Marie Matsen Oral History

[00:00:00] Elizabeth Uhlig:
This is an oral history with Marie Matsen. Today is December 18th, 2006. We're in Marie's office at Lane Community College. My name is Elizabeth Uhlig and I'm the archivist. Marie, to get started, could you tell us where you were born and raised?

[00:00:17] Marie Matsen:
Sure, I was born in Portland, Oregon and I was raised there, went to public school there. It was actually on fourth generation Oregonian.

[00:00:29] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Did your ancestors come over on Oregon Trail?

[00:00:33] Marie Matsen:
Actually, the earliest ones that came over, my great-great-grandparents came by rail from Missouri to Nevada right after the Civil War. And then after four or five years in Nevada, they took a wagon up to the Hermiston area and ranched there. I guess you could call it ranching. They called it dirt farming.

[00:01:05] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Do you see that family here then in Oregon?

[00:01:07] Marie Matsen:
Oh, absolutely. Lots of family. Yeah. My folks live here. I've got several cousins that live here, aunts and uncles.

[00:01:20] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Did you go to school in Portland?

[00:01:25] Marie Matsen:
Yes. In fact, I went to the same grade school that my parents went to. That was a real event. In fact, I had one of my teachers was a teacher that both of them had when they were in grade school. So that was quite an adventure.

[00:01:46] Elizabeth Uhlig:
When you were a child or a teenager, what things were you interested in?

[00:01:51] Marie Matsen:
Oh, well. I've always loved to read. So my sisters and my parents claimed that they never saw me in the house without a book in my hand. And that included when I was doing chores or supposed to be doing chores. I was also very, very active physically. I was good at sports. My favorite growing up was softball.

And I also eventually grew to love several other sports, but my passion was softball when I was growing up.

[00:02:35] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Did you play in your high school team then?

[00:02:37] Marie Matsen:
We didn't have high school teams for girls back then. The only teams for girls when I was in high school were swimming, and I sink like a rock, and golf. And I didn't have clubs and couldn't afford to play anyway.

[00:02:57] Elizabeth Uhlig:
So did you play in teams?

[00:02:59] Marie Matsen:
I played sandlot ball until I got to college. I didn't play organized anything.

[00:03:09] Elizabeth Uhlig:
When you said you like to read books, what kinds of books?

[00:03:12] Marie Matsen:
Oh, I read lots of different kinds of books.

I can't say that they were any one subject in particular. I liked fiction a lot, but I also liked science, so I read a lot about science and music and musicians. That's another thing I did growing up. I spent a lot of time playing the piano. I took lessons all the way up through high school.

[00:03:51] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Did you still play?

[00:03:51] Marie Matsen:
Oh, yeah. I bet. It's a big part of my life.

[00:03:58] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Did you go back to take lessons again, or you just kept playing the piano?

[00:04:02] Marie Matsen:
I just kept playing. Maybe after I retire, I might pick up some lessons somewhere. But I play regularly at church, and I play a variety of music. Not just hymns, but classical. I play a lot of classical music for myself, but also at church and contemporary, and I'm part of a contemporary worship ensemble. That's a new thing for me. I've just acquired those skills in the last few years.

[00:04:42] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What church do you go to?

[00:04:42] Marie Matsen:
Eugene Friends.

[00:04:47] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Has that been your church throughout your life?

[00:04:51] Marie Matsen:
No. I only started going to Friends Church since I moved to Eugene, but after I joined the Friends Church here, I found out that my great-grandfather was Quaker, and I have ancestors, Quaker ancestors, clear back to the mid-1600s in this country.

[00:05:17] Elizabeth Uhlig:
So there was something in the genes or something?

[00:05:20] Marie Matsen:
I think so, actually. That's a story, actually. It has to do with why I'm in education too, I think.

[00:05:27] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Do you want to tell that story now?

[00:05:33] Marie Matsen:
Well, sure. I think a lot of people know that education is very important for Quakers. It is today, certainly, and it has been throughout the history of Quakers, and Quakers have founded a lot of important colleges in this country, and always education has been important in the raising of children for just about as far back as there have been Quakers. And so that value certainly was passed through my great-grandfather. He grew up in a Quaker family. He had four brothers, all of whom were college-educated. My great-grandfather was college-educated. He had one sister who lived into adulthood, and she was college-educated.

And even for Quakers, that was pretty unusual. This was post-Civil War time, and they lived in Kansas at the time. They all started off at Lawrence, and some of his siblings went off to other colleges, and I can't remember for sure which ones, but across the country. His name, by the way, was Horace Mann Cox. So with the name of Horace Mann, you have to know that it was part of his family's values, his parents' highly valued education. And Horace Mann, of course, was an early proponent of free education, free public education in this country. My grandfather came to Oregon and settled in Newburgh in the 1870s, and of course there's quite a Quaker community there, and quite a few families that his family had known in Iowa or Kansas ended up in the Newburgh area. And I don't know if this was his specific purpose when he came out. He's listed in the census in 1870 as labor, but we know from several sources that he was the first Quaker to teach Quaker children, to have a Quaker school,

in the Newburgh area, so probably the first one in Oregon. And he was the first teacher in the schools in Newburgh, and what eventually became George Fox Academy, and then George Fox College, and now George Fox University. So having him as an educator, he then went on to teach in Central Oregon, and there weren't any Quakers in Central and Eastern Oregon, so when he married my great-grandmother, he worshiped with her at a Methodist church in Arlington, Oregon, is where they spent most of their adult life before moving back to Portland.

Also, all four of his brothers ended up in education. Two of them taught at Stanford, one his complete career was teaching at Stanford. One ended up teaching at the University of California in Berkeley, and there's a lecture hall named for him. I didn't know that until a few years ago. One ended up being the superintendent of schools in Oakland, California, and his fourth brother's superintendent of schools in Honolulu, Hawaii.

