This is Patricia Budd Kepler being interviewed by Alice Bradfield on September 30th, 1985, in Princeton.

Let's begin with some background information just general stuff: where you were born, and when and where you grew up, who your parents were, brothers and sisters and your order in the family.

I was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1934. At the time that I was born, my father was studying to be a lawyer. He became a lawyer and subsequently a professor of law. And my mother worked for the first two years of my life, but then became a homemaker for the rest of her life. I have three siblings, a sister who's two years younger than I am, a brother who's ten years younger, and a sister who's 14 years younger. Really two separate families. And I am the oldest.

Did you grow up in Lancaster then?

No, I grew up for two years, maybe a year and a half in Lancaster. And incidentally, my maternal grandmother lived with us until she died when I was 16 and she was a significant influence in my life. We moved from Lancaster to Philadelphia and lived in West Philadelphia. My growing up years in two separate, two different houses.

Would you talk about your religious upbringing for you and your family involved in church? If so, which one?

We, when I was young in Philadelphia, we did get involved in a Presbyterian church, the first place where we lived. The second place, which was about five blocks away. My sister and I were invited to come to the Westminster Fellowship of the church and we started going and subsequently my mother and father got very involved, through us, we were the first ones to get involved in this particular church, which was Presbyterian. My mother was Roman Catholic and my father was a Methodist.

So there must be a story about how you got into the Presbyterian Church.

Really not. When we lived in West Philadelphia somehow I don't know how we got going there, except it was close. And I guess maybe somebody invited my family to go. And then when we moved into West Philadelphia, some young people called on us. And that really was the beginning of my whole family's involvement in the Presbyterian Church. Yeah.

In your growing up years, who were some of the important persons who influenced you?

Well, I think the person who influenced me the most, at least on the surface, was my father, who really always expected me to do something professional, probably go into law, but I switched, switched professions, but not the idea of being a professional. And in the church where I grew up, there were several women who were actually lawyers. I guess that was the predominant profession of which I was aware. No, I'm fine, yeah. And, and they were influential in my growing up years and I suppose teachers in high school along the way, there just a whole host of people. I went to Girls' High School, which was very good because, just always assumed that females would do whatever they wanted to do whenever they wanted to do it. And so and we did. I mean, we did, we ran school government, we were in sports were oriented toward us. And I was very active in a theater group, and I think my theater coach was influential in my life.

Oh. What is your marital status now?

I'm married.

And you have children?

Three.

And they are boys and girls?

Boys.

Three boys.

Three boys, yeah, and the eldest is 27. He's married. And he and his wife were just entered a doctoral program at Brandeis in physics.

Both of them?

Bothof them. Yeah. My second son is a contractor and living with his girlfriend, who is a nurse. And our third son is working in computers. Computer engineering and studying in engineering physics. Doing both at the same time. And his girlfriend or I'm not sure, maybe ex girlfriend is a civil engineer and she's been very much a part of our lives, too. Yeah.

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate time to ask this question. If not we'll delay it. The relationship of being a mother and ministry. Which came first? Family or...

I got pregnant. I was married the beginning of my third year of seminary and got pregnant right soon after that. So I was six months pregnant when I graduated from seminary and also when I was licensed by Philadelphia Presbytery.

Sounds like maybe the time to talk about that is after when you talk about some of the other, then I'll ask you how that.

Maybe I could just tell you one story about being pregnant. It was kind of funny, actually. Peggy Howland and I were the first women licensed by Philadelphia Presbytery. And when I came up before the committee to be examined, I was six months pregnant and they didn't know it. And one of the ministers said, you know, Mrs. Kepler, what would you ever do if you got pregnant?

And he looked at you all the way in.

Tent dresses were in that year. And so that was kind of funny. I told him I'd deal with it when the time came.

Left him guessing.

Yeah

Okay, We'll pick the rest of that up then later. Would you reflect on your ideas about ministry? What time in your life did you begin to think about it?

