Interview with Quitman (Gene) Phillips

PHILLIPS, QUITMAN EUGENE "GENE" (19-)

UW Art History at 100

At UW:

Interviewed: Quitman Eugene "Gene" Phillips

Interviewer: Gioia Spatafora

Index by:

Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen

Length: 3 hours, 47 minutes

First Interview Session (March 29, 2019): Digital File

[00:00:00]

GS:Hello. It is March twenty-ninth. My name is Gioia Spatafora. And I am interviewing Professor Gene Phillips as part of the Art History at 100 Oral History Project. Would you mind starting by telling us a little bit about your life and career before you decided to join academia?

GP:Okay. I grew up in the deep southwest corner of Georgia, although I was actually born in Newport, Rhode Island, because my dad was in the navy and stationed there. And so, and actually he was stationed there twice. So I spent probably a total of four years of my early childhood in Rhode Island. But whenever anybody asks me where I'm from, I always say from Georgia. So, yeah.

My family was not in deep poverty, but we were pretty poor. I had my first job when I was eight years old, hoeing peanuts in a peanut field for three dollars a day. Things moved up from there. So anyway, I won't go through everything that happened in high school and all that. But I grew up in Georgia, in a rural area.

And I actually grew up in the time when I guess you would call it Jim Crow laws were still in effect. You had white and colored water fountains in the county courthouse and all of that sort of thing. So, yeah. That was a lot of stuff I was happy to leave behind when I went away. And to see, huh, has changed, though not as much as one would like.

Anyway, moving along. When it came time to apply to go to college, you know, I wasn't really planning to apply to any place outside of the South. I was applying to some good small schools. Southwestern at Memphis. Some others. But at a special summer program with people from all over Georgia, there were, that I attended one summer, there was somebody there talking about Harvard. And so I don't know, on a whim, almost, I sent in for the application. And was kind of filling it out at the dining room table and making jokes with my mother about the whole thing, because it seemed so crazy.

So, it's actually a little bit funny. Because I worked in a drugstore in high school. And they also sold money orders in this drugstore. And I was 00:03:00actually just about to get the money order to send to Southwestern at Memphis to put the down payment on my whatever you call it, my fees for housing and so forth, when a phone call comes for me. And my mom asked, "Have you sent that off yet?" I said no. And she said, "Well, maybe you better wait." She said, "There's a big fat envelope here from Harvard."

And I said, "Well, what does it say?"

She says, "It's your letter."

I said, "Open it." Anyway, it turned out that I was accepted and pretty much everything was paid for. Because, I mean, this is Harvard. It doesn't mean, the more money you get, it doesn't mean the smarter you are. It means the poorer you are. So, yeah. So, that was that. So it was kind of crazy. I wasn't expecting it.

And so I went to Harvard thinking, actually, I was going to do classics Greek literature. But you know, when I was in that area and I was taking Greek, I realized how far behind all these kids who went to prep schools and kids from England were, who'd been studying Greek and Latin from the time they were probably twelve years old, if not sooner. And I realized, this just wasn't going to work out unless I did something radical.

So I switched over to English lit. And then I went on, got to senior year and said, oh my God, I really don't want to go to graduate school in English lit. And I'm not really trained to do anything else. So, I just started going through all the possibilities, including even joining the navy. And finally I decided well, I would just get a job. And then I said well, you know, I've never really been that many places. So I'll try and look for a job abroad. And I said well, Europe, nah, everybody goes to Europe. I'll go east.

So I applied for jobs in Japan and Taiwan, since that seemed to be the easier places to get jobs. And the way it worked out, I wound up in Japan. Teaching at a school. Basically the primary students were people working for large companies. And they would send their students to our school for four-week sessions. And they would have classes almost all day. And they were expected, though I know they cheated, to only use English while they were there. So, yeah. I was going to stay there one year while I figured out what I was 00:06:00going to do, and wound up staying five and a half. Got married, had a child, etcetera, etcetera.

So then came back to, finally decided I'd never been an adult in my own country. And my wife, who's Japanese, and I, agreed to come back. Or for me to come back with her coming. And so then I vastly overestimated, because I'd been a teacher of English as a second language for five and a half years. But I vastly overestimated my qualifications to get a job. Because I didn't have credentials. I mean, I didn't have whatever it's called, the master's degree in this sort of thing. So we had some financial struggles. I did get a job but it wasn't super well-paying. On and on, you know. Sayoko worked and we didn't do too badly.

I finally actually got convinced by one of my colleagues at the school I was teaching at, in the private language school in Seattle, that hey, why don't you try for graduate school? So I said, well, okay. So I had a passion that I had developed in Japan for Japanese ceramics. But I also thought well, maybe I should look into graduate programs in things like educational administration or something. Even though I'd never darkened the doorway of an education class before. But I had never darkened the doorway of an art history class before, either.

So what I did was I got applications for education programs and East Asian studies, thinking that would be my stepping stone into an art history program. So I sent those things, I sent all the ones off for East Asian studies/art history and wound up never sending off the ones to education. Because, you know, everybody said Gene, it's clear that's not what you really want to do.

So I got some acceptances from good schools in East Asian studies. But I'd gotten a letter from Berkeley saying, "It seems pretty clear to us your real interest is art history, so we're sending this to the art history department." And I got in. And, you know, I can weave that story out more. But I got into the art history program at Berkeley. And that's the way things went. And finished in eight years, which wasn't bad for a field like Japanese art history. 00:09:00Didn't wind up specializing in ceramics, though it's still a large part of my interest. But did late medieval painting. It was just, at the time it was a field richer in conversations, let's say, interesting conversations. And that was interesting. So, that was that.

And then I, when it came time to apply for jobs, I applied to a number of places. I got, I can't remember, three job offers? One was here. One was at University of Kansas, which in some ways would have been really nice because the art history department at Kansas is highly respected by their dean, or was at the time. Whereas here, art history was you know, you didn't have the kind of respect that the history department or the English department had.

The problem with that job was it was 50% faculty, 50% curator. So, and those things can be problematic. Because they may be actually expecting you to do 80/80. Or worse. And when it comes time to go in for tenure, you know, are you actually going to be treated as someone who is 50% faculty? In other words, the exhibition work and all of that that you do for the museum, how seriously are they going to take it? And plus, Lawrence just wasn't as nice as Madison. So.

GS:Did you have any curatorial experience at that point?

GP:That wasn't the way I worked. (laughs) I mean, no. I'd spent a lot of time visiting museums. But at Berkeley, I would say a shortcoming to some degree of that program, though it's changed some now, I think, is there was this kind of divide. There were exceptions. But there wasn't the kind of collegial interaction with the museum there that there should have been. But one of the exceptions was the Chinese art historian who I worked with as well as 00:12:00my mentor in Japanese art history. And he actually collected art himself. Both Chinese and some Japanese. And it was on long-term loan to that museums. And we would go over there occasionally to look at things in that collection. And the contemporary art historian also did things with him. But by and large, it was not a very, it was like two different worlds. And I think that's always a missed opportunity in a graduate program. Unless, and maybe that's the thing with Berkeley, you're just not interested in producing anything except PhDs to go into academia. And that's true at major programs. You know, everybody wants to reproduce in some fashion or another. So what they're most interested in is reproducing themselves. That is, producing scholars. Because that gives them more luster, and so forth and so on.

That is changing over time as the job market has gotten hideous in the humanities, including art history, for academic positons. There are a lot of PhDs coming out in the humanities who will never, never get jobs. And this is true all over the world. It's true in Japan. It's true in Korea. Places I know. Oh, and in Europe it's been bad for a long time.

But one of the places, or one of the advantages art history has if we take advantage of that, really, is that, unlike history, students can pursue an MA with focusing on exhibition practice, or art librarianship or something else like that. And even people getting PhDs can try to get experience in museum work. And so there are those pathways that aren't typically open. Or at least the people I've talked to in history don't think that much of them. So, I mean, there are history museums and so forth. But art museums seem to be a better pathway.

GS:Was the museum's relationship with the department at Wisconsin something that attracted you to this position?

GP:You know, it certainly wasn't a detraction. I didn't think about it all that hard. I certainly when I was here for my on-site interview, you know, I had meetings with the art librarian. I had the meetings and was shown art 00:15:00over on the museum side. Talked with.

So I think without it being so specific, it certainly was very welcoming. And I don't think I thought it through all that much. But I think it certainly was a positive. And certainly my first couple of years, I became more and more--well, the beginning of my career here, I certainly became more and more engaged. Because there's that huge print collection.

And so, and I became really good friends, and he's still one of my best friends, with the print curator. And we did, I did a couple of class exhibitions. And I would sometimes consult with him if he was doing a Japanese print exhibition. So I've spent some very happy times doing that. And also, I fairly often take my students up to the, well, what I will always call the print room, but I think it's the works on paper or whatever, whatever, to look at a selection of Japanese prints. And that's, you know, it's really nice to have objects to look at.

I would say that's another thing. My training in graduate school was not very object-oriented. Even though--I should pull that back. Training at Berkeley isn't very contact with the object-oriented. Though in the East Asia side, we were much more so. I actually took one seminar where we traveled up and down the west coast visiting museums. Going into storage to look at objects of a certain type, paintings of a certain type. And doing measurements and all this kind of technical analysis. And that's really fun. It's really fun.

And then when I went to, at some point, maybe the year before my final year, I don't know. I was a research graduate student at Tokyo University. And almost right from the beginning, they were involved in a big Kanō painting project. And you know, I went down with them to Kyoto. We were in temples in various places, with the sliding door paintings. Measuring and doing all, taking notes and so forth and studying them intently. So, yeah. Yeah, it's fun. You know, and it's needed work. Somebody has to do it. And I'm a strong believer in 00:18:00contributing to the whole project of art history. Not just sort of being oh, it's not important for me to be in there until it's the interpretation part.

GS:Do you think that your prior experience working in Japan made you better suited for graduate studies there? Because you were familiar with the nation?

GP:Oh, undoubtedly. Yeah. I mean, I'm very comfortable in Japan. It's sort of my second home. It's problematic sometimes when like the World Cup, the women's World's Cup in particular is going on and it's US versus Japan. Because usually Japan is the underdog. So whichever one is the underdog in the particular event is the one I tend to root for. But, yeah. Madison is now one of my places I feel like is in my collections of homes. It's Georgia, Japan, and now Madison.

GS:So, Berkeley and Madison have a similar, or maybe a dovetailed history of student protests and the anti-Vietnam protests. Was there any sort of similarities between Berkeley and Madison that drew you to Madison?

GP:(laughs) You mean Berzerkly and Madtown? Well, you know, there are similarities. But honestly what drew me most to Madison was well, A, it was a Research 1 university, respected. But I didn't know much about it. But it was the location that sold it to me in a big way. Especially if you compare it to Lawrence. Which is a perfectly nice city. But it's smaller. You know, it's just not as rich. And the, you know, I'm a kayaker, bird watcher. And this place is great for that sort of thing. And you know, at the time I had a young family. And Madison's a really great, it was clear it was a really great place to raise a family.

So, one of the jobs that I was, I ultimately wasn't offered the job. But I was actually a strong contender for the position at Harvard at the time. Old stomping grounds, and you know, oodles of money and all of this. But that was one thing I thought about a lot was would I, if I got both offers, would I actually go to Harvard? Because it would be a great stepping stone, 00:21:00you know. You don't go take a position at Harvard unless you have a lot of super confidence. You don't go there thinking oh, I'm going to go to Harvard, get tenure and be a professor. It's changed some. But back in the day, you know, most people who were assistant professors at Harvard didn't go on to get tenure. But you stay there four years, you have fabulous resources. You set yourself up to go somewhere else. But on the other hand, I just couldn't see bringing my family to that Boston area, to there. Madison's just much, much nicer. And it just felt to me more like a place I belonged.

GS:Has Madison changed very much since you came here in the early mid-'90s?

GP:It's just gotten bigger and bigger. More and more traffic. You know, I don't know that the fundamental character has changed, to my mind. You know, I think there's probably a bit more crime and so forth. But it's not such that I walk down the street worrying about it, or anything like that. I don't feel--well, I would say the natural environment of the Madison area has been degrading. If you spend a lot of time on or near the lakes, the algae, the pollution. I mean, even when I got here, there were problems. But I think it's gotten, you know, just steadily gets a bit worse. And just all, you know, more cars and more cars. You know, things just naturally get degraded a bit.

Around the campus area, or my part of the campus area, along University Avenue, of course, more and more taller buildings are being built. So the availability of sunlight in some areas has gone down. And the buildings are pathetically dull. I mean, this--ugh. Right where I am, well, those buildings were there before me. But you know, next door we have the Inhumanities Building. And across the street we have the, what is it, whatever that building is called. The one where Comm Arts and so forth is housed. It's hideous. But the other buildings, it's not so much they're hideous as they're just dull. And I probably 00:24:00shouldn't say anything about this, but the new music school building is atrocious to my mind. Atrocious. I think a real opportunity has been missed. Because eventually the Inhumanities--the Humanities building, of course--will be torn down and something else built there. But you know, you could have had like a really nice stretch of buildings.

I mean, not that our buildings for the museum are that special. They're much better on the interior. But they're okay on the exterior. They're not offensive. But you could have complemented that much better than is being done. And to me, it's just a lack of vision. So, anyway. We'll see. Maybe that building will turn out to be okay. But so far, so bad. (laughter)

GS:So when you came to UW as a young professor, were there any expectations, since you were in a new field of study, for this art history department?

GP:Well it wasn't actually a new field. Before me, and before my colleague Julia Murray in Chinese art history, there was someone hired whose name is slipping my mind, but it doesn't really matter. So a position in East Asian art history was originally created with seed money from the Japan Foundation. So the first holder of a position in East Asian art history that I know of, though I think somebody else might have taught some in the past, was a Japanese art historian. So when you take that seed money from the Japan Foundation, you are obligated to keep the position going. So somehow when he didn't get tenure and moved away, this got lost on my department. And they went out and hired a Chinese art historian. And a bit later, folks in East Asian studies and Japan studies looked around and said, "Wait a minute." Or maybe the Japan Foundation folks looked around and said, so then it was clear they had to hire a Japanese art historian on top of a Chinese art historian. So that's how I came to be here.

So, I mean, it actually worked out great. So now we regularly have a Chinese art historian and a Japanese art historian. And my position is protected, because a professor, a main professorship is now in Japanese art history. So 00:27:00it's great.

