Kelsey: When and where were you
born and raised?
Pfaffenroth: I was born in
Pennsylvania in the
city of
Reading, in the year
1941. Actually, I was born five days before
Pearl Harbor. So
although I don’t remember it, my parents tell me I grew
up in an era where we had blackout shades on the
windows. My father was not in the military, because he
already had two children, but he taught the
Civilian Defense Corps
and helped the spotters on the East Coast identify
airplanes. So I grew up with
playing cards with
different color airplanes, and different insignias, and
different engines, and different wing models, and I
probably, to this day, could identify a bunch of
World War II airplanes,
from playing with them in my childhood.
Kelsey: Where did you go to college?
Pfaffenroth: I went to
Bryn Mawr College in
Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
It was a women’s college then, and it still is—one of
the
Seven Sisters. I had a
wonderful experience there, absolutely wonderful
experience. Indeed, I had such a great time that my
daughter wound up going to the same institution thirty
years later.
Kelsey: When did you graduate?
Pfaffenroth: In 1963.
Kelsey: What degree did you earn?
Pfaffenroth: I earned a
bachelor of arts degree
in English, and took as many English courses as I
could. I loved it, particularly writing, and writing
poetry.
Kelsey: And then did you go on?
Pfaffenroth: I went to graduate school right away,
University of Indiana,
into their master of arts in writing program, which was
partly based on literature study, and partly based on,
in my case, writing poetry.
Kelsey: Why did you decide to teach?
Pfaffenroth: I come from a familyof
teachers. My father is a teacher, my mother is a
teacher, my grandmother is a teacher, my sister is a
teacher. I frankly didn’t know how to do anything
else. So if you had put me in a business world
somewhere, I would have no clue what to do. It was the
only thing I ever knew, and I understood it from the
time I was young, and I loved it.
Kelsey: How did you find out about
County College of Morris?
Pfaffenroth: I got married in 1966 and left the
Midwest and
Pennsylvania, to come
to
New Jersey with my new
husband—he was from
New Jersey. So we
lived in
Newark. He was working
for a big law firm in
Newark, and I had to
find a job. I couldn’t sit around all day doing
nothing. So I found a job in a brand new
community college.
New Jersey was just
starting the
community college movement,
and I had already worked at a
community college for
two years in
Michigan, so I knew
what the structure and philosophy and purposes of the
institutions were. So when
New Jersey was starting
this, I got my first job at
Middlesex County College,
and I worked there for two years. Then two years later,
Morris County College
was just starting in 1968, and
Dean Gilsenen, who had been the dean at
Middlesex, brought, I
believe, nine of us, from
Middlesex County College,
and had us become part of the founding
faculty at
Morris County College.
We were known as
Middlesex North for a
number of years, I think. But anyway, the nine of us
already had experience in setting up the programs,
policies, institutions, that would be required for a new
community college. So
we were kind of leaders for the rest of the faculty that
Dean Gilsenen had brought on board. It was a wonderful
faculty.
Kelsey: How old were you when you started
working at
CCM?
Pfaffenroth: Oh, let me think. I must have been
twenty-seven, I guess—twenty-six, I think, twenty-six
probably. I could still wear short skirts in those
days.
Kelsey: What was the physical
campus like?
Pfaffenroth: Mud! That’s spelled
M-U-D, mud. There was mud everywhere. There was one
building, Henderson Hall.
I don’t think it was named at that point, but it became
known as Henderson Hall. But every access to and from
the building, and everywhere else on campus, as it was
being built, was on planks—plywood planks here and
there. Occasionally you’d find a sidewalk somewhere,
and the parking lots were paved—I
think. I’m not even sure the parking lots were
completely paved. But everywhere else was
mud.
Kelsey: Was there a
cafeteria?