So I figured I didn't have a chance. I had to end up in education. I didn't know where I was going to in the beginning. It wasn't anything I aspired to until my last year or so of college.

[00:10:13] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Did your parents expect you to go to college?

[00:10:20] Marie Matsen:
Let me put it this way. I never thought that I was not going to go to college. I can't remember my parents ever explicitly telling me or any of my four sisters that we were going to go to college, but they certainly didn't discourage it, and they spoke about college as if they hoped that we would go and be interested in going on. Neither one of them got to go to college. Their lives were such that World War II really interrupted them at just the wrong time. Then after dad got back from the service, I came along. Mom actually came within a couple of classes of finishing her bachelor's after we were pretty much grown up.

[00:11:26] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Did your sisters all go to college today?

[00:11:32] Marie Matsen:
You went to Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.

[00:11:38] Elizabeth Uhlig:
How did you go there? Why did you decide to go there?

[00:11:44] Marie Matsen:
Well, first of all, I wanted to go someplace away from home. I sensed that that would be good for me. I'd never spent any time away from home. I'd not been out of Oregon very much.

I applied probably five or six different colleges. I know I wanted to go someplace small, a residential college, and we didn't have any money. My dad was self-employed, and his business was just not doing all that well, and Mom was working nights to pay the bills, and they were sort of having to raise us with all those kinds of pressures.

So I applied to several schools, and my aunt and uncle who were in Eugene, my uncle taught at the University of Oregon and retired not too long ago. They had been at Dartmouth for a few years early in my uncle's teaching career, and their best friend there went to teach at Carleton. Just the year before, I was starting to apply to colleges, and my aunt said, you know, you really ought to look at Carleton. Our friend Dan is there, and he thinks it's one of the best colleges that he's ever seen or been associated with. He was really impressed. So I said, well, okay, I know I think about it. So I applied, and when everything shook out, Carleton was the only place that offered me a financial aid package that I could make it on. I mean, I couldn't have even gone to Portland State and lived at home.

So it was serendipity. I mean, you know, I'd never seen the place. I didn't step foot on the campus until...

[00:13:54] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Do you think you made a good choice then?

[00:13:56] Marie Matsen:
Oh, it was absolutely the right choice for me. It's a wonderful, wonderful place, college, really excellent teaching going on there, and the student atmosphere, the student environment was just incredible. I absolutely made the right choice.

[00:14:20] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What did you study there? What was your major?

[00:14:23] Marie Matsen:
I ended up majoring in sociology, which was a real switch for me. I started out in math or science and thinking that I might want to go into medicine or into research.

And then I sort of discovered the social sciences. I had really good science teachers in high school, and I think I just didn't get what the social sciences were about until I got to college. And then I became really intrigued by,

especially in sociology, by the, you know, what are human groups, human societies, all about? How do they shape us? How do we, how do people shape societies? And it was just fascinating for me, and it pulled together everything that I was learning.

You said it wasn't until the last year in college that you became interested in education? Really serious about it, yeah. And actually it was through sports and physical education that I became really interested in teaching. There was an incredible, there's no major at Carleton in physical education, but there was a very strong women's physical education department, and that was at the beginning of women's athletics, so I was in on the first basketball team at Carleton, the first volleyball team at Carleton, the first soft, in fact I was a founder, the first softball team at Carleton.

Carleton had teams already in field hockey, tennis,

it seems to me I'm missing one's scheme.

But it was the very beginning of women's sports, and the teaching that I saw going on and the learning that I saw going on in the midst of this very academic environment was something that the more I experienced it myself, the more I wanted to be part of creating that kind of experience for women in particular in colleges. And it was more meaningful to me in terms of having an impact on student lives.

It's a very, very different kind of a relationship that you develop with somebody in a physical education class, and even more so, way more so, on an athletic team. If, and I have to say if, I'm not real excited about the direction that women's sports have taken, I think it's taken predictably probably the same direction that men's has, and that's putting way much more emphasis on the sport and on winning than on academics. But I think there's a place, and it plays out really well in small colleges, Division III kinds of schools where academics are supposed to come first, but it provides an environment for a coach to have a tremendous positive impact on students' lives beyond the classroom, beyond the academics, including the academics, but beyond that. So that's how I got excited about teaching. That's probably more than you wanted to know. So then you were a coach.

[00:18:34] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Yes. Your first jobs were as a coach?

[00:18:37] Marie Matsen:
And teacher. Yeah, I taught physical education. That was my primary job at the University of Iowa for three years. And at the time, coaching was still an ancillary duty, and so I was the softball coach and the first volleyball coach at the University of Iowa. Then I got a job offer from Carleton. It was just a three-year stint.

They didn't, at the time, they had a policy against tenuring in departments and they had an opening, and everybody there was tenured, so it's an automatic three-year contract kind of thing, but I jumped at it because I really loved Carleton, the atmosphere. Of course, I still knew everybody there, the faculty and staff.

And there was a little more emphasis, believe it or not, in terms of my job on coaching. Still, physical education was my primary responsibility, but I also had built into my job. It wasn't added on. It was built into my job. I was coaching volleyball and basketball. And then after that, I was at Washington State University for two years, and there my primary job was coaching. I was 60 or 70 percent of my assignment. And there I had a nationally ranked team. I was hired in volleyball, yes. And really just had a wonderful experience there, but it was at that time that women's sports, it was obvious that in a year or two, it was going to be shifting from the old AIAW, Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. That was the precursor or the first national organization for collegiate women's sports. It was just for athletics, women's athletics at the college level. And that was in the process of transitioning to NCAA. There was much more emphasis on scholarships, on recruiting. I loved coaching. I loved teaching.

And the part I liked most about coaching was taking a raw group of women who had raw talent or some experience in volleyball or basketball, whatever it was, and just teaching and moving them a step forward into this environment where they were competing with other highly skilled women.

