two main men’s high schools.

00:37:00          Now there were others that were integrated in terms of men and women, but the ones that were considered the better schools were still single sex, so that was kind of interesting. And that was, I guess I should say, that was another reason I liked William & Mary, is I did want to go to a coed college, because I had been through… Now when I graduated from Moorestown High School in New Jersey, that, of course, was a regular just normal high school, so I had been in school with men in the classroom and stuff. But I figured I had done my bit of being in an all women’s environment, so I did want to go to a coed college. So anyway.

Carmen:           Also I’m thinking of other things that were going on in the broader United States and world during the time you were here. Obviously the United States was in the midst of the Cold War and Vietnam War, in fact. There were tensions.

00:38:00          The Civil Rights movement. The Cuban missile crisis happened during your time here, and of course the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. How did you see all of those nationwide things unfold on campus?

Cam:                The civil rights stuff not much, but yeah, the Cuban missile crisis. I had forgotten about that. Yeah, that was my junior year. And I remember we all…it happened right around, or reached its peak right around midterm time, and we actually said stuff like, well, should we bother to study? I mean, what’s going to happen?

And there was a lot of talk about that this would be an area that would be targeted because of all the military installations. And there were rumors that there were nuclear things stored under the Colonial Parkway or something. Who knew? But there was Camp Perry. So there were a lot of… There was a lot of feeling that if there were some kind of nuclear exchange this would be one of the main targets.

00:39:04          And people debated, well, maybe that’s good. I mean, we would just be gone. We wouldn’t suffer. It would be a first strike. But yeah, that was very tense.

But, you know, we didn’t have access to the news, the immediate news in the way you do now. Certainly when I lived at Ludwell the only television was one…I guess the house mother had one. And I remember for…when I was a freshman, for the presidential election she rented a—I guess we all went in on it and she rented a TV that we could all watch so we could watch the results. And maybe we even watched one of the debates. I’m not sure about that. But I know we watched the results. So that…yeah, but the Cuban missile crisis.

00:39:56          And then the Kennedy assassination, yeah, I can remember that pretty vividly. I was walking across campus. I guess I was coming over towards the sorority house for lunch when I first heard about it. And then I was going over to a class when they hadn’t said whether he had died or not. And as I was walking, people started saying oh, you know, he’s dead, he’s dead, and you thought, oh my gosh.

And so I think at that class—it was a German language lab, maybe, and I guess they turned the TV on for that over there so we could watch that. And then that whole period we—by then I was living in the sorority house and we did have a television, and so I remember everybody was sort of watching that the whole time and just being quite upset about it. So yeah, that’s one of those things you do remember where you were when you heard that, yeah.

00:41:01

Carmen:           Absolutely. And what was the general feeling? I’m just thinking things even within the past couple years politically have been so tense and at moments felt very dire. What was the general feeling then?

Cam:                Well, it was… Some people were really, really upset. I remember thinking that Lyndon Johnson would be okay. I was reassured that he would be okay as President, that he had all the experience and so on, so I thought the country would be okay. But it did seem really, really shocking. And I know some of the faculty members later said they had been just horribly upset by it. I guess we…many of the students were, in a sense, too young to have been really, maybe, involved in the, say the election campaign and so on.

00:42:04          Because in those days you had to be 21 to vote, so I had not even been able to vote in that election. And I had been brought up in a Republican household, especially my father. I think my mother was always a secret Democrat, but she didn’t say much. But he was a strong Republican. So we were not huge Kennedy fans. I mean, we weren’t brought up that way. But a lot of my friends’ parents worked in the federal government and so on, and a lot of them were very much Kennedy fans, so they were probably emotionally the most upset. And then, I mean, the rest of us were just shocked, probably.

Carmen:           Yeah, absolutely. And you made a good point earlier that the access to media and constant news, entirely different.

Cam:                Yeah.

00:42:55

Carmen:           Just not having the mechanisms for giving every individual news constantly.

Cam:                No, no. You just, I mean, you got updates. And of course for something like that people like Walter Cronkite and so on would be on the television almost continuously. But you certainly weren’t walking around with your smartphone or anything like that.

Carmen:           Right. And then I’m thinking also for the Vietnam War, which, at a certain point, was known for very specific information being given to the public, so you were hearing very specific things about what was happening in Vietnam. Had those tensions escalated that far yet during the time you were here that you saw students reacting on campus?

Cam:                Hm-mmm. I’d say that was a good bit later. By the time I was in graduate school that began to be more of an issue. But hm-mmm, not much then. I mean, the big escalation comes later, so… I don’t really even…I don’t even remember hearing very much about Vietnam as an undergraduate, but certainly not as a big issue.

00:44:08

Carmen:           Right. Not the activism stuff that we would come to expect, and the protests?

Cam:                No, no. Much later.

Carmen:           Okay. Well, just reading through all those events and things that happened during your time here, though, wow. What a time to be a college student in America.

Cam:                Yeah. And yet we were so much more isolated, you know. I think that’s the big difference. You really were in much more of a little bubble on your campus. And this was a conservative campus so, you know, I mean, people… You could read the newspapers, of course. And some people had the papers delivered, or you could read them in the library. But there just wasn’t…

And I remember I guess I got…I guess I got “Time” magazine. I got some sort of newsmagazine. And I remember one of my roommates, though, never read any of that stuff. You know, it was like politics, eh, I don’t pay attention to that. I do other things. So we were not “woke,” as they would say today, I guess.

00:45:11

Carmen:           Oh, excellent usage of that term.

Cam:                Yeah, right. I just was reading a Spike Lee thing.

Carmen:           Oh, right. That was great.

Cam:                He talked about that, yeah.

Carmen:           Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. Now you would have to actively cut yourself off from all of these things to not hear constantly—

Cam:                Yeah, exactly, right.

Carmen:           —about what’s going on. Wow. Okay, great. So I was thinking we could transition to your time leaving William & Mary for graduate school and then coming back. So you left to go to Yale for graduate school?

Cam:                Yes, uh-huh.

