Remembering a good friend

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I received a polite email this week from a distant cousin of our friend, Ann Keppel, a UH professor of education who passed away ten years ago this month.

Ann’s cousin wrote:

She was my cousin—distantly—as I am related to the Keppel/Pralle/Hauser clans of Western Wisconsin. I believe that my grandmother grew up with her. I didn’t know of Ann until after she had passed away, but I’ve always felt that I missed out. My family doesn’t produce many intellectuals, and when I read her obituary in the La Crosse Tribune in 2002, I thought that she would have been such an important role model. I even visited Honolulu in 2001 and could have met her then. I have been recently revisited with a desire to learn more about her.

She wrote me after finding the small online memorial I created back in 2002.

Ann Keppel was remarkable in her ability to nurture friendships for the long term, with members of her extended family, colleagues, students, friends of colleagues and students and family, people she met in so many different ways. We first met Ann through good friends of ours back around 1969 or 1970, then reconnected with her much later when Meda joined the faculty of the Women’s Studies Program (now the Women’s Studies Department) at the University of Hawaii, where Ann was the program director at the time.

After Ann’s unexpected death, I was able to gather written recollections of her from a number of her many friends.

I’ve just spent some time reading through many of them for the first time in a decade. Together, they create an amazing portrait of a remarkable woman, not a banner headlines kind of person, but a good, solid, sensible, sensitive, and reliable friend. There is poetry in these memories, a reflection of Ann, I suppose. I’m sharing a few snippets, and invite you to wade in and read more.

From the late Ron Johnson, a UH psychologist:

We shared growing up in the rural/small town mid-West. We often talked about the remarkable tolerance people had toward neighbors, some of them very strange, and the intolerance they showed toward outsiders, no matter how seemingly normal.

We both went through McCarthyism and the witch-hunt. We learned how little faith one could have in the courage of university administrators, most faculty and students, and the American Association of University Professors.

I wrote, in part:

We shared a belief that the world can and should be a better place than it’s allowed to be, but Ann added an appreciation of both the broad tides and minute details of history. She had a mind for those details, a passion for them. You could always learn from her, and we did.

She was invariably the first person to call whenever one of my stories made it into print, and usually one of the only people to immediately ask about the juicy unpublished details.

We also shared a love of cats, and watching Ann’s feline interactions was always a joy. She could sweep any of her cats off their feet and clamp them firmly in the crook of her arm while administering wholesale affection. It was a most awkward position for the cats, but they never fussed or complained, having long since learned there was little room for resistance if Ann wanted to fold you into her life.

That was a lesson, I suppose, that we all learned over the years, cats and people alike.

From Sheila Lumsden, who grew up next door.

She taught me that you didn’t always have to pretend‚ and say the polite stuff. That you didn’t always have to have a significant other. That you should speak the truth, enjoy what you have, appreciate good Classical music and eat the mangos while they’re ripe and always stop to talk to the cats.

I hope to see her again someday.

From Pat Scheans in Portland:

We emailed each other frequently (some times daily) as Ann’s appreciation of technology grew. Although she wrote regularly before computers, her handwriting was often illegible. (I was called upon to decipher it by other family members). Many newspaper articles arrived with no clue as to their significance, the annotation unreadable. She also managed to slur typewritten words (having sent an email or two after a martini or two), but the connection was always there.

There is a void in my life. I sent her Mother’s Day cards and olives stuffed with garlic, she sent me correspondence of my father’s and Hawaiian baby names. (I am an Anthropologist’s daughter working as a Neonatal Nurse Practitioner). What will I do without her?

The UH Board of Regents voted at their meeting this week to make the Women’s Studies B.A. degree permanent. Ann would have loved to be around for this moment, as she was such a big part of building the department. Meda and I later sat on our deck as the sun set over on the other side of the mountains, and raised our glasses in a toast to Ann. We do miss her.

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4 thoughts on “Remembering a good friend”

  2. Laurie

    Thank you for sharing her memory with us. I appreciate this post very much and would love to have known her.

    Reply ↓
  3. skeptical once again

    The UH Board of Regents voted at their meeting this week to make the Women’s Studies B.A. degree permanent.

    Your friend sounds like she was a wonderful person.

    But the creation of more departments at the University sounds like the typical logic of expansion. Programs become departments; new departments eventually get MA programs; and eventually PhD programs. This undermines the mission of the university.

    Here is an op-ed in the NYTimes by Jeff Selingo, editorial director at the Chronicle of Higher Education, that touches on this issue.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/opinion/fixing-college-through-lower-costs-and-better-technology.html?_r=2

    From 1999 to 2009, American universities underwent a costly and wrongheaded expansion.

