[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

PAMELA DEAN:

This is Pamela Dean. The date is the twentieth of June, 1989. I'm talking with Sharon Rose Powell.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I'm Sharon Rose Powell, and I was born in North Carolina and grew up in North Carolina and, of course, went to college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My father graduated from the University of North Carolina so I had been hearing about Chapel Hill since the time I was quite young. My mother took me to classes when she continued her education at Women's College, which is now UNC-G. She didn't complete her degree until after she was married and had two of her three children. But I do remember, I was probably no more than three or four years of age, I used to go to classes with her, so I was introduced to college life quite young. I was always intrigued by it. My father is a certified public accountant, and my mother was a teacher. Now she's head of her own public relations firm in Florida. My parents are divorced, and while I was raised in Greensboro, at the time of my parents' divorce, as a young adolescent, I moved with my mother and sister and brother to Charlotte, where I completed high school in Charlotte before attending Chapel Hill.

PAMELA DEAN:

Why did you choose to go to Chapel Hill rather than what was still more common, going to Greensboro?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

It had never occurred to me that I would not go to UNC at Chapel Hill. As I said, my father went there. I remember listening to the radio and hearing Choo-Choo Justice score touchdowns, and that's all I'd ever heard of. It's really quite

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fortunate that they admitted women when I enrolled as a freshman because I don't know what I would have done if I had not gone to Chapel Hill. I'd never even considered looking at another school. Today, I have a son who's looking at at least eight to ten colleges. I was spared that. I applied to Chapel Hill, and that's where I knew I wanted to be.

PAMELA DEAN:

You didn't even apply to other schools. This was it.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

No, that was it. When I discovered that you could only apply in certain medically-related areas as a freshmen and because I had had interests always in education and psychology, but I had had some trouble with my knees coming out of joint, so I'd had some experience working with physical therapists. I knew enough about it to ask to be admitted into to the physical therapy program, knowing, at the time, that that really was not the area that I'd probably end up in, but it was my way of entering as a freshman. I had only visited the campus once briefly for an interview, and other than that, I really didn't know what to expect. I had not been aware that only ten percent of the freshman class were going to be women. I guess I had been told that I would get a great education and that it would be a wonderful place to live and grow for four years. And, it was not so far away from home that it was terribly frightening, and yet, it was far enough away to really begin to develop some independence, so it had all the ingredients that I was looking for in a college.

PAMELA DEAN:

You lived in Spencer, is that right?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes, I certainly did, and that's one of the very special memories I have of Chapel Hill is 218 Spencer Dorm, which is where I roomed. It's interesting, when I came to Chapel Hill, I arrived early. That's pretty typical of me, coming to a place early, probably because I needed the security of checking the place out, and I met another young woman from Lenoir, North Carolina. Just as I was walking up the steps, there she was, and we hit it off immediately. She's very warm and friendly, and we both unpacked. I was on the third floor, and she was on the second floor, and we together decided that we would go around and spend the rest of the day, after we said good-bye to our parents, we would spend the rest of the day helping girls get into their rooms, knowing how scary it must be for them as it was for us. So we went around and helped girls unpack and just sort of became a welcoming committee for everybody in the dorm. It was just a wonderful way to meet all the girls from day one, and they were from all over. They were from all over North Carolina, from towns that I'd never even heard of because I had not really travelled very far in the state. And they were from New York, and I'll never forget Suzanne Aiello from Brooklyn, New York with this heavy New York accent, and I fell in love with her the day I'd met her. I'd never known anybody with such an accent and such a manner, just a presence about her. She was quite frightened. She was one of the few girls on our hall who had a single, which meant that she didn't have a roommate, and so I really felt a particular interest in getting to know her. I didn't want her to feel isolated, and there were probably not

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that many girls, at least initially, that felt comfortable with Suzanne because she was different from the rest of us, and so it was a nice experience to get to know her. What was also interesting that first week of school, we were told, "You have a roommate, you're assigned a roommate, and there are no changes in that rule. You have to stick with that roommate for at least that first semester, if not the first year." They were strict about that, and my roommate, she was just a darling girl, but I remember the first night, she cried herself to sleep. The second night, she cried herself to sleep, and by the third night, I thought, "How in the world am I going to get past this?" I was so happy to be at Chapel Hill, and she was clearly so unhappy, and the good friend that I had met the first day, who was Frances Dayvault, also had a roommate who was really quite shy and quite distant and unhappy. We introduced our roommates to each other, Betty and Anne, and they really hit it off. They had a lot in common. Part of what they had in common was that they were both so shy and uncomfortable in this new situation.

PAMELA DEAN:

So they weren't threatening to each other.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

They weren't at all, and we also, Frances and I, in our talks with each other, discovered that we both had had mononucleosis that summer, and actually, I was still getting over it. My doctor wasn't even sure he was going to allow me to enter as a freshman because my resistance was down, and Franny had the same problem, needed to get to bed early. We both told our roommates that we were really going to have to have lights out fairly early because we both had mononucleosis. I don't think

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they knew what it was, but the sound of it scared them to death. They went to the "Den Mother," or whatever. I don't know that we called her a Den Mother, but maybe we did.

PAMELA DEAN:

I think they were hostesses at that time.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

It was a hostess, but it was something "mother."

PAMELA DEAN:

Dorm Mother?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Dorm Mother, something like that.

PAMELA DEAN:

House Mother?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes, House Mother. I think that's exactly what it was, and they, Anne and Betty, went to our House Mother and said, "Please, you've got to move us because we don't want to be with these two girls who have mononucleosis." They made the exception, so they were roommates. Frances and I got to room together. That's when I got down to second floor, to room 218. Anne and Betty roomed for all four years. They were best friends, and Frances and I have remained very, very close friends for all of our lives, so it just worked out. Living in Spencer was not just living in a dorm. This was really before the Residential College system, and yet Spencer had a lot of the flavor of a Residential College because first of all, it was a relatively small dorm. It was not like some of the much bigger dorms that the guys lived in like Eringhaus, these super-huge, impersonal places where people lived. You really could meet everyone on your hall, and we had meetings regularly. The other really special thing about Spencer was that we ate all of our meals together, and so there was this opportunity to meet everyone and talk to them on a regular basis through the year,

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and I found that to be very special. It was also nice being waited on by the senior guys who happened to be lucky enough to be waiters in our dorm.

PAMELA DEAN:

This was a coveted job assignment, I imagine.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

It was, and one story that I'll never forget, a group of us were at breakfast, and we were being waited on by this absolutely adorable senior. My roommate, Frances, when he finished serving us looked to us and said, "That's the guy I'm going to marry." And she did. That was literally the first week of school. She did not even date him for two years. He was already out of college and came back to the campus. It's really quite incredible. We all laughed. "Right, Frances. You're going to marry this guy." She did. She knew it, and she did. I found the girls in Spencer to be very diverse. There's another one, Karen, who was from Atlanta, and it was a chance for us to meet girls from different regions, but also with varied interests, and we were small in number.

We were often the only girl in our classes. I mean, I could be in a class with fifty, and I'd be the only girl, as a freshman, which I, quite frankly, did not mind so much. It was kind of fun, but you had the feeling of being in a small women's college in the middle of this large university campus. We were, of course, given a book of rules during our Orientation by our wonderful Dean of Women, Kitty Carmichael. Dean Carmichael sat down with us, not only as a large group of women, but she would come into each individual dorm and meet sometimes with just ten or fifteen of us, talking about the importance of the rules and what they were there for.

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Quite frankly, as a freshman, I didn't know anyone who challenged or questioned those rules. We simply accepted that that's the way it is, and it wasn't until later that I began to take a second look at that.

PAMELA DEAN:

Tell me about some of the rules and how she presented the rationale for them, if you could.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Again, keep in mind that we're living in the South at a time when being a lady and acting like a lady at all times was very important. Your demeanor, the way you dressed, the way you speak, those were the ways that people judged you, and not just your female peers, but the guys. We were still living in a time when guys expected women, also, to act like ladies, or rather, they might date you if you were wild and lived daringly, but you weren't going to be asked out more than once or twice. It was just the norm that being lady-like was accepted. The rules, many of them, revolved around academics, and they were there to ensure that we studied, that we took our studies seriously, and that there was a quiet time and place to study. It was not encouraged, because we were on a rather large campus, to do a lot of moving around at night, and I think partly for safety reasons and partly because of the University's in loco parentis philosophy about women, that you're better off in your own room, and so we had closed study hours. Monday through Thursday nights, we had to be in our rooms, and we were checked, from seven to nine, and we were expected to be studying. There was no music, no talking, and I don't ever remember breaking that rule.