Carmen:           And how did that experience compare to William & Mary? Did you feel prepared?

Cam:                I worried that I wasn’t. No, I felt I wasn’t prepared. And I guess in the end I was fairly well prepared. Well, I guess all right. But no, that seemed pretty daunting, actually.

00:46:00          And after two years I then went off to teach at Knoxville, because I was sort of burned out, and I was thinking I’m not sure what I’m doing here. I would say that was not a very—well, New Haven is a very gray, grim place, it seemed to me then, anyway. And I had some good friends, but I don’t know.

As I say, I was sort of burned out, so I applied to the—I had had a Woodrow Wilson fellowship, so I knew they had this teaching internship program, and I applied to that, and they assigned me to Knoxville College, which I think no longer exists. I think it’s failed or been taken over. So I went off to Knoxville.

00:46:56          And there, by that time the civil rights stuff—well, I mean, obviously it was happening the whole time and I was much more aware of all that by then—but I actually heard Stokely Carmichael. He came to campus. And there was a…we all went. And there were quite a few white faculty at Knoxville. But anyway, we went, and he gave a sort of rousing talk, mainly aimed at getting the students to be more active. It wasn’t that he was advocating overthrowing the government or anything like that, but it was like you students need to get out there and be doing stuff.

And he said at one point that in the black community there was too much concern about color, and he said I bet—they had a thing called Miss Knoxville College. It was like the homecoming queen or something. Said oh, I bet Miss Knoxville is always light, bright, and almost white.

00:48:00          And it turned out actually he was wrong that year because the woman who had been voted Miss Knoxville was a very popular student, very cute, but she was pretty dark, and so the kids all hooted at that, like no, you’re not right, you know. But he said oh, I know you guys just want to get out and buy your Ford Mustangs, which was the big car then, and all this stuff, but you should be more concerned about what’s happening in the broader community and so on.

And he had some folks with him who would ask him things. I think they were sort of planted questions so he could make his pitch for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and so on. And he did talk about the honkies, and you’re sitting there going oh, here I am, a honky. But there wasn’t any real hostility toward us or anything like that.

00:48:51          But after his talk I noticed a lot of the kids did sprout afros, because before that time a lot of people had processed hair and stuff. But, you know, the afros then started coming in, and like, oh. And in fact at that time—this would have been ’66, ’67—on a black college campus people really dressed up to go to class, I mean, you know.

So Carmichael coming in and the whole image of SNCC with wearing the overalls and being part of the people and so on was a challenge to them, and that happened. So anyway, so that was interesting, and I really got interested then in African American history and so on from being there.

Carmen:           Yeah.

Cam:                And in terms of the Vietnam War, one thing that came up when I went back to New Haven was people would ask me, well, what were the kids like in Knoxville, and were there any protests. And I said actually, not much because a lot of African Americans were in the military, and it had been seen as a positive force.

00:50:03          It was a way up and out. It was a way to get the GI Bill and sort of get out of poverty and so on. So there was a lot of support for the military in the black community. And we didn’t…there weren’t many protests about Vietnam at Knoxville at all. And then the surrounding community was pretty conservative, too, so there wasn’t anything.

But when I got back to New Haven, by that time there was a lot of protest and marches around the New Haven Green and stuff like that. But even there there was a strong conservative element because there were a lot of Eastern European immigrants who were very anti-communist, understandably, and so they, when issues about Vietnam came up, they tended to strongly support the government and say no, no, North Vietnam is a communist regime, you’ve got to fight it, you’ve got to stop them.

00:51:04          If we don’t win there, you know, they’re going to take over all of Southeast Asia and go on to Australia or whatever, that whole notion of the red tide. So there was some conflict there. But of course on the campus it would be mainly antiwar. And those were the days of William Sloane Coffin, the chaplain who would…well, the kids would burn their draft cards and stuff and he would preside over those things, so there was a lot off antiwar feeling then.

Carmen:           Right. It strikes me how different, though there was, it seems like, maybe a thread of conservatism at the institutions you were attending or teaching at, how different still they each were, William & Mary in Virginia, and then Yale in Connecticut, and then Knoxville, Tennessee. I mean, just how different. How did you prepare yourself or adjust to going to such a different…?

00:52:06

Carmen:           Well, certainly going to Knoxville was so different because it was a predominantly, I mean, it’s a historically black college. So that was different. I don’t know, just sort of rolled with it, I guess. You know, you just sort of change and learn and pick up things from the surrounding environment. I do remember, it must have been after my first year at Yale, that summer I had the last camp job I ever had, and I worked at a camp in Connecticut. And I can remember there sometimes we would have conversations, the counselors and so on, about Vietnam.

00:52:57          And I remember then resisting some of the more radical arguments, that people said oh, it’s really all about oil, or it’s just an imperialist struggle. And I remember then thinking, no, I don’t quite buy that. I think that’s not really what’s going on. And even now I don’t think that. I think it was more the broader Cold War effort that led us to overlook the fact that it was also a nationalist struggle. But I think that a lot of it had to do with just the general Cold War and that firm belief that there was this red tide and so on, and that you had to take a stand. But yeah, no, it was just…I don’t know. You just change with the environment, I guess, learn more.

Carmen:           That’s a really good approach to have. Not everyone does take that approach.

Cam:                Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Carmen:           But to have that, especially going somewhere as different as Knoxville. And you said it was at Knoxville that you really turned your sights toward African American history?

00:54:00

Cam:                Yeah, I think so, yeah, yeah.

Carmen:           Was there any event, or was it the culture of being there?

Cam:                Well, it was the culture of being there, learning a lot. And so that…yeah, that was…

Carmen:           Did you always know you wanted to pursue a career in higher education?

Cam:                Well, not always, but I think once I decided to major in history and so on. And my father always said, well what about law school, but at that time, well, there weren’t that many women in law school. And also my image of law was that you had to go into the courtroom and argue, that that’s what you did, and I thought eh, no, I don’t think that’s for me. I didn’t really want to do that. And so teaching seemed like the… Or I guess I did think at some point about maybe trying to work in Washington on Capitol Hill or something, because I was pretty interested in politics.