Pfaffenroth: There was, yes. The cafeteria was the
gathering place on campus. It was
the largest room where more than a few people could
fit. Of course there was food there. And it became my
office for the first year. The
faculty had no individual offices during the first
year of operation. So the English department
commandeered a table in the back of the cafeteria, and
that was our office. We would all sit there between
classes and counsel students
there. But we could also see what was going on
everywhere else in the cafeteria—and that’s where
everybody was. You got to know absolutely every
student, every faculty member. Even if you never had
students in class, they knew who you were, and you knew
who they were.
Kelsey: What about a
library?
Pfaffenroth: Ah! the library was upstairs, and
Bill Bunnell was the first
librarian, a very gregarious fellow, very intent on
making sure that the library was at the core of the
learning experience for students, and encouraged all of
us to use it, and use it well, and we did. He was very
helpful in making sure that we had assignments and
material for the assignments that we would give. Very
enthusiastic proponent of the role of a library in a
community college, and
played an important part in those early years.
Kelsey: And even in the first year, before
the library building was built,
there were still library services?
Pfaffenroth: There were still library services,
that’s right. And actually, when I was hired, the first
thing I was asked to do was to make up a list of 500
books that I would like to have ordered for the
library. I still have the list somewhere, I’m sure. It
would be fascinating for me to go through the card
catalog now, to see how many of those books are still
here. Because what I ordered were classic books and
criticism. In those days, it was the
new criticism, of course.
There was no such thing as
gay and lesbian criticism,
or
feminist criticism, or
Marxist criticism, or
deconstruction. None
of those things had been invented yet. So all of these
books were classics from the period of
new criticism,
which is the way that I had learned to look at
literature in graduate school, of course. So it would
be fascinating to see how many of those books are still
here in this age, after all those other eras in library
transitioning and looking at criticism differently.
Kelsey: You might be surprised.
Pfaffenroth: I’m sure I would be. (laughs)
Kelsey: What were the rules regarding
smoking on
campus?
Pfaffenroth: I think you could
smoke anywhere. I
smoked in those years.
I
smoked until my second
child was born, actually.
Smoking was what
everybody did in those early years, so I probably
smoked maybe for the
first two or three years that I was employed here—maybe
a little longer, even—not really long. I stopped more
than thirty-five years ago.
Kelsey: Did you
smoke in the classroom?
Pfaffenroth: No, we never
smoked in the
classroom, but we could
smoke in offices and
the cafeteria. I don’t
remember ever
smoking in a classroom,
though, no. Classrooms were very formal. I addressed
my students as “Mr.” And “Ms.”
all the time, I never used their first names. In later
years, my preferred teaching method was to sit on top of
the table in the front of the room with the lectern next
to my elbow, and my feet dangling over the desk. But I
doubt that I ever took such an informal position in
those early years of teaching. The classroom was a very
formal place in those years.
Kelsey: What was the
atmosphere like on campus
during that first semester—especially given the fact
that there had been so much upheaval in the six months
preceding the opening?
Pfaffenroth: There was some uneasiness—not just
because of what was going on in American society at that
time, but also because nobody really knew what this kind
of college was, and why they should go here, and what
they should teach at a place like this, what we should
expect of students who…. Most of the
faculty there had never taught at a
community college—only
a few of us had. So what should we expect from
students, what should we demand from them, how was all
of it going to work? So add to that the uneasiness that
was coursing through the American society at the same
time, and it was a touchy period for a while. But we
all felt that we were supporting each other, too, and we
were on this little adventure together. So in a lot of
ways, the fact that we were in a small space, generated
a kind of intimacy that probably the college could never
again achieve. It was a very positive and upbeat
place. Dr. [Sherman
H.] Masten[1]
is a very positive and upbeat person as a leader. He
had hired administrators who were positive and upbeat,
and they were all leaders for setting the tone on the
campus. It was a good place to
be.
Kelsey: What about the
students? What were their attitudes?
Pfaffenroth: The students, again, didn’t quite know
what kind of place a
community college was.
They may have read about it a little bit. They also
came, for the most part, from families in which no
family member had ever gone to college before, so these
were all neophytes not just for the school, but for the
whole process of
higher education.