PAMELA DEAN:

This was for freshmen. Was it for upper classmen as well?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes. I want to say yes because as a sophomore, it's interesting because I remember as a sophomore leaving my room more. But I have a feeling that was because you could sign out once a week and go someplace else to study. There was a church basement next door and there was the library, and I think, probably, I did that more as a sophomore, but my memory is that closed study in Spencer Dorm pertained to all women of all ages. We were primarily freshmen and then sophomores. We were the only freshmen in the dorm, but there were juniors and seniors in the dorm as well, and it was quiet wherever you went. We also had closing hours. We had to be in the dorm with the doors locked at eleven o'clock on weekdays and twelve or one o'clock on weekends, and maybe for special events, we could stay out until two. If it was one of the big dances, they'd let us stay out until two, but that was a big deal. If you were late, if you were five minutes late, you were penalized, and you would have to then stay in the next weekend. It never happened to me. I was just one of these women who lived by the rules, so I never questioned them or challenged them at that time, but I know girls who ended up having to stay in on Saturday night because they abused that rule. There was never ever any question of girls smoking or drinking in the dorm. It never even occurred to us, I don't think, that that might happen, or that you would even do that without people seeing you. It just didn't happen. There

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were other rules about dress. There was quite a bit of time taken to talk about how we dressed and that we dress appropriately and not dress provocatively. After all, we were a small number of women on a campus with a lot of men.

PAMELA DEAN:

Did Dean Carmichael say that?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes, oh absolutely. I remember Dean Carmichael having teas in her apartment, and I don't know how many women were invited to these teas, though, because starting as a freshman, I was very involved in Student Government, and I don't know whether it was just the women who were active on campus or whether she did this for all women. I do remember on several occasions sitting in her living room, which was filled with antiques and all kinds of interesting momentos and talking about the proper attitude and behavior for women on campus. I don't remember much discussion about disagreement on that. I think what she was saying was something that we all valued. Again, as a freshman and a sophomore, there were other rules that didn't make much sense to me, partly because I didn't see how they could be enforced. Those were things like you couldn't be in a room with a guy, an apartment. The guys were allowed to live in apartments, and you weren't allowed to be in an apartment, even in the living room of a guy's apartment, unless two other couples were present. That always struck me as kind of funny because how in the world would anybody know, but again, I think most of the women just sort of accepted that that was for your own protection, that that was not a moral issue as much as it was just a safety issue.

PAMELA DEAN:

Of course, as far as enforcement goes, there was the Honor Code. You were supposed to report yourself or other people that you knew had broken those rules.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

That's absolutely correct, and I think the way that girls were actually turned in was more, the factor was that they would end up being late. They wouldn't get back to the dorm on time, and they'd be locked out, and some girls would end up spending the night out of the dorm, and then, of course, you had to go before the Honor Council, and there was a good chance that you would be suspended from school. I was on the Honor Council my sophomore and junior years, and I started to become disturbed at the numbers of girls that we were bound by certain rules, and if girls stayed out all night, it was not a question of judgement. Once you made the judgement that that in fact happened and she was found guilty, you didn't have a lot of leeway in terms of the penalty. The penalty was, the only leeway was whether it was a semester or a year suspension from school. That started to disturb me because her date faced no penalty whatsoever, and that just didn't seem to make sense. Of course, we were not allowed to wear slacks my freshmen year on campus at all. We could not wear jeans without wearing a raincoat over those jeans. In terms of going to classes, the proper attire included skirts and dresses and then the wonderful football weekends when everybody would get dressed up. That was quite common. It's very different from what you might see today on campus.

PAMELA DEAN:

Yes, very different. Back a moment to the dormitory itself. You mentioned that one of the ways you got to know everybody in the dorm was house meetings. Were those required? Compulsory?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes, they were. We had them on a regular basis, and we had them by floor. Then sometimes we'd have them with everybody downstairs. But I remember more intimate ones on the floor where we would meet and talk about what was going on in the dorm. A lot of the focus was around just dorm living and working out a system. For example, we had a system, we had one telephone for the entire—we had wings—and for the second floor new wing that I was on, there must have been at least twelve if not fifteen rooms, so we're talking about between twenty-four and thirty girls in a wing. We shared one telephone, and when you received a phone call, you were then obligated to pick up and answer the next phone call. [Phone ringing] Speaking of the phone, there it goes. It would get to be joke because I lived as far away from the telephone as you could get, and I used to get a lot of phone calls and they'd always scream at me because I wouldn't hear the phone ring for the next one to be responsible to get down there and get the phone and then call the next person to the phone. We also, of course, all shared a bathroom facility, which had two showers and three toilet facilities for all of us, but it never seemed to be a problem. We, again, because of the opportunity to sit and talk about schedules, we'd always work it out so that everyone could use it when they needed to. It was just a very warm, friendly atmosphere. I don't remember cliques.

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I don't remember, everybody was friendly with everyone else. There was a lot of emphasis on doing well, and I don't know whether this was because, again, because we were freshmen coming into the University, and we felt special. I think that's probably safe to say that we did because we knew that we were a minority, and we wanted to do well in our classes. We wanted to show both the professors and probably the other students that we could make it on this campus, so there was an awful lot of time spent studying. Most of the girls were in science-related fields, and they had a lot of science, biology, a lot of labs. They worked very, very hard, and they worked late at night. I was one of the, I had this thing about getting my sleep, so I think I was always in bed by eleven o'clock, every night. I don't think I ever stayed up past twelve. I used to get kidded about it, but a lot of the girls were up fairly late studying.

PAMELA DEAN:

Dean Carmichael had mentioned, had begun complaining as early as 1963 that there was a breakdown in respect for the rules. The Women's Residence Council had begun to say that they did not want to enforce some of these rules, particularly the apartment rule was one they raised, but you don't sound like you're sensing much of this when you came in the fall of '64.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I came in the fall of '64, and again, this may have been coming from the upper class women, who were older. They were juniors and seniors coming from other schools, and I don't know whether the women who were transferring were experiencing a different attitude in the schools they came from. I expect that they might have, some of them. We were seventeen and eighteen

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year old women, and the notion of the University taking on the role that our parents had taken on was one that, as freshmen, we really didn't question. As I say, that first and second year, as we got older, we did start to take a second look at really the differences. We started to wonder why it is that a woman at eighteen had to be in her room and checked to make sure she did her work and be in her room at twelve o'clock at night, but the guys of the same age, who were often far less mature than we were, had no rules whatsoever. That didn't make any sense as we began to talk more and more about it.

PAMELA DEAN:

But as freshmen, you were not thinking about this, you were not questioning it?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Our goals were to do well academically, to make friends, to become adjusted, and I have to say, in all honesty, many of the rules helped the adjustment, particularly the ones that ensured that the dorm was a quiet, peaceful place to live and work. As I visit dormitory and residential situations today, I'm struck by the litter, by the noise, by the lack of privacy in coed living that we, of course, did not face. We didn't have those as issues. I remember one of the things that happened sophomore year was that we were now eligible to go through Rush.

As freshmen, we really didn't know anything at all about sorority living, but as a sophomore, I was invited, as were all my peers, to go through the Rush system, and it was an opportunity to meet the women from—there must have been seven or eight sororities at that time. I had never thought about being in a sorority before that, but all of my friends talked as if that was what you do,

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you join a sorority. So I decided that that must be what I should do too.

PAMELA DEAN:

It was prestigious.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

It was. The sororities, they were quite nice. You could have your meals there, and I knew that I wasn't probably going to stay at Spencer Dorm all four years, which really was the ideal sorority. It was a larger mix and a more diverse mix of girls, and it had all the wonderful qualities that a sorority would have plus. But most juniors and seniors did not live in Spencer; they lived in the other dorms. Faced with that for the future, I thought, "Well, for a living situation, I might like a more intimate situation." There were older girls that I had met that I really admired and liked, so I joined my friends, and we all went through Rush. I remember Dean Carmichael saying to me quite early in that whole process, "You really ought to look at Kappa Kappa Gamma." I said, "Well, Dean Carmichael, I'm going to look at all the sororities. I haven't made up my mind." She kept saying over and over, "But Sharon, you really you ought to look at Kappa Kappa Gamma." That's all she would say to me, and I started meeting the girls from the different sororities, and I didn't know.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I didn't know girls from Kappa Kappa Gamma, but I did know some from ADPi and Tri Delt and that was where I really thought I would be more comfortable. There was a policy where you went to Graham Memorial, and we all went, and you would receive an envelope. On the third night, you would write down the three sororities you wanted to be asked back to, and if those sororities wanted to have you come back, they would extend an invitation back to you. You knew if you got through that round, which was not the last round, but the second to the last round, that you would be guaranteed of getting in at least one of the three, and everyone, everyone, would get through that round. It was just not something, everybody would get into one sorority or another, it just may not be their first choice, but at least you're going to get into your third choice. I will never forget, it was probably something that changed my life in more ways than one, the experience of going with my friends to Graham Memorial and receiving our envelopes with the invitations and receiving an empty envelope. I knew as soon as it was handed to me that it had nothing in it, and as I walked through the line past Kitty Carmichael, she was ashen, and she looked at me and said, "I told you to look at Kappa Kappa Gamma." What I learned later was that—I'm Jewish—and that the sororities, at that particular time, were not inducting Jewish girls, except for Kappa Kappa Gamma. They were the only sorority that had alumni who had given permission for Jewish girls to be in the sorority, and I had two strikes against me. I was not only Jewish, I had

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divorced parents, and that was another, at that time, in the mid-60's

PAMELA DEAN:

These sorts of things would come out during your meetings when you went to get to know these girls. These things would become known.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes, that's right. Well, the girls who had made the recommendations for their sororities and had recommended that I be in the sorority were told by the alumni, by their parents, that they absolutely could not consider me. It was just not acceptable, and they had veto power, so I learned this later and, of course, realized later what Kitty Carmichael was trying to tell me. It was fortunate for me that I had started going out, just that fall, with a young man who is now my husband, and he was waiting for me after we had found out where we were going to be asked back. He said, "Well, who are the lucky sororities?" And I said, "None of them because I didn't get asked back." I just felt mortified and embarrassed, and he said "That's their loss. Let's go to lunch." And that was sort of the end of that. He just had this way of saying, "Too bad for them."