00:55:05          But I think my mother said to me, you know, but you’d be working for somebody else all the time. And I thought oh no, that’s not too good, either. So teaching at the college level did give you a lot of autonomy, which I’m certainly grateful for having had that.

Carmen:           Sure.

Cam:                So that worked.

Carmen:           Yeah. And did you have any particular teaching philosophy or style?

Cam:                Well, I don’t know if I could really put it as a philosophy, but I think I was… I most enjoyed and was probably best at seminars and small groups more than the lecturing. So I would say that was what I most enjoyed. And I liked getting to know the students in that kind of setting.

00:56:00          And I did best with the really smart students, too. Of course that’s because it’s easy. You don’t really have to do very much except encourage them and help them and so on. I don’t think I was as good at reaching weaker students or students who needed maybe a lot of help.

Thinking about this interview I went back and looked at my old grade books because I did keep all of those, partly because in the first few years after retirement you’re still getting requests for recommendations and things, so I thought well, I better keep that. And I must say when I look at my first several years of teaching, I gave a lot of bad grades. I was really tough.

But I had, it was funny, I had sort of a split situation in that I taught the honors. There was an honors class—the basic introduction to American history, 201, 202, so those kids were all great, so those grades were all As and Bs.

00:57:00          But then in my bigger lecture class there were a lot of Cs and Ds, Fs. I failed people. It’s like oh, my gosh. These days I don’t think…I don’t know if anybody ever gives anything much below a B minus.

Carmen:           Yeah, I don’t know. But you might have been the professor to watch out for, the one—

Cam:                I know. I think I—

Carmen:           —others warned students about.

Cam:                I think that probably was my reputation for the general, the lecture classes. But anyway, yeah. No, I was surprised. I thought oh my gosh, I really was tough. So anyway.

Carmen:           So how did you find yourself back at William & Mary a handful of years later teaching?

Cam:                Well, when I was looking for jobs, I think my, about my year or a couple years after, like the very end of the ‘60s, the early ‘70s, were the last time there were a lot of jobs for college teachers. It just wasn’t a big crisis the way it is now where you think oh, my gosh.

00:58:02          So there were just, I guess I registered with a placement bureau at Yale. But I actually had a job offer in Memphis, where I was doing some research. I was actually in the public library there looking up something and got talking to somebody who found out I was interested in working on African American history, and he went back and talked to somebody at…what college was it?

It was a small…was it a small Catholic college? It was a small college in Memphis and they were looking for somebody to teach African American and they said oh my gosh, we’ve got a job, do you want this job? And I thought, now wait, this is a little—I said, well, wouldn’t you need to see my transcripts and so on? And they said, well, you can send them to us. So when I went back I did have them sent, but I thought oh, this is really strange.

00:59:00          I guess it was LeMoyne College. Anyway, I thought, well, that’s a nice backup. If I don’t find anything else I could always go there. But I didn’t. But then it turned out William & Mary had a job, and it seemed like a good fit. I mean, I had liked it well enough as a student and knew, again, the size and so on, that that would be good. So I came down and interviewed and got the job.

Carmen:           Just so we have it in record, what years were you at William & Mary teaching?

Cam:                Well, it was…I came in the fall of ’69 and I’m pretty sure it was 2002 when I retired. I retired early. I retired when I was 60.  Partly because my husband is older and he had already been retired for about three years, and if we wanted to travel and so on it would be much easier if I were retired, so that worked out.

01:00:04

Carmen:           So in the time since you left William & Mary as a student and all those experiences you had in different areas, did that change your perception of the school or impact your perspective when you returned?

Cam:                Yeah, I think so. And the school was changing by then, too, because I remember…was it the very first semester I was back? Anyway, I remember there was actually a peace march down Duke of Gloucester Street, and I guess I was talking to Dick Sherman or something and saying wow, I can’t believe William & Mary is actually doing this. And there had been some activity while I was away in graduate school that people talked about. There had been various protests and things, and I thought ah, things are really finally changing here. And yeah, so that did strike me.

01:00:59          And obviously they continued to change. In the early ‘70s there was, for this place, anyway, quite a bit of activism. So that was…yeah, that was good.

Carmen:           Could you talk a little bit more about the types of activism you saw, especially in the early ‘70s here?

Cam:                Well, there was…let’s see. There was anti-draft activity. And I’m trying to think. Ed Crapol in history and David Jones in philosophy had…they had had some kind of conflict with the administration over maybe draft counseling that they had done. I remember that. And that was actually before I came back, but they were seen as the radical professors.

01:01:56          And then…I’m trying to remember what else about… There was just a lot of talk and a lot of anxiety, I think, among the male students about drafting, and being drafted, and so on, and talk about, well, should you give better grades. I mean, what happens if you—because I know there was one student that I ended up giving a fairly bad grade to because he just wasn’t doing anything, he was totally distracted, but people saying oh, but you know that might put him at risk for getting sent to Vietnam, getting drafted or something. So there was talk about that sort of thing.

Let’s see. Well, of course with Kent State there were a lot of demonstrations, and we postponed exams and that sort of thing.

01:02:57          There were a couple times when the idea was that students could, or that we would either postpone classes or you could hold classes, but no one had to come. But there were always enough conservative students, I think, who didn’t like that that I think often I would hold, at least be there and maybe a few people would come, and we would simply talk. You couldn’t really go on with the subject matter very much because, you know, 75% of the class wouldn’t be there. But anyway, so there was a lot of that.

And then there was all the protest about the dorm rules and so on. And I remember at one point they took over James Blair. And Dean Lambert was still around then, and he actually was pretty good. He went in. I mean, they had the police outside and all that stuff, but he went in and just talked to them, and I think maybe they spent the night there.

01:04:00          There’s a local person in town, Brenda LeClair, who was a student then, and she was quite active in that, and I can remember the scene. Some of us kind of went in the downstairs of James Blair and talked to some of the kids, or talked to the ones who were outside and so on. But I think Brenda, I think she spent the night there. So you might, at some point, try to find her and get her take on it. So that…yeah.

