Wiant interview

[Begin Tape 2, Side 1]
Warren: This is Mame Warren. This is tape two with Sally Wiant, April 9, 1996.

         We were just talking about the jewel in the crown.
Wiant: The jewel in the crown. Well, obviously that expression comes from the title of
a book, but as it relates to us, it comes from one of our early Frances Lewis Scholars and
resident, Vic Rosenbloom, who is a senior faculty member at Northwestern. He knew
John Wilson before, and became reacquainted while he was here. Vic had been
president of, I believe, Reed College.
Warren: Oregon.
Wiant: Oregon. Which was about the same time that John Wilson had been president
of Wells. We were looking for—I think this is about the time that Roy had agreed to
stay one more year in the deanship so that there would be a strong dean in the law
school while John Wilson was in his first year in the presidency, so that not both the
president of the university and the law dean would change at the same time. But Roy
was clearly ready to retire from the rigors of being a dean. Most law deans now turn
over every 3.9 years. Roy had been a dean for fifteen years. That was in the era when

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law deans did last longer, but we were beginning this new era of deans that stay in the
deanship approximately five years, and we were looking for a new dean.

         John Wilson was talking with Vic Rosenbloom about law schools and legal
education and searching for deans, and how law deans were different than deans of
colleges, and we collectively were having a conversation when Vic was pointing out to
John Wilson that the law school was the jewel in the crown. Very few universities in the
country, particularly those that are primarily undergraduate liberal art colleges have
law schools, let alone a law school with a national reputation, let alone the special kind
of things that were happening in this building, and what that meant as far as how a
president looking for a new dean and working with a law faculty to find a new dean,
how important it was for the university to maintain the jewel in the crown, and that
sort of stuck with us periodically.
Warren: It's lovely, and it's what makes us a university .
Wiant: It is what makes us a university .
Warren: It is the jewel.
Wiant: Yes, it is what makes us a university and builds our reputation in circles that
we would otherwise not be known.
Warren: It's a lovely title. I really encourage you to use that as your title of your
chapter.
Wiant: Sounds like a good plan to me.
Warren: I wish the title of the whole book would come about so easily.

         Let's continue with this theme of coeducation. Did you get involved at all
personally in bringing the undergraduate women in? Was your opinion solicited
personally?
Wiant: I was appointed to sit on a number of committees that looked at varying kinds
of things, and then a committee that met very regularly, sometimes about weekly about
eight o'clock in the morning, so I was involved in that capacity. I was often invited to

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participate in interviews as we were beginning to build a women faculty on the front
campus so that they would have a sense of talking with someone who had been here
and what it might be like were they to join the University , so I was involved in that
way.

         As far as actively involved in the admissions of coed classes, I was not.
Warren: Who would those faculty members have been, who came as a result of those
interviews?
Wiant: I'm trying to think. Some have come and gone, like Isabel McIlvain and talked
regularly with Jean Dunbar in sort of early stages. There was a woman in the English
department who was a James Joyce scholar and who actually started the foreign film
institute. I'm trying to think about women who have been here. I was on the
committee, but that was years later, that rehired Barbara Brown and persuaded her to
return to the university . I'm just trying to think of some names of people who I—
Warren: I don't think of anybody who's been here a long time, other than Pam and you.
Wiant: And Nancy Margand.
Warren: I don't know her.
Wiant: Nancy Margand is a senior woman faculty member in the psychology
department, and she came after. She may have been on the faculty before I finished law
school. I don't remember exactly when Nancy came.
Warren: Right. Yes. She has been here, so she's been here longer than coeducation.
Way longer.
Wiant: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Very much so.
Warren: You told me a really lovely story that I particularly liked, last week, about
your graduation.
Wiant: Oh, yes. Well, graduation from Washington and Lee I think is more special
than graduations from most places, to begin with. I mean, it is a very personal event
and we're small enough so that you can really feel a part of something. I had not gone

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through graduation for my master's degree, a large university where the School of
Whatever stands up. I had announced to my parents that I would be delighted if they
wanted to visit me, that I wasn't going to do that. So having deprived them of that
graduation, I did say that I would do as much of the graduation ceremonies as they
were feeling so inclined, and that included graduation dance the evening before, which
was a formal event. I don't know when we stopped doing that.