I didn't want to go out and excuse the phrase I'm going to use, but it's the way I thought about it at the time. I didn't want to be buying meat, which is sort of a derogatory way of describing what I thought was going on in men's athletics in terms of recruiting. And I think that's not a fair characterization completely,

but it was so important to me that academics come first. And what I was experiencing at Washington State was a women's athletic department, coaches who were trying to maintain that kind of a standard, but just being forced into this kind of a maelstrom that was leading toward academics taking less of a primary place in the lives of the athletes. And I just didn't want to be part of it, you know, in that kind of an atmosphere. I'm trying to remember the title, whatever it was, that men's and women's, they had to get the same amount of funding.

[00:23:12] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Was this a good time?

[00:23:13] Marie Matsen:
Yeah, actually, it was just when I left Washington State, there was just the beginning of a lot of litigation around that issue. And yes, that was written in at that time. And in fact, I was part of a lawsuit filed against the Washington State University as a class action suit by female athletes and coaches. And it's a suit that was successful. And it was one of the two or three lawsuits in the country that was a real turning point where colleges and universities realized that this women's athletic stuff was serious and that they had to give that attention or they would be in hot water.

[00:24:12] Elizabeth Uhlig:
So you were suing the university?

[00:24:14] Marie Matsen:
I was part of the class action lawsuit. You had to take the funding. Yeah. Now, that may sound contradictory. And it was part of the inner conflict I was feeling at the time because we definitely, we had the expectation as coaches that we were entering into a period where we were going to start, having a winning team was going to be more and more important.

And recruiting the right players was going to be more and more important.

And there weren't enough resources to do that and to be successful at it. So it was an interesting time. And personally, it was a hard time for me. I didn't want to leave that team. I really didn't want to leave that team. The athletes, the women on that team were really terrific people and good athletes and that was hard.

[00:25:25] Elizabeth Uhlig:
So why did you leave or did you feel you had to leave then?

[00:25:33] Marie Matsen:
I really didn't, I just really didn't want to get into this business. And I had people trying to talk me into staying, staying with it and saying, you know, when people like you leave, it is going to turn the other way. And I would say, well, but is it going to turn that way whether or not people like me stay in it? Well, it was clear to me it was going that way. And along with that, I started also asking myself the question and I, let's see, I would have been in my early 30s then. I started asking myself the question, can you see yourself doing this when you're 55 or 60? And I thought, you know, I'm in my early 30s and I'm definitely headed on this track of being a coach. And that's all I'll be for the next 30 years. And is that all I want to be? Do I want to do the same thing for the next 30 years? And I said, well, no, now's a good time to leave.

[00:26:40] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Is that when you came to Eugene then?

[00:26:42] Marie Matsen:
Yeah, it is. I came to Eugene. I worked for a year for a lawyer in town and then partway through that year, I started taking classes out here in computer programming at Lane.

[00:26:59] Elizabeth Uhlig:
How did you choose that field then? Did you go back to your science?

[00:27:04] Marie Matsen:
No, actually, one of my sisters was a computer programmer

and when I was going through this decision-making process, she said, you know, I really think you would like computer programming. You know, she and I shared a lot of similar academic kinds of interests and sport interests and she was really doing well and really liking what she was doing. And so I thought, well, I'll take a couple classes and see if I like it. And I did.

[00:27:42] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Why did you choose Lane or were you available or anyplace else? Or was that an option for you?

[00:27:51] Marie Matsen:
The only thing going on at the university at the time was really mathematically oriented and I was thinking more practically at the time. I was thinking, you know, I need to get some tools that I can use to get a job. And there were a couple of evening classes out here that were convenient and the price was right, of course, and so I just did that.

[00:28:22] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Did you study here then?

[00:28:29] Marie Matsen:
Well, let's see. I just took a couple of classes that, in between year and then the next year I was, I got a job in the, oh no, I took classes full-time for fall term. That would have been in, what, your 80, I think. And then in January of 81 I got my first position here. They had an opening coordinator for the microcomputer lab, the first student lab here at the college in Health 207, I think. The lab is still there.

And I was a full-time student then that year, and the following year I finished up the classwork and at the same time, I think it was winter or spring that year,

82 that I, there was an opening for a computer programmer and I got that job. So I basically fulfilled all the requirements for an Associate of Science degree in computer programming except for personal health and freshman writing and whoever was doing the degree evaluation at that time in student services wouldn't waive the requirement. And I just said, well, I've already got a job, so I never pursued that. Of course I had freshman writing, and of course I had personal health, that was my master's was in health and PE. Marie, during the break you mentioned about your grandmother. Yes. And you want to talk a little bit about them and their educational experience. My grandmother, she was the one, she was one of the four daughters of my Cox grandparents, the great-grandfather Cox was the Quaker. So she was a third of four girls, and she was born in 1902, and in fact she just died in 2004, so she was 102, she lived to be 102. And all, she and the three of her sisters all went to college, got degrees.

Grandma taught until she met Grandpa, and she met Grandpa when she was teaching at Sherman County schools. She taught high school at Sherman County and met him there and married him. And in those days you didn't, once you were married, you couldn't teach anymore.

Her two older sisters taught for a while in public schools and then the first one went into business for herself and the second one, she and her husband basically started a manual arts vocational school for boys and then she did piano teaching. She was a very good musician and she taught piano until she died in her 80s. And then my grandmother's younger sister taught in the Oakland Public Schools in California and taught there until she retired in her 60s.

[00:32:29] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What college did they go to?

[00:32:32] Marie Matsen:
Yeah, Aunt Elma and Aunt Esther, I'm not sure exactly where they went to school. I could probably guess, but I'm just not sure enough to know. Grandma went to, she started out at Willamette University, spent a year there, and then finished at Monmouth. It was Oregon Normal School, yeah. And then Aunt Janet, the youngest one, she went to the University of Oregon. She was quite a bit younger. She wasn't born until 1911.