But there was just a sense, I guess, when I came back, that oh, William & Mary has finally joined the real world, that it was much more in tune with what was going on. I mean, certainly not a Berkeley or Madison or anything like that, but much more active than it had been.

Carmen:           Right. And of course during the time you were away was when the first three African American students in residence were admitted, and you had other key individuals in the black student community like Warren Buck were then here. And so I’m wondering how you saw civil rights starting to find a place on campus as a result of that.

01:05:10

Cam:                I’m pretty sure I remember going to hear Warren Buck play music. He was popular. Well, I went back and looked and I did teach my first African American history class in the spring of 1970 here, and it was a pretty big class. But I think…I’m pretty sure there were no black people in it, because there would have been so few students. I mean, I didn’t teach any of the three women ever. So I think that was an entirely white class.

Although at one point…what happened was I would alternate the African American history with the New South, and I’d actually been hired to teach New South, but nobody…I said, well, what about some black history, and nobody objected. They said eh, if you want to, go ahead.

01:06:05          And I’m trying to remember. I think—that’s where I should have tried harder to find an old syllabus—but I think probably those classes focused on the period from the Civil War to the present, so it wasn’t the entire sweep of black history in one semester, I don’t think.

Carmen:           That would have been a big undertaking.

Cam:                Yeah, that would have been a lot. Although there was a lot less available in those days than later on. But at one point in those early years one of the secretaries in the history department was African American and she sat in. And I remember she told me, at one point, just from reading some of the stuff, you know, this stuff makes me really angry. And I said, yeah, Freddie, that’s right, you should be.

01:07:00          She was from a well established black family here in town. But she said oh, you know, I never learned all this stuff. So anyway. So, you know, that was pretty interesting.

And we did have…I guess it would have been ’74, yeah. I tried to put together a program about the 20^th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, and we did do it. We tried to get John Lewis, and I think he could not come, but of all people, Marion Barry came. But that was before all his troubles, and he was, in his youth, he was a good civil rights worker in Nashville and so on before the drugs and so on. So he came and talked. And I’ve forgotten who else we got. There were some other good people. The turnout for that wasn’t great, but we did have that program, so that was good.

01:08:05          I’m trying to think of my other impressions. But there was interest in black history.

Carmen:           Yeah, I was going to ask. So I noted that class title, “The Negro in the United States Since 1861,” does that sound right?

Cam:                Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, because I did the war. That’s right. So I did their role in the war and then…yeah, that’s right.

Carmen:           The description was, “An examination of the role of the black man in American society from the Civil War to the present. The course will consider political, economic, and social developments within the black community as well as problems in black-white relations.” Which was an incredibly relevant course.

Cam:                Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Carmen:           I’m wondering what your thought process was knowing that there was a very, very small black cohort on campus at the time, that you would be teaching predominantly Caucasian students about this. How did that…?

01:08:57

Cam:                You know, I guess I just plowed ahead, you know. Yeah, but that…no, that’s true. Yeah. Well, it seemed to me, I mean, I suppose those were more my crusading days or something. I thought people need to know this, and they don’t know it, so…

Carmen:           But you said there wasn’t any pushback or anything from the administration when you—

Cam:                Oh, no, huh-uh.

Carmen:           —pitched that.

Cam:                No.

Carmen:           What about for the celebration of 20 years?

Cam:                No, nobody, huh-uh. No. That was fine, too. People didn’t really object. As I say, if they did, they just didn’t come or something. They didn’t care about it if they did that. But yeah, no, that worked. And very early on, for some reason I had to give a talk at the local high school for some sort of I don’t know what, some sort of assembly, and I talked about W.E.B. Du Bois, I think. And I think I wasn’t pitching it right to the students. They were probably bored to tears.

01:10:01          But I remember I got a ride with somebody from the administration, and he was asking me about that, like, well, is that how you pronounce his name? And, well, I didn’t know much about Du Bois. And I said, yeah. But as I say, nobody really objected.

Carmen:           Well, that’s great. I mean, you introduced that, at least within the history department, that type of study, so that was incredibly important.

Cam:                Mm-hmm.

Carmen:           So in addition to different sorts of civil rights, the activism that was happening, and war related activism, I’m wondering if you saw second wave feminism unfold in any certain way on campus. Obviously by that point, or a certain point the dress codes and the strict regulations were finally cut, but did you see that unfold on campus in any certain way?

01:11:00

Cam:                Yeah, I think it was certainly beginning. I’m trying to think the first time I taught some women’s history. I’m not sure when that was. But yeah, there was definitely more activism and more faculty interest. I mean, sociologists and…I’m not sure about the English department, but probably there were courses there that had a feminist approach. Yeah, so that was happening, too. I’m trying to think about…well… It’s just hard to—I’m not sure I can think of any incident or sudden turning point.

01:11:57          But there were more women being hired, so… Because when I was hired—well, Nancy Farriss was here, and she was a Latin Americanist. But she left fairly soon after I was hired. She went to Penn. And then her temporary replacement was a young woman from the U.K., and then Judy Ewell was hired, and so then Judy and I were in the department. I think for a long time we were the only two, and then gradually more and more over the years, obviously more and more women were hired. And there were certainly women in the English department, sociology, psychology. Hardly anybody in the sciences in those early years. Nobody in econ for a long time. Yeah, so…

01:13:07

Carmen:           That was going to be one of my questions, because I’ve noted that about one third, give or take, of the history department now are women faculty members, so I was going to ask what it was like. I sat down with Judy Ewell previously, and she noted also that it was the two of you for a good while there.

Cam:                Yeah.

Carmen:           Can you describe what the experience was to be one of one or two women in the history faculty and how you were interacted with or treated?

Cam:                Well, my experience is probably different because I had been a student, and so a lot of these people I had known, and they knew me, and there just wasn’t any particular problem that I ever faced about that. So there wasn’t…I guess it didn’t seem all that strange.

