Paul Scott Stanfield '76
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- Paul Scott StanfieldPaul: My name is Paul Scott Stanfield, but I go by my middle name, Scott. I currently live in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I am a member of the Grinnell College Class of 1976. And there were three professors, at least, who did have a particularly strong influence on me. Don Smith, who was in the history department in those days, particularly impressed me because he treated us—he took us seriously—he treated us as grown-ups. He didn’t expect us to be experts, but he treated us, not as peers or equals, but as historians, so to speak, who had obligation to be honest and rigorous and scholarly and he had such a, sort of, gentle and gentleman-ly
- Paul Scott StanfieldPaul: way of maintaining high standards that he made a tremendous impression on me. I had three classes with him. Michael Cavanagh was my main professor in the English department, and I was an English major. And he introduced me to the Irish poets, William Butler Yeats and the study of Yeats, and that’s what I did my dissertation on. And so he was a very important model for me in introducing me to material that I wound up spending most of my life with. And John Mohan, the late John Mohan, of the Russian department. I took his Tolstoy class and his Dostoyevsky class. And they made a terrific impression on me. They sort of just changed my way of looking
- Paul Scott StanfieldPaul: at everything. And his model of conducting class, which seemed to be just all conversation somehow: we were sitting down, we’d read a certain number of pages, and we just talked and talked and talked about it, and that’s always been my ideal for what a good literature class should be like. So he opened up a lot of things for me too. Since I wound up being a teacher myself, I mean, these became the people I hoped I was emulating in my own teaching. And I did meet my spouse--partner at Grinnell in an English class! It was called Modern Literature with Professor Lieberman, the late Professor Lieberman. And we were reading various European (mainly) masterpieces…Kafka and
- Paul Scott StanfieldPaul: Marcel Proust, and I think we started with Dostoyevsky in there. And so she actually got the better grade than I did, and we weren’t really that good of friends that first semester, but then that was in the spring, and we came back in the fall, we started spending a lot of time together. And by the end of that semester, we were, and have remained, a couple. And so that was…we were living in the campus-owned houses over on East Street. I was in Pine Tree House and she was in the house then nicknamed Hyperspace House, because of the personal habits of those living in Hyperspace House
- Paul Scott StanfieldPaul: And so we were neighbors in effect, and it was easy for her to drop in on me and for me to drop in on her. And that was that.
- Erica Seltzer-SchultzErica: What year was this?
- Paul Scott StanfieldPaul: This was…let’s see…we would have met in the spring of 1974, and by November/December of 1974 we were declared and open. And then we married sometime later, and had two daughters, one of whom is now a student here. So I can also compare the students of today with my classmates. And I think the advantage is to the students of today, really. My generation of students…I was here kind of
- Paul Scott StanfieldPaul: in the Watergate era and the great wave of student activism had passed. And we were all kind of burned out and lazy and self-indulgent, really, in a lot of ways. And so the people, the students I know, the people who are now 19, 20, 21, seem to do a lot more volunteering and seem a lot more aware of, a lot more responsible, better at organizing things, more aware of the community, than we were. We were sort of… we were a bit aimless, compared to the people who came right before us, who protested for civil rights and against the war and against the draft. By the time we got here, the war was over, or American involvement was pretty much over, and the draft was
- Paul Scott StanfieldPaul: over and the civil rights legislation had been passed. So we just kind of, we were just kind of self-indulgent, really, in a lot of ways. It was called the “me” decade, which is sort of fair. And I think I’m sort of more impressed by the 20-year olds of today. Yes that’s right…My two very impressive daughters have a lot to do with this, because they sort of really keep us on our toes, and they are always passionate about something. So that’s good. Okay!
- Erica Seltzer-SchultzErica: Is there anything else you want to talk about?
- Paul Scott StanfieldPaul: Well, let’s see… Let me review the… “What kind of clothes did you wear every day?” I did wear the same clothes every day. I wore blue jeans, and a work shirt, and work boots. Not the same shirt
- Paul Scott StanfieldPaul: like plaid or kind of those blue denim-y shirts, or sometimes plaid--flannel in the winter. And so did everyone else. Yeah, men and women, they had the same-length hair and basically the same clothes. It was pretty hard to tell us all apart in those days. I did have hair down to my shoulders in those days, parted in the middle. And I had wire-rimmed glasses that were made popular by John Lennon in the sixties. “What did your dorm room look like?” I did my best not to be in my dorm room. But we had a lot of Indian prints, that was
- Paul Scott StanfieldPaul: very popular. Thing most I remember about campus is the Grateful Dead. I never enjoyed the Grateful Dead myself but seemed that everyone else did. So you would walk down the loggia and coming out of every dorm in those days was some Grateful Dead music, or Uncle John’s band, or Europe 72. Let’s see…”Something no longer available on campus but that was meaningful to you.” Well, it’s still available, it’s still here, but I must have been one of the last students to live in Mears. (Interviewer: Oh, you lived in Mears, wow!) I lived in Mears when it was still a dormitory…the second floor. [Interviewer: Was it co-ed?] It was co-ed by floor, so there were guys on the second floor, and women on the first and
- Paul Scott StanfieldPaul: third floors. And I remembered my first year I was in Norris, which was coed every other room, kind of. So one of the things I learned about going to an all-male floor was that males are but neater when women are around, and women are much neater when men are around, ’cause Mears was dirty! Just let things slide. Yeah, I mean when it was just guys or just girls, I guess, you kind of get slack and you’re not trying to impress anybody so everyone got a little slovenly. But apart from that, it was a great floor; great people on the floor, and just the building had a real charm. The rooms were not all
- Paul Scott StanfieldPaul: alike. The rooms were kind of—each room was a little bit different. And you had the nice tall windows with the view out, in my case, towards the loggia. And the room was not rectangular, there were kind of crannies in it and little nooks and things like that. So I was very fond of Mears, but I understand it needed a makeover.
Alumni oral history interview with Paul Scott Stanfield '76. Recorded June 4, 2010.