Julia Armstrong-Zwart's Leadership at UC Santa Cruz

219 Pages·2014·1.07 MB·English

by  Irene Reti

UC Santa Cruz
Institutional History of UCSC
Title
Adding a Plank to the Bridge: Julia Armstrong-Zwart's Leadership at UC Santa Cruz
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56h206hb
Authors
Armstrong-Zwart, Julia
Reti, Irene H.
Publication Date
2014-05-01
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University of California
Adding a Plank to the Bridge:
Julia Armstrong-Zwart’s Leadership at UC Santa Cruz

Interviewed and Edited by
Irene Reti

Santa Cruz
University of California, Santa Cruz
University Library
2014
This oral history is covered by a copyright agreement between Julia Armstrong-
Zwart and the Regents of the University of California dated January 21, 2014.
Under “fair use” standards, excerpts of up to six hundred words (per interview)
may be quoted without the University Library’s permission as long as the
materials are properly cited. Quotations of more than six hundred words require
the written permission of the University Librarian and a proper citation and may
also require a fee. Under certain circumstances, not-for-profit users may be
granted a waiver of the fee. For permission contact: Irene Reti [email protected] or
Regional Oral History Project, McHenry Library, UC Santa Cruz, 1156 High
Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064. Phone: [phone].
Table of Contents
Interview History 1
Early Life 9
Undergraduate Years 31
Quito, Ecuador 39
Johns Hopkins University 45
Living in Italy 52
Researcher in the Bilingualism Program, Foreign Language Innovative Curricula
Study, University of Michigan 61
Living in Bologna, Italy 66
Lecturer in French and Italian, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 69
Affirmative Action at the University of Massachusetts in the Early 1970s 72
Minority Women Administrators of New England 79
Assistant Academic Dean, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 85
Changing Roles for Women in the 1970s 91
Applying for the Position at the University of California, Santa Cruz 95
Coming to Santa Cruz 100
Working with Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer 102
How to Change the Institution 104
Special Assistant to the Chancellor in Matters of Informal Grievance and
Affirmative Action 108
Faculty Affirmative Action 111
Proposition 209: Dismantling Affirmative Action within the University of
California 114
Change in Position: Assistant Vice Chancellor for Faculty Relations 115
UC Santa Cruz: A More Fluid Campus Culture 118
More on Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer 120
Retention of Faculty of Color 123
Mutual Mentorship 124
Women in Management Retreat 126
Equity for Women Staff at UC Santa Cruz 127
Survey of Faculty Who Left UCSC 134
UCSC as a Faculty Incubator 138
Encouraging Graduate Students of Color to Become Faculty Members 144
Chancellor Robert Stevens 146
Chancellor Karl Pister 152
More on the Stevens Years at UCSC 154
Making UCSC a Welcoming Environment for Women and People of Color 159
Challenges with Staff Affirmative Action 163
Executive Vice Chancellor Michael Tanner 164
Barriers to Staff Affirmative Action 167
Chairing the Committee on Americans with Disabilities 172
Developing a Faculty Database 173
Survey of Faculty Who Have Left UCSC: Part II 175
Sexual Harassment Policy at UC Santa Cruz 179
Title IX Sexual Harassment Officer Rita Walker 188
Keeping the Body Politic Healthy 190
UCSC’s Contributions to the University of California Policy on Sexual
Harassment 194
Valerie Simmons, Director of Affirmative Action 196
Chancellor MRC Greenwood 198
Leaving UC Santa Cruz 200
Final Reflections: Serendipity and Balance 202
Adding a Plank to the Bridge: Julia Armstrong-Zwart’s Leadership at UC Santa Cruz page 1

Interview History
Julia Armstrong-Zwart was hired by Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer in
1981 as Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Matters of Informal Grievance and
Affirmative Action and served as the University of California, Santa Cruz’s first
ombudsman. In 1983, she stepped down as ombudsman, to assume the position
of assistant academic vice chancellor for faculty relations, and continued to serve
as special assistant to the chancellor for affirmative action. In addition to her
work as assistant vice chancellor for faculty relations, she held the position of
assistant chancellor for human resources, with responsibility for the offices of
Academic Human Resources, EEO/Affirmative Action, Labor Relations, Staff
Human Resources, and Title IX. She retired from UCSC in 2001.
In this oral history, conducted by the Regional History Project in the
summer of 2013, Armstrong-Zwart describes how she worked with other key
UCSC administrators, faculty, and staff members to transform the cultural and
politics of UC Santa Cruz and the University of California system. They
accomplished this through vision and much hard work, strengthening existing
affirmative action policies and creating innovative programs such as the Target
of Opportunity faculty recruitments, establishing retention and faculty
development programs, and founding a Title IX office devoted to sexual
harassment prevention.
Adding a Plank to the Bridge: Julia Armstrong-Zwart’s Leadership at UC Santa Cruz page 2
Armstrong-Zwart’s oral history is also a historically valuable record of the
life and career of a pioneering African American female leader in higher
education administration. As the interviewer, I found her vivid storytelling and
incisive thinking engrossing and inspiring. Her sense of humor and love of
language was also a delight.
Julia Armstrong was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1941. Her father was the
only black policeman in downtown Chicago. He had immigrated from the South
and was born in 1882, only one generation after slavery was abolished in the
United States. He married Julia’s mother, Fairfax “Fairy” Hayes, who was
originally from Jacksonville, Florida. Fairy had recently escaped a difficult
marriage and had three small children at the time she remarried. The family
lived on the South Side of Chicago.
Fairy was a devout Catholic woman of white and African American
heritage, who as Armstrong described it “worked white and lived black,” and
experienced the emotional tensions that come with a closeted life. By passing for
white, she was able to secure a series of bookkeeping and other financial services
positions in Chicago. She sacrificed financially to send Julia (and her siblings) to
a series of parochial schools.
From an early age, Catholic nuns gave Armstrong the academic
encouragement and mentoring that was to serve her throughout her career. She
attended high school at Nazareth Academy in Kalamazoo, Michigan; college at
Marquette University in Michigan and St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana,
where she majored in Spanish and philosophy and spent the summer teaching
English as a foreign language in Quito, Ecuador. She then went to graduate
Adding a Plank to the Bridge: Julia Armstrong-Zwart’s Leadership at UC Santa Cruz page 3
school at Johns Hopkins University. In 1961, the year she arrived, Baltimore was
still segregated, although that soon changed. She was the first black student to
enter the department and completed her MA and all but the PhD dissertation in
Spanish literature.
Armstrong’s first husband was an Italian American from the Bronx. They
married in Cleveland, rather than in Maryland, because of the anti-
miscegenation laws common at that time. Her husband received a Fulbright and
they moved to Florence, Italy, where they had two sons and Armstrong enjoyed
being immersed in Italian language and culture. After her husband finished his
dissertation, they returned to the United States, to the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor. At a faculty party, Armstrong met the coordinator of a federally
funded project on the study of bilingualism and was soon offered a position
researching bilingual elementary school curriculum programs and writing
abstracts of scholarly publications about bilingualism. At the University of
Michigan she also helped publish the proceedings for an international conference
on bilingualism.
Her husband then took a position at the City College of New York,
directing the program of study abroad in Bologna, Italy. It was there that
Armstrong first discovered that she enjoyed working with students outside of a
classroom setting, serving as what she called “an unpaid dean of students” for
two years. She and her husband then moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, where
her husband took a teaching position in the French and Italian department and
Armstrong was hired by the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences to develop