Okay, getting back then to Lane and you had your first job at the computer lab. Yeah.

[00:33:24] Elizabeth Uhlig:
And how many years then were you in the computer services? How many years did you do there?

[00:33:34] Marie Matsen:
Well, I had the microcomputer lab job for almost exactly a year, as I remember.

And at the time it was the only computer lab on campus, TRS 80s, the RadioShack TRS 80s, and 16 kilobyte memory. Everything was done off of those big floppy disks. Yeah, it was pretty archaic stuff, but it was exciting for them. I mean, it was a neat thing. And then I think it was about six years as a programmer, six, six and a half, something like that.

And it was mainframe computing then, I mean, real mainframe computing. There was a big box down in the bottom of Building 2, big Honeywell, Xerox, and Honeywell bought Xerox out, as I recall. And programming was all in COBOL, and gosh, I can't remember. I know we started out using decks of cards, but it wasn't too long before that was all switched over to doing it more online. It's not online as you think of it today, but through, you know, terminals, dedicated terminals.

And, you know, pretty much big, big old long Herky programs for everything we did. And it was a batch environment, so we didn't have a lot of users directly interacting with the mainframe. Email was just kind of starting to kick in the last couple years I was in computer services. So obviously you've seen so many changes in these last 20-some years with computers. Yeah, I'd be lost if I had to go back to programming now. I'd be totally lost. I'd have to relearn everything or start again, yeah. I liked it. I liked the logic, I liked the idea of being able to do complex things with a machine, and, you know, I liked the idea of it helping people to be more efficient.

And it was like solving puzzles, you know, and there was always a product. That was a good thing about it.

I think then you moved into research and planning in Iraq, but it was quite something different in those days. How did you make that change, or was that just...

Yeah, I guess I was starting to get restless. I'd never been in a job more than three years until I was down there programming.

I guess I was just starting to get restless, and about that time I was starting to think, okay, well, I'm in here around 40 now, and I guess I started asking that question again. Do I want to be doing this for the next 20 or 25 years? So I thought, well, maybe I ought to start looking at, you know, some courses at the university. So I took an evening class from educational policy and management. It used to be a program at the University of Oregon, and basically it was education and administration, and there were some really good faculty there at that time. Exceptional faculty. It was a nationally known program at that time. And they had a... My first class was... I really got turned on to learning again.

And so I just... I took a couple of classes one year, and about that time there was an opening in research and planning. So it was kind of a fit with what I was starting, you know, the classes I was starting to take at the university. And so I did that, made that change, and spent the next three years working in research and planning and taking classes and writing my dissertation at the university.

[00:39:03] Elizabeth Uhlig:
So you were in the PhD program, and that's what you graduated from?

[00:39:08] Marie Matsen:
Yes, PhD, yeah.

[00:39:11] Elizabeth Uhlig:
At that time, did you know, then,

[00:39:13] Marie Matsen:
that your career would be in community colleges

[00:39:15] Elizabeth Uhlig:
as opposed to four-year universities or any classes?

[00:39:20] Marie Matsen:
Yeah, actually, by that time, I was really... I really felt committed to Lane at that point. The things that go on at Lane are just phenomenal.

If you look at what we're accomplishing here from an outside perspective, and I felt like I had... I don't have as much of an outsider's perspective now, but I felt for a good many years at the beginning that I really did have a pretty good outsider's perspective on the things that were going on here, and what was happening with students and the lives that were being changed, and I'm also committed to Oregon. I mean, it's just part of who I am, and so I wanted to remain in Oregon, so I wanted to stay at Lane, and so I thought, well, going on and getting more education will give me some more options potentially down the road.

[00:40:32] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Talking about perspectives,

[00:40:34] Marie Matsen:
because you've been here as a student, as a staff and an administrator.

Having that kind of perspective,

[00:40:44] Elizabeth Uhlig:
how has that helped you and influenced you?

[00:40:53] Marie Matsen:
Well, it's influenced me a lot to have the classified staff perspective. That, I think, has had a huge... I know it has had a huge impact on how I do my job as an administrator. I wasn't a student long enough

to really get that perspective. I still feel... My students' self, I feel more connected

because of my experiences at Carleton. They were so... That's such a dominant force in my life that it's hard for me to look at with a student lens from anything but that perspective. So, on the other hand, my experience as a student in need, coming from a working class family without a lot of resources, I think that part of my student perspective, I think, has had a deep impact on me as an administrator. So, from the personal student perspective, yes, from the academic student perspective, I don't feel like I have as good a grasp of that here as I might. But, nevertheless, I've seen it from that perspective, and I can understand, for instance, students' frustrations, I mentioned the incident earlier about not being able to get the requirements from my degree in for seemingly ridiculous reasons.

So, there are things like that that I guess I do understand. But, certainly the classified employee perspective, I was a classified employee for eight years, approximately, and that had a profound influence in it. And I think that my view of managing, and particularly in college operations, where I think we have the majority of classified staff or employed in college operations are pretty close to a majority. So, I think that really, really helped me to be a better manager and leader to have lived at from that perspective for eight years.

[00:43:45] Elizabeth Uhlig:
And so, how did you move into administration? You were in the president's office?

[00:43:53] Marie Matsen:
Yeah, well, a job came open there, and it came open as I was finishing my degree. And, in fact, I had a job interview the same week I defended my doctoral dissertation. And then the following Monday, I was offered the job. So, those things kind of were all together. They happened, at least in time, they happened all together. And it just seemed like the right move to make for me at that point. Actually, I loved what I was doing in research and planning. That was even more engaging than programming was. There was something about that job that took the technical skills that I had and the people skills and kind of brought them together and my sociology background. But, yeah, it was good timing for me in my career to move up to the president's office.

[00:45:15] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Who was president at that time?

[00:45:15] Marie Matsen:
Jerry Moskis. He'd been here a year, so I came into that job during his second year as president.

