. . . Summer 2002
Protection or Intrusion? In the 1960s, students began to consider the dean's power over women unlawful. Where students began to see intrusiveness, Bacon saw protection, especially against sexually aggressive males. "Tell those men to keep their hands off my women!" she's remembered to have burst out at a meeting of students, faculty and staff.
The dean's interest in what the students saw as a woman's private behavior infuriated students, recalls former Daily editor Peter Eckstein '58. "A woman would come in and talk about her personal problems, many of which would be of a sexual nature, and Miss Bacon's reactions were often highly insensitive." Bacon responds to such perceptions by noting, "You have to remember, I was thinking as a psychiatric and army nurse and as a prison worker." Davenport concurs, noting that Bacon kept extensive records on women because she was thinking like a nurse and creating the equivalent of a medical history, "but she was too intrusive." 'A Smart, Big City Girl With a Smart, Big City Mother' Bacon remembers expelling only one student, a "bright, smart, big city girl" with a "smart, big city" mother. The student "was just, she was impossible, at that time here," Bacon says. "It wouldn't matter so much now, I suppose, but this was a freshman, and she was out dating three and four foreign graduate students in a car, usually from India or Persia. I'm sure she thought they were all princes, I don't know. She was outrageous about it, and she meant to be outrageous about it. So that one I did [expel] but she could get into another university and do very well, and probably did. But she just had such a chip on her shoulder that you couldn't let it be." Asked if Michigan sent letters to girls who dated Blacks or Indians, Bacon says, "I wouldn't know, maybe somebody else did, but I would have sense enough not to put that on paper." Racial issues intensified the dean's difficulties. Michigan enrolled very few Black women between 1950 and 1961. An informal count of graduates based on photos in the Michiganensian from all U-M Schools and Colleges shows fewer than 150 over that entire span. Bacon says that in her encounters with Black students, she felt "a lot of them had a very curious double chip on their shoulder, which I think they still have—that particular type. They want to be themselves, and they want to be accepted like everybody else. Now how do you do both?" Bacon's tenure coincided with the beginnings of the civil rights movement, and students began to protest segregation and discrimination in many ways. Picketers often marched in front of the Kresge, Woolworth's and Cousins stores to protest biased policies. "Oh, yes, they had fun," Bacon says of the student activists. "What possible good it would do to picket Woolworth's, I don't know. But at least it puts you on the corner of Main, you see. Yes, there was a great deal of posturing." Bacon's wide power over women's sexual activities and relationships was to create a crisis for her and the University and to greatly reduce the University's in loco parentis authority. Students sought and secured broader constitutional rights in tandem with Blacks, and the faculty, which had ceded power over students' activities to the administration, now began to regain influence. The Daily controversy On March 4, 1958, Mary Ellen Carter Takeda '58 rose to her feet in a public meeting of the Political Issues Club and accused Bacon and the University of racial discrimination. She cited an incident in 1956, when fellow music major and friend Joseph R. Moore '55 accompanied her to a jazz concert.
The owner of her League House residence had told Takeda that the presence of a "Negro caller" had upset the other women. Takeda charged that she had been "forced to live in University housing which did not permit me to have the callers I choose." The Daily quoted her as saying, "I feel I'm entitled to have a Negro caller as well as a white caller."
Takeda remembers that her argument "just occurred to me on the spot " and that although she was calm, her words "set up a storm. Lots of people jumped in."
Dean Bacon replied at the meeting that the University supervised only such things as rents and the condition of the houses, and that the owner could do "what she wishes in her home. We are dealing with the feeling of a private individual and taxpayer." But student Robert Yesner '58 pointed out that since the University prevented drinking in all its approved housing, it should also be able to prevent discrimination.
