Tom Rainey, 2017-07-31, 2017-08-07, 2017-08-09

Item

Staff Only

Tom Rainey 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: 2017-07-31
Creation: 2017-08-07
Creation: 2017-08-09

Biographical / Historical

Thomas Rainey has been a historian ever since he knew the meaning of the word, a life-long slave of Clio, the muse of history. Directly out of his Florida high school, he joined the US Navy and served five years as a hospital corpsman where he learned discipline, comradery and continued reading history in his off hours. The GI Bill allowed him to get his BA from the University of Florida and then his Ph.D. from University of Illinois where he specialized in Russian and Eurasian Studies. Before coming to Evergreen, Rainey taught at University of Arkansas, 1966-67; Duke University, 1967-69; State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, 1969-72. When he arrived at Evergreen in 1972, he whole-heartedly plunged into the Coordinated Studies and inter-disciplinary teaching mode of the new college. This unique teaching opportunity expanded his academic life and interests over the past 50 years. Tom Rainey is now retired, but still stays on top of everything Russia and Eurasian and still gives the occasional lecture on Russian topics to local civic and community groups. He lives near Evergreen with his wife, Nina Carter. They have a forested property with a beaver pond and live there with their Three Kats Karamazov: Dima, Alyosha and Sam. They enjoy traveling to Europe and Russia to study history, culture, politics and ecology of an area. This year they celebrated 40 years of marriage in August 2024.