    [U]university leaders desperately need to transform how colleges do business. Higher education must make up for the mistakes it made in what I call the industry’s “lost decade,” from 1999 to 2009. Those years saw a surge in students pursuing higher education, driven partly by the colleges, which advertised heavily and created enticing new academic programs, services and fancy facilities.

    The almost insatiable demand for a college credential meant that schools could raise their prices and families would go to almost any end, including taking on huge amounts of debt, to pay the bill. In 2003, only two colleges charged more than $40,000 a year for tuition, fees, and room and board; by 2009, 224 were above that mark. The total amount of outstanding student loan debt is now more than $1 trillion.

    Ironically, it’s not just students who have gone into debt, but the universities.

    Students were not the only ones to go deeper into debt. So did schools, building lavish residence halls, recreational facilities and other amenities that contributed little to actual learning. The debt taken on by colleges has risen 88 percent since 2001, to $307 billion.

    This heady period of growth occurred precisely when colleges had the financial flexibility to prepare for what was to come: fewer government dollars, a wave of financially needy students, a drop-off in the number of well-prepared high-school graduates who could afford to pay, and, of course, technological advances in teaching and learning. Instead, colleges continued to focus on their unsustainable model, assuming little would change.

    Colleges need to change, or this change will be cast upon them.

    Other information industries, from journalism to music to book publishing, enjoyed similar periods of success right before epic change enveloped them, seemingly overnight. We now know how those industries have been transformed by technology, resulting in the decline of the middleman — newspapers, record stores, bookstores and publishers.

    Colleges and universities could be next, unless they act to mitigate the poor choices and inaction from the lost decade by looking for ways to lower costs, embrace technology and improve education.

    There is a need to embrace new technology, especially the Internet.

    One urgent need is to make better use of technology in the classroom. Despite resistance to the idea from academics, evidence suggests that technology can reduce costs, improve student performance and even tailor learning to individual students. The nonprofit National Center for Academic Transformation has redesigned courses on more than 200 campuses, cutting costs by an average of 37 percent, by using instructional software to reduce burdens on professors, frequent low-stakes online quizzes to gauge student progress, and alternative staffing (like undergraduate peer mentors).

    Schools should also offer more online education. In just the past few months, several elite universities, including Stanford and Harvard, have announced multimillion-dollar efforts to provide several of their courses free, online, for everyone. Individual colleges should take advantage of this trend, perhaps ultimately shedding their lowest-quality courses (and their costs) and replacing them with the best courses offered by other institutions through loose federations or formal networks. This is the idea behind the New Paradigm Initiative, a group of 16 liberal-arts colleges in the South that have joined together to offer online and hybrid courses to students on any campus in the group.

    Administrative costs have simply gotten out of control.

    Another key reform would be to reclaim academics as a top priority. Administrative expenses have grown faster than instruction on many campuses. In 2009, the consulting firm Bain & Company identified $112 million in annual savings just within the business operations at the University of California, Berkeley.

    There is also a need to eliminate low-ranking graduate programs.

    Academia also needs to cut back on low-quality graduate programs. Too many universities tried to become research institutions during the lost decade, adding graduate programs and research faculty, often using tuition dollars to finance their expansions. Today, too many of these programs remain far short of their goals, and their ambitions have come at a great cost to their core mission of educating undergraduates (as well as producing many dropouts and unemployed Ph.D.’s).

    Colleges need to embrace more ethical practices when it comes to accepting college credits.

    Finally, colleges should work to reduce the number of wasted credits. Most students take far more than the 120 credits required for a bachelor’s degree, partly because of poor advising and partly because colleges often refuse to accept credits from other institutions or for “prior learning.” Yet one-third of students today transfer from one college to another before earning a degree. Colleges make transferring credits difficult, often in the name of protecting academic quality, when often they are simply protecting their bottom line.

    But the possibility of reform from the inside at universities and colleges seems unlikely.

    Higher education is a conservative, risk-averse industry. Add to this the fact that a majority of its leaders are nearing the safety net of retirement, and we have a recipe for the status quo. We can’t afford another lost decade.

    The logic of expansion at universities would seem to manifest the “tragedy of the commons”. That is, what is in the self-interest of professors and administrators (and politicians, at public universities) — the grandiose project of building a university with all sorts of programs and amenities — has little to do with actual education. It’s mostly about prestige and salaries and, ironically, a kind of well-meaning and naive form of megalomania.

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