But to go back to your original question, I would say no. I mean, there are things anybody faces. Which is, I looked at the roster of courses that my Japanese art history predecessor has put together, and I didn't like them. I mean, there's one I kept, but I had to develop some new courses. I mean, that wasn't a huge strain. Most people have to do it. Because generations changed. Focuses are different. And you know, there was just a lot of things like ordering new slides made. But almost everybody spends quite a bit of time doing that. And of course then, there wasn't all that much material available online. So you actually had to get the books out of the library, flip through them, fill out slips. You know, to have the slide. So it took quite a bit of time.

And I think what was kind of interesting, I think within the dean's offices there was at least a hope that I would take advantage of the print collection. Because well, it's a, at the time it was actually a college resource. It's now under the provost's office. It used to be, for the longest time it was under the College of Letters & Science. That only changed a couple of years ago, or even one year ago. So, but the department didn't care if I chose not to use it beyond sort of taking my students up there to see prints once in a while.

But in fact, when you have a major resource, they don't have a great, they don't have, they have very, very, very few Japanese paintings. Or the other things that I was most passionate about studying. But you have this great print collection. It's there. So I was naturally attracted o using it with my students. It's fun. Objects. And you know, you learn things from looking at objects, no matter what they are, that you just can't learn--I mean, you can tell them. But that process of discovery from looking is much better. The quality of the paper, what that means for the ultimate appearance of the work and etcetera, etcetera.

I think in some ways art history, for good in some ways, but also for bad, has sometimes gotten so far away from the actual works that it's 00:30:00problematic. You know, a lot of people, or a lot of museums kind of complain that people just aren't trained to deal with objects, or to really look closely at objects. But you know, I think that's kind of being remedied along the way. The downturn in--so what you've had over the years is the growth of more and more PhD programs in art history and the other humanities. But in the meantime, you've had this downturn in jobs. So it's really ridiculous. There are far too many PhD programs in various humanities. And really, you could do with half as many. But it's kind of tied to a competition for, what shall I say? People with PhDs who are passionate about their field, they naturally want to nurture other people passionate about things. So it's very rewarding to have graduate students, to see them do well. But on the other hand, it's also prestige. It's prestige wars. If you don't have a PhD program, then you're lower in the prestige scale. And so you have a kind of, you know, let's say fifty years ago there were ten. But as their PhD students moved elsewhere, you know, there was just this natural proliferation. But with the downturn in the job market, it becomes problematic.

Again, art history is a little bit insulated because of the art museum position job market. I don't really remember how I got to that point. You asked me some question or other.

GS:Do you think that the University of Wisconsin is able to attract competitive PhD students?

GP:Competitive in what sense?

GS:As far as being able to be employed afterwards, and being students who come with expectation to write interesting theses?

GP:Oh, I think it's quite, quite varied. We are not going to be able to compete in most fields for what you might call the sure bet. The student who has really fabulous preparation linguistically, art historically, and so forth. 00:33:00And those really top students preparation-wise, they're going to get bigger offers at more prestigious universities. Like in my field, which is kind of medieval Japanese painting, you know, the top people probably won't even apply. Because they'll apply to Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, maybe another school or two. Which have, you know, guaranteed five-year, some money, and all kinds of things that we can't offer. So, I would say, on the other hand, you know, we have some faculty members who have attracted some very, very good students because of their reputation. And we also have a kind of reputation of somehow getting our best students funded and through. Sometimes it's a bit more of a struggle.

So, I want to answer that question with caution. It's not that I think we only get second-rate students. I think sometimes we have to go for students with maybe less preparation but lots of promise. So, and you know, let me qualify that. Few of our students get jobs right out after they finish, or a year out, at, in a tenure-track position at a major university. We had a student in African and sort of postmodern art who got a position at UW Milwaukee. And then he has gone out to a very good liberal arts school whose name is escaping me. But anyway, we have another student who recently got a tenure-track job at something in the University of South Carolina system. Not the main campus. So, yeah. But we have, our PhD students have, by and large, most of them gotten jobs. University, art museum, somewhere. But you know, we're not going to place them at a major research university.

With, there's always exceptions. You know, the brilliant student for some reason or another just really wants to work with this professor. But you 00:36:00know, there's always a kind of, even in the hiring process, when you're sitting on a hiring committee, oh, that person's from Harvard, that person's from Yale, whatever. So.

GS:Do you think that the art history department has been able to attract different types of students since you've been here, for undergrad and graduate students? Or if the type of student taking classes has changed at all?

GP:That's a good question. I mean, the number of students taking art history classes has declined fairly dramatically. Again, that's true across the board in the humanities. Certainly the classes that I had that regularly had forty or more now probably have twenty. Or fewer. And honestly, if it wasn't for the big influx of students from China, my classes would be quite small. (laughs) So I would say anywhere from a third sometimes to half of my students are Chinese. Bless them. I'm grateful. And many of them are really good students. So I would say the ethnic mix has definitely changed because of that.

My classes will also have probably more, they're not the majority, but they're a higher percentage of men than, let's say, 19th century French class. I mean, art history has come to be predominantly female. You know, I mean, there are exceptions. And there are very conservative programs where the majority of the faculty are still men. I don't know if that's true in Princeton, but that would be one that popped into my mind. But certainly the majority of our faculty are women, which is great. But the reason I think I have more men is, you know, samurai, anime, gaming. You know, all those things. Geeky guys.

And I also get, like in my history of Japanese ceramics course, I will often get like artists. People who do, there's a pretty vibrant ceramics program here. And I'll get men and women from that program.

GS:Do you incorporate those components into your classes?

GP:What?

GS:Samurai--

GP:Oh, I mean, I do a little. I tell them, I kind of warn them at the 00:39:00beginning, we're not really going to be talking about anime in this class. But it doesn't hurt to have a solid foundation in the culture and the previous art, etcetera, etcetera. So in my--but yeah. I mean, samurai, the warrior class, comes up. But I don't go out of my way to like look at, "Okay, let's look at swords today." I never do that. Because it's boring. To me. Or armor. But yeah, we'll look at arts that were promoted and commissioned by the warrior class. And we'll see some paintings with warriors in them. But yeah, I don't cater to it. With the exception of my FIG class, my freshman interest group class, which is Monstrosity and the Supernatural in Japanese Visual Culture. And there I just completely indulge my love of imagery and so forth of the supernatural and monsters. And it attracts students who also have those kinds of interests. Of which there are many. So you know, so I have students writing their final papers on anime or whatever. Some of them do more standard art historical things or historical things. But there are a fair number that are either on films or anime films.

GS:Is teaching how you've been able to reincorporate ceramics and your interest in ceramics?

GP:I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. I have two 400-level courses. And so when we hired someone who was, her field is basically American material culture and she was starting up a material culture program, and I love Japanese ceramics. So I sort of said well, okay. Since there's a program starting up, why don't I do a course that could kind of satisfy one of their requirements, fit into their program. I might get students that way. I was a little bit cautious about history of Japanese ceramics and allied arts. Would it attract anybody? But interestingly, even as that material culture program has sort of foundered a bit, though it will pick up again, I've still had a decent-sized group of students. I'm teaching it this year. So, yeah. It's sort of a combination of okay, 00:42:00now I can do it. It's a chance to do that. I've even made some pots since I've been here. A now retired professor of ceramics in the art department I became friendly with encouraged me to, yeah, why don't you come over? So I made a few pots. But nothing very much. But I might do it when I retire. So, yeah. So that was one of the courses.

The other thing was, I became, I've always been sort of interested in this intersection of religious practice and art as well. So at a certain point, I decided to do, what are they called? They're called Mellon seminar--no, I can't remember what it's called. But anyway, you get a fairly modest amount of money and you can use it for programming and you can form a group, any interdisciplinary group. So I decided to propose one on art and the afterlife. And I got connected up with Chuck Cohen, who's in religious studies. He was the director of religious studies. And we had a small group and we talked about various arts of various cultures. Everything from illustrations of Don (Day?) to Incan mummies to the stuff I do in the Japanese ideas of the afterlife. It was a fun group.

Anyway, so then I got, I became a member of, an affiliate of religious studies. I actually became director. So that encouraged me to develop another course, which is art in religious practice in medieval Japan. Which was other stuff I really was interested in. So.

So I think I've responded to my connections across campus in developing courses, you know. Okay, if I'm going to be part of religious studies, I should actually have a course that sort of fits in. And it's stuff I'm interested in anyway, so that's why I developed it.

GS:How different are the teaching styles in other departments?

GP:How different are the teaching styles in other--

GS:Are there different expectations or how students interact with material?

GP:Well, you know, art history's always going to be a little different. And we like to say that although lots of specialists in different departments will claim them work with art or visual material, they don't do it 00:45:00the way we would in the sense of deeply engaging it as a source of understanding. They use it more as sort of confirmation or illustration of ideas they're gathering from literature or historical text. It's just a different mode. It's not that it's a bad mode. It's just, it can get mildly irritating when you hear somebody, "Oh, we do that, too." No, you don't.

GS:Has interacting with other departments changed your teaching style? Or has your teaching style changed since you started?

GP:Has my teaching style changed since I started?

GS:You said that the sizes of your classes have changed a little.

GP:Yeah. I mean, I've always enjoyed interaction with students, and trying to integrate conversation. So I mean, there may be some level of difference. But the differences are more between like a larger class and something that's set up as a seminar. So no, I don't think my style's changed all that much. Though God knows, somebody who's observed me may think differently. I don't think so.

GS:You also mentioned the use of slides. Has technology and how material is presented visually in class changed?

GP:I think it's done more so for other people than me, to a degree. I mean, one of the huge differences when you go from physical slides to PowerPoint slides, for example, is that you can put text up on the screen. You can label your images. Whereas with the old slides, it's just the slides. And maybe you print out lists for the students to have. So I would say, I'm really conservative on this in that I have colleagues who like you know, if a slide is yay big, then they will fill up at least half of that slide with text. And the image will be small. Which I'm against. To me, yeah, now I label my slides, that's fine. But I kind of do it with minimal space so that the image is as big as it possibly can be. And I get actually really irritated when I see one of my colleagues doing a presentation or something, and they're showing this great thing. And they're burying it within text. It just seems wrong. So, I would say except 00:48:00for the labeling, I tend to either have no text or I put the text on another slide. If you know what I mean. So that the object they're seeing--I mean, part of what you want to do is engage them with the, I don't know what the right word is, but the excitement, even though it's not the object itself, if you have a really good slide that's big, you know, like in my Japanese ceramics, you can see the textural quality of the pot, rather than just the form. You can see a lot of subtlety.

And so, I think this is part of what maybe has changed in art history as well. At one extreme, you can have sort of the ooh ah school of art history. Which is, "Isn't it wonderful? Look at that. It's so beautiful." You know, you focus on the kind of splendidness of the object. And at the other extreme, you can have what's most important is the verbiage we surround the object with. And how this object helps me talk about some ideas I have developed from reading French critical theory and so forth. Or you're basically talking about political history and the object is sort of there.

I love the middle road. So, yeah. I mean, it's a difficult thing. I think one of the things that's happened in art history, in the field, is you know, in some ways, like the people who taught classics or English lit half a century ago, there was an aura about the things we study. Oh, it's Shakespeare. Oh, it's Picasso. Etcetera, etcetera. And so these are things that people have a certain awe about. You know. It's almost like mildly religious approach to them. Like these are transcendent things. And we would have been the high priests. I mean, I'm exaggerating this comparison. So over the last couple of decades in particular, over the course of my career, and starting before, there's been more and more of a move to sort of de- what is the word? To de-sanctify 00:51:00the objects, you know. To not think in terms of the transcendent artist, the genius producing the transcendent object. And I completely agree with that, you know? If you're just going to do, okay, we're going to look at these famous, people who became famous, mostly men, and we're going to go ooh ah over their genius, and look how we see it in this object, that's stupid art history, too.

On the other hand, I worry about reducing the object to text. So that's just, and it's something to struggle with. Because you know, either way, too far for me is bad.

GS:Do you think that's related to access? And how materials are more accessible online?

GP:I think this began before online accessibility began. It was more of an academic term. And it happened in literature to a degree as well. You know, at one time, if you were doing English lit, you wouldn't think of doing texts that weren't part of or close to the canon. You know, that were sort of legitimate. You wouldn't do like science fiction novels from the '40s. Nowadays, you will definitely find in English departments courses on science fiction novels of the '40s, or something like that. Or you know, just any kind of writing you can imagine, almost. And in our, I was just at a very good talk yesterday by a visiting faculty member. It wasn't great art at all, it was medical illustrations from the seventeenth century. And it was fascinating and interesting and good work. So I'm not belittling that in any way. But I'm just saying, the variety of things we look at has radically changed.

GS:Using this teaching style and the courses that you've been able to design, are there ones that you teach time and time again? Or do you mostly create new courses?

GP:Oh, no. Creating new courses is a huge undertaking if you want to do it well. I haven't created a new course in quite a while. Well, actually, that's not true. I think I'm on my third iteration of Art History 205 Global Arts. I won't tell the whole story of that. But it was actually, we decided as a department this would be a good thing to do. Somebody else took the lead in 00:54:00proposing the course and getting it through the system. But then she said, "Oh, well, I have these opportunities to take a leave," blah, blah, blah, blah, "I can't do it."

And so I decided, I said, "Okay, I'll do it." But in fact, I couldn't do it the way she had done it at all, she had proposed it, at all. So I had to sort of recreate it and develop it. So that's probably the most recent one. But otherwise, no, I just teach within the roster of courses. And then I have some seminar topics I would do. But you know, I have a variety of those. And students come and students go. So what you do is actually change the courses a little bit to new readings, new interpretations, whatever the course, new materials that come out. But developing a whole new course, you know, I'm not that far from retirement, so there's no way I'm going to do that. They'd have to like pay me lots of money to do that.

GS:Is it difficult re-teaching the same course?

GP:No. No. No. Not if you pay attention. It's much easier teaching the same course. My one-semester survey of Japanese art history I used to teach, until I got into some administrative positions and didn't teach a full course load, I would just teach it every fall. And there were enough students so that I could do that and offer it every fall. You know, regularly having thirty-five, forty students, which was good for that kind of course. It's actually harder if you have a course on the books and you've taught it and then for one reason or another you don't teach it for two or three years. Then you have to come back to it and things have changed. It's a lot more effort. And of course, over the course of my career, we've made the transition from physical slides to digital slides. So that's an effort to make that transition. And then I had to, then we have to adapt to Learn at UW, which I still haven't completely done. I don't do my grading on it or anything like that. But I do use it for basic things for the course. And of course, Learn at UW we switched from whatever it was now to Canvas. So there are these series of changes that even if it's a course you've taught again and again, there's new work you have to do. But what 00:57:00happens is, as you're doing this new work, you kind of rethink things a bit, too. You know, it kind of causes you to pause and not just walk in with your notes or whatever from previous years. But okay, you know, if I'm going to be redoing this and this, why don't I think about changing the course a little bit, too?