01:14:08          It was just the way it was. Hm. I’m trying to think… Well, as I say, there were—and I became friends with women in other departments. There were enough that you did have a sense of, you know, there’s certainly women faculty around. Oh, Linda Riley I think came the same year I did, and she was in classics. And she was a dean for a while and so on. So there were women who had some power.

And then there were various women in the administration. Harriet Reid. She held a number of different jobs. I’ve forgotten what she was doing exactly when I first came, but she was in admissions for a while and then she ran sort of career placement for a while and so on.

01:15:00          And fairly soon Juanita Wallace was hired in the admissions office. So, you know. But no, as I say, probably my experience is not in any way typical, since I had been a student and I came in knowing a lot of these people.

Carmen:           Sure. Yeah, sure. Did you find that you retained kind of the same mentors you had as a student, or did anyone else step into that role, or as a comrade during your time here?

Cam:                No, probably I retained a lot of the same, especially Dick Sherman, because we were interested in a lot of the—he had done a lot with African American topics. Not his first book, but some of his subsequent ones he got very interested in African American stuff, so we would talk about that.

01:15:58          Yeah, so probably the same people. And then my office mates and so on. The first several years there were three of us in a fairly big office, but we, you know, luckily our schedules were such that you could still sometimes have office hours. You could have students in there when the other two would be teaching or something.

But one was Boyd Coiner, who did the Old South. And then the first year a guy named Bill Leary from UVA, who also was interested in African American stuff. But he hadn’t…I don’t think he’d been able to teach the class. I think he was mainly doing just a survey class. And he was only here…I guess we only overlapped one year, maybe. And then Jim Thompson came in, and he also did Southern things, but he didn’t do African American stuff.

01:17:03          He did Southern intellectual history. And so Jim and Boyd and I shared an office for a couple years. And then when we moved to Morton we all had our own offices. But I was still friends with them. I mean, we were all in a row there.

Carmen:           Yeah. So I’m wondering—and this may have been an issue that those early years you were teaching or might have come along later—when I spoke with Judy, she went on record talking about salary discrepancies, which has been the case nationwide, worldwide, in all sorts of industries, but was an issue that she personally experienced here, fighting for equal salary to colleagues, male colleagues. And was that something that you personally addressed or personally experienced?

01:17:52

Cam:                You know, I don’t really know. I mean, I probably experienced it, but somehow I was never that focused on it. Although I did certainly take part in some of the petitions and so on. But Judy probably had better insight from her days as chair and so on of seeing everybody. But somehow, I mean, maybe that was a typical women’s reaction, that they say we don’t fight hard enough for salaries and so on, and somehow I really didn’t like to deal with that aspect, I must say.

So I just didn’t. I wasn’t one of the key ones. But I did support people, and I was on committees and things where we drafted protests and wrote reports and stuff like that. But I was not one who was going to go in and argue with the dean or anything like that. And there were plenty of people in the department, I mean, men too, who would argue about their salaries and just go in and say, well, I’ve done this, and why is so-and-so getting more and so on, so in addition to gender discrimination they felt there was other discrimination.

01:19:09

Carmen:           I’m wondering if you saw—well, it’s kind of all wrapped up in this, but I’m leaning back towards this idea of different sociopolitical things going on in the world during the time you were here, and even past. I guess I’m looking more into the ‘80s and the ‘90s, and even the early 2000s, things that went on.

I mean, you were here first as a student and then as a teacher for two of those big moments that everyone remembers where they were when it happened, the JFK assassination, of course, but then, of course, 9/11 as well. And you were here for such a broad span in which the world was rapidly changing. And I wonder if any of those events or just moments in time stand out to you.

01:19:55

Cam:                Well, I’m trying to think. I mean, certainly 9/11. I was just horribly shocked, like everybody else. And I think I had a few students in one of my classes, there was somebody who…I think did he have relatives in the World Trade Center, or close friends or something, so that was kind of shocking.

But I’m trying to think. I mean, I think the political stuff probably had more impact in that I was teaching…you know, when you’re teaching right up to the present, it’s hard. My husband and I used to sort of argue about this because he was teaching much older history, where the debates aren’t so relevant, really.

01:21:01          And he would always say I can’t understand you American historians, you’re so political and so on. And in a sense I’ve thought, since I retired, I’m certainly glad, say, that I’m not teaching right now because I would think it would be very hard.

And I would be pretty open with my classes about my own attitudes, but then I would certainly try to be very fair about listening to theirs and so on. But, you know, there were students, I’m sure, who thought I was some raging liberal and didn’t like it. But mostly it was okay. But sometimes that was kind of hard. I remember…what election was it? It may have been…was it Jimmy Carter versus Reagan?

01:21:56          Anyway, there was some election where it was very clear that the Republican was going to win, but I kind of joked with the class. Oh, I guess I was going to vote, one of the few times I ever voted for a third party. I was going to vote for Fred Harris. And I said, well, if my candidate…no, if your favorite wins, I’ll bring doughnuts or something. And of course, I mean, I knew I was going to bring doughnuts because my favorite was not going to win at all. So we would joke like that.

But anyhow, that…you know, some of that was, it was sort of tense. And also teaching…well, civil rights and black history in general, and even New South. There were students who would push back about, well, no, slavery was not the main issue about the Civil War. Yes, it was. No.  

01:22:57          And I would try to explain how slavery was at the root of so many other things that they would name. Like they’d say, well, it’s really states’ rights, or it’s economics, or it’s something. I’d say, well yes, but what’s the basis for that, what’s underneath? It’s slavery, protection of slavery.

And in fact I met somebody on the street just a couple years ago who I didn’t recognize, but he recognized me and said oh, yeah, I remember your class. He said I remember that you kept telling us, yes, slavery was the cause of the Civil War. I didn’t believe it, but you were right.

And one time I remember a student objected to Malcolm X. I was having them read the autobiography of Malcolm X, and he thought I was defending Malcolm X’s early life as a criminal, and oh, why are we reading this, why are you defending this guy who was breaking into houses and stuff.