I didn't decide to go into ministry until my last May of of the year that I graduated from college, I made a very quick decision to go into seminary. May have been in my mind somewhere, but I really didn't.

Can you talk about the decision where you were in college? Where you went to college?

I went to Drexel, now university, it was Drexel Tech at the time. I was a business major, planning to go into, I toyed with the idea of being a doctor and got into the basic science program there and decided that that really wasn't what I wanted to do. Ended up as a business major thinking about going into law and then decided at the last minute that I would not go into law. My father was in, had a law practice and had a partner and I just really wanted to do something on my own. So I made a very quick decision to go to seminary and applied to Princeton, was rejected. And my father got on the phone and raised a fuss and they interviewed me and reversed their decision. So I came to Princeton.

Bet it was an escape from becoming a lawyer.

I know. They had, they had accepted me into the MRE program and rejected me for the BD. And I had, would not come into the MRE program. I just had was very clear about that.

So your father's interventio, you had the BD

I did yeah.

When you began to think about ministry, who supported this decision?

My whole family was supportive.

Did you marry a Princeton student?

Yeah, yeah. My church was supportive too. St Paul Presbyterian Church in West Philadelphia was supportive. One of the women there, Carolyn Kennedy, helped get some money for me to go to Princeton from the church, and so I felt very supported.

Well now you finished before women could be ordained in the Presbyterian Church, right?

No. I finished after. The, the, I guess I thought the decision came in '57 somebody just said it came in '56. But it was '56 or '57 and I graduated in '58.

So were you under care of presbytery?

I was, yes.

And that was West Philadelphia?

It was Philadelphia.

Philadelphia.

Yeah, Mmm hmm.

What, what was your experience of coming under care?

Actually, the the experience in seminary and coming under care was very positive. There were some negatives in relation to the actual licensing process, but I loved seminary and it was, it was before there was much consciousness. I would have probably more trouble today than I did then. There was no consciousness of language or, you know, male theology. I had come out of a business background, so I was coming home. I loved theology. I waslike a duck in water. Yeah. So it was, it was great.

And you were early enough that it wasn't really an issue?

It really wasn't an issue. And even though, I mean, like I had no idea that I was going to end up preaching and doing pastoral things. I was clear. I thought I would do education, but I knew, I had been in a church that was big enough to have a Christian educator, and I had been very active in Westminster Fellowship and I knew that educators didn't have any access to the whole system. So I realized that if I wanted to be an educator with access to presbytery, a voice in presbytery, part of the political process, I would have to get a, BD and be ordained to do education. And that was what I was thinking of doing. So, I wasn't thinking of breaking down the stereotypes in terms of what women could do, but in terms of what political power women could have. I was pretty clear on that.

What happened when you graduated?

Well, when I actually after I got married and and had our first child, which was I remember telling one of my dear friends after I had the baby that I really found, being a mother was much more exciting than being a minister. So. I mean, it was just really it was an impressive thing having a baby. So but then and I fell into very stereotypical thinking and was like this an incredible transformation. I can't explain it, but all the cultural stereotypes were in my head, and the minute I got married, I fell into them and I began to assume that Tom would be the one that would look for a job, that I would take care of the baby, that I would be a supportive wife and the minister's wife and I would do all the traditional things. And I did that for about a year.

Can I ask you how long it lasted?

Yeah, lasted about a year. I, we, I, had our three children are very close in age. The first two were 13 months apart and then the next one is two years apart from that. So. But in that time what really happened was the women in the church resented my participation, which I thought was pretty low key. But it was nonetheless an informed professional participation. And I don't know how to make that distinction, except that there was a theological, I don't know, awareness or something that I brought.

Level of sophistication.

I think. Something. I don't know what it was, but there was there was a. I was, had been a leader in Westminster Fellowship. It's just a degree of experience in the church. And some of the women who were leaders in the church really found that difficult to deal with. And so I slowly had to drop out of active work in Tom's church, and that's when I became the supply minister of a nearby church myself.