PAMELA DEAN:

That's why you married him?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes, one of the reasons. Of course, what that did for me is give me the time and the interest to continue to live in the dormitories, rather than move away from that into a sorority, and to devote my time and energy to the majority of women who were not in sororities, and pay more attention to their needs—and our needs—and our living situation within the dorm.

PAMELA DEAN:

Let me ask you, had you encountered, previously, before coming to Chapel Hill, anti-semitism in any overt way? Was this something that was totally unexpected?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

We were living in Charlotte. We had applied to join the country club, the Myers Park Country Club, which was a few blocks from our house, and were denied an invitation because we were Jewish, and we discovered that Jews were not allowed, and so we had to go across town to the Jewish country club. So certainly, on that level, it was a less personal level, I was younger, but I was aware that, it was not a shock that Jews were not allowed into certain places. I knew, from a very early age, that not only were Jews not allowed, but even more so, blacks were not allowed into restaurants, into bus stations, and it was something I grew up with and always abhorred, but discrimination was a way of life in the South.

PAMELA DEAN:

Chapel Hill, just prior to your arrival, had gone through about a year and a half of major Civil Rights demonstrations.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes, I remember quite well my friend, Mary King, had been involved with Girls State, and she had met some lovely girls who were black from the all-black high school, and she'd remained friends with them, and she had invited them to come to Chapel Hill and spend a weekend. When she did, the shock that she received, so many of the girls in our dorm just really didn't know what to do with it, and one of the girls stayed in our room and one stayed in Mary's room, but she had a hard time convincing the girls in our dorm that this was O.K.

PAMELA DEAN:

I'm not surprised. That would have been quite something at that time. Clearly you were able to go on and play a significant role in campus life without being a member of a sorority, but generally, how important was it to be a member of a sorority or a fraternity, as far as power and prestige on the campus went?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I think it was probably pretty important for a lot of kids to be, all of us want to be a part of something. I think that's a need that, particularly young people, but even all people have. I felt a part of the University in the larger sense, so for me, not being a part of a smaller piece was O.K. I was very involved in campus life. I had an opportunity to be head of the Toronto Exchange and worked very closely with that group of students for two years. As I said, I was involved with the Honor Council and then became very involved with the Women's Residence Council. I was very active in residential life. It's amazing to me the size of our campus and how close we were able to get to the professors, and they were, for the most part, really interested in students, and they would invite us to their homes and we would have discussions focusing on campus life as well as on some of the academic subjects that they taught.

PAMELA DEAN:

Can you give me some specific examples of specific professors?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I remember Peter Walker and Sam Hill were two that really reached out, and Barry Hounshell, who's still in the School of Education, as someone who I became very close to, and

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these were teachers who you not only had in the classroom, but who would take the time in the afternoons and in the evenings to invite you to dinner and to spend time with you. Now, keep in mind that at this same time, we were a very active student body. Student government, at Chapel Hill was, I think, unique among the college campuses, and, I think, probably still is in terms of its very active student body. We were given a great deal of responsibility. It was not just a puppet on a string. The administration valued our input, and so, when I was part of the Student Legislature or the Honor Council, I knew that we had a say in what went on, and that was exciting. We were asked to participate in committees, and I was always asked to be involved in any decisions that were made about residential life and how to improve the residential college system that was just really taking shape. The other thing that was happening was that we were developing an experimental college on the campus. This really came out of the National Student Association relationship that we had developed, and many of us, through training in the summers at NSA, came back, and with the help of professors, the experimental college was an opportunity for students to teach courses as well as for professors to teach courses outside of their specific discipline, and to take electives in the afternoons, not for credit, but because you were particularly interested in a subject. I remember running a course on the feminine mystique, named after the Betty Friedan book, and both men and women came to that course. I was fascinated that so many

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guys were interested in looking at issues of what it meant to be feminine in the 60's.

PAMELA DEAN:

Remarkable.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes. So we were really very involved, so when you talk about fraternities and sororities, yes, I think there was an identity. I think for kids who depended a lot on partying, and certainly then, as today, that can become a major preoccupation, I don't know where they would party if they didn't have the fraternities and sororities because that's where, but if you were not in a sorority, you still could go to those parties. It was not something you were kept from if you met guys, which was fairly easy to do with the ratio the way it was. It was easy to be involved in that. The drinking, I remember, before I went to Chapel Hill, one of the things I was told is that "You're going to a big drinking school." Of course, this is something that Dean Carmichael spoke to her women about very early, really, to watch out for that, and I think there were quite a few of us who just were not as interested in becoming big drinkers and that whole party atmosphere and were just as comfortable going out to dinner in the evening and having a quieter time to be together. Football weekends were great because everybody would go to the games, and there was this wonderful sense of school spirit and camaraderie, and the same for basketball games. Those were just extraordinary events. Then there were things like, I'm going to forget what it's called, but I remember who came. I remember we had Petula Clark. Now what in the world was that spring fling called? Do you remember the name of it?

PAMELA DEAN:

No.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

It was a special event every spring, and we would have big name singers and entertainers, and it was wall to wall kids on blankets and picnics. It was all day and evening, and it was one of these things that brought the whole campus together, and there were always things like that. I think even without being involved in a fraternity or sorority that kids could feel a part of something special. Certainly back then that was true.

PAMELA DEAN:

There were many things that brought them together, the whole campus.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

That's right, and speakers—we had the Carolina Political Union that used to sponsor speakers. I'll never forget when Teddy Kennedy came to speak, and those things were happening all the time. We had a very active Student party and University party. There was tremendous, heavy competition between the two-party system in our school. I don't know many campuses that have such an active system. There was a lot of competing, running for President and Vice-President of the school and of the grade.

My boyfriend at the time, and now husband, Bob, ran for President of the student body when I was a sophomore, and he was a junior going into senior year. I remember campaigning for him and having him come speak in our dorm, and we got all the women behind him because one of the things he addressed were the women's issues. He was very concerned about the whole issue of in loco parentis, and he really stirred many of us to think about those issues. Dean Carmichael later said that she blames Bob for my radicalism, and I have to laugh thinking of me as a radical,

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but she did blame Bob for my change because she knew as a freshman and even as a sophomore how….

PAMELA DEAN:

You've been such a good little girl.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I had been such a good little girl, and I had really supported all the rules that the University had sponsored on our behalf, and then to change so dramatically from that to what happened as a senior really shook her up I think. We can talk about that in a minute. I want to share an incident that's probably been written up somewhere. Certainly, if you go back and look at the newspapers, it filled the newspapers for an entire semester, and that was something that occurred the fall of my sophomore, so that would be 1965. Is that right?

