Oral history interview Debbie Bogenschutz April 2 2012 · Web viewMost of the time these days the accrediting team just has access to your catalog ... was on a committee to start doing

Oral history interview Debbie Bogenschutz April 2 2012Tracey, Debbie

Tracey: Hi this is Tracey Stivers the archivist for Cincinnati State Technical Community College and today I’m going to be interviewing Debbie Bogenschutz who’s our Coordinator of Information Services here at Johnnie Mae Berry Library. Debbie, first off I’d just like to say thanks for participating.

Debbie: You’re quite welcome.

Tracey: Okay. I’m going to ask some introductory questions.

Debbie: Okay.

Tracey: Okay. Just tell me your name, I know we all ready stated that but, your name and date of birth.

Debbie: Debbie Bogenschutz, January 26, 1951.

Tracey: Okay. And when did you begin working at Cincinnati State?

Debbie: In January of 1980. I think it was the third that year but I haven’t looked it up.

Tracey: Okay. Now I’m going to ask you some questions about policies and culture. Okay?

Debbie: Okay.

Tracey: Can you just describe the hiring process? What was it like when you started here?

Debbie: Oh, it was hideous. We’ve always had these group interviews here. But, I swear, my group must have been ten people. We were in the library conference room. It was a bunch of people firing questions at me. It felt like taking oral comprehensives. And in those days to insure that everybody got asked the same questions, got the same information, nobody got a leg up, if the interviewee asked a question, all the rest of the panel could do was repeat the question they had asked you. They asked some question and I said ‘are you talking about something like a so-and –so’ and they would all just look at you and repeat the same question to you again. And if you said ‘so are you thinking about developing a

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program that would do so-and-so’ they would just read the same question to you again.

Things have gotten a little bit better. But we still basically use that group interview method. And then it was like ages and I got a letter in the mail, which you know you get the letter in the mail, you’re assuming it’s going to say ‘thank you but we hired somebody else’. And it’s the ‘thank you we’d like you to call us and tell us when you want to start’.

Tracey: Huh. So they didn’t call you and offer you the position?

Debbie: They didn’t call me and offer me the position. They sent me a letter offering me the position and I had to call them and tell them whether I wanted to accept it or not.

Tracey: Wow!

Debbie: Then I got here the first day and I said so where do I go and they said oh I guess you would like a desk. I said yeah a desk would be nice. But we’re not quite as bad at first days as we used to be either.

Tracey: Okay. Can you describe the culture of the college when you first started here? I know you mentioned it a little bit all ready.

Debbie: It was a technical college so it was very different than what it is now. There were we just had the single building. The main building wasn’t as big as it is now because it used to be more of an H shape and they started filling in holes of it through the years. So it was a much smaller operation. We had about 3000 students. I don’t know how many people worked here but everybody knew everybody. You would run in to everybody. The cafeteria was up on the third floor and I regularly had coffee in the morning with another member of the library staff, a member of the media staff, the vice president for finance and the janitor. I mean, you know, you don’t have those kinds of groups getting together like we did in those days.

It was just a whole different world.

Tracey: Right.


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Debbie: The students were older. I had no experience with the two year college or a technical college. It was pretty much culture shock from going in from a four year college. The library was so limited there were so many areas that we just didn’t have books about. We didn’t have literature. We didn’t have history. We didn’t have philosophy and religion and the arts.

Tracey: Because you had worked at what –

Debbie: I had worked at got my first job as a student worker when I was in college at Thomas More. I was a philosophy major. Then, when I graduated from there I got a job as a reference assistant at Northern Kentucky University. In between I did a small limited project with Proctor and Gamble, and couldn’t wait to get back to an academic institution.

Tracey: Okay, so what do you think has changed the most throughout your years here at Cincinnati State?

Debbie: Just the continued growth. We became a community college. Then we started adding a whole bunch more students, different kinds of students. More and more people we now have two buildings besides all the areas that they added on to this building. Everybody doesn’t know everybody anymore. It used to be much more common for somebody from health, somebody from the library, somebody from engineering to have lunch together. Now people huddle in their own little groups a lot more. The committee structure is still a representative of this area, that area and the other area so you do have more opportunities to mingle there than you do at some places.

Tracey: Okay. Talk about the process you went through to secure tenure here because your position is a tenured position.