There were a few students who had been away at other
schools and came to
county college that
year as transfer students, or beginning over again
sometimes. The students were typical of their time.
They were
activists when they
wanted to be, but typical of
Morris County students,
they were also reserved in their
activism. One of the
most important things that came out of that was
a picture of a girl holding the
flag here on campus, at one of the
campus protests, which
I think was eventually made into a postage stamp. But
it was, “Yes, we’re
protesting, but we’re
Americans and we want to be heard, but we’re not
rabble-rousers, we’re not radicals.” And all of the
protesting that was
done on the campus was like that. I had, in college,
been a very active
civil rights marcher,
so I had seen that same kind of
activism ten years
before. And now I was seeing it in the same tone in
Morris County. And it
reflected what the county really was like.
Kelsey: Were you aware of any
veterans that were going to
school?
Pfaffenroth: Oh yes! Oh! lots of veterans,
absolutely! And I remember so many of them very, very
well: the Early brothers…. Jim
Henderson was the advisor for the veterans club in
those early years, maybe the second, third, or fourth
year. The veterans were campus leaders
from the very beginning. They even talked me into being
the advisor for the
folk music club! Oh my! that was a job I never
wanted again! But they were leaders, they had real-time
experience, they brought the war and their war
experiences back home to all of us, and they were a
major part of the tenor on campus—major part. They were
great.
Kelsey: So they didn’t encounter any
hostility or animosity that you could see?
Pfaffenroth: I think maybe once in a while they
might have, here and there, from an individual or two.
But campus-wide, I don’t think so. Maybe there were
just things that I didn’t see or hear, or I don’t
remember, even, perhaps. But I remember being really
enamored of the leadership skills that those veterans
brought to the campus, and the way that they approached
things. They were wonderful.
Kelsey: Did you know they were
veterans because of their participation in the
veterans club?
Pfaffenroth: In the veterans club, and also because
most of them were older. We didn't have the number of
older students, or the age range
of students that certainly the college had experienced
later on. Most of the students were
fresh out of high school in those days. And the
veterans clearly were more
experienced, they’d lived more of life, and it showed in
their faces and their attitude and their bearing. So
even if you didn’t know that somebody was a veteran, you
could tell from the way they handled themselves.
Kelsey: What was the world like for you in
1968? What concerned you as an adult?
Pfaffenroth: I’d just been
married shortly before that, so I was getting to
know a husband, getting to buy a house for the first
time, trying to figure out whether I wanted children or
not. Students who knew me in those early years when I
was teaching literature, remember me as making
derogatory comments about what children do to the lives
of women. And later on, when they would come back to
school and discover that I’d actually had three
children, they would fall on the floor in laughter, not
believing that I was actually the same person who had
said such nasty things about children earlier. So I was
trying to sort through all of those things for myself.
It was a growth period for me as well.
Kelsey: Was there
feminist activity on
campus?
Pfaffenroth: At that point…. I’ve been a
feminist my whole life,
so I don’t know that I would notice anything different.
I don’t remember any
demonstrations about feminism.
I think it’s just something that was happening
everywhere around us, in the media and things like
that. I don’t remember activity in that field in those
days. I never felt that I had any reason to look at
being discriminated [against] in the college in those
early days. If I didn’t earn as much money as some of
the other guys did, it was because, frankly, I’d only
had four years of teaching experience before I started
here. And most of the other faculty
here had had much more experience. I was kind of
low on the totem pole in those years. I was more
concerned about becoming respected as a professor, as an
intellectual and an academic, than I was really about my
feminist role.
Probably that’s because I had gone to a women’s college,
and I’d always just taken for granted…. And I had
strong role models for women in my
family: my mother, my grandmother, my older sister,
who’s eight years older than I am. These were all women
who just did what they wanted to do, and never had any
issues with any of that. It may have also come from
growing up in the
Pennsylvania Dutch
environment, where women were absolute partners with
their husbands, because most of them were farm women.