PAMELA DEAN:

Yes.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

The fall of '65. As I said, we had all these rules for women. The summer before the fall of my sophomore year, the President of the student body and a student who was, I believe, at Women's College, UNC-Greensboro, had stayed out all night. She was in summer school at Chapel Hill, and they were at his fraternity and just fell asleep, and she never got back to the dorm. She had to go before judiciary, before the Honor Council, and she was suspended from school. Of course, as I said before, nothing ever happened to guys because there were no rules for them. I heard about it when I got back to the campus in the fall, and I was in the Student Legislature at the time, and again, there was something that was stirring inside of me about what would make this happen. Here was the President of our student body breaking a rule for women but not breaking a rule

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for men, and I guess at that point, I really started to think about his being our role model and for me, the issue at the time was not so much that women were being discriminated against. I was concerned about that but knew I couldn't, at that particular time, change it, but what I knew we could take a look at was whether we still wanted this young man to represent us as President of the student body, given the rules. What I believed in then, and probably still do, is that if there is a rule you keep it or change it, but you don't break it. I believe very strongly in changing rules that are inappropriate, but if you are representing the students and the University, and there are rules that are there and you break them, then I think you need to take a second look at whether those are the people we want representing us as leaders. That's certainly still a relevant issue for today on a higher level. I certainly knew and respected Paul Dickson. He was a very bright and competent young man, and he was also one of my boyfriend's best friends; they were in the same fraternity. But I felt that because of what happened, we ought to have a recall and simply have another election and let the students decide, and I didn't have an issue about whether or not the students would elect Paul. I didn't want to see him denied the opportunity to be President of the student body, I just wanted to reaffirm their support of him. To make a long story short, in order to do that, I had to initiate a recall petition. Now, while that was going on with the highest motives, we had people, and I was a member of Paul's party, a member of the Student Party. There were members of the

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University Party who had different motives. Their motives were to have him kicked out of office so that they could get their person in, and they got to me and supported me in sponsoring this recall petition which had really come initially from the women in Spencer Dorm. I was their representative, and the women felt that this was in order, so it grew from what I felt was a fair question about leadership to a political question about trying to

PAMELA DEAN:

Party politics.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Exactly. At that point, once the University Party got involved in it, Paul, in retaliation, he was in charge of selecting the person who would look at the recall petition list, and we had more than enough signatures, people who had signed for this recall, but because the person that he had appointed was worried that Paul would not be re-elected, what they did was disqualify enough names, either by saying they couldn't read the names or I don't know what else they used, but they said there were not enough names on the petition and so the petition was denied. At that point, rather than press further, I felt that it had really turned much more into a political issue, which I was not at all interested in, so I just pulled out of it. But it took a while for members of his fraternity to forgive me for initiating that. I want to tell you, I was what, eighteen or nineteen years old? The media, not just on the campus, but I was getting phone calls from television stations, radio stations coming to the campus to interview me. It scared me to death. I thought, "What in the world is going on?" It was just quite a media event.

PAMELA DEAN:

Why was there such interest? What did they see in this incident that made it newsworthy off campus?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I'm not sure I could have told you or understood then what I understand now, but I think the primary interest for them was beginning to address the issue of differences in the way the University treated men and women. I think that was much more of an interest, and I think a more appropriate one than the in-house fighting that went on between the University Party and the Student Party. They could care less. But it was the beginning of questioning, for me, about that whole issue of fairness and realizing that women could be and are as responsible, if not more so, than the guys on the campus and that we ought to be treated in the same way.

PAMELA DEAN:

Were you talking to the administration, to Lyle Sitterson who was Chancellor at the time, about this? Did you have dealings with them or was this strictly a student issue?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

During the recall petition, I don't remember talking to the administration, but when I became Chairman of the Women's Residence Council as a senior, my platform and the reason I believe I was elected was that I told the women on the campus that I wanted to take a second look at the kinds of rules we were living under and that my promise to them was not to change them. I never said that. I said, "I want to study them. I want to understand why we have them and whether we need them and what else is going on out there." We were pretty isolated. What were other campuses doing, both all-women and coed campuses? That was my promise and when I started as a senior, I remember, again, I

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will never forget Kitty Carmichael's reaction, the President of the Council traditionally gave a speech to the women freshmen year, for the women who were entering as freshmen, and this was for the freshmen who were entering in 1967, and it was traditionally a speech that told them that they better follow our rules. This came from Kitty down to the Women's Residence Council Head. She'd say, "You've got to tell these girls that they had better not break the rules or they're going to get in trouble." That was her way of keeping us in line, and I very politely told her that I was planning to give a different kind of speech, but I didn't tell her what that speech was going to include. When I got up there and spoke, I talked, I challenged them to question the rules, not to break' the rules. I told them, "Don't break these rules, but question them. Think about why they're there, and join me in getting involved, in forming committees this year to study where we are and where we'd like to be." She really blasted me at the end of that speech. We had this relationship of, I think, respecting each other. I certainly respected her tremendously, and I felt that she respected me too, but she was furious with me for, as she described it, "getting the women excited."

PAMELA DEAN:

[unclear]

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes. You know, you don't want to get the women excited. So I did, boy. What I did was I formed ten committees to study each major section of our handbook, the Women's Handbook, that looked at the closed study issues, that looked at the dress issues, that looked at the issues about dating guys and

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where we could be with guys, looked at closing hours. It just ran the gamut. It looked at every single major section of that handbook, and I had ten very capable girls heading those committees and then not only other girls from the Council, but I invited girls on the campus to get involved in participating on those committees. We had forums, evening forums, and we would have hundreds and hundreds of girls come out to these evening events to share their thinking on all of the different topics. We must have had between five and ten that year, five or ten of these forums. We also had girls going and visiting other campuses and bringing back their rule books and talking about what the options were. Dean Carmichael sat on the Women's Residence Council as our advisor, and she saw this entire process. It was a very thoughtful, respectful process of study and research, never saying a word during the entire year about our plan, which was to study and then to make recommendations to her. She had veto power. At the conclusion of our studies, we were going to make recommendations about what to keep and what to change and what to modify.

We also, I remember, had a tea for the women. Could it have been the women members of the Board of Trustees or the wives of the men who were on the Board of Trustees?

PAMELA DEAN:

I believe there were at least one or two women. Adelaide Holderness, I know, was on there for a long time.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I think it must have been the women members, and I remember we hosted this tea for more than one or two, so it may have included another group of women, but I do remember our

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Council did host a tea where we talked to them about what we were doing, and they were very interested. I don't know that they were thrilled, but they were respectful and interested in the process that we were going through.

Well, after a year of study and really careful deliberation, we made recommendations to do away with closed study all together. We still wanted to find ways to encourage girls to study and to find quiet places to study, but without an enforced rule.

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

PAMELA DEAN:

This is tape two of the interview with Sharon Rose Powell, June 20, 1989. Continue then.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

We also made recommendations that the dress code be changed to simply have no dress code, just as the guys on the campus had no dress code. Any rule that could not be enforced we removed. In our recommendations, we asked that they no longer be there. We used to even have silly rules like you couldn't kiss for more than five seconds when you said good night to your date at the door of the dorm. Can you believe it? That was a rule, and if you broke it, then you might get punished. There were some funny ones like that. They were not in the handbook. Those were more the dorm codes that were discussed at the house meetings that we used to have.

PAMELA DEAN:

So at the house meetings, the individual dormitories could add on and elaborate these things.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Oh yes, and they did, absolutely.

PAMELA DEAN:

Why?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Why would they? Well, you see, you start with the premise that it's an in loco parentis situation, so then you even have the girls getting into this whole way of thinking about themselves and creating a system that's probably even harsher than the one that the University might put on them. Again, it was "What is proper?" There was a lot of discussion about having the respect of the men on the campus and what is proper, and so you wanted to create a climate that encouraged that. So sometimes you'd add rules on top of rules, and it kept our Honor

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Council very busy. I can't tell you how many girls were suspended from school for acting inappropriately, breaking one of these rules that only applied to women. Of course, on another level, it probably kept the men in line. At the time, I don't think we were at all aware of the sort of hidden agenda that the University might have had in having rules for women. They never would have gotten away with having rules for men, but by having them for the women, it, in fact, created them for the guys. What were the guys going to do after midnight? There were no girls around. They'd go to bed, so it's kind of funny to think about.

PAMELA DEAN:

That was definitely one of the early concerns, when women were first being admitted, when Spencer Hall was being built. Would the admission of women mean that men would come under all sorts of restrictions? It's one of the reasons men were not enthusiastic about coeducation for fear that they would be restricted in some ways.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes, that they would also be.

PAMELA DEAN:

Of course, it did not happen.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

It did not happen. Basically, we turned what was a rather thick handbook into, I think, when we finished, there might have four or five pages left to it, and those were guidelines that just clarified for women what living situations they might choose and that kind of thing. We also looked into the idea of open dorms. There was a system with a key where everyone in the dorm would get a key, and you could come and go as you pleased.

PAMELA DEAN:

This was something you discovered other campuses had, Michigan?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

We discovered, yes, Michigan and some of the northern campuses were already, for years they had been using this system, and we discovered that it had worked quite well. We were recommending this kind of system. It did not take place my year, upon graduating, but I know that within a year or two after I left that they did move to a system, and not only that, but they did move to a coeducational system where then the boundaries really broke down. There were guys and girls living, I believe, on the same hall and certainly in the same dorm. It may have been alternate halls, but today, I'm pretty sure, I think I've walked through the residence halls and seen guys and girls on the same floor.

PAMELA DEAN:

It usually, perhaps, separate wings or more, perhaps, alternate floors.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes, separate wings, because of the bathroom situation.

PAMELA DEAN:

But no restrictions as to passing back and forth between the sexes.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Oh no, and you could go in each other's rooms and all those things that, of course, were unheard of when we were there. What happened, and we were feeling so good about ourselves making the recommendations very thoughtfully, using the democratic procedure, and then handed all of these recommendations to Dean Carmichael, and she vetoed the lot of them. [Snap] Just like that. She said it was unacceptable.

