Virginia Darney, 2018-04-12, 2018-04-13

Item

Staff Only

Virginia Darney Oral History Interview Transcript

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Scope and Contents

From the Collection:

The Evergreen Oral History Project collection contains interviews with more than one hundred retired Evergreen faculty, administrators and staff. These conversations were conducted mostly by current and emeritus faculty. From the initial year devoted to designing the College (1970-71) to the present, Evergreen has been a highly innovative academic institution, committed to pedagogy that strongly supports students’ learning. The project’s purpose has been to document a very wide range of experiences and points of view of longtime members of this community. Faculty narrators recall how they developed their practices of team-teaching, interdisciplinary studies, communities of inquiry, and other distinctive features of the curriculum. Nearly all narrators tell stories about their biographical backgrounds, how being at Evergreen affected them, and how their work contributed to students’ education. Narrators also reflect on how they and Evergreen responded to challenges and changes of politics and culture, including issues of class, gender and race, over the College’s first half century.

The Evergreen Oral History Project began in 2016. As of May 2024, 104 retirees had been interviewed by twenty-eight interviewers. Interviewers have chosen whom they wish to interview, which imbues many of these discussions with the tenor of dialogues between friends. Rather than respond to a preset list of questions, narrators discussed whatever was most memorable and interesting to them.

Special thanks go to transcriber Penny Miller, who made draft transcripts of almost all of the recorded interviews; Amanda Walker and Abby Kelso, Vice-Presidents for Advancement, who sponsored and found funding for the project; Pat Barte and Ray Janssen-Timmen, for administrative support; John Sheehy, director of Reed College’s oral history project, for guidance launching ours; Susan Fiksdal, Anthony Zaragoza, Barbara Smith, Nancy Taylor and Nancy Koppelman, each of whom interviewed many retirees; Liza Harrell-Edge and Sadie Aymond, for accessioning and managing the collection in the Library Archives; and the anonymous donor whose generosity made the project possible. Sam Schrager has been director of the project.

Dates

Creation: 2018-04-12
Creation: 2018-04-13

Biographical / Historical

Since her retirement in 2004 Jin Darney has returned to Portland and immersed herself in her Woodstock Community, helping to start their local Farmers Market, and continuing to volunteer there, and helping to start Eastside Village, a part of Villages NW. They are a volunteer organization created to help seniors age in their own homes for as long as possible. Because she offered to unpack the boxes in their small office, Darney became the Office Manager, and when she turned that over to her successor, she continued to volunteer with the organization. They are part of 10 Villages in the Portland metro area, with several more in development. In addition to the services their volunteers provide (transportation, primarily, but also household tasks, garden clean up, among others) they assist members who want to form interest groups (native plants, hiking, book groups, conversational French (taught by her husband Craig Johnson) World Culture, lots of card game groups), and help members host several weekly coffee gatherings. The work is most gratifying, and has encouraged them to meet many new friends and welcome folks new to the neighborhood and to Portland. Darney now serves as President of the Board of Directors of Villages NW, their “hub” which is the 501(c)(3), and manages all village finances. Darney's time directing the Vancouver Campus of Evergreen (1980-1990, teaching on teams, and serving as Curriculum Dean (1998-2004) certainly prepared her for the world of nonprofits, and the challenges they offer in management. She tries to nudge the organization to adopt “the Evergreen Way” of collaborative decision making, narrative evaluations, and respect for divergent views. Sometimes it works.