Yes, absolutely. She was an eloquent, she had quite a presence about her,
and she wouldn't talk with you. She would lecture. She had this voice
that carried, and I used to love to listen to her talk, but it was very
clear. I remember sitting in that room, and I believe Daryl Walker was
there and a couple of the other Assistant Dean of Women and some of the
women that worked with me, and she sat and explained to us why this just
wouldn't work. She appreciated all the hard work we had put into this,
but it just was not the right time for all of these changes to occur. I
remember leaving that meeting, and I felt that she was really
undermining the whole process that we had gone through, knowing full
well while we went through it that we were going to be recommending some
pretty significant changes and that it had been a farce. I'm talking
about a campus where I had experienced students being given a tremendous
amount of responsibility, and even when adults didn't agree with us, we
had the authority to make those changes and live with them. So I felt
terribly undermined, and I asked Dean Carmichael what recourse I had,
and she said, "Well, the only one who can change my veto is Chancellor
Sitterson." So I told her that I was going to be meeting with Chancellor
Sitterson. She said, "Well, you just go right ahead." I made an
appointment, and I had the ten women who were the heads of the
committees join me, and we sat in his office, and Chancellor Sitterson
was then and still is one of these very fatherly, very kind, open, warm,
easy-to-talk to people, and he just made us feel
at home, and he was a very good listener. I remember, I know we were in
his office at least an hour, and he let us talk. He let us talk about
what our needs were, what the process had been. Each one of us spoke,
and he listened, and he didn't say anything. At one point, I remember
alluding to the fact that—and I meant this not as a threat but I knew
that it was, in fact, going to happen—that if all of our recommendations
were vetoed that I suspected that he would have hundreds of women
sleeping out on his doorstep protesting the fact that we were not being
given an opportunity to be heard. At the conclusion of our discussion,
he chuckled, and he said, "You have convinced me that what you have done
has been thoughtful and responsible and that I will accept your
recommendations." We were all, of course, very, very pleased, and I
worried about how Dean Carmichael was going to take that, but she was a
lady, and she took it as I knew she would. She did not like it, but she
accepted it.
Of course, I had no idea what went on between Dean Carmichael and
Chancellor Sitterson after that, but we continued to work together until
I concluded at the end of the year. Then, of course, I left before any
of the changes took place, so I never really experienced what it was
like. It's interesting, too, because right after I graduated, I went to
the University of California at Berkeley, and I lived in a coed
situation in a coop where men and women shared a very large house and
shared responsibilities in the house, and it was very different from my
experience in Chapel Hill.