{"id":50,"date":"2013-07-15T18:27:13","date_gmt":"2013-07-15T18:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ccvhistory.wordpress.com\/?p=50"},"modified":"2013-07-15T18:27:13","modified_gmt":"2013-07-15T18:27:13","slug":"john-turner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/2013\/07\/15\/john-turner\/","title":{"rendered":"John Turner"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interview Conducted Circa December 1977 by Larry Daloz with John Turner (early CCV Brattleboro employee).<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was in the very early days in Brattleboro.\u00a0 We had started sort of slower than the other towns (Tom Yahn and Gerry [Hammer]up in Springfield and Carman (? in Bellows Falls).\u00a0 I was in Brattleboro.\u00a0 We invited Peter (Smith, the founder and first president of CCV) to come down and talk.\u00a0 We invited the whole community to come down and learn about the Community College of Vermont.\u00a0 Peter came down.\u00a0 Three people showed up.\u00a0 Peter got into a long discussion with a woman.\u00a0 It spilled out into the street and just as they were ready to part, a woman who later graduated from CCV, said to Peter, \u201cBy the way, what do you do with CCV?\u201d<\/p>\n

The other image I have with Peter and some community people [is when in] trying to impress some of the respectable people with the professionalism of the college, and in the process of making a point, he fell over backwards in the chair.<\/p>\n

One of my earliest recollections was the very first class, which was held at the Brattleboro Retreat, the oldest private mental hospital in America.\u00a0 I\u2019d talked to a guy over the phone about teaching creative writing and I\u2019d not had a chance to meet him before the first night of class.\u00a0 So we had it in the library of this hospital.\u00a0 I walked in and I found people all over the library, some with their chins on their chests, some looking up at the ceiling, and some twisting their heads around.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t figure out which one the teacher was. \u00a0They all looked crazy.\u00a0 I remember going around and saying, \u201cAre you Chuck Miller, are you Chuck Miller?\u201d\u00a0 It turned out this guy was from the Creative Writers Workshop in Iowa.\u00a0 He had straggly hair, long beard, and looked like a patient.<\/p>\n

Another one we did was one of the first courses when we started to get a \u201crespectable\u201d crowd, some of the mainstream Brattleboro society instead of the commune-hippy crowd.\u00a0 It was an American Literature course.\u00a0 The guy who taught it was living in a commune in Putney.\u00a0 We decided to have the course out at his place.\u00a0 So, I remember driving these four straight, Presbyterian women up to the course.\u00a0 He said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we meet outdoors?\u201d\u00a0 He didn\u2019t have any shoes on.\u00a0 It was the first time I\u2019d seen him without shoes, and he had purple nail polish on.\u00a0 So he begins outlining the course and these women are sitting on a wagon, and he\u2019s talking.\u00a0 Out of the farmhouse bounce four people with a volley ball and proceed to play in front of the class\u2026totally nude.\u00a0 It was the last time I saw any of these women ever again.<\/p>\n

The first time we went into Brattleboro, we invited the editor of the newspaper and all the civic leaders.\u00a0 The five of us stood up front like a line-up and proceeded to tell these very sophisticated, very tough-minded people we\u2019re going to start a college in your town.\u00a0 We\u2019re not going to pay teachers any salary; we\u2019re not going to build a campus; we\u2019re going to have a community faculty, and students don\u2019t have to pay anything.\u00a0 All I remember was the manager of the local radio station saying as politely as he could, \u201cYou people will not be around a year from now,\u201d and the editor saying it was a rip off of the taxpayers\u2019 money. [There we were] \u00a0Carmen coming in at two hundred pounds; Gerry as skinny as a beanpole; Mike Redmond with an afro and rotten teeth; Tom, the Dartmouth teenager; and myself looking as if some kid had just rolled him in off the street.\u00a0 It was not a scene to immediately inspire confidence.<\/p>\n

[Random Reflections]:<\/p>\n

Meetings:\u00a0\u00a0 In Gerry Hammer\u2019s house with her six kids running around and Steve Hochschild fresh out of Harvard with his reams of yellow paper trying to help us lay out a planning format.\u00a0 I remember the responses of people saying< \u201cWho the hell is this guy?\u00a0 What\u2019s he trying to do?\u00a0 We\u2019re trying to survive.\u201d\u00a0 We were meeting for support\/therapy.<\/p>\n

There was a teacher of poetry who ran away once with one of our student\u2019s poetry.<\/p>\n

After two and a half years away, things still hadn\u2019t changed.\u00a0 There was still that basic dichotomy there, unresolved.\u00a0 Nancy Chard\u2019s \u00a0\u00a0situation just played out a trend in CCV almost from the beginning.\u00a0 She lost.\u00a0 Label it those who seriously want to confront the issue of quality and accountability and the other half who wanted to be fuzzies and supporters at all cost.\u00a0 If the quality wasn\u2019t good, you still said it was okay because it was more important to be supportive and warm than to quantify or qualify.\u00a0 Nancy seemed to me to be the next generation qualitatively.\u00a0 She lost because unlike Peter, she didn\u2019t have the personal skills to soothe the need for touchy-feely relationships.\u00a0 Intellectually, she probably was smarter than Peter.\u00a0 Peter\u2019s gift was the ability to put the human together with the leadership.\u00a0 I would think of picking Nancy\u2019s mind more than of picking Peter\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n

