FACET's Eileen T. Bender

Yesterday I interviewed FACET founder Eileen Bender at her office in the English Department at IU South Bend. Several weeks ago in the cafeteria lunchroom FACET (Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching) director David Malik, who is also interim Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at IU Northwest, said to me, “Since you are an oral historian, how would you like to interview the woman who started FACET?” She is retiring from teaching this year, and he wanted her remembrances recorded for posterity. He offered to pay me but the terms of my retirement plan prevent me from earning any extra money from IU. I was in desperate need of a new computer, however, so I heard him out, and agreed that the interview might become part of a larger project. To learn more about FACET I interviewed Don Coffin, who had been an active member since 1989, as well as current campus liaison Charlotte Reed, and Malik himself. Tome Trajkovski and Aaron Pigars provided camera work and then produced excellent DVDs of the interviews that could possibly be part of a documentary or put on FACET’s electronic Website and/or Newsletter. I contacted Eileen and we set up a time and date.

The weather yesterday was threatening, but we plunged on. Aaron was a recent graduate of IU South Bend and navigated while Tome drove us in his new BMW. We made it to campus in under an hour. I packed ham sandwiches and Fritos for each of us. Eileen proved to be a charming woman with much to say. At one time she was special adviser to IU President Tom Ehrlich, who supported her vision to honor excellent teachers and bring them together as an unofficial leadership cadre to encourage teaching innovations on their respective campuses. The interview went on for nearly two hours. Each year in May new inductees and those already members of the organization go to a weekend retreat. For the past several years this has taken place in French Lick, a former spa in southern Indiana that now boasts a casino. Various sessions and workshops take place that involve teachers having to learn new skills outside their discipline. One such collaborative effort involved making pieces of a quilt. Another involved participants making silkscreen segments. As Eileen recalled, in 1998 her assistant “smuggled out” a snapshot of her, which was enlarged and cut into squares. People worked on and made abstractions from nine little screens not knowing what the larger picture was. The collage was unveiled at the closing session and now hangs in a lounge near Eileen’s office. Eileen said, “It has taken me years to be able to view my abstracted multicolored image with good humor. I’m amused when holding a class in the lounge when a student asks warily, ‘Dr. Bender – is that YOU????’”

Thanks to Vice Chancellor Malik I now have a state-of-the-art MAC (version 10.6.2) 27-inch screen computer with 4 GBs of memory. In the past couple days I’ve worked out most of the bugs and gotten used to it thanks in large part to technician Velate Sullivan. I love it. The old one had been freezing up every half hour or so. So far I have showed it off to Steve, Anne Balay, and other visitors to the Archives. Malik is also going to pay for Aaron, Tome, and me to attend next year’s retreat so we can do interviews and capture some of the highlights on tape. Malik was at today’s Holiday Party (you don’t say Christmas!) and I introduced him to 89 year-old Bill Neil, a surprise guest who mentioned that he, too, had been Dean (as it was called in 1971) of Academic Affairs until an idiot, Robert McNeil, became Chancellor (and Bill was not exaggerating). Chris Young sat at our table. His field, early American History, was the same as Bill’s, so they got along famously. Also at our table were Ken Schoon, who (as I pointed out to Bill) wrote the excellent book “Calumet Beginnings,” which combines his expertise in geology and history. Zoran and Vesna Kilibarda, who moved to the United States from Yugoslavia in the 1980s, were our other companions. Bill recalled some of his former Serbian students (what a memory), and Zoran expressed regret that after Tito’s death his country disintegrated into a half dozen little states with little power or influence. He knew Bill from chairing the 2009 Arts and Sciences Research Conference Committee that approved my Plenary Session on the history of the university featuring Bill, Paul Kern and me. Vesna thanked me for giving them my Retirement Journal and said she found it interesting. I mentioned in volume 40 that Vesna was a Voodoo Chili fan who danced to my son’s band at the Roadhouse, that as Chair of the Math Department she gave Lary Schiefelbusch the Gary Pictorial History and Ron Cohen and I co-edited, and that at grieving session in the wake of Robin Hass Birky being killed in an auto accident, she was so moved she could barely control her emotions (she wasn’t alone).

Next week will be the A & S Holiday Party, and last week was a Retirement Reception for Business Prof Bert Scott (didn’t know him very well) and an Information Technology secretary. Three other retirees failed to attend, including good old Mary Bertoluzzi, who was hired in 1978 to work in a unit that was later abolished and never promoted into a position that would have used her considerable talents. Usually try to provide witty anecdotes at such events, but kept my mouth shut. Have been reading with pleasure Gore Vidal’s “Burr,” told from the point of view of a young would-be biographer who works in the former vice president's law office. As in "Lincoln," the main character frequents a fashionable D.C. brothel. Picked up and skimmed through “Everything’s Changed” by Gail Collins about women’s history since 1960. In that year a judge kicked a woman out of his courtroom for wearing slacks. There’s a photo of a sexy stewardess lighting men’s cigars. How times have changed.

Wednesday ended with a wintry blizzard. It took my son Dave 90 minutes to get home to Portage from East Chicago Central H.S. and he begged out of bowling in place of me. I have been nursing a pinched sciatic nerve but drove through the snow and wind to Cressmoor Lanes and bowled a 509 series (194, 182, and 133 with four splits in the third game). The Engineers won one game and series for three points, and Dick Maloney beat me out for high series above average by a total of four pins to win the five dollar pot. Had two Leinie drafts and then a couple Goose Island 12-ouncers while listening to an Owl City CD and proofreading my forward to the an autobiography I am helping someone put together.