Debbie: My position is a tenured position. In those days you had to survive for seven years without getting fired. They would give you your new contract which had a little box checked that says tenured instead of the previous ones that would say untenured. Jim Horton was the library director at that time. He shook hands with me and said “Congratulations you now have tenure.” There was no process like there is now. That started with the first A.A. U.P. contract where you actually had to get together a portfolio


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demonstrating your value to the institution, to your department, to your profession. We didn’t do any of that; we just had to survive without getting fired.

Tracey: Right. And you said it was seven years?

Debbie: Seven years. Um-hum. I think it was seven years. I think it was four when the union came in but then you had to do a lot more work for it.

Tracey: Okay. Since then Cincinnati State has witnessed a tremendous growth in terms of campus size as well as the student body how did that affect the institution and more specifically the library?

Debbie: Well, you had to make more room for people. When we became a technical college – when we quit being a technical college and became a community college we added like history and literature and the arts and all kinds of fields that the library didn’t have to collect. So the size of the library had to just about double just based on the kind of books that we were buying. When we were a technical college pretty much you would get a new book and you would throw out an older outdated book that that was replacing. We weren’t growing exponentially like we are now. At the same time the library physically has not grown at all. When I came here in January of 1980 the library had been opened about six months.

Johnny Mae Berry, who was the first librarian and who the library is named after, had designed the new library and that was pretty much her swan song. She retired; I don’t know if she worked in it at all. She had retired all ready by the time I was coming. Apparently she was taken by surprise pretty late in the process to find that the library wasn’t going to get 100 percent of the space that she had designed to be part of the library. This department was going to borrow this and this department was going to borrow that. We have never gotten all that back. We’ve lost additional space. There used to be a separate media department where the media collection and all of the televisions and projectors and all that stuff were stored.

That all came to us and we just had to find room for it. While we were physically losing space rather than gaining space.


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Tracey: Okay. I’m going to ask you some questions about the library. Just talk about your job responsibilities here and how they changed from when you started to now.

Debbie: When I came IBM hadn’t made a PC yet. It was a whole different world. The catalog was an old fashioned card catalog. The periodical indexes were in print. You got a bound volume every year and it was updated every week, month depending on what the data base was. With a little thin paperback magazine kind of index. We had a vertical file which was the most current awareness thing. You would read the newspaper and cut out articles and categorize them and put them in the vertical files. We were all ready at that point in time an OCLC Library. So we were getting our cards produced through an OCLC Library. We weren’t sitting down and typing them out like you did in the old days.

But we would still get card sets in the mail. And everybody helped with the filing. It wasn’t all the cataloger you know, if somebody had a light load the cards were stacking up I’d go file cards for an hour. We had not done inter-library loan at that time yet. That was one of the things that I was hired to do, to initiate an inter-library loan program. We were part of the Greater Cincinnati Llibrary Consortium which became the SWON Libraries later. It was a consortium of basically the college and university libraries, the public libraries, a couple corporate libraries in the area and we would share our books with each other. We had a way when we would literally call each other and say ‘do you have this book, can we borrow it from you? ‘

Besides the cataloguing use of OCLC, to me as an inter-library loan librarian it would let me see that the University of Nebraska or whoever had this book that I wanted for my patron. In the beginning we typed up a three part inter-library loan form and mailed it to them. Eventually OCLC had a format online where you would fill out the form through the OCLC system and so it didn’t waste three or four days in the mail before the book wasted a week in the mail getting to you. We were able to give people – or at least know (sometimes you would send a form away to a library several states away and a week later you get the form back saying sorry in use.)

Eventually the OCLC system got to the point where first of all they would be able to reply the next time they checked their files


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usually the next day ‘sorry that’s in use’. Eventually you would be able to see even before you would even initiate the request to them that it was in use. So you didn’t waste time like that. Eventually you could put in a string of institutions that held the book so if No.1 said we can’t lend it, it would automatically go on to No.2 so you weren’t really sure where it was coming from when it got to you. But it sped up the process a lot. That was inter-library loan. Another thing that I was hired to do which was new to Cincinnati State was DIALOG searching.

