Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
ities program in the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs, where it was housed along with staff and faculty protests of various kinds, as well as sexual harassment case adjudication. The only rationale for the placement of this office—the one common denominator between these entities—was that they were all federally mandated programs, but they didn’t have much relationship to one another. For the longest time we kept fighting this [arrangement] in the College. Finally, under Steve Sanderson, we made the appointment of Wendy Newby as assistant dean for inclusive instruction. We seated her office partly in the College, so that it would not always be the most junior appointment in the EOP office.
How have faculty promotion and tenure changed over the years? Hyatt: It’s become a good deal more formal, with a lot more rules and regulations and procedures. Emory is just part of a trend nationally in that respect. David Minter was important in that. He really believed very strongly in the system that they had at Rice, where the Faculty Council, as it was called there, not only handled promotion and tenure but apparently played much more of a role in faculty governance than was the case at Emory. Rice is smaller and oriented a bit differently. What I constantly hear from people in the History Department now is that there is not the sense of camaraderie or fellowship that was the case when my cohort was coming through. But that’s probably the times also. Simply in growing, some sense of closeness is going to be lost. Dowell: The process became more systematic. The president became a more active part of it when Bill Chace set up the President’s Advisory Council [to review all tenure and promotion files and regularize the process across the University]. Both of your departments have grown. Hyatt: Substantially, yes. When I came there were fifteen people in the History Department, and now there are twice that number. Dowell: English is over thirty now. Hyatt: So many things have changed in our department. It used to be the faculty were all in either American or European history, and whichever of the two they were in, they knew something about the other. Now you have people spread all over the place, and methodologically they do different things. In the History Department as it was constituted when I came, virtually everybody was from the South. It was a different era in a lot of ways. One difference is simply size, and some of this applies to the student body. The class of 1958 had been so small that you would have known by name a great deal more of the people in your class than would be the case now. Your departments were very strong even in your first years on the faculty. Dowell: At one point, trying to build up the graduate programs, Emory decided to focus on six [or seven] departments to be the chief ones with graduate programs. English and history were two of them; chemistry was one; psychology was one; and biology. [The other two were anatomy and biochemistry.] They had obviously decided to say, okay, what are already the best or strongest departments here, and let’s focus graduate development on those. Who are some of the graduate students who went on to academic careers out of history or English? Dowell: Linda Ray [PhD 1971] was brought back here for an alumni award a few years ago. She had been at the University of Nebraska and worked her way up from faculty to being some kind of administrative person. There was a Joan Hall [PhD 1976], who worked with [Professor Emeritus] Lee Pederson, and of course his graduate students were distinctive because they worked with him on the linguistic atlas of the Gulf States, and we didn’t have any other 150