And the man had his farming to do, and the woman had her
farm-related chores to do, and they were partners in all
of this. I never experienced much discrimination at
this campus, or in my life
generally during that period of time—except for my
mother-in-law(chuckles), who couldn’t understand why I
didn’t stay home with the kids, why I went back to
work. I was supposed to stay home and take care of the
children. But you know, I loved my job here, and I
loved teaching. So it took about thirty years for her
to understand that.
Kelsey: Was the student body and faculty
and staff diverse, in the sense that we think of it now?
Pfaffenroth: Not in the sense that we think of it
now. But then
Morris County was less
diverse than it is now, as well.
Dean Gilsenen was very
careful to hire very strong women for the
faculty, so in terms of the
number of women and their visibility on
campus, that was not too much of a
problem. Dr. Louise Heim as
head of the biology department,
Agnes Clark as head of nursing. You couldn’t have
found better role models for women anywhere on the
campus.
So
diversity in terms of race,
there wasn’t a whole lot, but it wasn’t the same kind of
population to draw on, that we would have later on as
the county became more diverse itself.
Kelsey: What was
social life like for the faculty and those working
at the college then?
Pfaffenroth: It was drinking coffee in the
cafeteria with all of your
friends. There were a few parties here and there,
probably mostly founding parties, a groundbreaking here
for another cornerstone on some building somewhere, and
the usual Christmas party. But we all knew each other
very well. We knew about each other’s lives and
children and wives and husbands. It was a warm,
congenial place.
Kelsey: Did people go out after work? Were
there any local hot spots where the people went to
lunch?
Pfaffenroth: I was in a
carpool for two of those early years, so I didn’t
participate in going out after work. I’m sure there
were other people who went to Senatore’s frequently, but
I had to leave when the
carpool left, and so I don’t remember much of that.
Kelsey: So you were part of a carpool. How
many people were in the carpool?
Pfaffenroth: Three of us. We went from here to
Madison-Chatham
area, where we all lived.
Kelsey: And you all took turns driving?
Pfaffenroth: We took turns driving.
Kelsey: What kind of cars did you all
drive?
Pfaffenroth: I had a
Corvair. Everybody
felt unsafe in it. But that’s okay, I never had an
accident, it was all right. So it wasn’t unsafe at any
speed, it was probably unsafe at too high a speed. My
Corvair lasted me a
long time.
Kelsey: What did Route
10 look like at that time?
Pfaffenroth: Ah, Route 10. You know, I think it
looked pretty much the same as it does now, except far
fewer buildings—just less
development. It was still a four-lane highway, just
far fewer buildings—many more fields, far fewer
buildings. And that long left-hand turn lane, turning
into Center Grove Road—very
long left-turn lane.
Kelsey: Do you remember what, if anything,
was on the four corners at Center Grove and 10?
Pfaffenroth: There was a diner of some sort, where
the current diner is. And where the bank is now, there
was some sort of house with a fence around it. And I
think there was an old
A&P. I think there was
a primitive shopping center on the far corner, and a gas
station on this corner, but not much else in the whole
area.
Kelsey: Were there
traffic lights?
Pfaffenroth: There was a traffic light at
Center Grove Road,
yes. Traffic lights before that, far fewer than there
are now. I know that when I left
Chatham and moved
further south because my husband had a job in the middle
of
New Jersey at that
point, and I had to drive up here, about a
twenty-five-mile drive each day, I encountered only
three traffic lights on the entire route, up to the
college. And now I would easily encounter twenty. So
there were far fewer…. This was a rural area, still,
this part of
New Jersey.
Kelsey: How did you dress to
go to work?
Pfaffenroth: I always wore dresses. Nobody wore
pants to work. You wore dresses or suits. Pantsuits
didn’t begin for a number of years after the college was
founded. It would have been shocking for a woman to
show up in a pantsuit. So we all wore dresses or suits.
Kelsey: What about the
students?