PAMELA DEAN:

Did she sit down and talk to you about this or was it just

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes, absolutely. She was an eloquent, she had quite a presence about her, and she wouldn't talk with you. She would lecture. She had this voice that carried, and I used to love to listen to her talk, but it was very clear. I remember sitting in that room, and I believe Daryl Walker was there and a couple of the other Assistant Dean of Women and some of the women that worked with me, and she sat and explained to us why this just wouldn't work. She appreciated all the hard work we had put into this, but it just was not the right time for all of these changes to occur. I remember leaving that meeting, and I felt that she was really undermining the whole process that we had gone through, knowing full well while we went through it that we were going to be recommending some pretty significant changes and that it had been a farce. I'm talking about a campus where I had experienced students being given a tremendous amount of responsibility, and even when adults didn't agree with us, we had the authority to make those changes and live with them. So I felt terribly undermined, and I asked Dean Carmichael what recourse I had, and she said, "Well, the only one who can change my veto is Chancellor Sitterson." So I told her that I was going to be meeting with Chancellor Sitterson. She said, "Well, you just go right ahead." I made an appointment, and I had the ten women who were the heads of the committees join me, and we sat in his office, and Chancellor Sitterson was then and still is one of these very fatherly, very kind, open, warm, easy-to-talk to

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people, and he just made us feel at home, and he was a very good listener. I remember, I know we were in his office at least an hour, and he let us talk. He let us talk about what our needs were, what the process had been. Each one of us spoke, and he listened, and he didn't say anything. At one point, I remember alluding to the fact that—and I meant this not as a threat but I knew that it was, in fact, going to happen—that if all of our recommendations were vetoed that I suspected that he would have hundreds of women sleeping out on his doorstep protesting the fact that we were not being given an opportunity to be heard. At the conclusion of our discussion, he chuckled, and he said, "You have convinced me that what you have done has been thoughtful and responsible and that I will accept your recommendations." We were all, of course, very, very pleased, and I worried about how Dean Carmichael was going to take that, but she was a lady, and she took it as I knew she would. She did not like it, but she accepted it.

Of course, I had no idea what went on between Dean Carmichael and Chancellor Sitterson after that, but we continued to work together until I concluded at the end of the year. Then, of course, I left before any of the changes took place, so I never really experienced what it was like. It's interesting, too, because right after I graduated, I went to the University of California at Berkeley, and I lived in a coed situation in a coop where men and women shared a very large house and shared responsibilities in the house, and it was very different from my experience in Chapel Hill.

PAMELA DEAN:

You wrote a letter back to the Daily Tar Heel to that effect. Do you remember that at all?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

No, I don't remember. What did I say?

PAMELA DEAN:

You said something to the effect that you'd spent four years at Chapel Hill and had been denied the opportunity to learn to be independent, to take responsibility for yourself and that at Berkeley, the women students had this, and it hadn't seemed to do them any harm. They hadn't had nervous breakdowns or got pregnant or anything else. They seemed to be able to cope with this responsibility quite nicely and that you were denied at Chapel Hill the opportunity for that growth experience that should be a part of college life.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

That's so interesting. I had forgotten that I had written that letter, but it is coming back to me. I was so concerned after I left that the class following wouldn't understand and that the teachers and administrators that I'd worked with would resist the change. It was so wonderful to live in an environment where men and women were treated the same and had the same opportunities. It did, it worked beautifully, but I had forgotten that I had written that back to the school. [Phone ringing]

PAMELA DEAN:

The phone answering system's breaking down. Let me go back and fill in just a couple of questions I had on this. [Phone ringing] Do you want to answer that?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I have an answering machine that will pick that up.

PAMELA DEAN:

These forums that you held when you were reviewing the rules and you said a lot of women, hundreds of women, came to

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these. Did you get men and faculty members coming to these things as well or was this basically for women?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

It was basically for women. I don't remember any of the guys even invited to come, and the only women, Dean Carmichael and her staff, were there, always, always invited and always came with interest. They were exciting forums. I remember girls getting up in the auditorium and speaking on, I wanted to know, what are the advantages of closed study? What are the disadvantages? I wanted to hear them. I wanted to know what worked and what didn't. I wasn't interested in just throwing out every rule just because it was a rule. If it served a purpose, then it made sense to keep it, but if we could achieve the goals behind the rules—and there were some very good reasons for having the rules in terms of the goals and the climate that the school wanted to ensure for its women and for its students. The issue became one of discrimination, and the issue more importantly became one of whether this University should take the place of our parents at that age in our lives. That was even, probably, a more important issue than whether we were being discriminated against because men didn't have these rules, and I think the conclusion was that it was not the place of the University to be our parents and that couldn't be and didn't need to be, and they really could let go of that responsibility and feel O.K. and not feel as if they were somehow letting us down.

PAMELA DEAN:

Subsequent to your graduation, a whole series of faculty/administration/student committees were set up to work out these rule changes one after another. One of

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the issues that was particularly important when discussing the requirement to live in the dormitories, that there be closing hours and so forth was security—a very, very big issue for the administration. Was that something that was considered very much by the women students themselves? Was that a concern?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

We were aware of that as an issue, but I have to tell you, in the mid-60's, the notion of security was not a pressing issue. We felt safe on that campus. There had been one rape in the arboretum, and that really frightened everyone, and I don't think

PAMELA DEAN:

There was, in fact, a girl who was murdered in the arboretum.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I was just going to say, it was not just a rape. It was a murder.

PAMELA DEAN:

Sue Ellen Evans in 1965.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

That's right. That's right. That was very frightening and tragic, but it was something that was so unusual, it was just not something that happened or was thought about.

PAMELA DEAN:

There was no pattern of women being harassed or no sense that you might be assaulted or anything of that nature?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Never. Absolutely not. The notion of my walking through the campus alone at night was just never ever an issue, and it might have been for the adults, as I say, but for the women, it just was not a concern. We certainly, when we looked at the options and the idea of keys and losing keys, and there were all kinds of ways to ensure, by having security guards letting you into the dorms rather than worrying about keys.

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There were options that were safer than others. We always felt that the issue, rightly or wrongly, for the administration was not so much the security because if it's security, why wasn't there a security system for the guys too? The issue seemed to be one of morality much more than security.

PAMELA DEAN:

And the appearance of morality.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Exactly, and I think, in fact, that was the case. I would love to hear what the administration and the teaching faculty would say about that now, about their reasons for wanting this protective stance on behalf of women, but I know, from discussions that we had, that the big issue was morality, was not fooling around. Don't get pregnant.

PAMELA DEAN:

If you got pregnant, you had to leave school.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Oh yes, that's right, and that was the great fear. I don't remember having a vandalism problem or a theft problem when we were in school at all. I'm sure there were isolated incidents of it. We started to address the issue of drugs. This was one of the wonderful things about the University is that whenever there was a problem, we always formed faculty-student committees. All the committees had students on them, every single one, and I remember being on one of the committees that looked at drugs. I had not, at that point, ever seen drugs on campus, knew anybody who used drugs.

PAMELA DEAN:

Not even marijuana?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Not even marijuana, and that's 1968, and I went to parties. I did a lot of things socially. I never ever saw it or heard of one person using it, and the reason I know that is

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because the next year, I was in Berkeley, and I smelled it and saw it for the first time, and it was something that was just totally foreign to me. But I do know that the school was starting, was concerned about it. Maybe in the guys' dorms there was more of it than in the girls' dorms. That's possible, but they were addressing it. They were worried. We had a great residential advisor system. I was never an RA, but I remember the girls who were really—I don't know how well trained they were. Of course, I have an interest now in leadership training, and in good training for leaders, and for RAs can really make a difference in the lives of younger kids. They must have had, either the selection process was so good that they picked kids who were just so thoughtful and sensitive, and/or their training was so good because I just remember how important those RAs were to us as underclassmen. They were always there to help us, both academically and socially.

PAMELA DEAN:

And students did turn to them?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

All the time.

PAMELA DEAN:

They were considered, it was recognized that they were helpful? They weren't there just to keep an eye on you or anything like that?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

That's right.

PAMELA DEAN:

One other fill-in question I had, back when you were beginning to initiate this review of the rules, somewhere in Dean Carmichael's papers, I found a memo to the effect that her perception of this review was that it was partly in response to pressure from male students, and there are a couple of mentions I

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came across in there of someone who, I gathered, she certainly seemed to consider this person something of a radical and a trouble maker. Sandra Burden. Does that name ring a bell as someone who was pushing these rather radical extremes, that she was demanding?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Sandra Burden was, and I was not close to her personally, but I remember her as a very bright, vocal, what we might have called a feminist back in those days, and that's interesting. Kitty really didn't like women who were outspoken, and I don't think she'd ever consider me a radical because I was too respectful of the rules, as I said. I came from a background where I never believed in breaking the rules. I think Sandra would break the rules, so she wasn't just somebody challenging them or challenging the process, but my sense was that she might have gone a step further and really challenged them. I don't remember her being that active. I don't think she was that active in the process of actually making rule changes, just being a very outspoken young woman on the campus. I think Dean Carmichael's perception about the men being behind all this is accurate.