In those days the databases were pretty much held centrally and you would use a dumb terminal, it wasn’t even a computer, to log in to. Most of the services were in California and you would log in to whatever index you wanted to use, do your search get your periodical citations, your book citations, whatever kind of information you were looking for. You paid a $15 an hour communication fee plus a fee for the database that you were using. The cheapest ones, like ERIC was a Department of Education index was $15 an hour. Patent search might be $200 an hour depending on what you were looking for. You paid by the minute. The kind of thing that any college student now goes up to a terminal starts finding that information the faculty member would come to me for that information and it would cost a minimum of five to seven dollars, I would think, and often 25 or 30 to 400 dollars to get that information for them.

Tracey: Okay. Discuss your role in building the library collection and services.

Debbie: Well, the library that I came to was very, very small. Originally the college, this was before my time, the college and the high school that was the original tenants of this building had a shared library in what’s now the Writing Center upstairs. The high school was gone by the time I got here. But there hadn’t been a tremendous amount of books in the library. I don’t know what the holdings were at that time but we had a lot of empty shelves. Now we’ve continuously added more and more shelves. We taught business technologies, health technologies, engineering technologies and there was your basic English, psychology, sociology, classes math, science, supporting those.


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But there were so many areas that we just didn’t collect because we didn’t buy those kinds of things. My background was in philosophy. I had always been a liberal arts kind of person. I didn’t have any engineering background or health background or business background. I had to start reading best books kind of books and checking against our collection doing some ordering from that. Start reading reviews that would come with a science journal or whatever to start buying the books. We have always encouraged the faculty to make suggestions. We overwhelmingly buy I’d say 99.9 percent of what the faculty suggests we buy. If we would sit back and wait for the faculty to suggest things to buy the library would be much, much smaller.

For the most part I had to build it myself based upon what I knew of our curriculum and what I knew of the books that were being published. As we became a community college we added all of the other areas. I’ve just tried to keep up with all the different fields. What was the question again?

Tracey: Just your role in building the library collection and services.

Debbie: Okay. As I said we didn’t have inter-library loan before I came. I was doing the first DIALO searching. I’m really proud of the bibliographic instruction program that we’ve built here. When I came every once in a while an instructor would say ‘can you come talk to my class about the library’. It got so that more and more classes were saying can you come talk to the class about the library. We’ve always done the bulk of freshman comps but there’ve always been business classes, engineering classes, classes of the different sort that would say would you come especially when the class was requiring a paper will you come talk to my class about the library.

When I built the library’s first website, which was also the college’s first website, the library had a website for about a year before the college did. At that time we had all ready become a OhioLINK library we had the online searching, we were starting to get online databases through them, I made a website to give access to the online catalog and the online databases. At that time Cathy Rahmes who was the head of the English department sat down with me and we arranged a plan whereby every freshman comp. class would come get the library experience. That has continued to this day. I’m sure that a lot of my colleagues at other places would


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die for a bibliographic instruction that is as well incorporated in to the English program as ours is here.

So that was another new thing that I brought. But you know, it’s something that we started with in 1980 and then by 1997, 17 years of struggle of saying ‘please let me come to your class’. It finally gets to the point where … – and now we’re doing the nursing classes, we just added them. We’ve been doing a lot of developmental education classes. They’re calling that Foundations I think these days. That’s what they’re going to be calling classes in the semester of transition.

Tracey: You wrote a grant to get the cyber-lab space.

Debbie: I wrote a grant to get the cyber-lab space. Yeah. In the beginning when we started doing that the Writing Center had a computer lab that I used for maybe 80 percent of them. But they also taught classes there. So then if there was a Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 10:00 and there was a class all ready scheduled in the Writing Center at that time, I had to go beg a lab from business or engineering. I used to spend the better part of a week for every term lining up my classrooms to have all of this. So eventually we… some outside the library group was in that room and they were vacating it and I wrote a grant to get the first set of computers, that was for “library service to the underserved”.

Since we were doing DE classes, there’s a lot of it freshman comp. that was hitting large population we got the grant funded to get the computers for the first cyber-lab. That’s been just really nice because we’ve got first dibs at it for the three weeks that we use it almost constantly.

Tracey: Right. You’re not fighting other people for it.

Debbie: We’re not fighting other people for it.

Tracey: Okay. I think you talked about this a little bit all ready but how have you worked with faculty to build a library collection which supports educational needs and satisfies accreditation requirements?