Were you ordained on the basis of that?

I was, eventually. I was I served that church for two or three years before I decided to get ordained. I was having children and was not convinced. I mean, there was no model. The women I knew who had been professional were either single or had one child. And here I was with three children. And just there was no model. There was no image in my mind for how to do this or what to do or even what the issues were. And so I was working in the church as the pastor. It was a black congregation, and it was very small. Tom had gotten the job for me, and he was moderating the session because he was ordained and I wasn't.

What was the name of the church?

It was the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Manalapan, New Jersey. And I ended up being there for seven years, and I finally was ordained to do that work. When a friend of mine who was the minister in East Brunswick, Bill Hervey, said to me, and his his church had been helping out with volunteers and tutoring programs and summer camp programs. And finally, one day he said to me, he said, Patty, you're not fair to the people here by not getting ordained, they need an ordained minister to lead them. And I said, "But I don't know. If ordination is for life, I can't make plans for the rest of my life." He said, "Ordination is for right now." And he said, "You can't make decisions for the rest of your life. You make decisions based on what's right for now, and this is right for now." And that just turned my whole head around and made sense to me, then try to get ordained.

So how many years were you there before you did that?

I'm realizing that I don't have these dates clear in my mind. Two or three years before I got ordained. And then I was there four or five years after.

Was there an issue in your marriage? I'm wondering where Tom was in all this? Why he didn't say.

I'm going to close this

It was. Tom was very supportive of my working in the church there. And I was doing a master's degree program too, while I was raising these three kids and working at a church. So Tom was supportive. He was getting used to being a minister himself. And looking back, it's very clear to me that having no role models was very difficult on our marriage because we clearly we're not the prototypical couple. We needed support to be who we were, you know, two professional people and to work out a different lifestyle than other people had. We needed to know other people who were in the same boat, and we didn't. There was literally no one in the congregation who, either his or mine, who represented some kind of new lifestyle in marriage. People were pretty much segregated. I mean, the thing that struck me most was that women and men were segregated into different worlds and that we were both trying to live in each other's world. And, you know, you weren't supposed to do that. I mean, men and women lived in different cultures and had very different life experiences. And it was very hard for us that people didn't, we didn't have any role models and there was a pull. I mean, in order to fit in, we should have adopted their way of living, you know, or be tremendously conscious about the fact that we weren't and we weren't either. In the black church, women were not so much relegated to a separate culture because women worked and women were much, I found, much more compatibility with the black women in the church there than with the white women in my husband's church, because they were strong, they were in the public world, but their marriages were difficult in other ways. And there were more single women, again, in the black culture. So there was there was no place where we can get support for who we were trying to be.

When were you ordained? Was it '60?

idon't remember, to tell you the truth. I think it was probably '63.

You finished seminary in

We finished in '58, and I didn't start in that church probably until '60. So it was '62 or '63 when I was ordained. I was licensed right away so I could preach and I could participate in Presbytery but not with a vote.

Do you remember your ordination?

Oh, yeah I do.

Will you talk about that?

Well, I was ordained in in my church, this Manalpan Presbyterian Church, and it was it was a really, it was the day before Christmas, I think, or the day after. It was right around Christmas. It was a real celebration. And, some of the significant people involved in the service were Tom's father, preached the sermon and he's a minister and his whole family was there. And my whole family came. My mother and father and some other people from Tom's family and our sons were were old enough to know what was going on. Um, I bet it was in '60. John I have pictures of that and seems like my youngest son was older. I mean, he wasn't a baby. He was sitting there anyway. I have to check that all out. But it was. And my next, my one of my best friends was my Jewish neighbor and she was there at the ordination, but also kind of helping with the refreshments. I remember her there with the people from the church, you know, doing refreshments. And, uh, the priest across the street was there, which he got in trouble for later on. But it was seen so natural for him to be there and to participate.

I wouldn't think a priest.