PAMELA DEAN:

She wasn't simply speaking of Bob?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Oh, she may have had Bob Powell in mind because I know, but it wasn't just Bob Powell. There were other guys as well, and they really were, their motives were not to change women's rules so that guys could get away with more in relation to women. Their concerns were really quite pure in the sense of believing that women were, and they probably were the minority,

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this group of guys that I knew, but they believed that women should and could take the same responsibilities that guys could, and they just were outraged that women were being treated differently.

PAMELA DEAN:

This was a time with the Civil Rights movement, with student uprisings in general, when young people were demanding more autonomy, more responsibility, and at least some of them were including women in this.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

That's right, and I have to say that it was my good fortune to marry one of the guys who believed in this. Bob has continued to support me in every way he can to be everything I can be. Everything from coming home early from work so I could go to graduate school for ten years. It wasn't just a verbal support. He backed it; he always has backed it by being home to take care of the children when they were little so I could go to graduate school, doing the grocery shopping from year one because it was not something I particularly liked to do, really sharing in all the household responsibilities. So I married a feminist. You think, "Great!" I wish I could tell Dean Carmichael that today. I think today that she might look at it a little differently than she did. I think she was very frightened about, she was fearful that the changes in rules meant anarchy. It just meant total chaos and confusion and lack of structure and lack of commitment. Listen, she had good reasons to be fearful. We were then and still are in a situation in our society where kids and adults are always looking for an easy way out. They're searching for ways to get high and be happy that don't look inward but

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rather look for the easy out, and she knew a lot more than I did about where this might lead. I think we had some very valid reasons for making the changes. I think what we didn't consider then and what I hope the University is considering now and what I consider now in my adult life is what are the ways we can create a support system for kids so they don't have to seek these highs through drugs and through alcohol and through other forms of entertainment that they get away from self-responsibility. Creating a sense of belonging, that's what I had at Spencer Dorm. Creating a place where people who were different could be friends, creating a place where there was an openness and an honesty and a sense of security—I had that, and I see an awful lot of kids today who don't and that worries me.

PAMELA DEAN:

I think that's the quality I've begun to see in the women's colleges that I've been studying that I do think, certainly, my college experience lacked.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

There are no rules. There are no rituals. It's the rituals; we had the rituals. We had Sunday dinner where Professor Reckford, Kenneth Reckford, who is just one of the most beloved professors, a Classics professor, used to come with his family and have lunch with us on a Sunday and talk to us. We would invite our favorite professors to come and eat with us, and we'd sit together out in the garden after Sunday dinners, and we were always dressed up for Sunday lunch. That was a ritual. Those dorm meetings where we congregated in the lobby, and somebody would play the piano or we'd sing songs. Those were rituals; those were special times. Even coming in all at the

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same time was a ritual that also meant we talked to each other every night. We got in early enough for everybody to check in with everybody else about how was your night, how did it go. We'd all go down to the basement and eat candy bars. We could have done better than that, but that's what we did, but it was fun. It was a ritual, and I think what's happening in our educational system today is we don't have rituals. We don't have a structure that gives people that sense of being a part of something.

PAMELA DEAN:

I think that's a real good point.

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

PAMELA DEAN:

A complete change of topic, back to Dean Carmichael. There are a lot of stories about Dean Carmichael, stories about her rigidity, in some cases. One I've heard is that if you violated the dress code, you were liable to be hauled back to her office by your ear.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

That's true.

PAMELA DEAN:

That never happened to you, of course.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

It never happened to me because I loved the dress code. I always loved dressing up. I have since I was a little girl, [Laughter] so it fit right in. To this day, I love to dress up. Yes, that was never a problem for me. None of her rules were ever really problems for me, and even her manner. The thing about Dean Carmichael, I don't know how old she was when I was in school, but she seemed old.

PAMELA DEAN:

Could you describe her physically?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Very fair skin, and I remember her having lots and lots of wrinkles, and vibrant eyes, laughing eyes. She was slightly plump, but always well-groomed, exquisitely groomed, and held her head high. I remember her having grey hair, and I don't know whether she really did, but it seemed grey to me at the time, and as I said, she seemed very matronly and old. I was sure she was past retirement, and I know she couldn't have been because she continued to be the Dean of Women for many, many years after I left, but she just gave that matronly appearance. I don't remember Dean Carmichael smiling very often. She was very intense and could be intimidating, but spoke eloquently. I

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know she was well-respected by the Assistant Dean of Women, and I was always grateful that the Assistants were always much younger and with it. They were women you could talk to and look up to and relate to, and that helped and often we would go to them and let them be the go-betweens.

PAMELA DEAN:

Daryl Walker was

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Daryl Walker was the Assistant to Dean Carmichael that I remember.

PAMELA DEAN:

How about Sue Ross? Was she there when you were?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

She might have been, but the name is not someone that, do you have any other names besides that? I know there was someone else besides Daryl, before Daryl.

PAMELA DEAN:

Those are the two I remember off the top of my head.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Daryl's the one that really stuck out for me. Of course, I knew Peter Walker as well. I had him for history, and they were just a special family. She seemed to be more sympathetic to what we were doing and what we were saying. She understood us, whereas I never felt that Dean Carmichael understood. She just had her point of view, and that's the way it was going to be.

PAMELA DEAN:

I know with some of her colleagues she had an on-going series of practical jokes that they played on each other. Were you aware of that side of her at all? Can you imagine that?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes, I can. I'm sure she had a sense of humor. She must have, and I'm sure she took lots of kidding and probably took it quite well. But she didn't let us in on that side very often, the women. Her job with the young women on that campus

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was, I think, to be a role model and to always be in control, and I think the kidding part of her she might have seen as being too close, too friendly.

PAMELA DEAN:

With her colleagues, with faculty members, with close friends, but not with students.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes. I do remember once her kidding me. My mother and my aunt were visiting, and I introduced Dean Carmichael. I said, "Dean Carmichael, I want you to meet my mother, Phyllis, and my aunt, Shirley." And she said, "Oh no! You've got it wrong. You're aunt is your mother. She has to be. You look just like her. This can't be your mother." She just, she had us roaring because she was serious but so funny when her matter-of-fact "This cannot be your mother! This has to be your mother. You look exactly like her." We still tell that story, and I do. I do look like my aunt. She would not believe it.

PAMELA DEAN:

And she was used to getting her way.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Oh yes. She sure was. One last memory I have on that campus was the Valkeries induction. Valkeries was a women's organization, and it was for women who represented the highest ideals on the campus of leadership, scholarship, and I don't know how much Dean Carmichael had to do with that organization. I suspect she had something to do with every women's organization on that campus, in the sororities and in the dorms. I remember the thrill my junior year when I was inducted. It was a rather scary experience because they come in the middle of the night with all kinds of clanking noises, and they're in robes and their faces are covered, and they come into your room, and you're half

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asleep. They stand before you, and one of them reads a special tribute to you and about why you're being inducted into this society. It's really quite moving, and then they tell you to get dressed, and they blindfold you, and they take you away. At the time, I didn't know it, but we were taken to the planetarium. I think initially we were taken to a church near the planetarium, and we stayed blindfolded until dawn and then one by one we 'd go through the ceremony with candles and rituals, very, very special. And then just as the sun is rising, we'd go to the planetarium and we'd watch the sun rise all together and then have breakfast. It was very special, and I remember my senior year, when we were going to induct additional women into the group, I had pneumonia, and I was in the infirmary, and I had to beg the doctor on call to let me out to be, I just wanted to be able to go through the halls clanking those cans and tapping some of my friends who had not made it the year before, and he let me do it. I was able to participate. I left the infirmary, went, and then went right back to the infirmary the next day. I don't know how I got through it but that was

PAMELA DEAN:

To let you go out at night, running around campus all night long with pneumonia.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I know. Isn't that wild, but I'm so glad he did. It meant so much, but there were those kinds of special moments that it was part of being a woman on the campus.

PAMELA DEAN:

I wasn't aware of that whole induction ritual.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

The ritual, oh, there was a lot of time and thought that went into that.