This gave Daily editor Eckstein the opportunity he'd been looking for. He had been "investigating stories that the Dean of Women's Office was intimidating white undergraduate women if they were detected dating Black men." He hoped that a follow-up editorial on March 9 would bring forth other complaints and "expose the situation," he recalls, but "reached a dead end." So Eckstein started a file at the newspaper for allegations of racial discrimination by the dean's office and passed it on to his successor, Richard Taub '59. Eventually the file came to Daily editor Tom Hayden '61. Although Hayden wasn't available to be interviewed, others remember the burgeoning of student power that changed U-M. Patricia Golden Steinhoff '63 calls herself "a bit player" in the drama. But in 1961, Hayden assigned her to write a story about a woman who was dating a student from India. Dean Bacon wrote to the woman's parents to inform them of it. Hayden saw this as the "smoking gun," Steinhoff says. Hayden, Mary Wheeler McDade '61, James Seder '61, '64 LLB, Barton Burkhalter '62 and Nan Markel Sigal '61 led the effort to unseat Bacon. Seder and Burkhalter were on the Student Government Council, Sigal was a Daily reporter and McDade was the head of the student NAACP and the daughter of Emma '38 MPH and Albert Wheeler '44 DPH. (The Wheelers were Ann Arbor civil rights leaders; Albert Wheeler was U-M's first African American tenured faculty member and later became the city's only Black mayor.) The Daily's file included about 20 testimonials asserting, among other things, that Bacon removed women from the dorm after a visit from a Black man went five minutes beyond closing time and that the house director of Hinsdale House canceled an exchange dinner with a men's residence because "the Dean would not approve" the fact that "two Negro members of Adams House were to accompany two white girls from Hinsdale." It also includes a retyping of a letter dated 1956 that Bacon allegedly wrote the mother of a freshman woman. Bacon said the student made too much noise, flouted rules and "consistently dated colored boys." She added, "Although the University of Michigan has no segregation policies, in fact rigidly supports a nonsegregation policy in its classes, its residence halls, its athletics, etc., public opinion among the students themselves looks somewhat unfavorably at a freshman girl who continuously and conspicuously associates almost solely with individuals or groups of another race." This was a "serious warning" for the woman to change her behavior the second semester. "If she does not, the association is terminated." The file, now part of the U-M's Bentley Historical Library collection, also included a six-page statement dated March 7, 1961, in which the students charged that Dean Bacon was insensitive and discriminatory and asked U-M to give "serious attention to the idea of increased campus freedom for women." The students intended to present their grievance directly to the Board of Regents, but it wound up in the Faculty Subcommittee on Student Relations, led by Prof. J. Philip Wernette of the Business School. The panel issued in May 1961 a report on the dean of women's office and urged a broad review of all student governance at Michigan. The panel reported that it was its "considered observation that the judgments expressed by Dean Bacon seem often to be based upon dogma, stereotypes and patent misinformation. Additionally, these judgments are apparently passed frequently in an emotional atmosphere lacking compassion for and understanding of the problems of individual students." It also noted campus concern "about the engagement of the University in the nonacademic affairs of its students." Stanley Levy believes that Dean Bacon's actions reflected both institutional expectations and her personality. Former Regent and Daily staffer Philip Power '60 agrees, saying that supervising student behavior was U-M policy, but that Bacon "pushed the envelope." That fall of 1961, the Reed Committee under Law School Prof. John W. Reed undertook its review of University-student relations. Its findings led to the abolition of sex-segregated deans' offices, the reorganization of the Office of Student Affairs to oversee all student matters and a revision of student rights. "I don't know what happened between her and the Regents," Seder says, "but in May we were informed that she was resigning within a week." Bacon's resignation was not announced until September, however. Patricia Golden Steinhoff remembers that "the Daily was triumphant; we thought of ourselves as crusading journalists." A triumph lessened for Faith Weinstein Dunne, however, by the fact that the Daily staff "didn't include a single Black reporter." "Students were on a rampage and should have been," Elizabeth Davenport says of the Bacon affair. "I felt then, and since then, not ambivalent