No, but I heard later that they had, that he'd been reprimanded for doing that. Yeah. Yeah, right. But it was a it was an ecumenical service. The people from Tom's church who had participated in, we had started the Head Start program. They were there with really the two congregations were there together and it was a really joyful occasions. Yeah.

And you were, do you know what order you were? Fifth or sixth or sixteenth woman to be ordained? Very early.

It was very early. I don't remember which one. I think Tom and I probably were the first clergy couple though.

Did you ever serve a church together?

We served part time in West Philadelphia, St Paul Presbyterian Church together and we have just finished serving as Co-stated supplies in the Summerville Presbyterian Church and had made the very difficult decision to not do that any more. I'm going to continue as the stated supply there and Tom is going to go into purely secular work, which is a tough decision to make because I mean.

It's a lot of years.

It's a lot of years that he's been in ministry and then we've both, you know, been in ministry together. Now, I think it's I think it's a courageous decision for him.

I think I'll go ahead and ask you more about your ministry and then we'll come back and pick up other things. After that first position when you were ordained, would you talk about what happened after that.

Well, after that we went to Florida. Tom really needed to take a break from the church and decide what he wanted to do next. And we went to Florida and taught in a school for dyslexic children, private school, both of us teaching. And it became very clear to me during that year that I wanted to stay in the church full time, and it was impossible to do in Florida. So Tom and I agreed to move back to Philadelphia, where he could work in the school, continue to work. There was a branch in Haverford which is right outside of Philadelphia, and I would look for a job in the church. Because Philadelphia would be a more likely area. So I began to look at what I might want to do. We went through the career center evaluation and I interviewed for a job doing raising white consciousness about racism. And I was one of two people that were finalist. And I thought I had the job. And then finally, at the last minute, they decided to give it to a white man. And that was a tremendous disappointment, except that what I ended up doing was wonderful. So I'm so glad I didn't get it because I was eventually called to be Director of Women's Programs for the Board of Christian Education as a secretary for UPW.

And you did that in Philaldelphia?

Yeah, that was yeah. It was very unusual for them to choose someone with no name. I mean, they had been used to hiring people on the staff who had come up through the ladders. And I had been working to be sure for seven years, but it was in a small black church. I mean, it wasn't in the system in a big way. But I, anyway, I went to work for them. And I the very summer that I went there, there was a report on women coming out of the General Assembly that needed some continued work and there was no place to lodge it. So I suggested that they lodge it in, in our office, and that was the task force on women that was the predecessor for COWAC. And I became the staff resource person for that. And that was the first of a religious organization dealing with women's liberation.

That was in '65?

60, 60 Let me think. I was there from 60. I left in '68. No no. '68 to '73, I guess, is when I was there.

That report. The study began in '63 didn't it?

It began with a group of women from the Board of Christian Education, I think, and it was probably went for about three years. It was the last year of their report. Priscilla Chapman was the chairperson at that time, and Clifford Earl from Church and Society was stacking them and they were having a lot of trouble getting that final draft together. And they came into the office and they had finally got the report together, but they didn't know what to do about future, you know, work. And I suggested that they lodge it in our office, and that's what they did. So, it moved from Church and Society over into a women's office, which was really, I think, fortuitous. And yeah, and we organized a committee. But it was women within the board who it had, I think started that first.

Would you talk about the early days of COWAC? It wasn't called that.

It was the task force on women. Yeah.

And some of the things that you did?

Well, it was it was very new to all of us. I don't think anybody working on these issues had really dealt with them before. I mean, it was you know, it was all latent material. And the very first things we did were the obvious things like representation and numbers and visibility of women. By that time, of course, women could be ordained. But the issue really was women's accessibility to systems and women's acceptance in leadership. So, we began to collect data. We we gathered all the information on how many women elders there there were, and we began to get that published. And then we got into the we got all the sections in the Book of Order written in so that the church could not discriminate in electing elders. Ok, so we got that into all the every the committees and trustees. I mean, every level of church government we got in the nondiscrimination clauses, which was a political process, and we learned to work the political system. And that was those were the initial things that we did, and we began to get involved in the language issue. We raised the first questions of language, and that created a lot of internal conflict in the committee. It was probably the most difficult issue that we dealt with.