[00:45:29] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What kinds of things did you do in that job? What kinds of projects did you do?

[00:45:35] Marie Matsen:
Well, there was lots of routine day-to-day things.

Cottage Row, Florence, they were reporting to the president at that point. So was the affirmative action director. And one of my chief responsibilities was managing the budget and representing all of those areas in the budget process. So that was a learning experience for me. I had a pretty steep learning curve on that. It was an important experience for me. I was sort of the chief person behind the scenes for college council. I made sure that materials were ready and that I pretty much made out the agenda.

And that sounds kind of clerical, but it wasn't. I mean, it was sort of all of the organizational stuff and the background research, and it was keeping college council going. I was on the executive team representing the units that reported to the president. I did a lot of white paper kinds of things for the president.

I did a lot of research on different topics for speeches that he gave or things he was writing or topics that were hot on campus.

That was really a jack of all trades. And I kind of, you know, where there were holes and things that needed to be done, and I kind of filled those. So it seems that you had a pretty wide, I mean, these different opportunities just gave you all kinds of experience. Yeah, it was really diverse. Yeah, lots of opportunities in that job. A lot of it was wide open. I mean, there were things that, you know, you just had to get done from day to day, that, you know, a lot of things that the president just didn't have time to do needed to be done, and, you know, as often happens in that kind of a job, a lot of things go out under the president's name that I'd really done all or most of. And, you know, I mean, that's fine.

The president's the one that's supposed to get the credit for that kind of stuff. I learned a lot, though, from all of that. It was a good experience.

[00:48:42] Elizabeth Uhlig:
And then from there, how did you move that into college operations?

[00:48:51] Marie Matsen:
Well, the third year I was in the assistant to the president job, there was, at the beginning of that year, the previous vice president, it was administrative services at that time. That vice president resigned to take another job on the East Coast. And that year there was a search, national search, and it was failed search.

I can't remember why it was failed. I don't know if candidates turned us down or if we just didn't find the person we wanted to honestly don't remember. But the president then was acting as the vice president during that time, and then there was a failed search, and he just said, you know, I can't do this anymore. I can't do this for another year. And we had to completely retool this, and we were also, as a college, in the middle of a major restructuring anyway.

So he assigned me to, he asked me if I would first, but he assigned me to be the interim vice president. And originally I was to do the job just for a few months to a year until they could get through a search. And with all the things that were going on at that time around reorganization and such, didn't get around to doing that search. And so that year as an interim lengthened out to two years and then three years. And by that time, originally when I took it, I said, look, I'm not, this isn't the job for me. I don't want to be a vice president. But, you know, I'll be glad to do it for a while.

But, you know, after the second year or so, I said, well, gosh, I really am liking this. And I feel like I'm well suited, and I feel like I'm getting some things done. And so when it came open, I applied.

[00:51:16] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What were some of the projects that you worked on as interim and as vice president in college operations?

[00:51:28] Marie Matsen:
As an interim, it was really interesting. We really were in transition organizationally. And, you know, there was quite a, I don't want to use the term shakeup, but there were quite a few changes, you know, in the executive level. And what was college operations then was different from what was administrative services. Personnel services used to be part of administrative services, and in this organizational change, it shifted to the president.

Some auxiliary enterprises, food services in the bookstore, printing and graphics, those all got shifted to college operations from student services. There were some changes in there, auxiliary services manager retired, and rather than hire another executive, or auxiliary services manager, those units came to college operations.

And sometime toward the end of that first year, KLCC moved to college operations from what used to be community economic development. So, really, the first year was kind of a dust settling year, incorporating new people, including me, into college operations. It was learning for me. I learned a lot from the managers in college operations, and I could see, well, I kind of knew it before, but I could see immediately that college operations managers were not working together. They were a conglomeration of individual managers who met once a week and got instructions from, expected to get instructions from the vice president and they maybe shared some information. And I said, you know, this doesn't make any sense. And so, I spent that first year, and I thought it would be sort of my only contribution to college operations to bring together the managers into a leadership team so that they were together making decisions and considering important issues and problem solving for college operations as a whole.

And I think that ended up to be really, really important to the college.

And that, like, laid the foundation for the years when you did actually become a vice president. Yeah, yeah. Also, in that first year, I became interim in mid-August, and we had our 10-year accreditation visit in October. So, one of the first things I had to do as vice president was be, with responsibility for facilities and finance, was to be interviewed by the chair of the evaluation team, as it turned out, about the college's finances and our facilities.

And I was, I was, really, at the very beginning of my learning curve at that point. So, fortunately, they understood that and gave me a lot of grace. I have to say, too, I want to say it for the record, that in that first year in particular, well, actually, the whole three years, there were two or three managers who were in college operations who could have easily done the vice president's job. In fact, one of them already had been interim before and in between vice presidents. And any one of those managers could have made my life miserable and, you know, could have, I don't know, withheld information, you know, just not, but they, every one of them was so supportive of me and took the time to teach me and were so gracious.

And it could have turned out far, far differently, but for that. There were some really classy people in that group and I owe them a lot. And I think the college does, too. They were just wonderful. Maria, I wonder if we could talk about some of the projects, some of the things you worked on. And so let's start with the bond construction. Sure.

In 1995, the voters passed an election for around $43 million for bond construction at the college. Got tremendous support. Over 60% voted for the measure. And it really came at a critical time for the college. We really were bursting at the seams in terms of our physical capacity. We had classrooms full. Some of them weren't the right sizes anymore. There had been so much change in the way we delivered instruction that class and lab spaces weren't adequate. We were housing people, offices in closets, literally, or hallways, every nook and cranny. And there was also a tremendous push at that time for outreach, education.