         But I think probably the most touching event was for me to cross the podium to
receive a congratulations from the president and my dean, and then be met by Jim
Phemister [phonetic], who came from the faculty side where the faculty were seated,
and to be escorted from the ranks of the students to join the faculty, where they had
saved a seat for me. That was very heartwarming for me, and I think the pleasure that
it gave my parents was particularly touching. That was a high point.
Warren: It is for me, just hearing it. Jim Phemister also said something that day.
Wiant: Oh, he did. He pointed out that with my agreeing to join the faculty and with
that moment, I had now doubled the number of faculty women in the law school, and
that was yet another occasion to celebrate.
Warren: And indeed that must have made a huge difference.
Wiant: You know, by then we did have a number of women students. I don't know
what our percentage was, but it was probably approaching 30 percent, if not more, and
to still have such a weak presence on the faculty, and the faculty became very active
and had as its goal to try to hire some more women to join our ranks. We've been very
successful in that.
Warren: Is there anybody in particular you'd like to highlight there?
Wiant: Well, let's see. Sort of early-on colleagues and had for a while, Joan
Shaughnessy is another one who has such a presence among us. She is this petite
person with this little tiny voice, who is so thoughtful and has such insights and
sensitivity and can bring some of us to agreement or at least to an understanding of

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very different positions, and who is next year to move into the associate dean's office as
our first associate dean in the law school. We've, of course, had Susan Palmer, who was
one of our graduates and editor, the first woman editor-in-chief of the Law Review,
who went out to cleark and practice and then chose to return and become dean of
admissions, a position that she's exceptionally well suited for and does a splendid job.

         At the time Shaun came, we had another young woman, Toni Massaro, who
really helped me come to a better appreciation of some feminist positions. She started
the local NOW [National Organization for Women] chapter, she raised awareness in the
law school, she raised awareness in the community, and I actually think it was through
her initial hard work and her bringing me along that some of the way was paved for
some of these changes to later come, to come in a much smoother way than they might
otherwise have been implemented.
Warren: Would you be a unique person in that you went through law school here
already knowing what your career path was going to be?
Wiant: I don't think of myself as unique.
Warren: But has anybody else done that? I didn't realize that you came here knowing
that you were—I thought you had come as a law student and stayed on as the librarian.
Wiant: No, I had gone to library school to be a librarian. When I finished law school, I
really struggled with what I wanted to be. Did I want to change careers and become a
practicing lawyer? I looked and thought about that quite hard and decided, no, that's
not what I wanted to do. I didn't want to leave the academy. Then I tried to decide,
well, did I want to be a librarian or did I want to be—I mean, I decided I was going to
be a lawyer librarian, but then the question became, and did I also want to be a
professor. That was very rare to find individuals who were law librarians and who
were actually teaching substantive law.

         I first went out and gathered a number of offers to be a librarian, and turned
them all down. Then I decided that I wanted to be a teaching librarian. I was not sure

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whether—Washington and Lee was in the process of interviewing, and I was one of the
candidates, and I didn't know how I would come out in the running, but however I
came out in the running, I wanted them to do a full-fledged search. I wanted them to
look at other candidates. If I was the one they wanted, I wanted them to make sure that
that was the case before they offered me the job, and I also wanted to be sure that if this
is where I was going to have my career, that I needed to know that.

         They made the offer to me and I was still trying to decide among a couple of
other offers, and my mentors, some within the building and others without, said, "Why
would you leave? You're going to have opportunities at Washington and Lee that
aren't going to be available at other places perhaps for a long time, perhaps never, and
they like you and you like them and it's been a good match, so why would you leave?"
Warren: What opportunities?
Wiant: Oh, opportunities at other schools in other locations.
Warren: What opportunities were for you here?
Wiant: To build a collection, because the law school had burned in the thirties and
everything had burned with it, and the University had not invested much in its library.
It was significantly below minimum standards in the early seventies, and although we
had spent money, it was building a collection to match a curriculum program; it was
building a staff; integrating media; using new technologies to improve teaching; the
opportunity to teach substantively, which is something I wanted to do; support from
the dean's office, support and encouragement; become active at the national level. I
think those are things that other places don't have that.