Were you very divided?

We were divided in the sense that some people saw it as a very significant issue and other people saw it as really secondary to the really important issue which had to do with representation and child. We got into child care, I mean, abortion. We really laid the groundwork, I think, for the issues for building that. Yeah, because we we got statements. There was statements. If you go back into those records on all of these issues, we also, for instance, simple things like had it written into the book of governance, into the minutes of the General Assembly, that all documents of the church, including mailing list and whatnot, would include women's Christian name.

Oh my.

Yeah. So you know so that you wouldn't be Mrs. John Smith. You would be Mrs. Barbara, Ms. Barbara. But anyway, it was. That was very early on that we did that.

Things that we take for granted now, you were laying the groundwork.

Well, yeah. And people still, unfortunately, when you get into the local situation, when I came into the church I'm in now I did a mailing list and it was all in husband's names, especially where it was a Mr. and Mrs., Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so. And we redid the mailing list and it seems like a small thing, but women became there became church members. Yeah. You see instead of saying Mr. and Mrs. Margaret Beard, I mean Fred Beard, excuse me, you would just do, we would say, Fred Beard, Margaret Beard. I mean, we do that whole list, you know, of people, not couples. So but and then we began to deal with the issue of divorce and marriage. We had a task force on that. And we began church employed women. We started that organization. We organized for secretaries. We sent the first mailing out to every church in the in the Presbyterian system address secretary.

Now, when you say that you're talking about UPC, USA, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was all before. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, and Diane Tannis is doing some of this now with within the UPC USA system at that point in time. In fact, Diane, was really interesting when the task force was first created, Diane had was one of the early, early women to be on to these issues. And she objected that putting it in the Board of Christian Education and in the system would sabotage the whole movement. And she had a right to be afraid of that, you know, and but the next year after that, she became the chairperson of the committee at the General Assembly to work with these issues. So she was very involved and very creative and very. Anyway in the beginning and then so.

I guess I hadn't realized that she started out in the office and then

Well she wasn't in the office, she was a clergy woman. She was one of the women at General Assembly. She was a commissioner one year and commissioners chair committees. And we had a committee on women and she chaired that committee.

So that's how you came to work together?

That's how we came to work together. Yeah. So it was a good, good working relationship. Anyway, we did, we did church employed women, started that. Did this first survey of secretaries, church secretaries to see if they were getting Social Security. And, you know, you know, what kind of benefits they had, what kind of salaries, what kind of issues they wanted to raise.

Then did you put reports out?

Yeah, There in and published them in the general assembly minutes. We also did a study of all the judicial cases for the 25 years preceding the time we were working, in the Assembly to find out whether the Church had historically dealt with issues of social justice. And discovered that they had not, that the church had the kinds of cases that had come before the church were basically more private, financially oriented, etc., and did not appear to be related to issues of social justice. But that whole study is there in the record too, and added that we decided that it would be very good to bring a class action suit which never went anywhere but it was the most fun we had.

This is against the church?

We were bringing a class action suit against the church, against ourselves. And you can you can accuse yourself.

I see.

So we got, it was a wonderful idea. We got all the high, the staff people of the Presbyterian Church to sign this complaint against themselves accusing themselves of sexism. And it was both women and men.

And what happened to it?

We had 100 names and one man got up and read, you know, the accusations on behalf of the men and a woman got up and read the accusations against ourselves on behalf of the women. And Bill Thompson threw it out.

This actually came to the floor

Its in, its in the minutes and the accusations are there that we made against ourselves. It's a footnote, I think, because it was tossed out. And, you know, I to this day think that it was we had studied the book of discipline enough to know that it in our opinion, the book of discipline allowed for that. But in order to overturn the stated clerk, you need a two thirds vote of the assembly. And that was impossible. So but it was fun.