GS:Has your course load changed very much since you started?

GP:Only when I've taken on positions where there's a course load. But no, my basic course load has always been two/two. Let me take that back. When I first came, so somebody like the history department, their course load has always been, or it was for a long time, two/two. Art history, right before I came, the deans allowed it to go from three/two to two/two. But we had to offer a fourth credit in our classes. We had to offer some way for the students to get a fourth credit. Like have extra meetings with those students. So it was a pain. If you were teaching two courses, and any student in either of those courses had to be able to get a fourth credit. And then a lot of extra, it's almost better to teach three courses.

On the other hand, it allowed for some creative opportunities. For example, one of these small exhibitions I did with the Chazen, I did with the fourth credit students. That was how they got their fourth credit. But that just kind of fell away. That sort of fourth credit thing. There were no fourth credit police, and we just kind of slowly dropped it off.

And the reason, I think, art history had been three/two, and we may be getting into territory to talk about tomorrow, was we had been, we weren't as much of a publishing powerhouse as, say--

GS:Within the department's focus, or within the school's focus?

GP:Us compared to, like, for example, history. If you look at the amount of scholarship, the number of graduate students, etcetera, etcetera. We can talk about this more tomorrow. But let's say we were, I think we were considered more sort of service department, rather than, you know, high-level scholarly department.

GS:When you came to UW, was there an expressed expectation for you to focus on one or the other?

GP:Oh, it was clear. If you wanted to get tenure, you had to publish. I mean, it was, I don't think teaching was overly stressed, although I was 01:00:00certainly observed throughout my time as a probationary faculty member. And you know, you were expected to do both, and do a bit of service. Although not too much as a junior faculty member.

GS:Had you taught before?

GP:I actually had. I'd been a TA at Berkeley. But then my professor in Japanese art history didn't get tenure. And so I taught, I honestly can't remember, but I taught at least one of her courses each semester my last year at Berkeley. And I taught a summer course, too, on my own. So I had, you know. And she was very organized. So I had the benefit of all her slide lists. So, you know, it was much easier than walking in with nothing. I could really make use of what she had done. So I started out with just, you know, her list of objects to show in the survey of Japanese art history.

The problem with that was, students were gradually becoming less and less tolerant of tons of memorization. So over the years, I have reduced and reduced the number of objects that I expected people to be conversant with.

GS:How do they vocalize that?

GP:Oh, easily. On course evaluations. Just, you know, and I get to know my students pretty well. Also you would hear complaints, for example, around that, oh, art history classes is all memorization. Because the exams, we were still when I came here, the exams were very sort of memorization-oriented. You show the slide of the Arch of Titus and they have to identify it. They have to say when it was made. They have to say something about the context. So it was what I call sort of flashcard test. You know, testing of people to see how good they were with flashcards. And then the sort of more interpretive part would come through in papers. But this idea that people should memorize lots and lots of names and dates. And especially in my field, or China's. You know, a bunch of Midwestern kids who have to memorize a bunch of Chinese or Japanese names, it's hard. I have complete sympathy for them. Not just Midwestern kids. 01:03:00But you know, people who don't have a lot of contact with other cultures.

And our survey of Asian art is even worse, where one day you're doing something with lots of Sanskrit names and words. Another, next week you're doing Chinese, you know what I mean? I can see why it's kind of off-putting. And I also don't know that it's such a good thing.

So this is another issue that over the course of my career been there is like you can go too far and say, well, students don't really need to know any, they don't need to memorize anything because they've got iPhones and they've got Google and so forth. But you really want to teach them the processing skills. But I think you have to admit that you just can't have nothing in your brain to practice processing with. I mean, you need some kind of general erudition. On the other hand, I don't stress it at all anymore. I give my exams in my 400-level classes, the slides are labeled when I do the exam. And I sort of, I'll give them unknowns and I will give them what I call juxtapositions. Things that require them to think as much as I can do that.

So you know, all of us in the humanities claim as we fill out those reports on learning objectives, we're teaching them how to read and write and think critically. So, if you're not testing for that, then you're lying. Right? Because even if you think you are teaching, it doesn't they're learning it. But if they know after the midterm, oh my God, I have to actually do some critical thinking to make that juxtaposition. Or at least a higher level of sort of bringing in those things I've remembered from the course. So I think, so that gain, you know, it's a kind of, there are, I give open-notebook exams. Because if they do note processing, if they just bring in their notes during a fifty-minute exam, they're doomed, I tell them this. You're doomed. You have to read it. You have to, if you do nothing else, you have to put sticky notes on things. You have to process all that material. You can't just bring in your notebook. So it can be a curse if you don't do it right.

GS:Has there been anything else that students have really pushed for change?

GP:(laughs) Well, we have a problem now and it's kind of a temporary one. It's more a matter of fields. So right now, because of budget cuts and this and that, we don't have a modern art historian, we don't have a contemporary art historian. And that's ridiculous. All these students, potential students in the art department and our department and other programs on campus, they really want to have contemporary art history. So next year we'll be using short-term staffing to bring in more. But hopefully--my colleague in African art history is just announced he's retiring within a semester. I can't, I'm going to retire in two years, but I will be replaced by a Japanese art historian. So it may be that we can get a modernist/contemporary person. And some of my colleagues, like Nancy Marshall, who's really a Victorianist, will do, though, a course on modern painting. Mostly British and American, I think. Or even contemporary. She actually does a contemporary art course. But it would be better to have a real specialist. And we had one of those, but things happened and he's no longer with us. So it would be good to have a--yeah, we really, really need to do this. And until we get somebody, we really have to use short-term staffing, visitors and so forth in an effective way.

GS:Do you find it difficult to balance research and teaching? Or does the department support the two equally?

GP:I think, I think we support both. I don't know how equal it is. I think you have to think about the department versus the divisional committees. So if you had a department that overstressed teaching to the detriment of research and scholarship, then potentially it would be a disaster for junior faculty members who have to be, you know, they have to go through the tenuring process, which is the most important step is beyond the department. But anyway, that being said, we're much more attentive with our junior faculty members to being 01:09:00sure that they're doing the right things in scholarship for their career.

On the other hand, if someone, we wouldn't keep somebody who's a terrible teacher. But I think you can go a lot further into academia by being a mediocre teacher and a great scholar than you can by being a great scholar, I mean, a great teacher and a mediocre scholar. It's just the nature of the beast. And if you're at a Research 1 university, that's just the nature of things. And to sort of--and, you know, Madison is a Research 1 university. But outside of maybe the sciences and a few social sciences and so forth, you know, it's not really top, top tier. So you can't have the same expectations that you're going to have at Harvard, for example. But they're pretty rigorous. I've been on the divisional committee, I've chaired the divisional committee. They're pretty rigorous.

But, yeah, I mean, we observe our junior faculty teaching. We write up reports. We try to ensure that we don't have a dud. (laughs) You know, it would be tough if we had somebody who was really sort of borderline, but was a brilliant scholar. It would be difficult. Really difficult. But you often find that, for example, maybe someone's not the greatest classroom teacher in a lecture class. But is really strong in doing seminars and mentoring graduate students and even undergraduates in sort of their senior theses and things. So there are different balances. Different balances.

GS:Are you able to use your research as a way of bringing students out of the classroom? Or is it primarily for your publishing? And your--

GP:That's a good question. In my particular case, it's almost all for my publishing. Yeah. You know, if I worked on Japanese prints, it would be a different matter. But there would be too much travel involved to get them deeply engaged in what I do. I mean, the closest, I do, you know, I have, I integrate into one of my courses material that I just published on, if that's what you mean. But you said outside the classroom. So, not so much. Unless you think about going up to the print room and looking at prints. But that's not really related to my research.

GS:Could you describe your research a little bit, and how it's changed while at Madison?

GP:Sure. So, it actually hasn't changed tremendously. So when I came here, I had written a dissertation on certain aspects of the career and art of one of Japan's most famous late medieval painters named Kanō Motonobu. Anyway, so I got here and I relatively quickly published a couple of articles related to that kind of thing. And then I started working on my book. But I kind of knew my dissertation couldn't easily be made into a book. So I thought okay, I'm going to take half my dissertation and wrap it up and turn it into a book. But then I wasn't happy with that. Because I really felt to understand the situation of Motonobu, I had to understand the situation of his father. So, to make a long story short, my first book, which actually turned out to be my only book so far, was completely different from my dissertation. Which is not the wisest thing for a junior faculty member to do.

GS:Why is that?

GP:You're just rolling the dice in a big way. Will you get it done in time? It's a short book. It had to be, to get it done in time. But I was lucky that one of my Japanese colleagues had been working on a big project. And they had actually collated a lot of the original source documents together that I used. So at least I didn't have to spend infinite number of hours going through archives to find things. There was a lot of help there. So that was what encouraged me and said okay, this is possible. And I just focused on a 25-year period, which also made it possible.

So anyway, to make a long story short, I'm still, I've stuck with the Kanō school more or less throughout my career. I got more engaged with their Buddhist art, their art related to Buddhist practices. So I've published on that. And most recently, I went back to one of my very first loves, which is illustrations of a tale of vanquishing woman-devouring demons. Women stolen from 01:15:00the capital. It's an illustrated hand scroll. So I finally brought some closure to that after God knows how many years.

So no, I have not been terribly productive. I tend to get too focused on whatever is in front of me. And rather quickly after I got tenure, I became chair of the department and stayed at that for five years. And then only stopped at that because visual, not visual culture, religious studies was in kind of a crisis and somebody had to take over the reins of being director, so I did that for two years. Somewhere in there I was on the divisional committee and chaired that. So I spent a lot of time, and I think I got way, way too much in the weeds of those kind of things, and sort of let my research and scholarship slide. You know, it's just what it was. You know, if I'd been one of those people completely devoted to my scholarship, I wouldn't have let this happen. But I tend to be, you know, what's in front of me and how can I do it as best I can. So I did it to myself. So there you go.

GS:Does the use of sabbaticals kind of change that balance?

GP:Well, sabbaticals are great. But it's very hard, you know, if you let things slide. Especially if you're in a field like mine and you don't really use all the skills you've worked so hard to develop. You know, reading sixteenth-century Japanese texts and all of that. You just kind of let that slide. It atrophies pretty fast. So the first part of your sabbatical or whatever, first three months or so, you're just getting yourself back up to speed again. It's not very efficient. And that's been a problem with me. I mean, I got things done. I got things published from it. But it was never sort of, I should have done it better.

GS:Did you use your sabbatical primarily to write, or to conduct research in Japan?

GP:Oh, not to write. Hardly at all. You just don't have time. If you start, I mean, you write notes. You compile notes. But as far as effective writing, yeah, no. I mean, the exception is, if you have a project you need to finish up, which is my last sabbatical. While I was doing the research and so forth 01:18:00for the current project, I submitted another project and had to do revisions. So, yeah, I guess I do some writing and editing of older things. That's inevitable. But as far as, some people can do it, I guess. But as I said, there's also ways to solve the problem of sort of getting really back up to speed in your skill set. And as you get older, that gets harder. So, yeah. Just being honest, I'd say that's been sort of a bit of a problem I gave myself is that sort of okay, I'm doing this now and I'm really going to focus on this. You know, there's the teaching, too, at the same time.

GS:So, teaching, research and then service is another big component of being a professor. And I think within art history, that usually ends up being done through exhibitions.

GP:No.

GS:No?

GP:No. Service is primarily service to the department.

GS:Ah.

GP:Plus service to whatever entities you are affiliated with.

GS:So, exhibitions would be a completely different component.

GP:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is, if we get involved in exhibitions, we count that as outreach. Which is not without merit in the eyes of deans and so forth. You know, because they get to say to the governor, "Oh, look. We do care about the community and the fine citizens of the state of Wisconsin."

One of the big problems in a department--and the smaller the department, the bigger this can be--is the unequal sharing of the administrative burden of the department. Because of budget cuts over the years, staffing in the colleges and so forth, support staffing, has been cut back. Which means more has been put onto the departments. Which means there's just more service burdens, I think. And you can have almost as many service burdens in a department of twelve as you can in a department of thirty. Because you still have to have a curriculum committee, you still have to have an admissions committee. Now granted, you will have many fewer applicants in a smaller department, just by the nature of things. But still, it's not like the service burden is relative to 01:21:00the size of the faculty. And let's face it, there are some faculty who are just selfish and will only do what they're absolutely forced to do. And then there are other people who think we really have to do this, so I guess I'll do this. And I think in our department, there's a very unequal distribution and we all know it. But you know, it's not rare. I was a reviewer for the art history department at the University of Pittsburgh. It was virtually a mirror image. There were six people out of, I don't know, eighteen, who did all the work. I mean, virtually all the work. The other people were on the committees, but really didn't stain themselves to do any of the work.

GS:Have you seen that change over time, especially as new hires get added to the department?

GP:Um--

GS:Or has the pattern stayed pretty consistent?

GP:I just think the service burden has gotten greater over the years. There are more demands for things like doing assessments, writing up assessment plans. All of these things, you know, in the new environment of accountability. So in the old days, you kind of took accountability for granted. You're teaching your courses, you're giving your exams, you're having them write papers, you're doing your work. You're accountable. But now it's like okay, what are your learning goals for this course? How are you assessing those learning goals? Which is not a bad thing in theory, but there's a lot of sort of paperwork that has to go with that. And a lot of stuff. Budgets, things like that. So (laughs) especially having been chair in the not too distant past again for my second time, the difference between when I was chair the first time and when I was chair the second time was monstrously different.

GS:For the expectation of the chair?

GP:Yes. And having to have, well, part of the problem was, we had a fabulous long-term administrator of the department the first time I became chair. And basically, Sandi said, "Gene, you have to do this." "Okay. I'll do it."

The second time, we were in upheaval in our staff. And I didn't get a good staff member, a good administrator during that period who knew the budgets, who understood stuff, and etcetera, etcetera. So it fell on me to do 01:24:00that. But at the same time, the college's expectations, the budget decisions and so forth were put much more on the departments. There were just a lot of things that I felt like I don't remember having to do this in the past. And I can't completely sort out whether that was the wonderfulness of Sandi that was missing. But my colleagues all say oh, no, no, the job of being chair has become much more onerous. So if the chair's job is onerous, then the chair has to depend on fellow faculty members to really be on top of some other things, rather than sort of saying okay, I've had a chance to look at this, can you guys talk about it and execute it the best way you can? You have to depend on them to really get into the weeds and really be in charge of it.