Debbie: We’d always like to do more. The only thing you can do is meet with faculty members one on one. Tell them when you start


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making your contacts through committee work or through lunch or however you make contact with faculty to let them know that you’re willing to buy what they want you to buy and things. Accreditation has really changed. When I started here it was very typical of a program that was going up for accreditation to contact me far in advance and say we’re going to be accredited in April, I need a bibliography of all of the books that you have in the library that support my program. And we will literally type up a bibliography of all the books we had in the library that supported their program.

This was when we were using IBM electric typewriters we didn’t even have word processing at that time. I would start working and when they had it maybe a week before I would have separate information on what we had added since this big document was done so we could update it at the last minute. But it was literally typing up 20 to 30 pages, 40 page 50 page depending on the department what their criteria was bibliographies for these accreditation things. When we first became automated through Innovative a lot of people would still be asking for that, but in that case you could just type in a few key subject headings, a few ranges that the computer would spit it out.

Most of the time these days the accrediting team just has access to your catalog so they can search around. We just did a visit for one of the programs a week or so ago and Cindy Sefton the library director and I and the two gentlemen from this accreditation team just sat down and just casually chatted about what we do, what kind of questions this program generally brings, they just wanted to see that we did yes physically have a library. But most of our journals now are not physically in the library. Most of them are online, and that’s what people are expecting. Where it used to be a real energy intensive process.

Tracey: Okay. How has technology changed the way the library serves patrons? Yeah we talked about that all ready.

Debbie: We had no technology when I started. It was filling out writing your name on the little card that was on the pocket in the back of the book and filing them and stamping the little date due on the little date due stamp. Then just gradually I did mention how we progressed from IBM electric typewriters to first we had a Wang Word Processing thing which was a centralized word processing


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for the college. We would type up our documents but there were just a handful of printers throughout the building so we would have to go to an office down the hall to pick up our prints. After we had sent them we had to go to the computer room up on the third floor to do our backups.

They used eight inch floppy discs in those days. Then we got… IBM started making PC’s and we got one PC that was on a little rolling cart and it would be like ‘I’m going to do this project, I’m going to have the PC for a while’ and then somebody else would have a project they wanted to do they’d have the PC for a while. OCLC, we had a wired in terminal at that time. We just had a dumb terminal that we were doing the dialogue searching with. Then more and more everything’s done with the PC’s that are more powerful and more capabilities, more flexibility.

Then when I got here the library and the media were all part of a Learning Resource Center. Media was much more commonly 16 millimeter films. Filmstrips were still in use. Slide programs with the little tape recorded accompaniment were part of that. I don’t think VHS was around when I started here. Then for a while there was the battle between VHS and Beta as to which video format was going to win out. Now we still have some videos but if it’s a program still in use, we’re replacing them with DVDs as much as we can. And we’re getting a lot more digital access to films online. We still have some VHS things that people have been begging me to get digital access to and every so often I’ll contact the distributor or publisher whoever and say ‘is program X available yet?’ and they said ‘no that’s still on our list, but not right now. ‘ Or they say “no we’re not dealing with that program anymore.’ We still have some things that faculty insists are the very best thing on their topic that’s available, in VHS format and it’s probably going to be available VHS format as long as the VHS tapes and the VHS units are surviving. Which probably isn’t going to be forever. But if we can get things on DVDs and digitally we’re doing that. But those are all new formats. We had never had microfilm here. When they went to periodical storage they went to microfiche which is much more compact for storage purposes. I think that’s probably the main advantage microfiche has over microfilm. Now most of the journals too, we still have some microfiche. Most of the journals too are digital online. We have a lot less paper


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journals than we used to have because so much is digital access these days.

Tracey: Is it true that the library had the first internet connection in the college?

Debbie: When we became an OhioLINK library (OhioLINK started as the state supported four year colleges eventually they added the two year colleges state supported. Then they kind of opened up to private colleges could join.) When we became an OhioLINK library… one of the main things of OhioLINK libraries is the centralized catalog where all of our resources are shared. So you search in our catalog for something and move in to the statewide catalog with just a keystroke. In order to make that happen we had to be on the internet. So OhioLINK at that time was arranging for all the two year colleges to get National Science Foundation grants to bring the internet to their campus.

We originally had the internet basically for the purpose of the centralized catalog. Then OhioLINK started adding periodical databases that were shared statewide. They started coming through the internet too. We used, gosh, what did they used to call those … “gophers” in those days it was all you know, you had a list of your six things and you wanted database No.5 so you typed a five in the number. Nothing was… you didn’t use a mouse for anything on the early OhioLINK programs. Then the World Wide Web was coming in. So you had the more visual information. You had the mouse driven access.