PAMELA DEAN:

Any other things as elaborate as that that you recall?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

The induction of the Golden Fleece, we women were not inducted into the Golden Fleece when I was in school. Women are now, which I'm delighted to hear, but I remember how special that is because everyone goes to the large auditorium and then students, again, people in robes come—I never knew how they would know where to go because it was all dark, and it was filled with hundreds of kids, and yet, the guys who were inducting the new guys knew exactly where to get them, as if they had planned it. That was a rather elaborate induction ceremony. The society of Janus, the Janus Society, also had an induction where we were invited to come to, I think, a cemetery at a certain time of night. We all went there, and then they took us and blindfolded us and put us in cars and drove us around for a while. There was some ceremony, but it was not as thoughtfully done as the Valkeries. That was the most special.

PAMELA DEAN:

We've covered the major topics about Chapel Hill that I had raised, but are there other issues or events that were important to you in your days there that we haven't talked about?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Just that, what I said before, about the opportunities for leadership that were there, for me, that was probably one of the greatest gifts I got from being a student at Chapel Hill was that as a student and as a student leader, you had the opportunity in a variety of ways to make a contribution to your school and to your peers that, I think, was rare and that the respect that came from the administration to students in general was rich. It was a rich experience for me, and it certainly, in

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terms of giving you self-confidence and in giving you faith that you can change the system. It gave us permission to do that and to experience that in a safe environment so that we could leave there having faith in ourselves and confidence that if you work through the system, you can make lasting change. That's what I got from Chapel Hill and from people like Kitty Carmichael and J. Carlyle Sitterson.

PAMELA DEAN:

You went from this college environment, which did give you the sense that you could take a meaningful part and make changes, to Berkeley as a graduate student. Berkeley, the hotbed of student-administration confrontation.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

That was quite a change for me. It was a change in many ways. I saw students revolt at Berkeley. I saw students who were violent in their protest. There were some peaceful marches around People's Park, which was the big issue in '68 and '69. The University wanted to turn this vacant lot into a parking garage, and the students wanted to turn it into a park. But I also saw that turn into something that was not peaceful, and I have to say that the reason it turned into something that was not peaceful is that the administration and the then Governor, Ronald Reagan, called in the armed Guard on the campus. In reaction to having armed guards on the campus who were tear gassing peaceful students who were standing in protest but were not doing anything, that when the tear gas started, that's when the students, in reaction, started throwing things and fighting, and it became a very scary place for me. I was trampled during one of the tear gassings by so many people. I was going to

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register for classes, and the next thing I knew, we were tear gassed, and everybody was running. So that was a real shock for a southern girl who was used to going through the system and being heard. Most of my courses, most of my classes that year were held off-campus because they were tear gassing the campus from helicopters, and we never knew when that was going to happen, and I was working in some of the schools in Berkeley at the time, and they were even tear gassing the elementary schools because the helicopters couldn't be sure where it was going to land. So we even had to evacuate the elementary schools from time to time. That was sad, that experience for me. I came from a campus where, as I said, at least I had not been aware of the amount of drug use. There certainly had been plenty of drinking, but I then became aware of things like LSD and people walking around stoned in the middle of the day, and that frightened me. It was not a safe environemnt for a woman. I had men following me in the middle of the day who I didn't know. That frightened me. These were all things that I had not experienced at Chapel Hill, and in one year, to be in that situation was uncomfortable.

PAMELA DEAN:

Initially, you saw much more equality and autonomy for women at Berkeley than you had seen at Chapel Hill.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes, and the living situation that I was in was wonderful but outside of that cooperative, wonderful living situation, there was a political situation that frightened me. Academically, of course, I was in an area when John Holt, who had just written How Children Learn and How Children Fail, was on

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sabbatical from Harvard at Berkeley. So I had a chance to work with him for the year. Herb Kohl, who'd written Thirty-Six Children, was there. For somebody who was involved in education, it was just the most wonderful place in the world to be. I learned so much about how to develop a curriculum that addressed kids' needs and concerns and how to teach in a way that helped motivate people. That was important. Funny story, I was in the School of Education because I had wanted to double major, of course, in psychology but was told that what in the world could I do with a degree in psychology, that it was far better to become a teacher, and it's always something that you can fall back on.

PAMELA DEAN:

This was something that you're advisor at Chapel Hill had said.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

My advisor as a freshman at Chapel Hill, when I knew I wanted to teach—I had always wanted to teach—but I also was very interested in psychology, and I simply wanted to double major, and my advisor said, "What in the world would you want to take psychology courses for? What could you do with it?" And so he wouldn't let me double major, so I went into the School of Ed, and I'll never forget it. I don't remember this teacher's name, but this was a course on how you motivate students. There were fifty of us in the class, and he would stand up in front of the class and lecture us, day in and day out. He was so boring, and I had been through, I had been working with Barry Hounshell on experimental college courses, and I was learning how to be an effective teacher myself with all this encouragement from so many wonderful professors. And so, I went to this professor and said,

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"With all due respect, sir, I think you might take some of the things you are teaching us about how to motivate students and use them in your own classroom, and might I suggest that instead of lecturing every day that you break us into small groups and let each small group develop topics and present to each other." I had four or five recommendations of the way he could change the structure of his class to become more interesting. He listened, and he said, "Thank you, Miss Rose, and I'll see you in class tomorrow." The next day I walked into class, and he gave the same boring lecture, and I was so upset, I got up and walked out in the middle of class, and I did not go back to that class. He gave me a B instead of the A I deserved for the semester, but I just couldn't believe that he would continue to be so boring. One other thing that happened on campus before I left was that sensitivity training groups started forming, and Gene Watson, who may still be in the School of Education, initiated a sensitivity training group for students, and we met on a regular basis through the year, this was my senior year, and learned about T-groups. He had gone to Bethel, Maine, and he brought back his understanding of group dynamics and taught those of us who were interested about this, what I found to be, just absolutely fascinating experience of being in a group and focusing on the here and now and learning about roles and relationships within that group. It was the beginning of my interest in groups and group dynamics, which, of course, has become my life work. That was a very significant, additional piece. There were so many things like that that Chapel Hill offered. For students who had

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their eyes open and wanted to take advantage of all the opportunities, there was just no end to them.

PAMELA DEAN:

While you were talking about you're advisor, it reminded me of the story you told me earlier about a professor and the MRS degree. I wanted to be sure to get that one on tape, and we almost forgot it.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Oh, that's right. You're absolutely right.

PAMELA DEAN:

Sort of the other side of

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

The flip side. My freshman year, I was taking a French class, and the professor, he spoke fluent French obviously, and he spoke so quickly that I sometimes would miss parts of what he was saying. So I would raise my hand. I was the only girl in the class, and I would raise my hand and ask him to please repeat whatever he was saying or I would ask questions if he was raising a topic, I would ask questions about it. I think he just became so exasperated with me. He hadn't been teaching there very long, and I don't think he had been teaching very many women. He took the French book, and I was in the back of the room, and he took it, and he threw it at me. It came very close to hitting me, and he yelled at me, he said, "Sharon Rose, why don't you get your MRS degree and get out of this school!" And that attitude was actually, I don't know how widespread it was, but I'd heard it on more than one occasion, that the women who were coming there were there for one reason only. Get that degree and leave us men to our important work, so that was something I didn't forget. But I have to say, in all honesty, that the majority of professors were really quite responsive, I

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think, to women's needs, although I do remember, I think his name was Dr. Dixon in the Art History Department. Is there still a Dr. Dixon there?

PAMELA DEAN:

I'm not sure.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Oh, he was wonderful. He was a wonderful teacher, and I was running for President of the Women's Residence Council, and I was campaigning and I had this Art History exam. I just knew that I wasn't prepared for it, and I never ever wanted to go into an exam unprepared. So I remember going to his class, to his office, and I had never done this before, but I asked him whether he would give me an extension on the exam of one or two days because I was just so exhausted from campaigning and that I really wanted to do well on the exam. And he said no, and I remember sobbing in his office, and I just could not stop crying. He was taken aback, but boy, he did not change his mind. He just would not let me, and so I took it, and I remember I got a B on that exam, which was devastating at the time, but I got over it. There were some wonderful teachers, Professor Boyd, Professor McCurdy, some of the really inspiring professors in religion and psychology that really got us all to think about things in a way we never had before.

PAMELA DEAN:

Was there any particular professor who encouraged you to go to graduate school?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Absolutely. Barry Hounshell. Barry Hounshell is the one. I'd never ever thought of going to graduate school. It was in the winter of my senior year, and I had already missed a lot of deadlines for graduate schools because it had not occurred to

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me, and I guess I had the option of going right into teaching, but Barry Hounshell's the one who recognized that certainly with my interest and dedication in education that going for the Master's would be something that would really benefit me, both educationally and, later, professionally. No one in my family would have encouraged me to do that or even thought of it, and none of my friends, my boyfriend was in graduate school at Princeton at the time, but I didn't know any women who were going on to graduate school. They were all getting married, and probably if Bob had decided to marry me at graduation, I probably would have done that and not gone to graduate school, but we were not at the place where we were going to get married, and graduate school seemed like a wonderful way to spend my year after college, so that's what I did.