but polarized. She was dead wrong. But it was like watching a horse fall in a race. I've hurt for a long time about Deborah. But it was time for her to go, time for that role to end." Yet Davenport believes that Bacon "took the fall for the administration." Bacon's View of Her Departure As for the reason for her resignation, Bacon stands behind what she wrote in her memoir, that the Daily's story was "factually true, emotionally one-sided." She said the paper had "opened a strident, sustained campaign against me. Editorials and/or front-page articles daily rehearsed a) the perennial male-undergraduate resentment against all Deans of Women; b) the rumor of my disapproval of the University's upcoming policy change-all residents halls to become co-educational; and c) my 'racial bigotry.'" The main question in Bacon's mind was her strong disagreement with the Hatcher administration's plan to let undergraduate women visit men's off-campus residences, the ongoing discussions to allow co-ed dorms and the president's habit of "politely overriding" her arguments. "In Deans' meetings and private conferences I maintained I could not hold responsibility for a policy I strongly disapproved of and over which I would have neither influence nor control," Bacon wrote. "Further, not all parents of freshman girls approved this change and expected me to support their concern.... Lastly, I resented the President and 17 other (male) Deans unanimously issuing a mandate for which I alone (who strongly disagreed) would carry sole responsibility." In the face of the Daily's continuing "barrage excoriating me as a 'racial bigot'," Bacon told the president that she was resigning. "Two such letters remained utterly unacknowledged," she wrote. But with the third she threatened to go to the Detroit Free Press with the story, and her resignation was finally accepted. An Academic at Last At the age of 55, Deborah Bacon became a full-time academic in the English department, taking "an immediate 55 percent cut in salary." She was the second woman in a department of 100. "They had a Chinese woman and a disgraced dean-they had it covered," Bacon says. She taught literature, poetry and expository writing to freshmen and sophomores. From one of her classes, she chose seven or so "energetically bright" students to pursue special projects and to meet in her home on Thursday nights. Hubert English, who taught in the English department with Bacon, remembers her as a hard worker with "great moral and intellectual force," and Bacon enjoyed strong support from the department's long-time chair Warner Rice. But the Daily's charges against her rankled and she "slowly developed a response to the campaign about my 'racial bigotry.'" Bacon contacted the United Negro College Fund and twice took unpaid leave to teach at St. Augustine's College, a historically Black school in Raleigh, North Carolina, as the lone white faculty member. She says the deprivation she found there reminded her of her work 35 years earlier among the Alaskan Indians. But she recalls how times were changing there, too. At a faculty dinner at a local restaurant, one of her African American colleagues turned to her and said, "About three years back, I came here for lunch. They turned the fire-hose on me!" Bacon published an article about her North Carolina experiences in The Michigan Quarterly Review in 1968, the same year, at the age of 62, she resigned from the University of Michigan. Her break was total. Today, she says she last visited campus 30 years ago despite living only 15 miles away. "When I cut things, I cut them completely," she explains. First, she moved to California and pursued scholarly interests. Assertions that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare's works had long captivated her, and she wrote Quintessence of Dust to add her argument for de Vere's authorship. After taking many trips throughout Asia, Africa, South America and Europe, and writing other books (the unpublished "Brothers In Exile" about "The Brothers Karamazov" and "The Man God Loved" about the biblical David), the state of Michigan lured Bacon back to a home on Lake Huron. She's met a lot of famous people on her journeys—Eva LaGallienne, Sara Delano Roosevelt, George Patton, Haile Selassie, Katherine Ann Porter, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gertrude Stein, Margaret Mead, Rebecca West and the Shah of Iran. Vigorous despite health problems associated with her age, Deborah Bacon
displays confidence and command. During a conversation about her salary
as dean, she notes she was paid "conspicuously less" than the male deans.
Asked how she'd measured up with them, she responds in a way that typifies
her spirit and career: "My opinion is that I usually measure up pretty
well with almost anybody."
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Marge
Piercy '57: 'I did not back down'