In 1997, I was awarded a sabbatical to make the library’s website. So I worked at home on my home computer. At that time I had much better internet access at home than I had here at the college. I have never even an internet pioneer. I’ve never been on the cutting edge of any technology. But I made the college’s homepage on my home computer and when I got back we made it live. The college at that time didn’t have… we were getting phone calls all the time what’s your website address? We said that the website for the library is… but the college doesn’t have a website address yet. And that’s changed. The downside is I had total control over my website in those days. The look of it, the feel of it, what was on it, I did it in HTML, I didn’t do it with any kind of fancy programming and then as the college got more sophisticated in web use we’re just given a part of the overall


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package and our look had to meld in with the general look of the college.

I have total control over the library website again now but for a while I would make my edits, they’d have to go to somebody else to be approved. If they were on vacation my edits might be sitting in a queue for days. So there are tradeoffs.

Tracey: Okay. All right. I’m going to change focus here and talk about some faculty involvement.

Debbie: Okay.

Tracey: What kind of relationship did or do you think the faculty members share with the administration? Do you think they have any say in the administration of the college? Or have they over time?

Debbie: It’s really varied from time to time. When I started here we did something called foursquare evaluation where everybody evaluated everybody below them in the flow chart and everybody above them. So that every library staff member evaluated the library director. Evaluated the vice president that the library director reported to. I’m not sure if everybody has always evaluated the president but we evaluated the vice presidents in days like that. That’s something that’s really been lost. We don’t offer as much input in to other people’s jobs. I was here when there was a period of time when we were under constant spending freezes. We hadn’t had a raise for a while.

Relationships between faculty and the president was deteriorating and we brought in an AAUP chapter and voted to unionize. My personal belief is that the advent of the AAUP is the strongest thing that has ever impacted the quality here at Cincinnati State. I think AAUP has been a quality effort all along. There’s nobody who knows more about what should go on in a classroom than a classroom teacher. And the AAUP has tried to increase that role. Administration has tried to make the faculty role lesser and lesser. There have been times when the relationships between the two have been more congenial. There have been times when they’ve been more adversarial.

We were on strike this past fall for the first time ever. Something that we all sincerely hoped it would never come to. But the


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administration, the Board of Trustees, just weren’t giving the faculty any respect at all at that time. That’s been really… unfortunately, presidents come in talking a good game ‘this is the best place I was so excited to come here because you all do things right.’ Then immediately telling us what we did wrong and trashing our history. Trashing our, anything good that we were bringing to the plate. But I sincerely believe that the AAUP was absolutely the best thing that’s happened to ensure quality here.

Tracey: Okay. Discuss the formation of Faculty Senate in the early 80s. What role do you feel Faculty Senate has played in decisions at the college over the years?

Debbie: There’s always been some form of faculty senate. There’s been years when it’s been very active. There’s been years when it’s been very minor. There’s been years when faculty senate argued more about water fountains in the halls than anything else. The AAUP contract gives the Faculty Senate more teeth than its ever had before. I think we have a wonderful Faculty Senate that’s representative of the whole institution. It’s been one of those places where we have the cross departmental thing. Each department engineering, business, science, humanities (the library and counseling have always been considered one unit for those kinds of things) elect a person. Also through Faculty Senate you elect your representative to the Sabbatical and the Tenure committees.

The Faculty Senate – the only committees that are actually spelled out in the AAUP committee are academic policies and curriculum committee, APCC,… and the other one just left my mind. .. Committees that were very diligently instilling quality at every level of the college.

Tracey: Okay. Describe your role in the movement to unionize the faculty in the late 1980s. What rewards and challenges have resulted from the faculty union? I know you’ve all ready talked a little bit about this.

Debbie: I was one of the first people who brought in AAUP chapter to campus. In those days our initial goal in getting an AAUP chapter was simply to vote no confidence in the president and move on. So actually it was the generation a little bit after us that started the union method. I wasn’t actually part of the real movement to get


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us to become a collective bargaining group. But I’ve always been very active in the union. I’ve been on several collective bargaining teams. I’ve been on the AAUP exec. I would say I was certainly instrumental in bringing the AAUP here but I wouldn’t want to claim credit for getting the union effort. Because that was certainly a different group of individuals who have my utmost respect and gratitude.