01:24:01          So I had to talk about the fact that in some ways this is an autobiographical trope. There are many famous autobiographies where the person talks about his or her early bad life and then the reformation, and moving on to new purpose and so on. I said I’m not defending what he did, but he changed, and he’s explaining to you how he became a Black Muslim and so on, how this changed his life. So there were cases like that, where people would be unhappy with the reading or thinking I was trying to defend something that they didn’t think was true or defensible.

Carmen:           I’m wondering also if those classes and the readings you required didn’t also have the opposite effect of, say, the African American community here at William & Mary grew, and so maybe you did start having some of the individuals from those communities in your class, and then they were reading these things. I wonder if they viewed this as a safe space or a positive thing, or if you ever had any interactions.

01:25:14

Cam:                It’s sort of hard to tell. I remember one student I had who’s now, I think, an administrator somewhere in New York. Anyway, I remember she wrote a paper on Polly Murray and actually got to interview her. And I think mostly the black students, you know, seemed to like the classes okay and so on. I think I did try to be careful not to do the business of saying, well, give us the black perspective or anything like that, because you certainly don’t want to do that to students.

Carmen:           Absolutely.

01:25:59         

Cam:                And there were still so few in my day that there often wasn’t a big body of black students in the class. It might be just two or three, or one or two at a time, especially in a small seminar. Because I had classes later on, especially after Mel Ely came and pretty much took over the African American stuff, I had classes like The Search for American Identity, where we would have black, white, all sort of ethnic groups, immigrants, all sorts of things. Yeah, so…yeah, it was… I don’t remember any particular, you know, uproar or anything like that.

Carmen:           Well, that class you just listed sounds fascinating, and I wish I had taken something on identity like that because that question is ever relevant.

Cam:                Oh, I know.

Carmen:           Always trying to define what that means.

01:27:00

Cam:                Yeah, that was fun. And sometimes, you know, that’s why I was trying to look up some of the teaching records, and oh my gosh, I’ve forgotten all these different things. But sometimes they were freshman seminars. Sometimes they were maybe at the sophomore level, because we went through several curriculum changes over my time.

And then we had things like Project Plus and various honors, interdisciplinary honors classes, and the service class, and so there were all sorts of—which was fun, because then you could—again, nobody ever objected to the topics. Sometimes you had to check and make sure it wasn’t overlapping with somebody else’s course, but I would say that was one of the real benefits of teaching here, that there was a lot of autonomy for the teachers.

01:27:59          And especially later on in my career, when I was doing more of this interdisciplinary work, the department never objected or cared. Partly history was big enough so that it wasn’t that I was not teaching something that needed to be taught in history, which was an issue for people from much smaller departments. Sometimes they just couldn’t be freed up to teach in the interdisciplinary courses. But those were good courses. Those were fun to teach.

Carmen:           Yeah, absolutely. And definitely having autonomy in a job is something I think anyone would value, especially being able to choose the types of courses and the information that you were teaching students. So I noted that—and you’ve listed a couple of these earlier on—that while you were teaching and very busy as a professor here, you were also involved in different committees. And a lot of the things you did, when reading through the list, it really just seems like there was a focus on really bettering William & Mary or making it more inclusive, or just addressing certain things.

01:29:06          Like you were part of the Affirmative Action Advisory Committee. And honestly, were considered on campus as a crusader for social justice in the 1970s. You participated in different workshops for the BSO, wrote an op-ed on the setbacks of racial progress in the 1980s, and so much more. I mean, the list…

Cam:                Yeah, yeah.

Carmen:           So can you just talk about any of those things you were involved in that stand out to you, or why you chose to be engaged in what you were?

Cam:                Well, I guess… It is funny because I looked back at that affirmative action report a couple years ago when one of the students in a class was doing something, and they had gone through the archives and found it, and I read it over and I thought, wow, I was a crusader in those days. [Laughs.]

01:29:56          But I think the stuff I was interested in in terms of committees and so on was focused more on students and the educational process, so I was less interested in, well, things like the faculty salaries or faculty benefits, you know, because there were committees where you could do all of that, and somehow I thought that the issue of the students and the educational process was somewhat more important.

So yeah, we did try to do a lot of stuff, that’s right. Oh, gosh, the BSO, yeah. And there were various African American students that I got to know fairly well. One that I’ve been surprised I haven’t seen that he’s been back for any of this stuff, was Rodney Williams, who teaches dance, I think, at Longwood now. And he was a great kid.

01:30:56          I can remember walking across campus with him and everyone knew him. Everyone greeted Rodney. I mean, it was like oh my gosh, you must know everyone on this campus. Or just before I retired, Devon…I can’t even remember Devon’s last name, but he’s somebody who went on into library science and information science and so on, and he’s done quite well. And I had taught him as a freshman in one of these freshman seminars. He was a Gates Millennium scholar.

So there were a lot of kids that were interesting. I’m trying to think. I did try to bring—well, I was active in Phi Beta Kappa, and there I tried to bring interesting people to the campus, because I figured if I have to do this work, I’ll try to bring in good people.

01:32:00          So John Ashbery came once as the poet. Stanley Kauffmann, who was a prominent film critic and drama critic. Who else came? Well, we got some good people. I’m trying to think who else we brought in. Oh, for honorary degrees I remember I suggested Eudora Welty, and she came, and she was great. And that was when George Healy was vice president. I remember he kept saying oh, she was so wonderful, I’m so glad you nominated her.

And we got Robert Coles here. So… And who else? There was somebody who came and then people thought the performance was sort of disappointing. Maybe it was the graduation speaker. And now I can’t think who it was. Anyway. Maybe an African American or something, somebody famous, but anyway.

01:33:03

Carmen:           I did read at one point—and this was for a different interview I was doing—that Jesse Jackson came at one point and the turnout wasn’t quite what was expected, so I don’t know if that’s what you’re referring to.

Cam:                No, no. No, I remember, I think he came a couple times. And one time I think the turnout was quite good. He was very good. Yeah, he was over at William & Mary Hall.