Going to rural areas instead of, since we're such a big county, instead of having these large distances that students would have to travel to come to our main campus or Florence or Cottage Grove. So it was an exciting time being part of that. I think we had an excellent information campaign. A lot of people were involved, a lot of staff and board members involved in speaking with community groups. And we had a good citizens committee that campaigned for the bond and a lot of activity on campus around sorting out our priorities in terms of needs. And it was exciting to pass that bond and then exciting to start to see it take shape in terms of, well, bricks and mortar. Community learning centers and the Cottage Grove Center were the first projects. First real construction, an addition, and renovation at Florence. That was a big project earlier on. The welding facility was one of the first projects on campus, as was the early childhood.

Well, early childhood was contained along with the child care co-op and our grant program, Lane Family Connections, in the little complex out in the southwest.

Then renovation of the health tech area. It just seemed like we had big, big projects going on for several years in a row. The most sizable of which was the math and science construction and renovation, the Building 19 workforce, and Center for Meeting and Learning, and the student building, number one. Major renovation, Center building, it just goes on and on. I think it really gave us a big boost. It certainly was a big morale booster to have new facilities and the excitement that goes with that and be able to do some new things because of those facilities. Be able to do some old things better because of new facilities. It was really good to be a part of that.

Next, then, about the budget.

Yeah, in the 12 years I've been in this job, we took the budget from being really a manual thing. I mean, Carol Beckley, who'd been here for 30 or so years, most of that time working on the budget, did an excellent, excellent job with the budget. But it was pretty much a manual process that she went through. And now budget is done through our information system. It's done in an interactive way. The information is all on Banner, it's all online, and we're able to generate reports, we're able to have departments do things that before the budget office had to do. And along with that, we have increasingly put out more and more information about our budget in an attempt to make it more understandable, more clear, to make sure that the public, as well as our staff and students have all the relevant information that they need to understand our financial position

and what we're trying to do in budgeting. And that's been an exciting process, and it's taken quite a few years and, again, quite a bit of learning on our part, my part as the Chief Budget Officer and on the part of our personnel in the budget office. But I'm really proud of the fact that the information that we have online about our budget is so extensive, it's just the best and the most information you'll find anywhere on the web for any college. And we've refined it over the years. Staff, of course, has given us feedback about information they want and how it's presented, and I'm really proud of that. I'm really proud of the fact that we have built a good system for budgeting, and it's only now that I'm leading, and I think that that's going to become apparent. The transition from our old manual system and our old information system to Banner and the new technology that we have available, it's been a difficult transition.

And we're only now getting to the point where users are starting to appreciate, the department users are starting to appreciate the tools that they have and really beginning to use some of those. And so I think in the next year or two, I think it's going to become real apparent, particularly to employees, that we have a much more rigorous budget system than they realize right now and than we've ever had in the past. I'm really proud of that. And in fact, a year ago, we got an award from the Government Finance Officers Association, their Budget Excellence Award, and there's a very rigorous application process. They have very rigorous standards you have to meet to get that award, and it isn't every college who gets that award, and we got it our first year submitting, so I think that's really something to be proud of.

[01:06:01] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Could you talk a bit about the developments in the health and wellness area?

[01:06:01] Marie Matsen:
It goes back to your interest in school. It does, yeah, absolutely. And in health and fitness. Yeah, the evidence has been overwhelming over the years that when employers provide wellness programs and access to wellness programs for employees, that employees are healthier, and they're more productive, and there's less absenteeism. And we sort of had some fits and starts of employee wellness type initiatives over the years, and I always tried to encourage those when I was in the President's office and then again with this job as Vice President, but they never really gained a lot of traction until Mary Speldy became President, and I went to her with, well I'm sure it was within the first month, and it might have even been before she really, her first day as President, and said, Mary, I'm really going to be bugging you about getting, about the college funding a good employee wellness program, and she said, give it to me, I'm ready. And we had all the evidence that that was clear, and she has that kind of history too.

She was an athlete in college, and personally knows the importance of fitness and wellness for her and her work life, her personal life too. And so it was an easy, real easy sell for her, and the key I really think was hiring a coordinator for that program. Somebody whose job it was to promote wellness for employees, and Wendy Simmons was the right person for that job. She was already an employee here, and really got us going with some resources, and we've managed to build those resources a little bit, even in hard financial times, because it was clear that it was having an impact, certainly on morale, if nothing else, but from the evidence that we could gather employees, first of all we had a high participation rate, and it kept getting higher and higher, and those people who were participating and being tested along the way,

it was clear that the people who were participating were more fit and healthier. So that was really a plus, and then I think it's been almost three years ago now, financially we've been in really tight times for quite a while, but three years ago we got a quote for renewing our health insurance for employees, there was like 40% increase, just huge, even the market was double digit, around 20, but we were twice that, and it was just clear that we either had to make really drastic reductions in the plan, or we had to do something else, and around that same time we had, or just before that time, if I remember right, employees had worked with the administration, the college, to come up with one plan for all employees, and that certainly was help in terms of cost, but even at that 40% increase on any premiums was huge, and that kept me awake, almost literally,

for quite a few weeks, and one night, while I was lying awake, I thought, my goodness, we have a student health clinic, we employ nurses, and nurse practitioners, and we have a doctor on contract, and we've been doing this for years, and students are paying for primary health care, colleges paying for onsite emergency, but students are paying for primary health care, we have the infrastructure, why don't we expand that to employees, that can't do anything but have a good effect on our experience rating, which is what drives health premiums, and the next day, I called Sandy Inouye, who by then was reporting to me, she was, for many, many years, been the director of the student health center, and at the time she was also directing public safety, her job duties got added to,

and I said, Sandy, what do you think of this, is it, you know, is there something wrong with my thinking, or is it something we should explore, and she immediately picked up on the idea and said, well, gosh, yeah, she said, obviously we'd have to expand the clinic, we don't have enough space, undoubtedly we'd need more staff, we're pretty much at capacity right now, but gosh, we do have all of those things in place that, you know, if we were having to start from scratch, we'd have to be thinking if it was worth, you know, buying the infrastructure, so to speak.