Tracey: Okay. Did you want to say any more about rewards and challenges that have resulted from the faculty-

Debbie: From the faculty union? There have been rewards. I talked about how when I came in we did the foursquare evaluation of everybody and then evaluation – the union has really fought to keep the evaluation of the administration. The administrators have always fought against it. Even when there’s not been a formal stipulation that the faculty will review the president and the academic vice president the union has always done that and presented that information to the board whether they wanted it or not. If boards would have listened to the faculty sooner about when a president’s time to go had come I think that many things here would have gone much smoother.

We’ve had many presidents longer than we should have. Everybody comes in great but you know, - I really would like the Board to have more respect for the faculty. I don’t know what you can do to do that, but we’re not the bad guys. We’re really here to ensure what’s best for our students and to keep the college alive. The sooner the Board would come to realize that the better off everybody’s going to be. There have been other things. In the old days before the union we had a program whereby people who had accumulated a lot of sick leave could donate sick leave to people who needed it, maybe brand new employee hasn’t been here very long and all the sudden has a problem pregnancy and needs bed rest for a long period of time. .. A young faculty member who hasn’t had time to build up a log of sick leave gets cancer and starts using sick leave. Then that program was here for a while and then it just kind of faded away. The union brought that back. It never would have come back without the union fighting to bring it back.

Tracey: Okay.


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Debbie: I’m sure there are other examples.

Tracey: Yeah. Okay. How would you describe your relations with other faculty members? Because you are a faculty member but we’re a little bit removed from the teaching faculty.

Debbie: Um-hum. Yeah. I think because of the way we do Faculty Senate, because of the way we do Tenure and Sabbatical, because of the union, that I think I have a greater opportunity to interact with faculty as a peer than a lot of librarians. It’s real typical for librarians to be faculty but I don’t think it’s as typical for them to have a lot of the close relationships that we have here. And the fact that when I started we were all so small and everybody knew everybody. We’re getting away from that still, but I think that I’ve always been active in the union. I was one of the co-chairs of the strike this past time. I think that any way that you can meet a faculty member is not only for your good but for the library’s good.

I really would encourage I’m leaving notes for my successor and I’m all ready calling to people that I talk to and saying you know, when this new person comes call him or her and take them out to lunch. You need to get this person involved from the beginning. You can’t it doesn’t do anybody any good if the librarian stays inside the library all the time.

Tracey: Right.

Debbie: But I’ve always… I’ve been nominated but I’ve never won, but I’ve been nominated for the House Bruckman award for faculty excellence a couple of times. That’s always a thrill to know that your peers think of you like that.

Tracey: Okay. Discuss some of the other faculty committees you’ve been on over the years and any important contributions these committees have played in the direction of the college.

Debbie: Well, I think I want to go back to accreditation plans. Cincinnati State is accredited by the North Central Association. When I first came in 1980 we were preparing the self-study. Accreditation has changed dramatically over the years. In the early days there were all these committees. These committees would talk about this, these committees would talk about this, you would make a self-


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study document that was like four inches thick or something like that. I came in as a brand new hire in 1980 and immediately was on a committee to start doing part of this self-study work. I think we talk about involving more people I just don’t see it. I think the accreditation now, that’s supposedly is totally bottom up driven thing, is more top driven than it was in the old days.

But there have been many different versions of accreditation always a role for anybody who wants to get involved. Either as a formal part of the library doing the kind of research that you do or just as your own talents that you bring to it. I’ve been involved a lot of accreditation for different programs besides our North Central Accreditation. All of the health things are accredited by the health organization for their particular specialty respiratory care, surgical tech, whatever. I’ve always helped them with their things. I’ve been on both the tenure and sabbatical committees. The way we do tenure here now is that the tenure candidates have to submit a portfolio showing what their contributions have been to the college. What their contributions have been to their profession. What their contributions have been to their community. How they’re evaluated by their students, their peers, their supervisors. In a lot of places like the librarian supervise the library tenure. The nursing faculty supervise the nursing. Here it’s that representative so there’s a librarian or counselor on that committee as well as the somebody from engineering, technology, somebody from business, somebody from science, somebody from humanities, who all vote then on the tenure for people all over the building too. I’ve been on that committee.