GS:Has that impacted who wants to be chair and for how long?

GP:Oh, God, yes. It's also in our department a problem of, let's say, personality difficulties and personality differences and different attitudes. So we are actually, there are several, a few people who might, it might be their time to be chair. But just won't do it. And probably can't. Not because they're not smart or talented, but just on a kind of interpersonal difficulty level and so forth. Their, you know, emotional level. So it's a problem. It's a big problem. That's why we have an outside chair right now. And we will have one for the next three years after this. Hopefully by that time, we'll have gotten our act together. I'll be retired. They will have gotten their act together. But, you know, you couldn't pay me enough money to be chair. Well, you could pay me enough money. But being chair again, no. I did it for a total of eight years. Is enough.

GS:Was that four and four? Or?

GP:Five the first time and three the next. Yeah.

GS:Do you think that's how long you need to be chair for you to be an active chair who understands what the expectations are for multiple years of three to five?

GP:It's a really good question. My colleague Tom Dale was chair the first time for six years. Did he become chair again after that? I don't think so. It used to be the expectation you would be chair for three years and you'd step down. And that was the general expectation. But things just became more 01:27:00complex. And more and more, the college would prefer somebody be there for four years or even five years. But certainly I think as long as you stay for three, you're not considered to be deserting the ship. But it's hard. You spend one, if you've never been chair before, you spend a year figuring out what the heck is going on. So it really makes sense for somebody to be at least four, if not five years. Depending on how good they are at it. Some people are terrible. So, yeah. You know, I would never recommend it to somebody. "Oh, you should be chair, it's such a great thing." (laughs) But you know, I was marked in my department by the time I'd been here for three years as chair material, somebody who should grow up and be chair. So--

GS:Why was that?

GP:I just, I guess I showed that I cared about the department and could get along with everybody. You know, even the people who hated each other. Well, extremely disliked each other. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was--anyway, I think about my fourth or fifth year I was saying this to somebody outside the department. I was like, "Yeah, my department seems to like be thinking I should be chair after I get tenure, and I'm going, whoa." And then I said something else about, oh, I was complaining about the way the college had treated the department in a certain thing.

He said, "Oh, yeah. You should be chair." (laughs)

GS:Do you think that impacted your tenure review?

GP:No. No, no. You know, tenure reviews are kind of tricky things. I think the fact that I was, I think the fact that I was very willing to do service and do it well and thoughtfully, it certainly didn't hurt me. Nobody, you know, there's no antipathy in the department towards me. But the main thing was my teaching record was good. I actually had a book under contract. Not just under contract, but scheduled for production. So it was an actual contract, not one of those preliminary things. With good preliminary reader reviews and so forth. You know, that's the main thing. I had another project sort of that I, in hand. And that book was a new book. I mean, it wasn't like a perfected dissertation. 01:30:00So those are the things that made it, yeah, you never get, you never get voted in for tenure on your service. Never, never, never. (laughs) You don't even get, if the scholarship, if the scholarly production isn't there, you just don't get it. But did it help? I guess. In a way. (laughs) So I think, yeah, that's the way it works.

I took my first sabbatical right after I got tenure. Because it's every seven years. And then they wanted me to be chair right away when I came back. But bless her, my friend Julie Murray, who was a Chinese art historian says, "No, no. You can't do that. Give him a year to actually process his work and maybe start writing and do stuff." So I think it was two years after I got tenure I became chair as an associate professor. Which the college frowns upon nowadays. Because you still have another step to go, and you need to be productive, etcetera.

Now in my day, and I don't know if it's still true, the requirements for being, for getting tenure are pretty, I wouldn't say they're standard. Different departments will have somewhat different standards. And of course art or music will have very different standards. But you know, in the humanities, there's generally, okay, you need to have a book already published or it needs to be in production, really. And you also need to have some other publications. And the other teaching and service records to be okay. And you also need to have some sense that there's another project in the wings. So it's pretty standard.

The standard for going from associate professor to full professor can actually be quite different in different departments. So, for example, they may have an absolute requirement that you have a second book before you can become a full professor. Our department was different, and the college accepts difference. Whereas I primarily became a full professor on the basis of my service to the department as chair. In fact, the associate dean, I think it was of the graduate school in the humanities at the time, we had lunch. And she says, 01:33:00"Gene, if your department wants you to be chair, you should demand that they put you up for full professor." So I think there's a sense that the service roles here are so critical to the health of departments that extraordinary service you can get full professor. Which I actually think is fair. But it varies. And I'm not sure, but I think maybe the tendency has been more towards having to have a second book. I know I have a couple of colleagues who are still associate professors in other departments who I think have done a lot of service work, but still haven't been put up.

GS:Do you think the--

GP:They're younger than me, of course, so times change.

GS:Do you think the art history department's flexibility on how they promote people to full professor works in their favor? Or in the favor of the actual professors?

GP:Well, the easy answer is it works in the, to the benefit of the actual professors. You make more money. You have more status. On the other hand, it's to the benefit of the department because people are more willing to do that necessary service. So what crazy person is going to become chair as a less than full professor if it means nothing? I mean, at the time, I didn't actually think it did. It was only when I talked with this associate dean. And I went oh, okay. I mean, that's how stupid I am. I just said, "Oh, okay. I'll be chair." Because it was a challenge and I knew I'd be good at it and I wanted to do it. And I underestimated in my own mind how big a distraction this would be from my scholarship.

I mean, I know people who manage to keep their scholarly output going. Not in a big way, as if they're not chair. But yeah, there are people who do it. They're just better at doing two things at once than I am. Or, you know, dividing their focus.

GS:So were you able to take a second sabbatical after that term as chair?

GP:No. This is where I was really stupid. You know, I actually had--okay, let me go over the history of this a little bit in my mind. So I actually had, before my first sabbatical, I actually had a year off with the Japan Foundation.

GS:When would this have been?

GP:Fourth year? I applied for an outside grant with the Japan Foundation and I got it. And so I had sort of, I had an extra year's leave to work on 01:36:00my material. Thank God. I wouldn't have made it if I hadn't. Fourth or fifth year. I don't know. But anyway, but then, okay, so when the time came up for my next sabbatical, I'd been chair--I'd delayed it to be chair of art history. And then religious studies was so desperate a situation that I delayed it again. So I missed almost a whole cycle. And so I sort of, and they'll never give you an extra one. If you know what I mean. So my second sabbatical was rather delayed. I think, it was nine years later, rather than six. Stupid. Really, really stupid. But it just shows that I just got way too wrapped up in this sort of investment in helping out the programs I was affiliated with. But then I went back into a regular cycle of sabbaticals. Actually had delayed this most recent one because of when my plans were to retire. Because I'm not going to get another one, so it didn't matter when I took it.

GS:Do you think the rest of your department follows the more typical trajectory or timeline spacing?

GP:Oh, if they have any sense at all they do. I think they all do. Sure. Again, you know, this is something the public doesn't understand, or that state legislatures don't understand, is you know, they will complain oh, they have too much time off, they have sabbaticals, they only teach two courses. Most of us put a lot of effort into our teaching. Plus, we advise students. And there's graduate students to advise if you have many. There's a lot that goes into the teaching program beyond those, you know, three fifty-minute periods or two seventy-five minute periods for each course, two courses per semester.

But the other thing is, is we're judged primarily by scholarly output. It's what gives us prestige, what gives the department prestige, what gives the college prestige, what gives the university prestige. And so all of that prestige actually translates to having benefit for the students who get degrees from here. So a degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison means more than a degree from University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. Not to pick on them. 01:39:00Perfectly good school. But you know that's true. And partly is because of the prestige, where they rank in, the departments rank, the universities rank. And that's based primarily on publishing. And scholarly production, research. So, yeah.

So I think personally in the humanities, I'm not sure that scholarship maybe should be quite as emphasized. I mean, we're not curing cancer. We're not getting big federal grants. But if you don't stress it enough, you're not going to have, be able to attract those best minds to be faculty to mentor students. So you know what I mean? It all kind of, it's all interrelated. The mentoring of students, the prestige of the degree that students get. It's still, I'd say fairly heavily dependent on scholarly and, you know, research output. If that makes sense.

GS:What would you recommend for a new professor coming into your department for how to strike that balance?

GP:I think almost everybody kind of does it quite naturally. And we certainly keep an eye on them. You want to be a good teacher. But you can't get too wrapped up in--I would say develop as few new courses as possible. Wait until you have tenure to do that. And you know, focus on publishing, other than that.

You know, inevitably, people's situations change lanes, though. For example, my colleague Yuhang Li, she just got involved with all sorts of things. And she wound up doing a fairly large service burden. Not for us, but for the museum, for East Asian studies, and so forth, because of her skillsets, really, and her willingness to do it. But she got everything else done as well, so there you go.

You know, and I think, not in Yuhang's case, but I think sometimes women of color can have a bit larger burden placed on them because you want diversity of representation on various committees beyond the department level. I 01:42:00think this may be--so in other words, if you're an African American woman, you're maybe a bit more likely to be asked to be on certain committees that other junior faculty wouldn't be. Because the university has such a paucity of, you know, diversity is not our strength. You know, and I don't have any hard evidence that this is true. But it seems like this could be, and has been, an issue.

But everybody, if you get a job as an assistant professor at a major research university and you don't understand okay, you have to publish that book. You have to do good scholarship. Then you have no business being here. You know, so I'm getting a little bit--you know, there's "Oh, we have to mentor our junior faculty members, make sure they--" Well, yes. And I enjoy doing that. But on the other hand, if they don't know when they walk in the door the basics of what they have to do, they're either not very bright or they're just self-deceptive or something. You know what I mean? You just know. You've known it. If you've gone through a graduate program and you kept your eyes open at all, you know. And they tell you this in the new faculty meetings. It's very clear what you need to do.

Now, that being said, people can still get a bit off track. They can lose sight of that. I mean, in a way, I almost did. My department used to have meetings with your mentoring committee, and you would sit there with them. And I remember Narciso Menocal, one of my mentors on my mentoring committee, saying, "Okay, what are your plans for next year?"

And I think I was coming up on my third year. I said, "Well, I have a couple of articles I want to work on."

He says, "No. You'll work on a book. And think about it."

And he just like--I'm going oh, wait. He's right. This is coming up the third year and I haven't really given serious thought to the book yet. So I mean, I don't know. But I remember that moment vividly. And I'm very grateful for that. Because even though I knew exactly what I needed to do, we can all procrastinate, or we can get involved in the current project and say okay, well, a soon as this gets done. So, I'm not saying mentoring is useless. (laughs) It helped me. But at the same time, it's pretty clear what you have to do.

GS:I think that's a really lovely place to stop for today.

GP:Okay.

GS:Thank you so much.

GP:Sure.

End First Interview Session (March 29, 2019)

Second Interview Session (April 9, 2019)

GS:Hello. It is April ninth. My name is Gioia Spatafora. And this is the second interview with Professor Gene Phillips as part of the Art History at 100 Oral History Project. Would you mind starting out by speaking a little bit about the relationship between the department and the museum?

GP:Sure. I think it's had its ups and downs. And right now, I think it is at a high point and has really great potential for the future. And part of that has to do with the change in director and their approach to the relationship with the department. The previous director, I guess one could say he was much more, things have to be my way. And sort of--so, it wasn't that things didn't happen between the department and the museum. It's just that it was much more a sort of, you know, Russell saying, "I want this. And do you want to do it?" Rather than sitting down, exchanging ideas, etcetera, etcetera. And he also had very strong ideas about what was okay for the museum to do and what was not okay for the museum to do. So, as you might imagine, for an academic department, you know, we might have tended to want to be more experimental and controversial in things. And for a variety of reasons, some of which are probably good, Russell really strongly shied away from that. And even once sort of entered into a pitched battle against something. Which could create, and did create, some bad feelings.

On the other hand, I know the department could be kind of, what is the word, unreasonable sometimes. Or to push for something and then not follow through. For example, one of my now retired--well, anyway, one of my former colleagues really pushed to buy a collection of some modernist designed chairs. And Russell went along with it. And then after ten years, they were never used in any teaching or anything. So you know, I don't want to be one-sided about it. There were issues.

But on the other hand, all in all, I have been happy with my ability to work with the museum. Partly because it's a very large print collection 01:48:00and nobody on the museum staff has real expertise in Japan. Though the former print curator was amazingly knowledgeable and very good on the connoisseurship of those prints because it was his job and he was dedicated to doing a really--and he'd learned to love them. But on the other hand, he didn't read Japanese, you know. He didn't have all of the deeper cultural background. So he and I cooperated in a variety of ways very well and became very close friends.

But you know, those kinds of relationships help things. And those kinds of factors. But I think now, going forward, we have, there's just a lot of potential for collegial development.

You know, one of the really interesting changes, any class-generated exhibitions would be relegated to the Elvehjem building in the small Mayer Gallery. Which was fine, in its way. But now, the new director wants them to be over in the new building in the, I'm sorry, I can't remember the name of the gallery, but it's the one that they especially often show prints and drawings in. Which is a larger gallery. And because it's in the new building, it's a bit more integrated. And so I think that's another thing is having a sense that, of collective ownership of things that are generated primarily by the department.

Now, I'm not saying we won't at some time run into some conflict because of what we might want to do and what the museum decides isn't really in their best interest. But so far, so good. So all in all, I think there's a really productive future in store.

GS:Has the museum ever pushed for a specific class to be taught because of how popular a certain exhibit is?

GP:No, I would say not. Not so far. They don't typically do that at all. I mean, they may ask us to give a talk, which most of us are very happy to do. And of course if we're behind organizing the exhibition, we're sort of obligated and happy to do talks or to help with programming and such as that. I would say it's been sort of more the opposite, where we might have classes where we want to involve students in curatorial activities, like designing an 01:51:00exhibition. And then we are requesting their staff members, who have expertise we, of course, don't have, to come and speak to our class or work with them. And we now have a kind of curatorial studies class and we do, you know, request that staff members be able to do that, to be able to do that, to be able to come over and speak. And the only impediment to that, no matter who was director, has been they're really short staffed. So staff time is really valuable. But still, for the most part, you know, people have come and spoken to our group.