So, she talked to her staff, and one of the nurse practitioners happened to have come to Lane from Peace Health, and had been working at 4J, Eugene School District 4J, in their health clinic, that Peace Health ran. And so, she did some research on how they, you know, really the mechanics of how Peace Health and 4J did their employee health clinic, and did some research at some other places, the university, obviously lots of universities have health clinics and infirmaries, and she and Sandy came up with a good plan and a cost for adding employee care to the health clinic, we got the board to invest in remodeling another area of campus for an expanded health center, we decided that the added costs of staff and professionals for serving employees would be part of our OPE costs, replacing, if we were right, and replacing premium increases. The first year after the clinic was in place, on a pilot basis, not full steam, but on a pilot basis, our health premium insurance increase was, I think it was 4%, which was dramatic.

The industry wide, it was 15% in that neighborhood, and then the first full year of full staffing and in the new facility, our premium quote, was actually a decrease of a few percentage points. And at some point when we're totally phased in, our premiums will start increasing again, but we'll be starting from a much lower base. We've, Dennis Carr, human resources, and Duke Vandervoort, our nurse practitioner manager for the health clinic, they keep track of the metrics and as best they can, the impact of the health clinic, and their estimates are that we're saving employees a significant amount of out-of-pocket medical equipment. We're not going to be able to pay the expenses, but also the college, the health clinic has saved college several million dollars, and that is significant. And I have to say, though, that the most significant thing to me is that employees have access to health care that they might not before have taken the time to go off to somebody off campus.

There are fewer sick days. Employees are really happy with having the clinic here, and by every indication and satisfaction surveys, it's making a huge difference. And, well, I've gone on and on about it. I'm really proud of that accomplishment. And, you know, it's easy to have the idea, but, you know, everybody from, you know, from the beginning, Sandy and Nadine Wilkes, or it wasn't Nadine Wilkes, Mona Arbuckle, who did the research, and students who worked with us through their misgivings about sharing the clinic with employees and skepticism from some employees and from the unions, but also their willingness to work and the staff and the health center and the wellness program. They work together hand in hand, and the new employees from Heritage Health Clinic, I mean, it's just been an effort by everyone to make that thing work, and it's working beautifully, and it's a really good, neat example that we have at Lane of what other colleges can do to help cut costs, yes, and to have a happier, healthier workforce. It just makes sense.

[01:18:24] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Marie, the next project I wanted to ask you about was sustainability, and how did you become interested in that topic?

[01:18:33] Marie Matsen:
Yeah, first of all, it's not a project. I don't see it as a project. Well, that's okay. No, I don't see it as a project. I see it as a way of operating, a way of living for the college. But how did I become interested in sustainability? Well, gosh, of course, one of the major roots of today's sustainability movement is the environmental movement, and I've always had an interest in that. You know, I think being an Oregonian and being an Oregonian interested in outdoor activities all my life, that's really the basis for it. And having grandparents in particular, my father also, working in growing things. And farming, and then my dad and my grandfather, their business was growing flowers. And so there's always been a connection to the land for me that's stronger than just enjoying the outdoors.

And my long connection, you know, family connection with Oregon, certainly. And then, you know, just being in college in the 60s, how could you avoid the environmental movement? You know, along with civil rights, human rights, peace, I mean, all of that, too, is part of the Quaker faith and testimony. And so it all comes together in sustainability.

And I also had a pretty good role model. My grandmother's youngest sister, the one who taught in Oakland, was an environmental activist and emphasis on the word activist. She was one of those people who would stand, you know, with a lot of other people in front of a nuclear plant and, you know, protest and always writing letters and devoting her time and energy, particularly after she was retired to environmental issues. She was a huge inspiration, especially in the later years of her life. She died just before my grandmother did. And so I had a lot of connection with her the last 10 years or so of her life.

Here at Lane, again, it was the confluence of a lot of factors that made it possible to think about really incorporating sustainability principles into operations. One was what was happening at the grassroots. We've had Osprey here for a long time doing things from the student perspective to help us and push us in the environmental area. We had, for many years, a staff, largely staff group, but also students involved who were interested in recycling. And out of that group of people and the passion of a manager who, in our specialized employment services, developmentally disabled adult training program, he was able, through that program and the resources, you know, training resources for his clients and students in that program, able to start a recycling program here at Lane in conjunction with some folks in facilities. And eventually we were able to eke out enough money for a halftime recycling coordinator.

And then it just started mushrooming from there. The more we recycled, the more we saved on our garbage bills, the more revenue we got, although it's volatile from what we've recycled, selling recyclables. And so then it grew into we could justify a full-time position because it was paying for itself. And by the way, it was good for the community. And then, again, along came Mary, and it's kind of like the wellness thing. She wasn't here too long, and I said, Mary, we really need to do more in this area, and I'm going to be coming to you to do more. We had a little bit of serendipity with the budget cuts just after Mary got here the first two years of her presidency. We had some major budget reductions and some major reorganizing in facilities, purchasing, and college finance. And we also had some retirements, and so we were able to cobble together a job for surplus property and recycling.

And to have a full-time sustainability coordinator who is also working on indoor environmental quality issues, which we've had a history of here at Lane, and hazardous waste and safety. So a lot of things, even though we reduced the budget by reorganizing a lot of work and becoming more efficient, we were able to start this kind of a core of what eventually became our sustainability office. It was really dedicated to, on the operational side, taking steps to become more sustainable, and a lot of things then started happening. We got together a sustainability group that was kind of the old recycling committee that got morphed and combined with some energy management. There was a group working on energy management for a while, and then just folks interested in environmental and sustainability issues. That group kind of came together and said, you know, we really have a lot of resources and people resources and interest, and let's see what we can get going.