I’m just finishing up a stint on the sabbatical committee. Again our sabbaticals are competitive building wide. You have a certain amount of sabbaticals and whoever has a project that they want writes up what they intend to do, how much time it’s going to take them and then this committee that’s representative of the different areas votes on which ones to support and sends it to the vice president who then sends it to the board. The board ultimately awards tenure or sabbatical. But that’s where it starts, with the faculty committees. I’ve been active in lots of different things like that on Faculty Senate. I’ve been on the AAUP exec. There have been little committees for this that and the other. A lot of times they get together an ad-hoc committee for this particular project.


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I’ve served on numerous committees over the years. We had a time when we had this quality circle thing. I was on the one for teaching and learning. We met regularly for months and months and months. Sent our proposals on to the president, and then they’d like die in a pile on his desk. I mean absolutely nothing came from that whole wasted year. And things like that can be quite frustrating. Sometimes the administration mouths support for a program that they really don’t attach their hearts to.

Tracey: Okay. On that note let’s change focus and talk about college leadership. What is your perception of the various administrations under which you served at the college?

Debbie: I don’t know what to say about that. I’ve worked here for… Fred Schlimm was president when I came. He was succeeded by James Long. Who was succeeded by Sister Jean Patrice in an interim job. Bbetween Fred Schlimm and Jim Long, all the vice presidents were running it as a foursome. She was succeeded by Ron Wright who was succeeded by Dr. Henderson who came in on temporary basis for a really long time. Now Dr. O’dell Owens. Dr. O’dell Owens has been here for about a year and half. What’s frustrating is everybody always comes in saying this is such a dynamite institution I just can’t wait to start working here. You all do things right. And then it seems like the next week they’re telling us what we do wrong and just throwing away throwing out the baby with the bath water. We have reinvented the wheel so many times. It seems one thing has been really frustrating and some people do this more than others but one thing that’s been very frustrating is that it seems like a lot of times an administration put in a new program without even taking the time to see what it is that they’re replacing. And taking time to see whether that really needs to be replaced or not. I would have good things to say about everybody who’s worked here and I’d have negative things to say about everybody who’s worked here.

I think I’ll leave it at that.

Tracey: Okay. All right. What are your memories of some of the major events that have taken place during your time here at Cincinnati State? Or what are some of the major events that you think –

Debbie: When Al Gore was vice president and he came to visit us. That was a big deal. Unfortunately the secret service men managed to


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turn off the internet accidentally when they were doing their security checks and we found out later that that’s what it was. Which is really ironic since Al Gore did more than anybody else, I mean you know, he didn’t invent the internet but he certainly did get it to the prominence that it has. He did more than anybody else to get the internet where it is now, to get everybody using it. That was exciting. I mean, I didn’t see Al Gore here but he was here. We were written up in the Wall Street Journal. We’ve had national exposure for our coop programs especially.

Mrs. Biden, Dr. Biden the vice president’s wife was here just about a month or so ago. I remember when the health building was built. We celebrated that whole new having new labs and that was the first major construction here in Cincinnati State’s history. I remember when the nursing program – we’ve always had health technologies but we acquired somewhere along the line the nursing faculty that had been hospital based nursing program. Then they came here. We got an airport. We always had a hangar here the aviation department would get a plane up to where they would turn the motor on but that’s as far as they went because they didn’t even have any place to taxi.

Tracey: Um-hum.

Debbie: Then we acquired an airport. We built the ATLC. The Midwest Culinary Institute went from being a small dinky little hole in the wall cooking program to being a really prestigious deal. There’s always been a student run restaurant here. When I came it was up on the third floor right around the corner from what was then the main cafeteria. The restaurant was called the Stateroom. It was pretty much like a trucker’s blue plate special. You could buy like a .85 hamburger and hotdog and bowl of soup in the blue plate lunch of the day. You just had to call and make a reservation. Students ate there. It was just another option for lunch as opposed to the cafeteria.

Then they hired new culinary faculty who were coming with more expertise, more high end culinary skills and then they had a student run restaurant called the Continental Room which was still when we just had the one building here. They had a set plate I think it was six dollars when they stopped here and you got your appetizer, your meal, your dessert all for that one price. They would say we’re taking reservations on these days and you would have to


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make your phone call immediately to see when you could get a table. They would sell out the first day. Then they have Summit Restaurant which is open more and we have still the lunches that are primarily student labs.