PAMELA DEAN:

But even though he was at Princeton, you were willing to go clear across the country?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Oh yes. Barry knew a lot about Berkeley. He'd either taught there or gone there himself, and I remember he wrote a recommendation for me, and he said he knew John Holt was going to be there on sabbatical from Harvard, and he said, "Sharon, that's just the right place for you, educationally." I was scared to death, but I did it, and it was one of the best moves I ever made.

PAMELA DEAN:

So you were there a year.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I finished my Master's in a year. I worked double time to finish. I was there for two summers plus a full year, so it was like a year and a quarter, a year and a half, plus I also

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was a Research Assistant out there. And then Bob and I did decide that it was time to get married, and we moved to Princeton. I started teaching, and here we are. You know, throughout our married life, for the last twenty years, we have, from time to time, talked about going back to Chapel Hill and taking up residence there. For both of us, it's just one of those very special places. Of course, now with our careers really very involved here, we really couldn't or wouldn't go back, but whenever we go back for a reunion to visit, it still has that magical quality.

PAMELA DEAN:

I talked to more than one couple who both had been students there, and these are people who recently had been there, but I find that most of the time, it was much more meaningful and pleasurable for the man than it was for the woman. That the men have a much stronger sense of loyalty to the school than the women do.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Were the women actively involved on the campus, do you know? Or were they just more involved in sorority life?

PAMELA DEAN:

I really don't know.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

You see, I have a feeling if a woman is involved in a sorority that her allegiance was probably to the sorority more than to the college, to the University, whereas for me, the experience was being very connected on the campus. I never felt, when I was there, that I was denied opportunities because I was a woman, ever.

PAMELA DEAN:

Nonetheless, you did feel that, to a degree, women were treated differently.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Treated differently, no question about it.

PAMELA DEAN:

And were in separate college to some degree, as far as many of your experiences.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

What I used to say is, "We have the best of both worlds. We have the advantages of a small women's college within the atmosphere of a larger university." I never saw that as a negative, but rather as an advantage.

PAMELA DEAN:

That's very interesting. There is so much debate, now, of the advantages of integration as opposed to separate institutions both for blacks and for women.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I don't recommend the separateness piece. I think what I was saying before is that it's the qualities that create a home away from home that Spencer gave us and that the residential college system, in its best form, will do that, and it can be a coeducational college within a larger university, but it's a place to identify with. It's a place where you meet people socially as well as do things with them academically. That's the key.

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

O.K. Our orientation my freshman year at Chapel Hill included several meetings every day with our Resident Advisor in a group of about ten girls, and her name was Mary Ann Fulton. She was wonderful in just helping us feel a part of a group. There was another wonderful Resident Advisor named Ellen Allen. She was also terrific. During those four days, there were meetings. You had the meeting where you went into the large auditorium, and the Chancellor would say, "Look to your right. Look to your left. One of you won't be here next year at this time," to kind of wake you up and help you realize that you got here, but you're not going to stay here unless you do something about it. There were meetings with advisors, academic advisors. There were social events. There were picnics; there were dances, but it was really that core group, that small group that met on a regular basis throughout the four days that helped you feel a part of something. You can't feel a part of something big if you don't feel a part of something manageable, and I don't know how many campuses today do that. From the moment kids walk in, is there someone greeting them? When I think about what Frances and I did, which was so natural to just be there greeting kids as they came in and helping them and talking, that's the kind of thing we ought to be setting up. It can make such a difference in kids just feeling welcome. It's sad when you think we could

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be on such large campuses and feel so isolated, and yet, I talked to so many students from Princeton University. Of course, I work with a large college population now where they'll tell me, "I don't feel close to anyone. There are no professors that I feel close enough to talk to, and I certainly don't want to go over to the counseling office and talk to the counseling staff." The way the rooms are set up, they don't have dorms like we did where you're on a hall sharing bathrooms. Everyone has a separate suite, so you could live in a dorm and never see the people living next door to you. Unless you create situations where people get together socially, and when the kids do get together socially, it's around alcohol, and they're drinking. That's not a way to get to meet people. So if we could start to create peer groups and have older kids who are trained there for the younger kids, like the RA system, but have something that's not just there for a few days but is there all year long—on-going discussion groups. That's what we had at Spencer. I don't know whether they still do it. We talked. We talked about dating. We talked about boy-girl relationships. We talked about friendship. We talked about cliques. We talked about drugs and alcohol. Those were on-going discussions in our regular house meetings.

PAMELA DEAN:

So you weren't just nit-picking the rules at all. You were dealing with very important issues.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

That's right. I don't think that happens on very many campuses today. It's just not done.

PAMELA DEAN:

And so you have spent a fair amount of your career

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Creating that kind of support structure within high schools. I have a peer leadership training program now that's in over eighty urban and suburban public and private high schools in the Northeast and now in Atlanta, and it's a program where I train teachers to learn the leadership skills and understand group dynamics so that they can facilitate this program in their schools. They train seniors in high school as positive role models to work in teams with younger students, the freshmen, every week throughout the school year. It's a year long orientation program that helps kids look at and address some of the common concerns they share about peer relationships. We just had a study completed by Educational Testing Service in our urban schools that concluded a significant impact on attendance in school, grades, and discipline for kids in our inner cities where those are very real concerns, so we're very pleased that this program can have that kind of impact. It's the kind of program that can be adapted to college settings, and I think it will be.

PAMELA DEAN:

Do you have any specific plans?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I've already talked to people at Princeton University. They've had a form of peer counseling where kids receive minimal training and then offer workshops particularly focused on sex, sex education, sexuality issues, and I've proposed that more faculty get directly involved in working with kids in a more comprehensive and on-going way, both for training and for supervision of groups as seniors work with freshmen through the year. I think it might be a wonderful way, again, to create that kind of support for kids. If they have that, that's where the

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confidence building comes in. That's what I experienced in college, and that's what I'd like to see more kids experience. If you feel a part of something, then you can begin to stretch a little bit and take some risks in some positive ways.

PAMELA DEAN:

Chapel Hill provided, even given all of the rules, given the fact that women were such a small minority, do you think your experience was typical, atypical?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

It was certainly typical for the women I was closest to, and there were about, at least twenty of us who I know really just maximized what the University had to offer in terms of being involved. But probably for the majority of women, those opportunities were missed, and their focus might have been a more narrow one.

PAMELA DEAN:

I wonder if an unexpected consequence of eliminating the special supervision and government for women was to decrease the opportunities for women to take part in University life, to feel a sense of control. You didn't have the separate women's government, the separate women's courts. You had, as you came to shortly after, within a few years after you left, one unified system.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

I don't think there is a problem in a unified system. The first governing body I ever worked in was Student Legislature, where both men and women, predominantly men, were involved in making legislation, recommending legislation for changes in the student body. We had a huge budget. There was some power there because we were given a budget. I think the issue is not men versus women in separate residential situations,

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but what kind of residential college system can ensure the same qualities that I experienced at Spencer Dorm. If they're less personal, if they're fewer opportunities and rituals where people are expected to get together, they won't. They won't do it on they're own. First of all, it's not cool, and somehow, it's getting in the way of whatever else they're doing, but if it's there and it's a part of being a member of this residential college, then kids will do it, and they will become more actively involved.

PAMELA DEAN:

You've talked about the positive things that Chapel Hill gave you. Is there anything you didn't get that you wish you had? Was there anything that was lacking in your experience there that you think the college should have provided you, either individually or more generically as a woman?

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

That's a good question. Honestly, if I had it to do over again, I'm not sure I would change anything. Knowing what I know now, I think I was really lucky. I think I was at a time and in a place where being a student leader was valued, where being involved, it was a scary time. John Kennedy had been killed the year before. While I was in college, Martin Luther King was shot and killed. Bobby Kennedy, on my graduation, June, a week or two after I graduated, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. It was a scary time for us. Those are the things I would like to change. The Civil Rights movement, the war in Vietnam, we lived in a time when we never really knew what was going to happen next. Our futures were uncertain, and yet the message for me, and I think for my generation, was "Get involved. Don't just

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stand back and complain about what you see happening. You get in there and do something about it." And I don't know that, if I missed something, it wasn't because it wasn't there. It was because either I was too busy or too naive to take advantage of it.

PAMELA DEAN:

I think that a pretty glowing report card you just gave the University.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

It's the way I feel about it. I'd love to hear what Bob would say to that question. As President of the student body, he was also someone who was very, very active, both academically and in terms of the Student Government, whether he felt anything was really missing that he wished he'd had. But I know he was challenged, as I was, academically, intellectually, spiritually, and with all the social opportunities that a student could ask for. I love the place. [Laughter]

PAMELA DEAN:

I noticed that.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Yes.

PAMELA DEAN:

On that note, shall we

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

Call it good night.

PAMELA DEAN:

Thank you very much.

SHARON ROSE POWELL:

It's been wonderful talking about my favorite place.