We also had some faculty who started working with some of our facilities people, science faculty and her students working with grounds on native landscaping. Faculty and students in culinary arts working with grounds for an herb garden, which is still going, and they use herbs for them. And we were kind of able to bootstrap some more things in recycling, and you know, just things started happening, and it started getting more visibility. And then instructions started getting excited, too, about the instructional possibilities and sustainability. And Sonia Christian, Vice President for Instruction and Student Services, really just developed a passion for this area, and she and I kind of grew together and played off of each other in many respects. We knew that energy use was a place where we could make some huge gains. If we put some resources into it, the board invested in enough money for a full-time energy analyst.

They said, we'll fund it for two years, and then this position has got to pay for itself in energy savings, and part of that is saving 10% energy in those first two years, reducing our energy by 10%. In the first year, our energy of that energy analyst position, our first year, our energy use was reduced by 17%. So in the first year, we accomplished way more than we were expected to accomplish in two years, and so now we have an energy analyst funded by our energy savings. And our energy savings, we continue to capture, and will for a while, and plow that back into investment in our facilities, technology, that will continue to save us more energy, and or pay for on-site renewable energy production. We started doing that in conjunction with the energy management instructional program, putting, we already have one solar array, we're going to add a solar array every year, hopefully more than one a year, and so we're producing our own energy.

All kinds of great things happening there, we've won all kinds of national and regional awards for our sustainability efforts, both in operations and in instruction, and we now have a core value as of last month, new core value for the college around sustainability. Just some really great things happening there, and things that are really good for the college, not just in terms of environmental impact, or impact on students, but financial impact. And I'm really proud of the fact that the president gets it, staff get it, the board gets it, that this isn't just an environmental thing, but it's a social thing, and a financial thing. I really believe that the long-term financial viability of this college depends on us operating in a sustainable way. Financially, we're not going to make it if we're relying on eWeb for electricity and Northwest natural gas for heating and lighting this campus. It's going to be too expensive, or it's not going to be there.

So, we absolutely, just in energy management alone, we have to get ourselves off of our dependence on non-renewables.

[01:31:20] Elizabeth Uhlig:
If I would ask you what you think your legacy is for here at Wayne, imagine you would say sustainability would be higher than that.

[01:31:36] Marie Matsen:
You know, I always struggle with what a legacy means. I mean, I didn't do sustainability. I didn't do all these wonderful things. I mean, Jennifer Hayward, for instance, has done, has actually accomplished far, far more than I ever could, did, or could in my position in the health clinic. Sandy Ingwies and Duke Vandervoort and the staff and employees in general have accomplished far more than I ever could on my own. I couldn't do any of that on my own.

Yeah, but it's not my legacy. Those things aren't my legacy. They're the legacy of all the people who've contributed to those. I guess that if I think, the way I'd like to think of my legacy in quote marks is that the staff, particularly the staff in college operations, but also other places in the college, I would hope that they're better equipped, that they have the confidence and the support and the knowledge and the skills to really continue to make meaningful, positive contributions to the college. And again, I haven't done that. They're the ones that have done that, but I guess it is that through that facilitating role,

I guess what I'm saying is a legacy isn't a particular accomplishment or, to me anyway, a particular accomplishment or project or something that people can see or put a name to. A legacy isn't a legacy unless it carries on and good things keep happening and meaningful things keep happening to students in particular. This is a positive place for students, but for employees as well, that they have the confidence and the skills and the encouragement, the practice, whatever it is to be the best that they can be.

[01:34:59] Elizabeth Uhlig:
And finally, to turn you a little more personal, then what are your plans for the future after you, when you retire next week? What are you going to be doing in the short term?

[01:35:17] Marie Matsen:
Well, in the short term, there's a long list at home of things that I've been putting off for years.

One thing I've had quite a few friends retire in the last five or six years, close friends, and every single one of them has had the experience of becoming very busy doing other things, good, worthwhile things and meaningful things. But every single one of these friends has come to a time fairly quickly when they said, wait, I've got way too many things going on and I'm not having the impact that I want to have in any one of those ways. And so, every one of those friends has cut back and focused their energies more. And what I'd like to do for the next few months is not make any new commitments. I have a few commitments that are ongoing outside of work that I'll continue with, of course. But let the dust settle. Give myself some time to think and explore where I'd like to put some of my time. I love to play golf, so I'll be doing things that are just personally fun and satisfying. I love photography, I love hiking, I like putting those two together, really looking forward to having more time doing that.

My folks, while they're healthy, are getting up and they're in their 80s and so I definitely want to spend more time with them. But, you know, I can guess that my focus will be, it may be in sustainability, it may be in working for peace, I don't know.

Yeah, that's kind of a personal enjoyment thing. Yeah, I just don't know yet. And I guess I don't feel like I have a great big need to just jump right in and, you know, I want to be thoughtful about it and explore a bit what I might do.

[01:38:18] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Is there anything else you haven't talked about that you think you will need to add?

[01:38:30] Marie Matsen:
Not any big thing. Just the Lane has been a really wonderful place to work. It's such a, I mean, it's a cliche to say it's a huge asset to the community. But it's also the truth. Lane makes a huge difference in the lives of students and there's so many talented people here. There are also the usual frustrations. When you get a lot of people together in one place from a wide variety of backgrounds and a lot of smart people, you know, they're always disagreements about which way is the best thing or which thing is the best thing to do and sometimes those get pretty heated. And they're not always the most pleasant, but on the other hand, having that diversity and all of that intelligence and energy in one spot is also just a huge positive. And this is a good place. Lane does great things and I'm so happy to have been a part of it. And right now, I think we have also very, very good leadership at the college.

And I think most people at the college know that and have confidence in that leadership and they should. We're really, really fortunate at this point in time. And it's a time that as a college we should be taking advantage of. And that's my one regret that I couldn't have had more time before I retired to be part of that.

Twelve years as a vice president in the same institution, that's enough. The institution is ready for a change. And I certainly, it's been great, but it's time too.

Thank you very much. Thank you.