But then they have the Summit Restaurant open at other times more as a money making enterprise. But that’s been a really major change just to see how that one program has grown and changed and improved. But lots of things have happened like that. There have been lots of growth. When we became a technical college a community college instead of just a technical college. We’ve had lots to celebrate here at Cincinnati State. We’ve had… when I started we used to graduate in the fall. It was always at Music Hall like the last Sunday in September or something like that. We had a period when graduation was … graduation’s been moved to summer. I guess since we’ve been a community college. We had a time when they were held under allegedly air conditioned tents on campus. That space isn’t there any more. The last few have been at the convention center down town. But they’re been different spaces rented at different times for graduations. That’s really been another thing that has really changed a lot over the years.

Tracey: Okay.

Debbie: I’ve seen lots of things come and go.

Tracey: All right. Let’s just talk a little bit about your legacy. What do you feel is your greatest accomplishment here at Cincinnati State?

Debbie: I feel like I’ve got a lot to be really proud of. I really feel like I’m leaving the library a better place than I found it. As I said earlier, the way the library instruction is integrated in to the English composition classes is the envy of librarians in lots of other places. That’s really something to be proud of. I’m really proud of having brought the website to the college. I’m proud of the collection that I’ve built. I’m really happy with the staff that I’m leaving here. I didn’t hire them. I helped hiring some of those people but I really feel like the library’s on the right path. I wish that eventually it would get all the space back that it was suppose to have for a library a fifth of its size with a fifth of the students.


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I would hope that eventually the library would be even bigger and better. But I feel good about where we’re leaving it.

Tracey: Okay.

Debbie: I feel good about the AAUP. I feel good about the faculty in general.

Tracey: Okay. If you were writing the history of the college what would you include from your years here?

Debbie: I just hit on a lot of the highlights just a minute ago when I talked about the nursing program coming, the expansion of the culinary program, building thing, way back I talked about how this original building used to be more or have more open spaces that they filled in with classrooms filling in what had been like a little court yard between two wings. I’ve seen a lot of construction. Lots of changes. It’s not the same world as it was in 1980 and the college and the library certainly reflect that.

Tracey: Um-hum. You think we’re better off today than we were back then?

Debbie: There’s always challenges and successes in anything. I mean, if I was going to be a student I would certainly want to be student in today’s library rather than a student t in he ones that I was a student in, and the one that was here when I got here. Because of the… so much information that’s right there on your desktop where ever you may be 24 hours a day. You don’t have to wait for the library to open. I think the online access to information is only going to get better. I hope Cincinnati State … We had a visiting team from one of the programs lately and we were talking about ‘because we’re small, because we’re small, because we’re small’ and one of the guys looked at us and says ‘everybody’s been saying because you’re so small but you’re the second biggest college in Cincinnati.’ We’re bigger than Xavier now I think. We’re really not small but we still have that small college feel, because most of our rooms don’t hold 30 students. Most of your classes are still small. I would certainly hope that we never lose that. I hope we never get to the point where we’ve got 500 seat lecture halls. And we have everybody take an online classes where an online instructor is suppose to be responsible for 100 students or


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something like that. I hope we never get to that point. I hope we never lose the hands-on touch that’s been our hallmark.

Tracey: Okay. Last question is there anything else that you would like to add or comment on from any previous questions?

Debbie: I might after I hear the tape of it. I can’t think of anything else I’d like to get in to.

Tracey: Okay. Well, we’d like to –

Debbie: We sprawled kind of.

Tracey: Okay. Well, thanks.

Debbie: I think this is an exciting project that you’re doing. I think I’m Case On of the oral histories. I hope that there are a lot of them. Because we have lost so much of our history by not recording it. I mean, you know how you’ve got these boxes and boxes and boxes of slides that don’t even have captions. I think this is a remarkable project that you’re undertaking. There’re an awful lot of people this year getting ready to retire and I really wish you a lot of success with this project.

Tracey: Okay. Well thanks so much.

Debbie: You’re welcome.

[End of Audio]

Duration: 58 minutes


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Documents

Oral history interview Debbie Bogenschutz April 2 2012 · Web viewMost of the time these days the accrediting team just has access to your catalog ... was on a committee to start doing