Sounds like a pretty exciting and heady time.

It was, it was the it was also a painful time because the first time that we reported on the floor of the General Assembly, we were laughed off the floor. People thought the issue was funny. I mean, literally, it sounded like a junior high group of people. And it's hard it's hard for me to get into even feeling that or experiencing it. You know, as I say it. But we were, people, literally, the whole assembly laughed when we got up and said that we were dealing with women's issues and women's oppression.

Did you happen to be the speaker?

No. The staff people were never figures at the front. It was the, I'm not sure who it was. I'd have to go back and look. It was certainly a consciousness raiser for some of the women who were there. Infuriating. I mean, just really infuriating.

And so as a result of this, even women commissioners who maybe hadn't though in these terms before.

Would begin to. say, yeah. That's when we began to have women's commissioner orientations and women general assembly breakfast.

Does that come out of your obligations.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm. So it was an important time. And we also worked very closely with the secular women's movement, and I got to be very good friends during those days with Wilma Scott Heide, who had who died just this past year, but who was the second and third vice, no president of now of the National Organization for Women. So we had a lot of ties back and forth, and she was a real mentor.

Do you want to say some more about that?

Well, there were a lot of myths and a lot of feelings about whether or not in a secular women's movement, women religious were not sell outs because of the strong oppression in the Church of women in probably the most oppressive institution of women in society, apart from marriage is the church. And so there were a lot of women in the secular women's movement who didn't want to touch the whole issue of religion, although there was a religious task force and now which I worked with too, but Wilma built the bridges with me. And there was some feeling too, in the religious sector that the secular women were too radical and too far out and too confrontative. And so it was really important for us to work together and to build some of those bridges and to get some of the confrontation into the church in our own way. I mean, it's really interesting because Wilma never, she always honored our feeling about how things should be done, even if she thought they were going too slowly, you know, within the church, because that was where we knew what we were doing. But she was there at General Assembly and.

I think I read the report. I was thinking it came out in '67 and I saw Betty Friedan was on the committee, I thought, I didn't know that.

Yeah, well she wasn't on the I don't know what committee exactly but.

It was the committee this was the committee on. I'm going to go back.

And go back and. Yeah, there was another woman, Betty. I can't. Her name won't come to me. She chaired the Task Force on Women and Marriage and divorce. I wonder if that, Betty Friedan was not directly involved with us. Betty and Wilma were friends and knew each other. And I met Betty Friedan through Wilma and through the work that I did with NOW and also worked knew her and at the conference in Mexico City on the first the International Year Conference on Women's Development.

Go back and look at that.

Yeah. I have a feeling it's this other Betty though. Yeah.

Cause I didn't know that.

Betty Friedan was involved, but not directly. Wilma is the one that was involved directly. And I don't even think she was involved in a committee. It was more a presence, you know, and there at General Assembly. And we had invited her to speak at one of the women breakfasts and she got pneumonia. And I didn't come and I pinch hit, hit in for her at the last minute.

And you were in that job until '73 roughly?

Yeah, which was the time of the restructuring

And that's the time that you left?

I went to Harvard.

Would you talk about that?

I was offered a job at Harvard right at the time, there was a lot of transition going on. Regional synods were coming to be and the Board of Christian Education was being phased out. And this new structure, which would create the new program, agency and support agencies and also move all the offices to New York was coming into place. And Tom and I were separated for a period then too. For about a year and a half. And I was offered the job at Harvard and decided to go. So I moved to Harvard, bought a house, took the three sons. Tom moved us up there. I mean, he and moved us in then then he came back to Philadelphia and I started a job as director of Ministerial Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Which was a faculty position in both administration and teaching. To, theoretically to upgrade the MDIV program at Harvard and other aspects of professional education, including continuing education.

Did it have anything to do with bringing women's traditions or experience into the divinity school?

well, they had decided to hire a woman, as a matter of fact. So they did want a woman in this position, although I don't think they knew what they were doing. They and they did have a strong women's program within the student body at Harvard.

