Transcript
Index
00:00:00 - Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
00:00:18 - Steudel was born in Providence RI on September 25, 1946, but shortly thereafter moved to Dubuque IA, where her grandparents lived. She mostly grew up in Freeport IL.
00:01:48 - KS talked about being the first person in her immediate family to have a college degree, though they valued education. She described her family as “out-doorsy,” which engendered a love for animals in her. Her family had high expectations, so she enjoyed and did well in school and sports. But she recalled being mildly depressed in HS for a while, because all the women she knew were teachers, nurses, or housewives, none of which occupation appealed to her.
00:05:48 - KS discussed going to UW-Madison because the family was living in WI at the time and she’d committed to going to the major university in whatever state they lived. She recalled loving life in Madison and the academics at UW.
00:07:01 - Though KS was against the Vietnam War, she thought both side should be able to express their opinions, and hence wasn’t a “fervent demonstrator.” Since the turmoil came at the end of her time, she remembered mainly keeping duplicate copies of her data at home, being tear- gassed a couple times, and being involved in sports.
00:09:36 - KS talked about her decision to go into zoology. During two years of majoring in education—which her father wanted but she didn’t enjoy—she kept her grade-point low enough to not be admitted to the teacher training program. So when she married in her junior year and moved with her husband to Milwaukee, she transferred to UW-Milwaukee (UW-M), which she hated because of the lower quality of courses.
00:13:18 - She recalled getting a job with Neil Tappen (a physical anthropologist), getting hooked on human evolution, beginning to hang out with anthropologists, and Tappen’s encouragement that she could go to graduate school (though she wasn’t thinking of it in terms of a university career). She got a master's there, and then transferred to Madison, where she worked with John Robinson and her husband got a master's in engineering.
00:18:11 - KS reminisced about graduate school, which she loved. She discussed courses in genetics and described herself as “a maniac” in grad school—her idea of a good time was to spend weekends at the computing center. She TAed at UW-M, but couldn’t recall what she did at Madison.
00:20:42 - She detailed a trip she took to Europe and Africa to study hominid fossils under an NSF dissertation improvement grant. She mused about being daunted at first, being out on her own, but coming to enjoy it. She also remembered the privilege of being able to work with well-known scholars on the same specimens in Kenyan museums. She shared reminiscences about chatting about fossils after dinners at the hotel, the remarkable (and sexist) character of Louis Leakey, and her trip to South Africa.
00:28:22 - Back at UW, she remembered beginning to think that she could actually make a career in academia and getting a number of job offers, one of which was as a lecturer at UW. In keeping with the norms of the time, she chose the UW job so that her husband could take a job at Marquette, but became a professor in the third year.
00:30:58 - She observed that people mistakenly assumed she knew how things worked at the faculty level, since she’d done her PhD there. So she outlined difficulties she had with getting tenure, since the chair wasn’t completely up front with her.
00:32:24 - She discussed the unpleasantness of her assistant professor days because of being the first woman in the dept. She wisely stayed out of M. Namenwirth’s lawsuit, but recalled her colleagues expectations—that she would only teach, not research—not out of malice, but preconceived gender notions. She cited some examples of ways she was treated differently as a woman—after toying with applying for a Med School gross anatomy job, the chair figured her tenure wasn’t a problem.
00:39:20 - She noted that it was very different currently, with 50/50 hiring and a total of 25 women faculty. When she started, most of the grants were being netted by the Zoology Research side (cell/molecular biology), which meant that the ecology/evolution side of the dept did most of the teaching and generated two little worlds in the dept. This reflected a more laid-back granting/research environment in the 1970s, in which getting outside grants wasn’t as critical.
00:45:18 - She taught Zoology 101, a 3-credit course offered for about 900 students a semester that early on she taught entirely by herself; organic evolution, in the Biocore program, and animal structure design. She discussed changes in her teaching strategy—initially she only lectured, but increasingly used interaction, group learning, and lab experience. She contemplated using clicker technology— interactive software that allowed the instructor to know what students were thinking.
00:50:02 - KS was happy with the quality of undergraduate data-collection in her lab. She commented about her best grad student.
00:52:02 - She started out working on human evolution, extrapolating (from physics, etc.) the significance of substantial differences in the body size of fossils on evolutionary theory. She also explained how an early study on locomotive physiology had implications for her early research, which was based on biomechanics. So she abandoned physical anthropology for locomotive morphology and physiology—she discussed the results of this research.
00:57:56 - She discussed taking a sabbatical in 1994, during which she refocused her locomotive physiology research on early hominids. She suspected that her return to physical anthropology had a certain “venerability factor,” leading to her reviewing more publications and getting good responses from her work.
01:03:07 - KS discussed various committees she’d chaired or worked on. She thought she learned early to choose committees that weren’t “turn-the-crank” (enforcing standards) ones, but liked interesting ones on which one could accomplish something. She noted the benefits of being chair—coursework reduction, a postdoc, and the ability to do something significant—and its downsides—that one’s life was a little out of one’s control. She discussed the climate of the dept and the talent of its administrators.
01:09:34 - Steudel found it hard to generalize beyond her experience, which was that during the 1970s a lot of residual “unconscious sexism” existed. This seemed to have changed in terms of hiring.
01:12:31 - KS talked about her current husband and stepdaughter, her family in Freeport IL and Seattle, their living arrangements, and how she balanced work and pleasure in the summers. She discussed her recent interest in learning yoga.
Direct segment link:
https://ohms.library.wisc.edu%2Fviewer.php%3Fcachefile%3DSteudel.K.759.xml#segment0
https://ohms.library.wisc.edu%2Fviewer.php%3Fcachefile%3DSteudel.K.759.xml#segment0
Direct segment link:
https://ohms.library.wisc.edu%2Fviewer.php%3Fcachefile%3DSteudel.K.759.xml#segment18
https://ohms.library.wisc.edu%2Fviewer.php%3Fcachefile%3DSteudel.K.759.xml#segment18