Pfaffenroth: I do think they wore jeans for the
most part. I think that was the uniform—jeans. Yeah.
I don’t remember them wearing more formal clothing, no.
Kelsey: What were the students like?
Pfaffenroth: They were very eager. They didn’t
know what to expect, and so it was easy for you to guide
them in a path. And sometimes it was easy for you to
overestimate what they were able and willing to do. I
remember that the first year I
taught Survey of British Literature, Semester 2, in
which the most important thing that happens in British
literature is the development of the novel. So I wanted
to give them not just the poetry from the
Romantic Period
forward, but also a sense of how the novel grows and
where it comes from, what happens, how it changes along
the way. And so I had carefully worked out a plan in
which I started with a very early 18th century novel—in
this case
Moll Flanders—which
they all loved because it’s a story of a thief and a
prostitute, so that was fun. But then moved on to, I
think I used to try to teach something from the more
Classical Period, usually
Jane Austen, one of the
Jane Austen novels.
And then moved to a
Romantic Period. Very
often I would pick
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
or one of the other novels, a
Scott novel sometimes.
And then I would try a
Victorian novel,
because
Victorian novels were a
major part of what happens.
Charles Dickens, maybe
one of the….
Thackeray, maybe one of
the others. And then a modern novel, from the modern
period, so that there was a flow for all of this. And I
discovered very quickly that
Victorian novels, which
generally are about 600-700 pages in length, were never
going to fly with any of the
students. I had to find something shorter. There
were no really short, good
Victorian novels. The
shortest of all would have been
Thomas Hardy, and I
could never expect them to read this much in one
semester. So I had to change my outlook on how I was
going to do things. And I quickly cut back—the third
year that I taught that, I cut back to four novels, made
sure they were much shorter novels, and that all worked
well. So I had high expectations, but I was just out of
graduate school five years earlier, where the reading
was piled on, and you were expected to do it all. So
when I looked at these students,
I had to be much more realistic about what I could
expect from them. All of them had jobs, many of them
were not well-educated in literature in high school, so
I had to start at a different level. I started at the
same level, I just couldn’t go to the lengths that I
might have gone to otherwise. I had to fashion
something into the curriculum that
was more likely to suit the students. But they were
enthusiastic, they learned a lot. I found out which
novels they were too young to handle. I tried teaching
D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in
Love one year. Well, you can’t read that
novel unless you’ve been in love, been horribly
rejected, tried love again, been hurt again. I mean,
it’s a novel of passion, and if you’re too young to have
experienced all that passion, you’re never going to get
it. So I had to really retrain myself to think in terms
of what good experience would move the students forward
from the age they were at, and not the age that I was
at. Because to me,
Women in Love was the
most important novel ever written, when I was
twenty-seven. But not to them at twenty-one and
twenty-two.
Kelsey: What was considered cutting edge
classroom technology in 1968?
Pfaffenroth: Technology? The
mimeograph? That’s all
I remember, the
ditto machine. Yeah,
that was it. Did we have any other technology? Chalk.
I seem to recall that the music department had one of
those
chalk holders where you
could draw five lines of the music bar with five pieces
of chalk at one time. Technology. I suppose that would
be technology. Other technology: books. Books were
it. Books and a
ditto machine. Maybe I
used a
phonograph now and
then. If I wanted to have them listen to somebody
reading
Beowulf in
Old English, instead of
me trying to recite it. But I didn’t use a
phonograph very much at
all.
Kelsey: What differences—because you’re
still teaching, even though you’ve retired, you have
taught some classes …
Pfaffenroth: I have, yes.
Kelsey: … very recently. What differences
do you notice in terms of
student behavior, dress,
interactions with faculty,
between then and now?