Is this the time that they had the fellowship for women?

They began at about, I think they began. I know they began it after a year or two when I was there. Yeah, those were wonderful idea. But they were a way for Harvard to get a reputation for doing women's studies, to make courses available to women without having to deal with women having a power base. Because these research associates, as they were called at the time, and I guess they're something new now, were there for two years or a year or two, and then they were gone and they never got into the system. Okay. So they could affect what other people were teaching, but they were never, never got a power base. Not the same as having full professors.

What else did you do? Or are there particular things that you did at Harvard that are historic?

Well, I did I, I did what I think was important to me and important to Harvard. I had to really come to grips with what ministry is as a profession, you know, not just as a lifestyle or with a small "m". But I had to look at what I thought ministry is and what how you prepare people for ministry. And to do that, you have to decide, first of all, what the profession is. I mean, what should people be doing? That was an arduous process, and I really did that in-depth for five years. And in the midst of that, we involved clergy that I thought I knew who clergy whom I thought knew what they were doing. We developed criteria to teach in the divinity school, in the arts and ministry areas so that we would have a combination of people teaching and preparing students for ministry who were academically trained and also trained in the parish, which seemed to me a critical combination.

Were these all men?

No. No, but the majority were. And with black as well as white. We were very careful about the racial mix and were very careful about bringing women in too, although in the beginning there weren't as many women available, eventually we had more women yeah. But it was that the departure you see was that to bring in people without PhD's, clergy, to teach potential clergy. And, you know, along with the academic people anyway, and I taught a course in local church administration and preaching and we put together a course on power and governance. And we did denominational courses. So that students at Harvard could prepare for their particular denomination, which was essential to using the ministerial education.

And now that's still going?

That's still going. That worked well. That was in place when I came in a very loose form. And what we managed to do is establish credit for those courses and pay the people who were doing them minimal fees and actually enter into a contract with them to legitimize what was there in a very ad hoc way and to develop a philosophy for legitimizing it. Which we did. Yeah.

Are there any other specific things that you did in your five years at Harvard?

Well, the field education program is part of this whole responsibility, too. And we did develop seminars related to field education. Some of most of which are not there anymore. By the time I left Harvard, 25% of the curriculum of every student in the MDIV program was in active ministry. Which didn't hold after that. But it was it was interesting that we had sort of built up the program. I went in fairly naive, actually, about what academia is like, and there were a lot of things I would do differently I think.

Do you want to talk about those.

Well, I think what I would do is move more slowly and build more support from within the system. What I discovered about Harvard, at least, and I think it may be true of other academic institutions, is that it is a feudal system. It's a hierarchy. And it's really a top down administration in ways that the Presbyterian Church is not. The Presbyterian Church is a representative democracy, and it works that way. The academic community appears to be that at first glance. I mean, there are committees and, you know, people serve on these committees and whatnot, but it's it's a false perception. At least it was at Harvard at that time. And I, I would have to learn how to work within a hierarchical system more effectively. So I would say that's one of the things that I would have to revise, I think. I think I would have been more careful about teaching courses myself. And I'm glad for what I taught. And I think. I could teach what I taught them much better now, although some of it was effective because I would. I would. I was doing a lot more. And I would also understand the difference. I did not understand the difference between what people intend and what they say they want. Okay. I think Harvard wanted to make its MDIV program look good, but they weren't serious about changing it.

It's certainly been the criticism of it I know

Yeah. And that's a big difference. I mean, you can.To say MDIV education is important to us. It's at the heart of what we're doing. You can keep saying that and saying it and saying it by saying, it's like saying I love you, I love you. But put some foundations under that that are solid is what I thought they wanted to do. And I'm not sure that they realized that they didn't really want to do that. OK, they wanted to be they wanted the MDIV program to be significant and important. And it is, but they didn't they weren't serious about looking at why it's not what the relationship is between PhD and MDIV between professional academics and professional clergy and whether one is valued more than the other and for what reason? And what are these two separate professions and how are they different? And a lot of basic issues still in theological education.