         There was so much to be done here. The faculty and students had not had the
kind of collection and service that they ought to be able to expect, and I think if you
were to ask them, yes, there are more things that they would like us to do and we're
now ready to do them, but I think if you ask sort of what they think about the library,
it's resoundingly supportive. In order to do that, yes, it takes money, but it takes more

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than money. Lots of places have had money, but not the freedom to work with your
colleagues and your staff to build something that's right for the place, and that just
doesn't come along very often, and it is here. It's not just in the law school; I think that's
one of the reasons it makes the university the place that it is.
Warren: Have you ever thought of leaving?
Wiant: Oh, several times. Even resigned. When I had resigned, I had gotten engaged
and my fiance was in research in New Mexico, and although he had interviewed the
year before and had been offered a job at VMI, I was not ready to marry him, and he
wasn't going to take a job, thankfully, at VMI and move to Virginia if I was not going to
do this. So then when I finally decided I was going to marry him, he had another offer
from VMI, but it was not in his field and it was really not one he could take, and I
thought, well, there are far more opportunities if I move back West.

         So I had resigned and I had told Roy, but also because of the timing when all this
happened, I said I would stay. This was the spring, and I would stay through the
summer and through the next fall, and I would teach everything that I'd agreed to teach
the next year, but in the fall, so that those classes would be covered and he would have
ample opportunity and the school would have ample opportunity.

         I had told him this, and the next day I got a call from him saying, "President
Wilson wants you to call him," which I did, and John said—no man in the university
had ever said to me, "I'd like to come over and talk to you." I was forever endeared to
him. I would have gone over to the president's office in the blink of an eye, but he said,
"I'd like to come." And then the next thing that left me absolutely dumbfounded, he
said, "When would it be convenient for you?" And I thought, in all the years that I've
been at the university , no one had ever asked when it would be convenient. There
weren't any women. You just got used to it.

         So he came over, offered his congratulations on my engagement, had learned a
remarkable amount about my fiance, who had taught at Virginia Tech and had been an

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outstanding faculty member there, so he didn't know him personally, but he had
managed to find out a lot and knew this was the kind of person he wanted to rebuild
the engineering department, and although he did not tell me that, the only thing, after
discussing my personal plans and my professional plans, he exacted a promise from me
that I would persuade Bob to talk to him the next time Bob came to visit me, and I
agreed that I would be willing to do that. Through those conversations, he managed to
talk Bob into leaving the University and me into staying and destroying my letter of
resignation.

         So a couple of occasions and more recently in the last couple of years, Cornell
was trying to talk me into talking to them, and in a very blizzardy trip in Minneapolis,
where I had gone for a meeting of the West Law Advisory Board, Bob persuaded me
that I hated gray, that I didn't function in gray, even though it would have been a
chaired professorship, and I finally came back and called and said, "We're wasting my
time and your time and our energies, because I cannot live in Ithaca, New York, even
though I am exceptionally flattered that you would have come after me to try to talk me
into doing this." And there have been a couple of other times, but there's always
something that's drawn me back.
Warren: It's a very nice place we live.
Wiant: Yes.
Warren: And is Bob happy here?
Wiant: He loves teaching and he's good at it. He misses the research so that sabbaticals
are really critical for him, and he just spent last semester at Clemson doing research.
Major universities with first-rate engineering departments and, of course, when he was
at Tech it was that, but the state has just decimated that school, the part that he didn't
like was raising all the funds to support graduate students, and that's probably very
difficult in this environment, so he sort of gets the best of all worlds here.

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Warren: I think we all do. Thank you, Sally. Is there anything more that we haven't
covered that you'd like to get on the tape? I've crossed everything off of my list.
Wiant: No, not that I can think of. Roy's not going to know this, I don't know whether
Uncas is, and whether you may have to find out from maybe Lash Larue or Joe Ulrich,
we need some stories about "Skinny" Williams.
Warren: I've got a few tiny mentions of him.
Wiant: And "Red Eye" Johnson and some of those maybe war years or immediately
post war years.
Warren: These people have been alluded to in other interviews, but I haven't gotten
real good stories about them.
Wiant: And I don't know whether Uncas has heard this. Charley McDowell might be
able to tell some stories about them, but a chapter like this has to have some. Those are
the people, as the Steinheimers and the Huntleys of this couple of generations, and if it's
predominantly twentieth century, those folks still need to be in.
Warren: And I will be interviewing people who went through the law school at that
time, and I will really be coaxing those faculty stories.
Wiant: I only have old records about them, and photographs, the portraits, and we've
just had a couple of them restored, so they'd be in good shape to be photographed, I
think.
Warren: Good. Good. Thank you. I think you've got a lot to work with here.
Wiant: I hope so.
Warren: I assure you.
[End of interview]

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