I think a real potential for the future is if staffing can go up in the museum and people aren't just being driven crazy by the demands on them, to have a more sort of integrated curatorial studies program or body of activities more heavily involving or integrating faculty and museum staff. Because, I mean, some of my colleagues have had a lot of experience in organizing exhibitions, being deeply involved in it. But most of us haven't. And you know, we don't know 100% what the different jobs, I mean, deep down, what the different responsibilities are for different parts of things. So, yeah. I have a lot of hopes for that. And yeah, I honestly, I could hardly be happier with the way things are going now at the museum. You know, so far, so good.

GS:Could you talk a little bit about that print collection, and how it came to be at UW?

GP:(laughs) Well, that print collection famously, probably the largest portion, well, definitely the largest portion of it, came through the hands of Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright, as you may know, is famous all over the world, but especially in this area of the country as an architect. But he had a lot of interest in Japan. And he had a lot of, he traveled there a lot. But he also was virtually a Japanese print dealer. You know, he needed to support his activities and he wasn't always sort of sound in his management of money and so forth. And so, yeah. I think a lot of the prints around the Midwest that are in American collections in the Midwest, actually went through his hands.

But this particular collection, the Van Vleck collection, the story 01:54:00is, and everybody says it's true, is that at a certain point, Frank Lloyd Wright put his current collection of Japanese prints up as collateral to a bank for a loan. Defaulted. The bank got the prints. And then Professor Van Vleck--there are several Van Vlecks in the story--but anyway, Professor Van Vleck and his sister collected Japanese prints and had a small collection. But saw this opportunity and bought them from the bank. And then later, I think it was his son who donated them to the museum here. So, yeah, Frank Lloyd Wright to the Van Vlecks to here.

Now, the collection has continued to grow, because Professor Van Vleck actually left, or his heirs left a very sizable sum to--I mean, the wording, I don't know exact wording, but basically to support that collection. And that has been interpreted in various ways over time. Buying more prints, restoring prints. You know, all sorts of things. Or even to buy Japanese art of the same period that the prints were done. You know, the wording in these things can sometimes be flexible enough that if you don't abuse it, you have a range of things you can do. So the print collection has continued to grow until it's over four thousand. So. But still, I think the sizable majority of those are still from the hands of Frank Lloyd Wright.

GS:Do you think that's one of the original collections that's specifically East Asian? Or as far as the basis for collecting East Asian art within the Chazen?

GP:That's actually a really interesting question that I don't know the answer of. It's certainly by far the most prominent collection. You know, there's all kinds of collections, like Chinese export porcelains. You know, but those are much more minor collections in terms of number and value and all of that. So, the Chazen, until fairly recent, outside of prints and some other things in small numbers, hasn't been that active in the collection of East Asian art. You know, museums of the size of the Chazen are often dependent on bequests of collectors. They leave their collections. Like the fabulous Lane collection of modern sculpture and drawings by sculptors. It was a bequest. So whenever I'm sort of going through the museum with students, one of the 01:57:00questions I ask, I say, "Well, why do you think we have so much of this, and almost none or none of that?" And more sophisticated students will know the answer. But often, you know, you go into a museum and you think oh, they really like this and they don't like that. Because otherwise, they would collect it. No. Unless you're the Metropolitan or something and have lots and lots of money. Your collections are largely formed by bequests of collections. Not exclusively by a wide margin. But you know, that's the way it goes.

GS:Have there been any more recent ones that you've been called in to look at?

GP:Well, up to a point. I mean, I was called in earlier on in my career to look at like a screen, Japanese screen painting. In fact, I helped buy one when I was in New York going to a dealer and checking it out. But for the most part, not so much. I mean, I've certainly always been welcomed to look at things that they were considering and to offer my opinion. But if you're dealing with really reputable dealers and you kind of know what you're interested in, that's okay. But yeah, Drew, the former print curator, we would often look at the catalogs from print dealers and chat about what seemed the most interesting.

But you know, he has a much clearer understanding of what the whole collection is like. He's spent much, much more time than I have. So he would know where there's a gap or what would fit in with aspects of the collection. But still, yeah. I mean, my input was not law by any stretch of the imagination, but it was welcome.

Something that happened more recently is the museum under the former director started collecting contemporary Japanese ceramics. And I'm a ceramics guy. Up to a point, though I do historical ceramics more. So, I've been more taking pleasure in that than being really involved. Partly because those, those ceramics are coming through a dealer in New York who is a member of 02:00:00the Chazen Council who is the benefactor of my professorship. And sort of, the way it kind of works, she deals, is sort of like buy one, gift one. So the museum gets a really good deal, so to speak. And you get a lot of, as she says, Japanese clay art right now is really big. And she's selling, or she likes to say placing pieces in the Met, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, major collections around the country. Because she loves clay art. She loves Japanese ceramics and knows all the really famous contemporary Japanese ceramicists. And nobody is in a better position to sort of help guide the museum in its collection. So you know, it's an interesting relationship. It's partly financial, but she also supports the museum and the department financially, and gives art as well as money. But they also occasionally buy things from her that they really want.

GS:And when you take students into the print collection to look at material, is there also a component of familiarizing students within a museum space for comfort? For trying more different types of students into a space that might historically have seemed somewhat sterile or unwelcoming?

GP:Well, up to a point. This is, with my, you know, ordinary class students, this is probably not so big an issue. Though definitely there are many who've probably hardly ever been into an art museum, in the lower level classes. They don't particularly feel uncomfortable being there. That's much more true with my Odyssey students that, I work with the Odyssey program. And these are adult students who sort of missed out on going to college, or went to college for one year and had to drop out. Mostly, the great, great majority are minority students. And many of them, when we take them to the museum, it's the very first time they've been in a museum. And I've heard comments like, "Well, I 02:03:00just didn't think it was for me." Not in the sense of not my taste, but it was for, you know it was for white people. It was for the well to do. It wasn't for poor minority people. And, you know, museums can easily feel that way. And most, and more and more responsible museum directors and other staff are working hard to combat this. I know Russell made efforts. And I think the new director, Amy, is making even more efforts in this direction by putting African American art more regularly on display. And just in general trying to be more welcoming and reaching out.

But working with the Odyssey program reminds me, you know, I don't come from a privileged background. I come from, I think I might have told you last time, a poor country background. So it kind of reminds me that, you know, I was certainly not on any road towards becoming an art historian. Even by the time I graduated from college. And you know, art has been made for rich people. Historically. The rich and the powerful. And museums are filled with things made for the rich and the powerful. That's not exclusively true, but largely true. So how do you sort of deal with that? And wanting to serve underserved populations and be an art historian. You know, it's a tricky bit.

GS:How did you get involved with the Odyssey program?

GP:Kind of kicking and screaming. When it was first being formed--

GS:Is it a national program, or just at Madison?

GP:No. No. It's, there's a complicated history there that I won't go into. But it was formed, let me think for a minute. The proper nouns are just like fleeing from my head right now. But it was formed under the leadership of Emily Auerbach, who was in continuing studies and has a professorship in the English department. And there was something called the Clemente program, which I don't know completely the ins and outs of. And I apologize to her, but 02:06:00one of the radio hosts on WNPR was very stimulated by this. And she and Emily got together and Emily became the director. So they wanted to include art history. This is a humanities program. And one of my colleagues, who shall remain nameless, decided he wanted to be involved. But he didn't want to be so involved that he went too often. So he tried to organize it so one of us went each month. And I was a bit reluctant to do it but I said well, okay.

And then, as things will happen, the person who was supposed to be taking the lead in art history got busy. Some other things came up. You know, somebody else is going to have to take the lead. And I think I was chair at the time. And I went, oh (groans). And I took over the lead. And we started with that sort of rotation. And it was terrible. I just, you need consistency for people. I mean, not that my colleagues did a bad job, though some of them did much better jobs than others. It was just very clear to me after three months, this was just not the way to go. So I decided to do all the classes. And have been doing them ever since. And am very grateful to my colleague who left me holding the bag that he did, because it's a very, very rewarding experience. And I'm very happy to be involved. So, yeah. Yeah.

GS:It does seem like a program that would rely on a lot of relationship-building to build trust between people, too.

GP:Yes. But you know, after it's been going on a while, you have cousins and even, by this time, children of former students. You have a kind of broader community. You also have lots of people who have no experience with it. But I think there's been a trust in Emily, who's really wonderful, and just the program as a whole, that that's not really quite so big a deal. But yes, you do have to sort of go in and be willing to open up and share your story. But it hasn't been that hard, really. Partly because of all the groundwork 02:09:00that's been laid over the years. The first one, you know, I hardly even remember now. But I'm sure it was a little bit more difficult. But you know, it worked really well. It was wonderful.

GS:About how many students do you interact with a year?

GP:In the Odyssey program there? There are, the class is limited to thirty. So it's thirty a year. And usually they all make it through. Occasionally they'll have to drop out. You know, these are people who can have problems. You know. Some of them, very bad. So one of the things I like about it is you take chances on people. Up to a point. You know. If someone has a very serious drug problem and can't give it up, then they have to go. But that happens much more seldom than you would think. But you know, somebody's cousin may get shot. Things might happen to people. But the students are really devoted to doing what they need to do in this class. Because it's been proven such a benefit to them.

GS:Are there components of that class, of the Odyssey program, that you've brought back to the Chazen, or even to your undergrad or grad students?

GP:You know, that's a good question. And off the top of my head, I would say not really. But on the other hand, it has made me more aware of what my usual classrooms are like. And I certainly have tried occasionally with like a FIG class or something to offer a topic that sort of seems to be more welcoming to a broader population.

GS:Could you describe an exhibition experience at the Chazen that you found to be especially memorable?

GP:Yeah. I mean, probably the one I remember, actually, best was the first one. And I had a, it was called Paper Women. And it was images of women in Japanese woodblock prints. It was for a graduate seminar at a time when we had really way too many graduate students to be practical, but it was really nice having a good large group of graduate students. And the majority of the graduate students were women, so this seemed to be like a good idea. And Drew, the former print curator, was really super helpful. And so we met as a class and we 02:12:00talked about issues. And it was generated largely through this give and take with the students and what they thought was really most interesting. And you could do this with graduate students because they already tended to have a body of feminist theory and ideas that you could move forward without having to lay a lot of groundwork for that. So we can just proceed into thinking about our objectives. But you know, there's so many prints. A lot of it is just, it's not just what you want to do; it's like, what do the prints lend themselves to doing?

So that was actually my first experience at all in working to put together an exhibition. And you realize how little you know about the mechanics of it all, and how much you need your colleagues in the museum. But also how rewarding it is to have the students sort of make the ultimate decisions.

And it's always a question, you know. Because of time constraints. If you only have one semester, it's difficult if you want to do some dense sort of topic and bring all the students together with you up to speed on that topic. And also organize the exhibition. It's kind of impossible. So, it's always a matter of there's not enough time to do it right. So often these things lead into that if you, like if you do the class in the fall, then over the summer, you know, you're going to have to pay some of the students to be student hourlies, to sort of carry through. You just can't do the whole thing in a semester. Unless you sort of pre-picked out the objects. Which you know, that seems to be sort of the missing part of the learning experience for the students. But if you have, for example, four thousand Japanese prints, you can't, say okay, look at every Japanese print. That's just not going to work. So you have to sort of find a balance between over-streamlining what they get to do, or the part that goes into their participation and just having it too vague.

So I think something that maybe even works better is when you have a small collection, like my colleague Tom Dale, used the icons and 02:15:00photographs taken on Mount Athos, that Frank Horlbeck owned the icons and took the photographs and did a Mount Athos exhibition. And so, the objects, in other words, you didn't have a big assortment of objects that you had to sift through. They were what they were. You had a lot, a lot of photographs. And so he did a lot of preliminary work in sort of sifting out and, you know, having a much smaller selection for the students to deal with. And then they could really concentrate on the activity of researching the objects and doing the write up and intellectual part. So.

GS:Have you done any digital exhibits, or digitization of the prints to promote on a digital platform?

GP:You know, I've worked with small, small groups of like an honors class of students on a kind of Omeka digital exhibition. But you know, it doesn't give me great pleasure. There's no objects involved. Which to me is half the exercise. And so I'll never be, you know, a fan of doing digital exhibitions. I understand their value 100%. It's just I personally, someone who loves objects and likes to get students engaged with the actual objects, have very little interest in doing it. So there. Yeah.

GS:Are there any other uses of technology, though, that you think the department has really needed to promote? Or to work on or develop?

GP:(laughs) Well, you know, it's an ongoing struggle with how to provide the students with high-quality images to study. I don't know if you ever darkened the doorway of an art history class in your young days, your youngest days. You're still so young. Even in your young days, it was probably already digital, wasn't it? Yes. So, when I was in graduate school, oh so many years ago, how did you provide study images? Well, the way most places did it was you cut up books with big pictures, color pictures in them. You mounted them somehow. And you put them up physically somewhere.

At Berkeley, where I went to graduate school, it was down in the lowest level of the undergraduate library. There were kind of niches where you basically pinned them to the wall. And something like that was done here. I don't know exactly what was done. But, yeah. You actually physically cut up big picture 02:18:00books and mounted these things to the wall.

So, once the worldwide web came around, which was, I think, just one or two years, it started before that, but it actually impinged on people's consciousness, and the whole idea of digital images being made available for students. So when my colleague Nick Cahill was hired, and we had Tom Gombar as our visual resources curator, who was very interested in the digitization of images and making them available online. And Nick had been working on the Perseus Project, which was a big project to put classical art and texts, to digitize them and make them available online.

So I mean we were at the point, so I decided hey, why don't we form this committee? And I said, "Tom, why don't you be," I wasn't chair, but I was, you know, I said, "We've got you two guys. Why don't we do this? And Tom, you be the head of the instructional technology and space committee."

And so we did. And that's how we got our first website up with the, I, less than the two of them, but still contributing. We actually did the coding ourselves in HTML 1, which was dead simple. And is completely, now it's a different world. You can't even begin to put together a website. But yeah, that's what we did. And images started getting digitized. And we were, I think in the humanities, one of the very first in the country to have a departmental website. And it was even mentioned once in the New York Times about, you know, just got a little mention along the way. So, you know. And over the years, it's really grown.

The thing is, is the options. So here comes the issue with this. And this gets kind of dry and tedious. But when you're putting together a database, you have to have the database behind it. So how rigorous a database do you want it to be? So if you want to do a good artwork image database, you know, you have to have a whole bunch of fields that you have to meticulously enter. Artist, place, time. And that can be really complicated. Like if you're talking about 02:21:00time, to what degree do you incorporate period times? To what degree do you only use dates? And what date range do you work with? Really tedious stuff. And so, if you have to digitize a lot of images and to expand the database, you need a certain pace to do this. Then it means really, really a lot of work in keeping that database up.