Pfaffenroth: I think a faculty member determines
some of those things in the way he or she structures a
class from the very first day. I’ve always been a more
formal teacher, but very open to discussion. My
inclination personally would be to have a very loose
class. And I’ve had to make a concerted effort not to
be too loose. For instance, in teaching creative
writing in a real classroom,
students write something every week, they have
everybody else in the class read what they’ve written,
and then the rest of the class comments on it, and I
comment on it. Now, in most ways, I have to be a real
balance in a class like that, between somebody who
understands what these kids are writing, and is in touch
with the modern world to know what they want to be
saying. But I also have to be an authority figure,
because in the end, I really am the one who has the most
experience about what’s going to fly, in terms of
successful writing, and what is not. So one of the
things I always had to do in that class was to be very
careful what I wore to the first day of class. I could
not look like an old fuddy-duddy, or they would all
disregard anything I said from that point on. I
couldn’t look too modern and too with it, or they would
think I was a chum, and wouldn’t regard my authority and
what I had to say. So it was always a big deal for me
to pick the right thing to wear to that first day of
class, to set the right
tone.
The way
that I set that right tone with
students in my other classes, was to walk in the
door the first day of class, pick up the roster, read
all the names on the roster, have students raise their
hands so I could see who they were, and then I would
start again, and read through the roster again. This
time I asked them not to raise their hands, and I would
point out who they were, and I would make a few mistakes
here and there, not having remembered completely from
the first one. And then I would turn the roster upside
down, and I would go through the class and name each one
of them, without looking at the roster at all. So in
three tries through the roster, and a lot of short-term
memory games, I was able to make them think completely
that I had control of the situation, that I would know
who they were from that point on, that they couldn’t get
away with anything, because I would remember exactly
what they had said. And it was very effective. And of
course they had no idea that by the next time, I only
remembered a third of them. But it set the tone that I
am in charge of the classroom, and then the rest of my
tone—which is my real nature coming through—was very
open and very eager to answer questions, eager for them
to ask questions. And so I always managed to maintain a
balance. So I think a lot of that is the relationship
of professor and student hasn’t changed all that much.
The students are more forward,
they’re more informal, they’re more vocal, but in the
end, if they respect you as the academic that you are,
it’s never been a problem for me. Have I had any
problem students over the years? Oh yes. But you send
them right over to the dean of students office, and deal
with it that way. Those are the professionals. You
don’t have to be able to deal with all of it.
Kelsey: What do you remember most about
that first year?
Pfaffenroth: Loving all the people I worked with.
Just feeling so excited that this was a project that was
getting off the ground, and it was going to work. There
were so many competent people, so many committed people,
that the place was going to be a success. We knew all
the board of trustees members, they would come visit us
in the cafeteria, sit down and
talk to us. There was no separation of anybody, from
the highest board member, to the most recently-admitted
freshman. It was all really a very cohesive, congenial
group, and we sensed that spirit, all the way through.
Kelsey: How has
CCM changed since 1968?
Pfaffenroth: Anything that grows begins to be
depersonalized in a lot of ways. It’s just hard to
maintain a close relationship with so many people all
the time, and so things just fall by the wayside. There
are things that you don’t express and don’t say out
loud. It’s just when something gets large, it becomes
different. It’s not anything
CCM has done wrong, it
can’t be helped, it’s just a function of size, that’s
all.
Kelsey: What do you think were your best
and worst moments that year, 1968?
Pfaffenroth: It was either ’68 or ’69 when the
Mets won the
World Series. That was
absolutely the best moment from those early years. We
were all in the cafeteria
together. The cafeteria manager had kept the place open
so that we could all stay there and watch the game
together. He brought in an extra-large TV screen so
that we could all watch it. The energy in the
cafeteria that day was great.
Worst
moment? Learning to drive
in snow—you know, the fog around here. It was generally
connected with getting to and from the
campus—fog, rain, snow, mud.
That was it.
Kelsey: Is there anything else you’d like
to add?
Pfaffenroth: Can’t think of anything. Unless you
ask me something else, I probably won’t remember.
Kelsey: Okay, thank you very much, this was
great.
Pfaffenroth: Thank you!
[END OF
INTERVIEW]
INDEX