Carmen:           Okay, great.

Cam:                Yeah, yeah, he was good. Yeah, Jesse and…yeah, so…

Carmen:           Yeah, a number of notable figures were brought in.

Cam:                Yeah, yeah.

Carmen:           And that is one way to definitely engage students, is to bring in—

Cam:                Bring in the names and let them actually hear and see these people, yeah. I think now there are many more endowed things like the Hunter B. Andrews whatever they call that speakership or internship or whatever.

Carmen:           Yeah, fellowship, yeah.

Cam:                Fellowship. That now they can bring in more people for several days and have them go to classes and stuff, and that’s really helpful.

01:34:03          It was harder earlier. We just didn’t have much money, so you really had to try to say to people, well, you know, we can only offer you X, but could you come and so on. And people did.

Carmen:           Right. Well, great. I have a couple more specific questions before opening it up to some broad questions.

Cam:                Okay.

Carmen:           And then after that I will open it up to you to add anything that we haven’t covered or that you want to add. So as you know, we’re in the midst of celebrating 50 years of African Americans in residence, and next year we kick off celebrations for the 100^th anniversary of coeducation here at the school. So I’m wondering how you have seen diversity and inclusion at the school evolve and change since you came here.

01:34:49

Cam:                It’s been massive, of course. Now in terms of women, there have always been a lot of women students. But yeah, the diversity is just amazing. I mean, I really notice it just walking around campus now. There’s so many more Asian American students, African American students, all sorts of people, international students. So that’s really good. I think that’s just an amazing change.

I think, I’m pretty sure even when I retired in 2002 there weren’t nearly, I don’t think there were nearly as many, say, Asian American students. I think that must have really boomed in recent years, perhaps because of the diversity in Northern Virginia, I’m not sure. Or the foreign students coming in from China and so on with the Confucius Institute and so on. And I think the international emphasis is so amazing and so good now.

01:36:00          I was just reading that little blurb. It was in the “Gazette,” but I think they had pulled it from one of the William & Mary news things, that something like 49% of the undergraduates here last year studied abroad, and they said that was very high for a public college.

I mean, in my day, when I as an undergraduate, I think the only opportunities were maybe Exeter there was a scholarship or a small program for Exeter. And that was about it, I think. Now when I was teaching in the early days, I mean, there was, the Exeter program was pretty active for a while, but it only involved about five or six students a year, I think. And then they could go to France. Was it Montpelier, is that where we went? Yeah, I think it was. So I had students who did that.

01:36:56          But that was really about it. Oh, and a few who went to China, that’s right, once we began to have the exchange with Beijing Normal and so on. I know some of the students I knew fairly well spent time in China. But my goodness, now people just go everywhere, and I think that’s really, really, really good. So that’s been just a huge change. I think there is a much…well, you just look at what’s going on on campus. I mean, it’s much more international. All sorts of interesting things. And so it’s much less of the little Southern school that I knew.

Carmen:           Yeah, so if you wouldn’t mind, then, maybe telling me what you believe to be the value of diversity and inclusion, or the contribution of women on campuses like William & Mary, or even more broadly in the world.

01:37:56

Cam:                Well, I do think it really gives people a much broader perspective to, you know, to have such a wide range of people. And it seems to me in this world there’s no going back. It’s one world, and I think people are going to be working across borders, and across cultures, and I think it just can’t be…I mean, you can’t say that it’s not important. It is incredibly important that they have these experiences and just get to know people from different backgrounds.

There’s probably still a problem with class here. For one thing, it’s gotten much more expensive, and obviously the school doesn’t have the money that, say, Princeton does. You know, there was just the story about how Princeton has become much less preppie because they offer full rides to talented kids without so much money.

01:39:05          And years and years and years ago a student I did know very well said to me at one point that she often felt out of place here because she was the daughter of a Naval enlisted man and everyone else here was the child of an officer. And when I met her parents—she was a Phi Bet—and I remember meeting her parents at the dinner or something, and they were, you know, they just looked working class. They were. And so she felt—but Myra was incredibly bright and went on and she had some sort of fellowship. I think she studied at Birmingham in the U.K. because she was interested in Shakespeare or something. And then I’m pretty sure she went on to teach, that she’s been teaching high school English in Manassas or Manassas Park or something like that.

01:40:03          But I do remember she just said, you know, really, everybody here is kind of upper middle class or more, and I’m not, and that’s been hard. And I imagine that would still be true, that there’s still, you know, there probably just aren’t that many kids from Appalachia here, you know, way out in the West in Wise County, or Nelson County, or wherever. So that’s probably something that needs…they need to work on. But that takes money, so…

Carmen:           Yeah, as do most things, unfortunately. But yeah, no, that’s a great point you make about just having a greater number of experiences and perspectives.

Cam:                Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially in, you know, smaller classes where the students do have to talk and engage with each other. I think that’s pretty important.

01:40:59

Carmen:           Sure. Are you still involved with William & Mary? Well, obviously you are because you came back to do this oral history. But what ways are you still involved at William & Mary?

Cam:                Well, I haven’t…I really don’t go to the retired faculty stuff like that annual cocktail party or dinner or whatever they have. But I am supposed to be, I mean, I am on the committee for the hundredth anniversary. But my subcommittee hasn’t done anything, so I don’t know what’s going on.

But I’ve been trying to go to a lot of the 50^th anniversary things because I think they’ve done a great job. Jackie has really just done wonders with it. They’ve had so many good speakers and good programs and things, so that really—as I saw Jane Bernard at something, and she was saying yeah, that really raises the bar for the women’s—

Carmen:           This coming year, yeah.

01:42:01

Cam:                Coming year. I saw that they announced the women’s weekend that they’re going to do in September, but other than that, I don’t know. I hope it’s going well, but for some reason our committee on exhibits just hasn’t been meeting. I know they had a problem with finding out what their budget was, but anyway.

Carmen:           Right. I think the last I heard there were some plans for an exhibit in the Sadler Center.

Cam:                Yeah.