And Tom was amazing in doing this. And I found out much later how much time he spent at home after work doing this. But the problem is, in the long-term, it's unsustainable. In the long-term. As the images multiply. And you can't expect people down the road to be so dedicated that they spend sixty, seventy hours a week doing this and not getting paid for it. I mean, for any more than forty hours a week. So, it's not sustainable. And that's what we're facing now. And that database is, the library has been supporting it and it won't do it anymore.

Plus we're in a different age in terms of images. Because there's Google images, there's Getty images, there's Artstor. So there's a wide range of images, which are often free.

And the other thing that's happened is our old scanned images were done so long ago, they're no longer of sufficient quality. They're perfectly okay for the kinds of digital projectors and screens we had back in the day. They're not anymore. So you have to think about re-scanning things to make them of sufficient quality. Or, you know, so it's just--it was very important and useful for a while. But over the long-term, you know, you have to kind of say well, you can't sustain it. And resources have to go elsewhere. Especially when, honestly, it's really quite easy to get a lot of the images I need from sources online. And those I can't, I have a lot of, you know, I can scan them myself fairly easily. Or even photograph them with my iPhone and still get a better image than I have in the database among the earlier ones.

So, the changes in technology are just, it's just changed completely from when we first done that. And, to a large degree, for the better. Easier 02:24:00access to images. And less need for sort of a central database controlling things, or keeping things orderly. Though I don't know how, you know, we may pay for that in the longer-term.

GS:Does UW support the department by paying for a subscription to some of these larger national databases?

GP:They do. The Artstor, they pay for that. A lot of them, you don't have to pay for. We don't go pay for Getty Images. The big one we pay for is Artstor. You know, even Wikimedia has a bunch of stuff. And a lot of us over the years have photographed things ourselves. Or we have catalogs sitting on our bookshelves that we can quick scan if we need to ourselves. So, you know, but yeah. I mean, yeah. So, yes. They do.

GS:Do you have to advocate for that especially hard? For that use of money? Or is it fairly simple to convince the university for the need?

GP:Oh, no. It's difficult. Our art librarian, Lynn, has been really good at advocating. And I once actually really did something wrong when she had advocated really hard for Artstor. And Tom Gombar and I found out how much it cost. And I made the comment to somebody in the library system, "Well, you know, if you gave us that much money, we could put together a fabulous image base really suited to our needs." And this was after Lynn had worked really hard to advocate for it. And so I had to like wind up going to her in abject apology for muddying waters after she had worked so hard. Anyway, I managed to redeem myself. But it was a lesson in don't step in somewhere where you don't know what's been done before, where the groundwork's been laid, and how important it is. And of course, Artstor wasn't that good at the time. It had a lot of crappy images that they had digitized just, you know, one collection in one university and many of the images were poor. But of course, that was just the beginnings. And it's improved dramatically over time in many ways and expanded. So the proportion of good to mediocre or not so good images, it's gotten 02:27:00much, much better. So, you know. You have to think towards the future, too. Getting in, you're paying a lot of money to get, I don't remember the amount, but it just seemed astronomical to me. But that was sort of your ticket in. It was only going to get more expensive. And it did improve a lot over time. So, yeah.

GS:Are there other kind of large price tag things that the department has really had to advocate for as far as facilities or specific positions or focuses?

GP:Well, I mean, the big thing used to always be advocating for faculty positions. You know, somebody from another department, somewhere in print, referred to it as the gold standard of success was getting another faculty line.

GS:Do you agree with that?

GP:No. Not at all. I think, you know, it's just a kind of academic reflex is to cover as much, many of the bases, and to be competing with the Ivy Leagues or somewhere. You know, like okay, they have a fourteenth, fifteenth century Italian historian. We need one, too. To compete. We want to be at the level. And you can't sustain that with a state university with budget cuts, etcetera, etcetera. And everybody has come to realize that. So, you know, with all of our downsizing and rightsizing, as they call it. You know, the terrain has just been transformed. Plus I think, and this comes to the issue of what is your most important concern breadth of coverage or depth of coverage in certain areas. Because almost nobody, with a few exceptions, can kind of do both. So, is it critical, if you lose your Italian Renaissance art historian and your northern Renaissance art historian, is it critical to replace them both? Or do you look for somebody who does one primarily but is more than willing to teach both? And that way, not endanger another line in some other area.

And you know, like right now, our department doesn't have a dedicated 02:30:00modernist or a dedicated contemporary person, which is insane. It's absolutely insane. But the question is, how do we get them? What do we give up? You know, we have, and I believe in this, we have gone for a certain breadth in Asia and Africa. Though our Africanist is about to retire. And because of budgets, we won't be able to replace him anytime soon. But you know, we have an Islamic art historian. We have a Chinese art historian. We, at least now, have an African art historian, Japanese art historian. But no modernist. Or European modernist or contemporary person. And that just has to change. I mean, can we change it in the next couple of years? No. Some things have to sort of work themselves out. Because, you know, the dean is an economist. The chancellor's an economist. And their budget models now--

You know, it used to be you'd go to the dean and argue your case for a line. Now it's much more, "Okay, here's your tally sheet," as they call it. "These are your financial resources. This is how much you're in the red or in the black in terms of what you're allotted for financial resources." And so unless you can keep sort of out of the red over the long term, they're not going to let you hire. So it's a very--I mean, what else can they do? You know, unless budgets really get much better.

So, anyway. To make a long story short, you have to commit to what you want. But you have to play the long game. And that's all you can do. But you know, we have to make priorities for our next hire. And those priorities, the priority, I think, has to be either a modernist or a contemporary person. Or maybe a modernist/contemporary person combined. I mean, how can we serve the great number of students in the art department and elsewhere without one? Not in our department.

So anyway, that's, so in terms of resources and our having to advocate for them, you know, we control our own classrooms. We're not in the general assignment classrooms. That means we're responsible for all that equipment in 02:33:00them. And who maintains the equipment? We do on our budget. Who, bulbs, even, are really expensive. So we're responsible for all that. But we don't want to give those up to general assignment. You know, they're perfect for us. They have the wide screens for showing two works of art at the same time. The lighting, not perfect, but, so anyway, so we do ask for support sometimes in being able to hire student hourlies or whatever, to help with maintaining the equipment or helping in emergencies when a professor goes down to start the lecture and the projector won't work for some reason.

So, and that's probably our biggest anguish right now is the technical side of things. And who's going to do it. In the old days, Tom Gombar used to do it all. And then his successor, Jacob Esselstrom was very good at doing everything. In the end, though, he retired, resigned, whatever, because he was just too frustrated. He wanted to do the cataloging. He wanted to do what a visual resources curator's main job should be. And he had less and less and less time to do it. Because his time was just being eaten up by being our techie IT person. And so since he left, it's been a struggle. And so, you know, finding a solution to that is going to be difficult.

And if you look at our proportion of faculty to support staff, many people would look at that and say wow, you have many more staff than any other department in the humanities your size. So, in other words, and we have more project assistants helping out with things. And you know, I don't know how to answer that. Part of that is just historical, things that have happened over time. But you know, it's hard for us to look at a configuration where, you know, we can say, "Oh, yeah, we can do without that person." So, I don't know. That's going to be a struggle is if one of our staff members leave, do we replace that person? We're not going to get more money. And are they going to let us use our money to replace a staff person? It's just really, you know, once you 02:36:00get beyond the department administrators, like you're going to have to think, what do you do? So it's hard for me to blame L&S or the deans and say oh, well, they're not giving us what we need. But yeah, we would like more. And we advocate for it. And sometimes we get it.

But you know, a lot of what we have been able to do has been through, have been through, what is it, class and laboratory modernization grants. They're grant systems. So one of the ways we got our classrooms digitized were through those. Because they're not general assignment classrooms. They're more classified as laboratories, like a chem lab or something. And we are really low-budget, compared to chem labs, if you can imagine. So, laboratory modernization grants and so forth. So, these competitive grants, where you--and that's a lot of work, too, putting in proposals. Tom Gombar used to do it. Jacob Esselstrom used to do it. I mean, taking the lead. So that's another thing, who takes the lead in the future grant proposals? So. Yeah, my colleagues, I'm retiring in two years, but my colleagues have some, I think some rough waters ahead in dealing with all of this.

GS:Have you seen a change in the establishment of endowed professorships, too?

GP:Yeah, well, well sure. We had one endowed professorship when I came. That was the Africanist position with Henry Drewal. He's Evjue-Bascom professor. Now, the Evjue-Bascom is controlled by the college. Or maybe the provost. Higher up than we are. So at a certain point in time before I came, the department was granted one of these to hire somebody. To help get somebody really good. And they chose to do African. Or maybe they said, "Hey, can we get money to get an Africanist?" And they did. So he came as an Evjue-Bascom professor.

When he retires, that money goes back to the college. We don't keep an Evjue-Bascom professorship. Now, more recently, the Morgridge matches, I don't know if you know what those are. Well, the Morgridges, very, very rich people who've given a lot of money to the university, they gave--okay, I'm not going to remember this correctly. Let's say a hundred million. And they said, 02:39:00"This money will be used to match any gifts towards a professorship, a chairship or a distinguished chairship." And the professorships were a million together with, so, if somebody put up five hundred thousand, out of their money would come five hundred thousand for the million, and so on. So it was like one million, two million, three million. So, our department was lucky enough to have some really good supporters. So, Joan Mirviss and her husband were able to do a professorship in Japanese art history, which I hold now. And those stay with the department forever. And the Chazens, who gave the vast majority of the money for building the museum, gave enough money for a distinguished chair. Which stays with our department, but is not committed to one certain position in the department. So, yeah, that's a huge change.

Now, that didn't mean we got to add faculty. The rules were that it was an enhancement, not an addition. And the college takes half of the earnings. So, just, it's not quite 5% that it earns every year. But so, for example, out of the million for the Joan B. Mirviss professorship, let's say it's 5%, just for easy math. That's $50,000 a year, of which the department gets twenty-five. And 25,000 goes to the college to offset part of my salary and benefits. So the college benefits from reducing what they have to pay for my salary and benefits. And the holder, same thing, even bigger with the holder of the Chazen distinguished chair. That still benefits us in our tally sheet, but we won't talk--it still helps us in the tally sheet and our balance of resources used and resources allotted.

So, the rest of the money, the money, the half that goes to the department, there are various ways to do it. Most programs give the entire amount as research funds to the faculty member who holds the position. Our department decided to give them half of the half, a quarter of the whole, for, you know, research funds. And the department would use the other half for 02:42:00various things. Which is the way we decided to do it.

GS:Is that how some graduate positions are supported financially, then?

GP:We have used, we have used those monies fairly regularly to support graduate student travel. It's not enough to support a fellowship. We do have a couple of fellowships that were funded under a previous program. The distinguished fellow program. Where, again, donors could put in half, and WARF would put in the other half. That's the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. And so we got two of those. One in East Asian and one in decorative arts. So.

No, we've done well. We've had good donors and generous donors. And maybe that's because we're an art history department. And people really interested in art are often people with a lot of money to collect it and so forth. Bless them.

GS:This sounds like a somewhat intricate system, though. How familiar were you with how money interacts with academia before you became a professor? And how did that understanding change as you were the chair?

GP:Yeah, that's another good question. I think my lessons started fairly early. Because my very position, and I think I might have talked about this last time, was funded originally by seed money from the Japan Foundation. And I had gotten a Japan Foundation grant to do research when I was a graduate student. So I kind of always, and I went to Harvard as an undergraduate, where everything is, even a water fountain or two is named after somebody. So the connection between wealth and academe, you know, I think I always knew that, and I was always aware of it.

On the other hand, I think shortly after I came, we went through a series of budget cuts. So, yeah. And also for reasons that are a little bit bewildering to me and could never happen now, I think my second year, there was something called the Gender Equity Pay Adjustment Program, to, you know, all departments had to look at how men and women were being compensated relative to their productivity, blah, blah, blah, blah. Good stuff. I don't mean the "blah, blah, blah" to be a bad thing. So, I was actually put on that committee as 02:45:00a junior faculty member, which I think is technically wrong. But so then I suddenly was seeing, because we had to have comparisons also with other departments, other programs in different universities. I saw salary figures I never expected to see, you know. So I got sort of involved for one reason or another with budgets and salaries and things from a fairly early time.

But that still didn't prepare me for being chair. Where, you know, budgets, you just realize wow, this is crazy. And especially our department, which his not only the 101 budget, the money from campus to fund our salaries and supplies and expenses and some other basic things. There's also the foundation accounts, our gift monies. There's also something called trust funds that were set up before the foundation was set up. And we had, thankfully, we had quite a few of those. And we had ones for very specialized purposes. Some for much looser purposes. And how much, you know. So, getting access to our foundation accounts, and learning the ins and outs of those. And I still realized, because I had such a great department administrator, who oversaw those things, I realized later when I became chair again without that terrific person, wow, there are things you did not learn, because she protected you from it. Bless Sandy. But, yeah. You just learn.

It was really, really difficult my second time as chair as far as dealing with budgets. Because it came to be, I felt I understood them better than anybody else in the department. Which was scary, because I didn't feel like I had complete control. And there were things I still didn't understand. And also, the second time I became chair was just when the latest big budget cuts hit and our department, I think, was cut by 30% in its 101 budgets. Maybe not quite that big, but a big chunk.

GS:And this would have been around 2010 kind of area?

GP:Yeah, let's say that. Maybe. Yeah. And that was just at the beginning of my second round as chair. And that's when they started bringing out things like tally sheets and all these accountability things. So I really, really had to get to know the budgets better. It's also the time that these Morgridge 02:48:00matches started to come in. So there was just a variety of budgets and money things that I just felt I had to be more on top of than I had been before. And so you asked me earlier did I believe that the gold standard was getting more faculty. No. The gold standard is when you have the chance to recruit. Recruiting the right faculty. And that means not only recruiting somebody who's a brilliant scholar, but someone who's also a great colleague. The smaller your department, the more pressures there are on a department, the less you can afford to have the prima donnas and so forth. So I would happily lose out on some sort of super scholar who was a jerk and a prima donna. No. I wouldn't care at all. On the other hand, if I had this really good scholar, really very good scholar who just seemed to be a great colleague and teacher, willing to really contribute to the greater good in a meaningful way, I would snap that person up much more quickly. You know, if we were a department with forty people in it, it would be a different, it would be different.