Harvard tends to veer on the side of the academic I would expect.

That's right. I mean, Harvard Divinity School, unlike a lot of divinity schools, this is part of the it's a professional school on its own. But it's also related to the arts and sciences department and I'm losing the terminology here. But related to arts and sciences and does joint phD work. And the academic criteria that they have to keep up in order to be acceptable ok, within those standards are quite different, perhaps, than the academic criteria or the criteria that you would use in a purely professional school. And so they're always torn between being a professional school and being a doctoral program in arts and sciences. Yeah.

Did you go there with a five year contract?

I went there with a five year contract with the option for renewal and possibly even with the option for a tenure. But there was a lot of hostility to my appointment from the day I came. And there were there were a lot of internal politics going on at the divinity school that I, to this day do not understand. Although I think there was some resistance to Krister's Deanship. And Krister did leave the year after I did or stepped down as Dean. So that whole thing was in turmoil at the time I was there. And partway when I first came there, there was another appointment for a director of field education who would be under my supervision or in my office actually, and I don't like these term and that the fact is administratively and they were interested in appointing. students. And I refused. I said I would not be able to honor I mean, I could not be involved in a program that was training people to be clergy and then having a supervisor of clergy who had no experience. I said that would be such an insult to I mean, the field education director was supervising the clergy who were taking students. And I said to have somebody in the institution supervising these people, you know, who has no experience in ministry. It's like I mean, it's inconceivable. So we insisted I insisted that we bring somebody in who would have enough experience in ministry to honor their profession. I mean, to acknowledge it is a significant and great profession. So they agreed and Billy Alton came to work there as director of field education and part way through when the school was going through budget crisis, etc., they wanted to downgrade that position again. And I just held the line and. Did. I was working with about 70 clergy by that time who were connected to the school. I mean, through field education or through teaching and other denominational programing, orientation to ministry program and a seminar. And we talked it over and they agreed that we should you know really Harvard should, in fact, hire somebody who is qualified as a minister and has the credentials. So but anyway, that was the issue at which I finally. I would not back down from that. And Krister said, if you do not accept the downgrading of this position, which is what it amounted to and Bill's leaving, then we will not renew your contract. And I just had to say then you will not renew my contract because I can't work under those conditions. And I still I think I am glad I made that decision, although it was a painful decision and it was a very difficult time yeah.

Such allure of Harvard.

That's right. And there's a lot of power connected with it. It was really interesting because with Harvard as a base, people invited me to do speaking. People would invite me to do workshops. It was an it was open access to all kinds of other systems. And so to say no to that was very difficult. But there really there really wasn't any integrity and in continuing. And there had been a lot of resistance to who I think a woman in that position. But I found when I left that there had been a lot of support too. I got some very supportive letters from people thanking me for the contributions I had made and saying that it would be a long time before people would appreciate what I had done. However, there were other reports, there were studies and whatnot done during the time that I was there. I still don't know what's in the record, and I still don't know what the archives will show and whether they're accurate, because I know that there were minutes taken at some committee sessions that I really disagreed with completely, and I don't know that they're not in the record. So, you know, I have this sort of I'm there's some unresolved issues there. I really would like to know what's in the record.

If you did some future research, would you then go back to those records?

They are sealed for 25 years from the day that some of the material was so there. It'll be interesting 25 years from now, I'm still around. if I care which I may not. But anyway.

Uh, what was after Harvard?

Well, after Harvard, I. I guess maybe I licked my wounds for a while. I was in a strange position because by that time, Tom had moved to Boston we had reunited. Our kids were in high school and out of high school. I mean, they were at college at the point of college, and we were suddenly because and my income had been the primary income in the family. So not being at Harvard was a tremendous financial blow. My salary had been, yeah, the primary I was making more than Tom. And so we lost my whole salary. And at at a time when our children were ready to go to college.