Not enough of the people in the college who felt strongly about quality stood up for it.\u00a0 All of us got sucked into the Gerry Hammer thing of \u201cDon\u2019t pull that Ivy League, highly educated s*** on us.\u201d\u00a0 We chose too often to placate that.<\/p>\n

The college ended up serving itself and its staff.\u00a0 I looked back on the college and it was an intellectual wading pool.\u00a0 You could get into it up to about your ankles, but you couldn\u2019t immerse yourself in the process.\u00a0 Some people had never been in the water, so it was important, but there was no eight foot end.\u00a0 I still see that pool as pretty level.\u00a0 A lot of the people who ran that pool were scared to get in themselves.<\/p>\n

At meetings we\u2019d touch on issues and then back off\u2014a real reluctance to get involved on issues of importance.\u00a0 When you did get into it, your got accused of snobbery.<\/p>\n

We had a couple teaching Irish literature who quit in the middle of the summer; we never heard from them again.\u00a0 I think they must have been running guns for the IRA. \u00a0Then we had that woman who was arrested as a student for being in the Weathermen.<\/p>\n

Ron Krupp did yoga headstands during staff meetings while trying to do needs assessment.\u00a0 Staff members would disappear for forty minutes a day to meditate.<\/p>\n

Once we printed up a thousand Certificates of Achievement with the word achievement misspelled.<\/p>\n

I remember Sig Lonegren yelling, \u201cBe here now!\u201d<\/p>\n

There was an excessive need for meetings in those days.<\/p>\n

Breast feeding picnic; bring your own.<\/p>\n

I remember talking to a woman in the early days saying, \u201cStick with us; it\u2019ll come.\u201d\u00a0 We didn\u2019t have any degree structure at that time and she wanted a degree.<\/p>\n

I saw a light go on in terms of them saying, \u201cHey, I really have some potential here I didn\u2019t know.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s one of the important goodies I took away.\u00a0 When you institutionalize, will you destroy those light bulbs going on in the eyes?<\/p>\n

A woman took a consciousness-raising course, having been married for forty years during which she\u2019d never been away from her husband for a single night.\u00a0 After the group she spent a night in a motel in Brattleboro alone.\u00a0 She came back to the class and said, \u201cIt was like going around the world.\u00a0 I was scared, but I really made it back.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was another forty-five year old woman who had put two or three daughters through school and had zero confidence in herself.\u00a0 She kept saying she couldn\u2019t do anything.\u00a0 She turned out one of the best early students we had.\u00a0 She went on to Antioch and now has a master\u2019s degree.\u00a0 She still tells me, \u201cIt was at CCV where I began to believe in myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Peter always had a good sense of humor about himself. \u00a0George Billicic (a former president at CCV for a very short time) has been described as a man with humor.\u00a0 Also, the fuzzies had little humor.\u00a0 It was the fuzzies that were most destructive toward Nancy and yet who were most filled with talk about compassion.<\/p>\n

The majority of the staff had still not come to terms with that do-gooder, social welfare attitude that the client\u2019s always right and should be believed.\u00a0 Never question or challenge someone you\u2019re trying to \u201chelp.\u201d\u00a0 It is like helping a fat lady get into a bus from behind.\u00a0 Instead of helping her lose weight, just shove her into the bus.\u00a0 She was drummed out by the people who would get up on platforms and say we got to care about people.<\/p>\n

I always saw it as basically very revolutionary.\u00a0 I figured if we can give these people [students] an opportunity to take control of their own learning, to have a major voice in what they learn and how they learn it, it has to run over into other aspects of their lives.\u00a0 That\u2019s important in our increasingly regimented society.\u00a0 It\u2019s romantic, but the alternative doesn\u2019t impress me.<\/p>\n

I think that you [Larry Daloz], individually, were the critical person in legitimizing CCV to the rest of the higher education world.\u00a0 You, more than even Peter, were important in legitimizing it.<\/p>\n

You articulated CCV more effectively to that higher education community.\u00a0 You were the translator.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think we\u2019d ever have been accredited.\u00a0 (????) said CCV can\u2019t die; it\u2019s too important to higher education in America.\u00a0 I think that you were the reason it was so important.<\/p>\n

You were caught up like the rest of us good guys in that b**S***.\u00a0 I remember you finally letting you anger out and saying B*******.\u00a0 On the one had you were dealing with people asking hard, academic questions in places like Washington, and on the other hand, you wanted to feel good about working with people because you were the head of the Learning Services program, and also realized that if you were going to translate our position in the field, you had to have some influence there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interview Conducted Circa December 1977 by Larry Daloz with John Turner (early CCV Brattleboro employee). It was in the very early days in Brattleboro.\u00a0 We had started sort of slower than the other towns (Tom Yahn and Gerry [Hammer]up in Springfield and Carman (? in Bellows Falls).\u00a0 I was in Brattleboro.\u00a0 We invited Peter (Smith, … Continue reading “John Turner”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[12,14,19],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-staff-stories","tag-community-college-of-vermont","tag-higher-education","tag-vermont-state-colleges"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}