The other thing is, I used to tell my colleagues, I'd say, "You know, I'd much rather lose one of you than our best staff member. (laughs) We can replace you, but I've seen what happens when you lose a great staff member." It's hard. It's really hard to get a person as good again. And you may almost never. So, I said it with a smile and a laugh, but I think they understood I was kind of--if you're chair, you know, who's more important to have, you know? If you ask me to pick between you and Sandy, get out. (laughs) I mean, I'm joking, sort of. But sort of not. I just think with all the pressures, budgetary pressures, and all the other sorts of pressures on departments now, you have to think about what makes a department function as a unit best, while still not, you know, you don't turn your back on the quality of scholarship. Because the quality of scholarship affects everything. You know, are your undergraduates, and especially your graduate students, being taught by a first-rate scholar? It makes a difference. People don't often understand that. They say well, anybody, you know, who's learned enough can teach about Michelangelo, etcetera. But can they 02:51:00teach students to understand how what we know about Michelangelo is shaped by a lot of other things? Or that knowledge of the past isn't just clear-cut facts? That knowledge is a construction. And sort of who can teach them how to deal with the complexity of that. And that's important for everything. It's important for life today and living in the political world we live in and the construction of reality. So there's just a lot of things, you know. If all you were doing was teaching facts, we could do it with computers. But you're also teaching students the nature of arguments, the nature of subjectivity in the creation of histories. And just how difficult even it is to interpret visual media. So there's a lot of things you want in a faculty member besides having a lot of knowledge. That's kind of, you know, is not the most important thing. It's not who knows the most about Michelangelo; it's who approaches Michelangelo in the most sophisticated way, and can teach students to do that. And then has broader applications in everything they do, I think. Jobs, everything. If we do it right.

GS:How much do new hires and budget cuts and who's department chair dictate the morale of the department, too?

GP:I mean, it's a really good question. Absolutely budget cuts strongly affected the morale of our department. I think I talked about this last time, too. Early in my second time as chair with the big budget cuts, it really, really hurt morale. And I might have needed to have done things a little bit different in sort of leading people through the shock of that. And so, yeah. I think if you have, I know this mostly from rumors of other departments that have had chairs that have wanted to be too dictatorial or weren't interested in thinking through decisions, just wanted to get it done. You know, that can really hurt morale. I don't think we've had chairs in my memory who did that. Most of them, they really tried hard. They really tried hard. But you know, in a department 02:54:00our size, even one or two faculty, can make problems. And if you have people who are, for one reason or another, always finding reasons to be disgruntled or whatever. I don't want to go into too much of that. But yeah, you can have people who, more than the chair, create climate issues and create morale issues.

You know, but the tighter the budgets get, money does become a bone of contention. Right now, in fact, later this afternoon I'm chairing a meeting over a certain resource to support graduate students. And already, even though I told people do not make comments online, save it for the meeting, somebody did. And somebody else snapped back. You know. Money is touchy when it's tight. Support for graduate student money is very touchy. It's almost as touchy as parking. (laughs) No. Parking is a very touchy issue among faculty, but not between faculty, because we don't determine anything. Anyway.

GS:Does the university and the department pay attention to mental health, too? Especially, we're currently coming out of winter. Is there anything your department does to maintain student and professor mental health?

GP:Not that I know of. No. I mean, I don't even know what we would do. I confess, that's just sort of alien to my way of thinking about things. I'm not even sure what we could do, given our resources. We certainly try to make students aware of what resources are available on campus. But no, I can't imagine it.

GS:It seems like there's a lot of components about being a professor, in specifically your case, for balancing publishing and teaching and volunteering and service. And that's added on to personal life, too. How have you successfully balanced having a personal life with so much time dedicated to the department?

GP:Well, you go through periods. Sometimes you have more time to spend with your family. And when my family was younger, there was probably more. In 02:57:00that phase of being a junior faculty member and having to get tenure, and your children are young and you have to spend a lot of time with them. There's some tugs and takes. I mean, one of the benefits I've had is we're not really a dual career family. My wife has worked, mostly for financial necessity from time to time. But I think it's much harder for my colleagues who are trying to deal with both having fulltime careers. And small children. But people do it all the time.

So in my case, but I have to say, and I'll honestly say, push comes to shove, family comes first. And always has for me. Getting married wasn't an afterthought. I was married long before I became an academic. I had children before I became an academic. That's not quite true. My son was born while I was in graduate school. But anyway, yeah, so for me it wasn't like, okay, do I deny these responsibilities in my career to benefit my children? Well, my career benefits my family. And so you just figure out the balances there. So, no, I feel I've been luckier than a lot of people. There are so many people who have dual careers. And, you know, who's going to be responsible for what? And a kid gets sick, and who stays home or how do you find somebody to take--yeah, I mean, we had a little of that when I was younger. But I just can't imagine it, honestly. I really respect and admire those people who manage to deal with that. Yeah. So.

GS:Was your family able to go with you on your sabbaticals?

GP:Oh, always. Yeah. I wouldn't go without them. Especially since my wife's Japanese and the sabbaticals are spent in Japan. That would be really--(laughs) I'm not sure we would still be married if I had done that. No. I mean, it was never a question for me whether we would do that or not. And fortunately, we've always had just enough money to make it all work and not go too far into debt. And you know, so, yeah. I don't think I have any really interesting answers to this, because it's been fairly straightforward for me. I mean, yeah, there were times when you say okay, I can't go see my daughter play volleyball because I really have to go to this talk or something. But you know, they're academic kids. They understand this by the time they're in high school or something.

And fortunately, my kids are also the kind that aren't very needy, you know. As long as her friends were there, my daughter was pretty happy. I mean, yeah, she wanted us there sometimes. But, yeah.

GS:Shifting a little bit back to the time that you were chair twice, you've talked a little bit about how the two instances had some major differences to them. Is there anything that stayed pretty consistent?

GP:Well, certainly my colleagues were continuing. And those were known personalities. And I don't want to make this sound bad, and they were known problems. As well as known benefits. We all present problems and benefits in an organization. So, you know, there was continuity in that way, though there were new faces and new people. And so, yeah. Issues with the museum continued to be what they were. Maybe slightly exacerbated in a couple of cases. You know, and just fundamental things like dealing with the classrooms. A whole bunch of issues remained the same. But you know, mostly there was a lot of change, for the good as well as the bad. You know, our support from Joan Mirviss and some other donors had expanded. And we could see some possibilities for the future. So things on the sort of giving side had had to really gotten better. You know, and dealing with the deans. That wasn't fundamentally different, even though people had changed. You had to adjust to different approaches to things. And just the campus as a whole. You know, the balance between being chair, teaching your classes, family, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, there were different nuances. But I don't think they were altogether different. Yeah. I can't say that I feel that things were completely different. But they were very different, for any number of reasons. Either dramatically or in nuance.

GS:Is there anything you're especially proud about your times as chair? Something you facilitated?

GP:No. You know, I just felt like, I felt like I did the job well my 03:03:00first time as chair. I felt like we had had some issues before I was chair. The chair before me was good. But there still remained issues. And I think I did sort of try to change the culture a bit. And I actually have the personality whereby I can kind of, I don't want to say diffuse, but sort of cause tension to go down a bit. I mean, I was even said to be at one point the Xanax of the department. In other words, I don't react dramatically. And I think that's kind of important in a chair. You know, if a chair gets too caught up in the emotions of the moment or the drama of the moment. And I just don't do that. It's not in my nature. I mean, I may feel it and I may go home and grouse to Sayoko. But yeah, you know, I don't--and I think the fact that I was in some really tough times, like with budget cuts and stuff. Really just kind of stay on an even keel and try to guide my colleagues through understanding what was happening and what it meant, and not get too caught up in okay, we're just going to sulk or we're just going to rant about how unfair this is. I'm trying to think if there's anything. I just don't kind of think of it that way.

I think I did the job well. I think I did the job better my first time through. And how much of that is because of Sandy as a wonderful administrator, I don't know. But I think I did it quite well. I think the second time, you know, I did it because no one else would. Or no one else that you would really want to do it would do it. And then the budget, got smacked in the face with the budget cuts. So I was never sure of, it was just like, by the end of the third year, or even during the third year, I was just, I just cannot wait to get away from this. And I felt like it was less, I was being less, I just had to be reactive, rather than progressive and thinking about leading the department into the 03:06:00future. I had five years, too, to do it. And this was more like how can I hold things together with these budget cuts and the personality conflicts that are heightened by the tensions of the budget cuts and all of this. So, yeah, I felt I was just kind of maintaining. And I would tell people by the last year. I said, you really need to get somebody fresh. Somebody more forward-looking who isn't kind of just tired of the whole thing.

Would it have been different if we hadn't had those big budget cuts? I think so. I don't think I did a bad job. But I think by the time I left, I had sort of seen the department through the crisis. It was time for somebody who was very positive about promoting the department. You know what I mean? And was really ready to get in there and be fresh. And to all parties, promote the department and take it forward.

GS:How do you prepare the next chair when you're leaving, as far as gifting all of this information you've gained without overwhelming them from the start?

GP:Well, you know, there are kind of two theories on this. And one is that you get out of town, so you're not sort of looking over their shoulder.

GS:Oh, literally.

GP:Yeah.

GS:Okay.

GP:I mean, yeah. I mean, actually I left the country the second time. So, that's not quite fair. But yeah, you know, what you try to do is you figure out who's going to be the next chair. And you try to prepare them for it. If you're in a bigger department, you have an associate chair. So that's kind of what I tried to do with a couple of my colleagues who I thought might be chair. And yeah, I really tried to bring them in and sort of make them associate chair, if not in real name, in sort of practice. But short of that, it's very, very hard.

And now we come back to, gosh, her ears must be burning. But you know, Sandy. It wasn't such a big deal, because the administrator provides the continuity. Chairs would often rotate every three years. So who provides the continuity? A great administrator. And, yes, the previous chair sort of, you can go to, if they're in the country. But the chair that followed me, I mean, even though I'm in Japan, we're all connected still. We talked on the phone. We 03:09:00shared email. We put files up on Box. But unless you start going to some of these meetings and so forth. And that's the other thing. You invite them to. You say, look, why don't you come to this meeting of chairs, or that meeting with the deans. And that's the best way to do it. But you're really asking a lot of a person. They're usually not being compensated for it. And it can be a big bite out of your time. But yeah. You know, I mean, it sounds bad, but you can sometimes know who's going to follow you. Not because you're grooming them and picking them out; you just know. Especially in a smaller department where there's usually not a race. It's like who in the heck can we get to do this? And you do it by in the last year or the last semester, really trying to bring them onboard. And then maybe over the summer, working much more intensively with them.

GS:Have you sat on any other committees? Or meetings that interact more with the whole campus?

GP:Oh, God, yes. I was on divisional committee which, as you may know, there's the humanities division, the science division. And that's for the whole campus. And that's the main, they do a couple of things. Actually, I don't know if they any longer review course proposals. They used to, when I was on it. But what they mostly do is review tenure cases. And I was on that for three years, and chair of it. So that's kind of eye-opening. But that's really kind of nice, because you get to see a broad picture of who's coming up into the department, you know. And you meet people, really interesting people. And smart people. And you learn where other smart people may be, so you can go hunt them out. No. But it's an important job. And I did that.

And you know, I've been on a couple of committees for campus-wide scholarships. I've been on the East Asian studies committee. I was chair of the Center for East Asian Studies. I was director of religious studies for two years. Right now, I'm on their executive committee. And probably the hardest, in some ways, the hardest thing I did, and I'm going to forget what the name of it is, the Student Misconduct Committee. I served, and you looked at, basically 03:12:00you adjudicated, a team of three people adjudicated accusations of student misconduct, either academic or nonacademic. And so, academic was okay. You can figure out fairly clearly from the evidence whether they cheated, they'd actually cheated or not or whatever, plagiarized. The nonacademic was much tougher, involving things like drugs or sexual assault and things like that. You know, but it's important work. And you know, we did our best.

Another thing I worked on was, what was it called? The faculty, I did this quite often, the Faculty Appeals Committee. Which is students who were going to be not dismissed, but, what is the word? Forced to take a leave of absence for a semester or a year, because of their academic record. They can appeal. And they can explain circumstances and why they should be given another chance, you know. It might be okay, they bring in documentation on certain tragic things in their life and how now they're seeing a professional and are ready to go beyond that. Or it may just be a desperation attempt not to be--what is the word? It's not expelled, it's just temporary. Anyway.

GS:Did you ever see any overlaps of patterns as far as what types of students were being brought before the board, especially when you're working with the Odyssey program for how the university sees different minorities being brought before these committees in different patterns?

GP:I actually, in the student misconduct arena, I mostly did not, it doesn't stand out in my mind that I saw a particularly large number of minority students. You know, maybe just one or two in the time I was serving on it for three years. In the other committee, the Faculty Appeals Committee, I did, I think, see just a somewhat larger number of minority students who, 03:15:00you might imagine, many of them come from more difficult circumstances. And making the adjustment to college was tough. But again, you know, you had to sort of in the end look at the record. But also look in the reasons for the record. But just because someone has a good reason is not enough. You have to look at okay, what are the corrections that are in place for the person to be successful? And that's what we really looked for. It wasn't that you had a drug problem. Yeah, right. You had to say, okay, here's my documentation. I've been sober for six months and I will continue to be sober. I actually don't remember anything as dramatic as that. But that's just a kind of easy illustration of the issue.

So, but yeah. I mean, it wasn't primarily African American, I don't think. There were a number of Asian students and Asian-American students who ran into issues. And I'm still not 100% sure why. Part of it maybe they were much more likely to appeal. They had more pressure, because of cultural reasons, from their parents. You know, it would be much worse for them in the eyes of their families to be dismissed for a semester. What is that word? Anyway. Do you know what I mean? So, you can't say, okay, more of those kids were getting into academic trouble. Because it's up to them whether they want to appeal or not. And so there were some cultural reasons why some students might appeal more than students in a different group. And, you know, I don't know if there's been a study of that at all. But it was interesting, I have to say, over the time I was there, I became less and less easygoing. Because you'd see the same students again. Or you would get, you know, you'd get, next time you're around then they would tell you how many students sort of won their appeal and then flunked out. (laughs) So as I said, the real critical thing became not what was the quality of your excuse, but what is the quality of the correction?

GS:Was there ever a component of UW taking direct action as far as facilitating those long-term corrections? Like seeking out, in your little example, like AA meetings for students. Or going any step that would expect 03:18:00long-term change.

GP:Oh, sure. Any student who went on appeal had to meet regularly with an advisor. A campus advisor, an L&S advisor. So, yeah, I mean, they were, and, you know, there were different mechanisms put in place. Didn't always work. But sometimes it did.