Carmen:           And then I know we’re going to be using the oral histories we collect for the 100^th to put up an exhibit in Swem. That’s kind of separate, but that will be up as well. But yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how the celebrations unfold in the coming year, and even as we continue to roll out celebrations for the 50^th.

Cam:                Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was thinking in some ways maybe the 50^th is easier in the sense that there is such a clear focus, whereas 100 years of women, there’s so much you could do, or not do, or whatever.

01:43:07          I was looking at something I had gotten from Yale, and of course they have celebrated various milestones, and they didn’t go coed until about ’71 or ’72. So again there you’re dealing with a much more recent development and a smaller group and so on, but they have a wonderful fountain and monument that Maya Lin did for their thing. So I thought now—unfortunately, we don’t seem to have a Maya Lin here, I don’t think, and I don’t think we’re going to end up with a wonderful new monument on campus, but who knows, maybe.

Carmen:           It would be nice to have some sort of tribute to it all to mark it.

Cam:                Yeah.

Carmen:           They are, I just heard they got the okay to put the two plaques on the Wren Building, one for the 50^th and one for the 100^th that will list the names of the women, which will be really nice.

01:43:59

Cam:                Yeah.

Carmen:           They’re supposed to be fairly substantial and it will be nice to have those there. But yeah, it’ll be…I look forward to seeing what else is…kind of what other celebrations go on.

Cam:                Because when we first started a couple years ago and had brainstorming things, they had a lot of ideas about stuff. But, I mean, there were so many, and you would have to narrow it down. But they were talking about, well, all the buildings that are named for women and so on. You could certainly do a little bit with that.

And they were hoping, at one point, to do something with practically each department, but I think that turned out to be too much. At one point they were going to ask each department to, I don’t know, list the most impressive women students or something, but departments just don’t have time to do all that, and they don’t have the records, I don’t think, either.

01:44:51

Carmen:           Right, yeah. Yeah, I think that is a problem we’re finding for both these anniversaries, that we don’t know so much of the history. Which is actually, you know, why it is a good thing to record these oral histories and have things on record. But yeah, that is something we’re really having to dig in in the archives and see what is there, what’s available, what do we know, what do we not know.

Cam:                Yeah, exactly. So anyway.

Carmen:           Definitely. So a couple more broad questions for you.

Cam:                Okay.

Carmen:           Well, actually, one specific question for you. I find sometimes this is a challenge for individuals to answer. If you had to narrow it down to just one, what would be your proudest achievement in your career?

Cam:                [Laughs.]

Carmen:           I know.

Cam:                I guess it would be encouraging good students to be even better. And I have kept up with some.

01:45:59          And the problem with saying that, though, is that some of these people are so good when they come in it’s hard to know if you really added anything to them. But I do keep with Andrew Zawacki, who was one of the Rhodes Scholars, and we’re still in touch. And some students from…I’m trying to think what years. Maybe the very early ‘90s, maybe the ‘80s, but they’re a couple women students, one in Charlottesville, one in Richmond. Another student out in North Dakota, actually, I think. She’s one of the ones who went to China. I hear from her at Christmas. So, you know, some of the honors students. So I’d say that was probably the achievement.

01:46:58

Carmen:           Yeah. Well, I think it’s fair to say that you clearly had an impact on your students, whether for the individual you passed on the street a couple years ago who mentioned remembering your class or for being the very first to introduce an African American history course to a bunch of students who might not have been introduced to that before, you definitely have left your mark. So last question from me. Do you have any hopes for the future of William & Mary or things you would like to see change in the future?

Cam:                Well, I guess I would hope they’re able to continue to diversify, particularly in terms of class, because I think, especially at this moment in American history, that’s clearly a division that maybe the colleges could help bridge. And I guess I would hope it doesn’t become too much bigger. It seems to me that…I mean, they’re under a lot of pressure to keep growing, but it seems like a pretty good size.

01:48:07          There’s a huge amount of diversity in terms of the offerings. There are a lot of opportunities. And yet I think—I mean, I’m on the outside now—but I think there’s still a sense of community here, so I would hope they can maintain that and yet diversify the student body maybe a little more in terms of class especially.

Carmen:           Great. So I’ve had you talking for quite a while and I asked you about three pages of questions. But I want to turn it over to you now and ask you if there’s anything that you thought I would ask but I haven’t or that you would like to add that we didn’t cover.

01:48:54

Cam:                I can’t really think of anything to add except this is just sort of a funny aside. I was thinking the best way to celebrate the hundredth anniversary would be to hire a woman for president. [Laughs.] But I don’t know if that will happen or not.

Carmen:           That would certainly be a big celebration.

Cam:                Yeah, that would be the thing. And there are, you know, there are a lot of good women out there who have a lot of experience with administration. The only discouraging point I think from an academic point of view is now the presidents seem to be just money raisers. I mean, they’ve got to spend so much time raising money.

And I noticed there was something again in the paper, I guess about the meeting that the committee, the search committee had with various people on campus, and everybody said yeah, it’s got to be somebody who’s going to raise money because the state keeps cutting back and so on.

Carmen:           Yeah.

01:49:55

Cam:                So that’s too bad because I think I like the older model of sort of the intellectual leader, too. I mean, I know they do have to raise money, but anyway.

Carmen:           Maybe there is a holy grail out there, a single person who will be all those things at once, and a woman.

Cam:                Yeah, that would be great. That would cap off the celebration. [Laughs.]

Carmen:           Absolutely. It definitely would. Well, if you don’t have anything else to add.

Cam:                No.

Carmen:           Well, thank you so much, Cam. This has been wonderful, and I appreciate you just sitting down and talking to me about all of this.

Cam:                Okay, yeah. Well, I hope it…yeah. I’m sure I’ve forgotten loads of things, but…

Carmen:           Well, you can always reach back out to me and we can add things in notes and all of that, if need be.

Cam:                Yeah, that’s a thought, too. If I think of something great that I’ve forgotten.

Carmen:           Absolutely. But thank you again.

Cam:                Okay.

01:50:45          [End of recording.]