And you know, we sat on these committees. The faculty members really made the decision. But we also sat in there with a professional advisor, L&S advisor. So we consulted with them on their experience. We relied on their professional experience. We didn't have it, so, you know, I think it was, I think it's a decent system. You know, it's a decent system. I mean, I think you could argue that you shouldn't even have it, because the students aren't being expelled. They're being asked to take a year off and get their act together. Or a semester, and get their act together. But on the other hand, for some students, even a semester is going to create great problems for them in terms if they're on a scholarship program or foreign students with visas and issues like that. So there is a reason to have it. As imperfect as it is. The consequences for at least some of the students are just so great.

GS:Being on so many different committees and a lot of service to the school and university, how have you avoided becoming jaded?

GP:(laughs) I think, I think you can become jaded. And I think in certain things, I have become jaded. Although that's probably too strong a word. There are a lot of things I'm tired of. But those kinds of committees, I'm not tired of. I don't do them as much, because I think it's time for other people to do it. But yeah, if they got desperate and they really wanted me to do it, I would. There are rewards to that. And when you see students struggling and having problems, and maybe you can be part of a mechanism for helping them, I'll never be jaded of that.

What jades me more is people. You know, I'm not going to go into it. But people who make problem unnecessarily, and having to deal with that. And you know, and people being just, I want to say, grow up. And that's all I'll say on 03:21:00that. But that has made me tired. Dealing with budgets has made me tired. Even now, I'm not chair, but I'm head of the budget committee. And our current chair is from outside. And bless him, but he doesn't know our budgets and he hasn't dealt with these kinds of budgets before. And our administrator, who seems very good, our newest one, she's been struggling, quite rightly. There's nothing else that could have happened except to struggle. Because as much experience as she's had, she's never dealt with the variety of budgets we have. And you know, there's a learning curve. So I feel like I'm still tied to budgets. But I won't be next year. Because it's a rotating position, and I'll rotate off. And so, that's fine. I'll give a little bit of advice if anybody wants it. But by that time, our new administrator will be much more on top of things, and it will be fine. But yeah, you don't get jaded helping people. Especially those who most need help. I don't. You get jaded--well, you know. (laughs) I would just say, enough's enough. It's not jaded. It's just like, really? I'm just getting fed up with this.

Yeah, I mean, if there were, I'm on the executive committee for religious studies. And it's a great group of people who are basically volunteering to be on this. Because there is not big, religious studies is a program. It has two fulltime staff members. But it has a lot of affiliates. And affiliates have been asked and have been willing to do this. So to be with a bunch of volunteers who just have the good of the program, that's the only reason they're doing it, I'll always take pleasure in that, working with groups like that. Especially since very positive things have been happening for a variety of reasons. And the director is a wonderful person. So, yeah, I'll never be tired of that.

GS:You've mentioned previously that you plan to retire in the next two or three years?

GP:Two.

GS:Two years. How do you start walking away from some of these things that you enjoy or don't enjoy, and how do you prepare for retirement?

GP:Oh, I don't see any problem. To me, it's easy. You know, I know my position will be rehired, because it's a named professorship. That would be my big regret, if I was going to go away and it wasn't going to be replaced. And you know, you can't start thinking that the world is going to collapse if you leave. The university got along without me, and it will get along, before I came, and it will get along fine when I'm done.

And as far as the things I really like to do, you know, I'll do the Odyssey program probably as long as I am mentally competent, if they want me. And I would happily volunteer to do some things for the museum, and so forth. You know, I think there are ways that I will remain doing things I really like to do. And I will probably even continue to do some scholarship. Though I think it will be less what you might call standard scholarship. I'm thinking of a couple of websites or blogs I would like to put together on things that really interest me. But I don't want to do the kind of hardcore scholarship needed for academic publications. There's just a lot of stuff I know or have access to knowledge of that I would love to see people know much more about. History of Japanese ceramics, and other things. But I don't want to get so deeply involved in the sort of academic scholarly side of it. So think of it as kind of like outreach. I really will enjoy a variety of kind of outreach activities to a broader population.

Because as long as I've been doing this, I confess, I have been a happy fish out of water. But I've always felt a little bit like a fish out of water. Not in the sense that I don't belong in a big university. But it's as I said. The kind of upbringing I had, you know, the idea of being, being an elitist, or being in a field I think has tinges of elitism, or has been colored by elitism. 03:27:00I wouldn't say it's a big problem for me. But it's a little nagging problem for me. You know what I mean? So that's partly probably the reason I've been so willing to become engaged with students with problems or with the Odyssey program, to serve a broader population. (laughs) So, that's kind of a confession I probably shouldn't have given, but there it is.

Yeah, no, you know, I've been very happy. But there's a little bit of me that wants to go in a different direction. Plus, you know, I want to do things like make pots and God knows what. Do more birdwatching. You know, people kill me when they say, "Oh, I don't know what I'm going to do in retirement." That's just pathetic. I've got so many things I want to do. So I don't really think walking away will be hard, because I won't be completely walking away from the parts I like best. And I'll still be friends with the people on campus I'm friends with, and go to events. And I've told one of my colleagues I really like, I said, "You know, when I retire, and in fact, I already am, I'm old enough to be a senior guest auditor. And I'm going to haunt your classes." Because, you know, I think they're really interesting. (laughs) So, yeah, I'm serious about this. I'm going to take a course on dinosaurs or something.

GS:Have you seen a trend within your own department of people maintaining relationships? Or has it been mostly once people retire, they kind of just leave?

GP:It has varied a lot. You know, when one of my colleagues retired, even moved to California, and we basically never saw him again. Although, interestingly, his granddaughter became a student of mine as an undergraduate. So, anyway. But yeah, you know, mostly people keep in some touch. I think I mentioned Jim Dennis before. Did I tell you what I thought about his retirement? He retired at a very reasonable age, what I think of. Still in his sixties. Maybe sixty-eight, I don't know. And then he proceeded to do things he wanted to do. He bought a house in Germany and fixed it up with the help of the government's money there. He'd bought a Frank Lloyd Wright house here and fixed it up. He wrote another book. But at his own pace. So I think that Jim Dennis did, he did 03:30:00retirement in a very, I think, positive way. And something to be, to envy, almost. Not that I would want to do the same things. But, you know.

Other people just waited too long to retire. And sort of just held on and held on, so by the time they retired, the decline was fairly fast. So they didn't get to experience, I think, the fullest benefits of retirement. But, you know, we keep contact. My colleague, Barbara Buenger, Suzy, is around a lot. In fact, we were birdwatching together over the weekend. So, yeah, there are some I see quite often. Because they're friends, and you have activities you do together besides be in a department. And I think others of my colleagues keep much closer contact with some other retired people. So it's always interesting to speculate when you know somebody's going to retire, how much will you see them again.

GS:Do you plan on spending more time in Japan? Or staying in Madison?

GP:Yeah. (laughs) If I had enough money, we might retire in Japan. But we don't. So we'll stay in Madison and go to Japan as much and as often as we can afford to do, probably. We're not going to be, we're not going to be really well off when we retire. We won't be poor. But I would have to have--there are possibilities. There are possibilities. There are things I want to do. I still have family down in the Deep South. I've thought of contacting Florida State University and saying, "Hey, look. How would you like a visiting professor for cheap for a semester?" Then I could spend a spring semester out of Madison in the snow and have just, get just enough money to make it financially possible. And then get back up here before the summer hit down there. And so, you know, if I could figure out ways to go to Japan and be compensated a small amount, it would make it much easier. But still, we will go to Japan. Just how long can we afford to sort of live there for a while. That's kind of up in the air till we see what our financial situation's going to be like.

GS:I thought a good closing question might be as far as where you see the future of art history. Specifically with this department, but also maybe in 03:33:00the humanities after you retire. What is its trajectory?

GP:I haven't the foggiest notion. I'm not a futurist. As far as the department goes, though, I think we've just gotten confirmation that someone we want to hire is willing to come. And you know, we're excited about that. And my two junior colleagues now, one of them is about to get tenure. Just got voted positively by the divisional committee. They're both good scholars, wonderful people, people who want to do right by their students, by the program. And this new person looks promising in the same way. So I feel very good about the department over the long term. We've got some humps to get over. So, you know, I just think we need the renewal of good people.

So what is the future of art history? It's a really interesting question. And here's where I'm sort of divided. You know, art history has sort of given way to visual and material culture studies. And for me, to some degree, that's great. Because you see I have kind of issues on the elitism of art, the elitist aspects of art and art history.

On the other hand, you know, visual culture and material culture are such broadly defined things, and can have such a range of disciplinary methodologies. You know, one of the rallying cries in academe has been for quite a while, interdisciplinarity, we must be interdisciplinary. Because we don't want everybody siloed. So my concern has been when does interdisciplinarity become no discipline? In other words, are we bringing together disciplines, or are we just sort of taking any sort of sense of rigor that belongs to discipline out of it?

The other worry I have, quite frankly, is rather than true interdisciplinarity, the sort of taking the strengths of different disciplines, it's sort of all being subsumed under a kind of, in some cases, critical theory stream 03:36:00where everything is sort of being read in the same way. Or an overly anthropological.

And here comes the kind of, where I contradict myself. One of the deep pleasures of studying painting, for example, is thinking about it, the painting itself, and what its meanings are, and what its significances are, and exploring that really deeply. It probably comes out of my literature background where, you know, you delve into the poem for all its worth, and then do that kind of analysis. So, is some of that going to be lost? In other words, I would hate to see bodies of work becoming just kind of illustrations of a general principle, rather than things--in other words, are the questions begun by the work of art and your engagement with it? Or are the questions initiated by an overarching body of theory to which you apply on top of those works? I'm not saying that the latter is invalid and that interesting work can't be done that way. I just worry about if interdisciplinarity as a concept is taken to too far an extreme.

And it hasn't been, in our department. There's a mix. And people are doing good work in different ways. And I would like to see that continue. I'd really like to see that continue. Because I like the opening up of things that visual culture studies and material culture studies does. But I kind of want to see the variety of approaches, including those of art history more traditionally, continue to flourish. And the augmenting and augmenting each other rather than becoming just, I don't know, too homogenized under theoretical structures.

So, where is art history going? It's going to be smaller, in general. You know, PhD programs are going to have to shrink. And some of them are going to have to disappear. There are just not enough jobs. And it is criminal to keep convincing students, or keep, I shouldn't say that. Students, most graduate students are adults. They make these decisions. But let's say over-encouraging 03:39:00them in pursuing something that is ultimately going to be frustrating. I mean, I always tell students if you can think of something else you would like to do besides go to graduate school in art history, you should not go into a graduate program in art history. But if the opposite is true, if this is what really, you just feel like you have to do no matter how it turns out, sure, come on, let's do it. Because you know, you never know where things are going to lead.

My graduate student, I think I can say her name, Laura Mueller. You know, she came into the program. She had less Japanese training than I had thought, but that was my own fault for not investigating enough. She struggled. Then she told me, she said, "You know, Gene, I'm going to sell my car. I'm going to cash in whatever I can. And I'm going to Japan to the Inter-University Center." And that's what she did. She borrowed money from her family, she sold her car, she did all of this. And she went to the Inter-University Center in Japan, which is the best place to get training in modern Japanese. And she came out of it completely different. Super Japanese. Very--and that just changes everything. You can do everything much more efficiently. Reading and talking with people. So she did that. And she made lots of contacts there. And so, you know, in the end, she got her PhD. But really, academe was not her strength. Writing a long, dense, academic book was never going to be her strength. But she had done a very successful exhibition with the Chazen. So she had lots of talents. She got a job for a while as the private curator for a wealthy Japanese art collector in New York, until he lost interest in it. And then she applied for a job as the art curator for the Portland Japanese Gardens, which has a nice--well, actually, it does a lot of exhibitions with borrowed material. But is a very responsible position. So that's where she is now. So could we have imagined in a million years that this is where Laura would have wound up? No. But that's what she really wanted to do. She persevered. She made sacrifices.

And so, you know, you always feel like well, I can't say to a student, "Your 03:42:00chances of getting a job are very poor." But you should say, "Well, yeah, if you don't have something special about you, and if you're not able to get out and be flexible and promote yourself, you know, yeah, you shouldn't do this. If you can only be happy getting a job at a fairly big university teaching Japanese art history or whatever your field is, do not come." And that's just going to get worse. Well, I don't know. Maybe it's reached its low point in terms of job opportunities for people with PhDs in art history. I don't know that. But even now, even if there weren't even fewer jobs in the future, there are too many people coming out with PhDs.

All those jokes are, to some degree, there's enough truth in them. When I was in college, it used to be the joke was, "Where do you find somebody with a PhD in Russian literature? Working at a Russian coffee shop." (laughs) Or tea shop, I guess, is the stereotype. You know, there's enough truth in those to be painful. And we have to be cognizant of it. And the university, because of budget cuts, has been insisting on what they call rightsizing our graduate programs. Letting in fewer people. Funding them better while they're here so at least they don't come out in sizable debt. And if we can't do that, I don't think we should have a graduate program, you know.

GS:How do you balance that with the desire to introduce undergrads to the field of study?

GP:That's a really good question. I mean, I really enjoy introducing students to Japanese art history. But partly as a vehicle to introducing them to Japanese culture and Japan, Japanese history. It's an interesting way for them to get into that. Or in some cases, students who already know about those things, to give them an added dimension to it. And I to some degree enjoy getting students interested in art history as an endeavor. You know, what it's about and what it does. But I would say the larger part is more like Japan-specific, for me. And I really enjoy that. I really like that. But I also enjoy teaching them to think about images. Or to think about objects and what our relationship is to them and how that has changed. And how to read images. Because that's the world we live in. It's full of images. I just read a really scary thing about deep fakes. The fact that you make one person, only experts can tell whether the person speaking in a digital medium is actually that person. Or they've used these sort of mask--anyway, there's technology involved so that somebody could do an image of you online, actually looks very natural, speaking and saying things you would never say. So, anyway. So, you know, we live in a world where understanding the potentials and the profit in reading images and understanding images is really, really important.

GS:Was there anything you wanted to add or comment further on?

GP:I don't think so.

GS:Okay. Well then, thank you so much and good luck with your retirement.

GP:Thank you.

GS:And ceramics, and maybe a few paleontology courses.

GP:Yeah. Not only paleontology. All sorts of things. Philosophy.

GS:Perfect. Thank you so much.

GP:You're welcome.

End Second Interview Session. End Interview.