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Ann had no taste for
the minutia of rules and regulations (her mailbox at
Women's Studies often remained stuffed for weeks with
administrivia), but she was wonderfully attuned to
institutional hokum and adored scoffing at it.
I hope what I write here
conveys the many years of affection and admiration Steve and
I have felt for Ann. I want to start with my
first and last memories of her. The first is hearing about
Ann from Steve when he came back from his initial meeting as
a member of the Honors Council, the group of people who
decided whether students in the Honors Program got to
graduate with Highest Honors, High Honors, Honors, or,
sometimes, no honors at all. The members were a
collection of bigwigs from around campus, a dean, some
department chairs, some senior full professors, and Steve,
either an Assistant or Associate Professor at the time.
He told me afterwards about
the vigorous, almost ferocious discussions that took place,
and he said that one of the members was someone named Ann
Keppel, the only woman in the group and the chief advocate
for students. "That's not being fair to the student" were
the words he heard from her many times over the course of
the semesters--and yet her argumentation was unpredictable,
her angle on issues was often fresh, and her presentations
always forceful. Forcefulness was necessary in the very
self-confident company of the Council crowd. My last memory is of an
evening about a month ago. Steve and I ran into Ann at the
Olive Tree, a little neighborhood restaurant, where she had
just finished dining with her old friend, Victor Kobayashi's
wife, Cleo. She gestured at the plate of mussel shells and
raved about how delicious they were. (The next time we went
there we tried them--and she was right.) She was enthusiastic about
the news that our daughter Robin was going to Swarthmore.
Ann had come to the baby shower for us a few weeks before
Robin was born, and somewhere we still have the little
stuffed Thai cotton mouse she gave us for our child. Now she
was happily chatting about her acquaintance with Robin's
college. She looked happy and at
least relatively healthy, although in the last few years she
had faced a number of discouraging ailments, large and
small. I made a mental note to see if we could have
breakfast together at our favorite Kaimuki coffee shop when
we got back from Colorado. I am very unhappy that this
is not to be. When he came back from the Honors Council,
Steve had said to me that I would probably like this
energetic and compelling woman. That was true. Somewhere
along the line when I began teaching some courses in the
Honors Program I met Ann Keppel. She was very impressive.
She cared passionately about students and about good
teaching. She persuaded an ever skeptical Honors director to
let her train students to lead Honors Seminars, to choose
their own topics, select the readings themselves, conduct
their class for the semester. Looking back, I can see that
Ann was extremely receptive to the pedagogical ideas of the
sixties--and she succeeded in dragging an often reluctant,
doubtful institution along with her. I remember the Honors
seminar she taught about autobiography; the students found
it so fascinating that they simply didn't stop the course at
the end of the semester. They just kept on reading and
meeting. Eventually I became a
faculty member in the Women's Studies Program. It was a
difficult time with a lot of transitions that factionalized
the small department. With faculty members often complaining
about their treatment and the previous, rather authoritarian
director moving into an administrative position, the dean
lost faith in the ability of the Program to manage itself.
He started hinting about looking for some outside help. I
can't remember how many of us may have had the same idea at
the same time, but I am sure I was not the only one who
thought that Ann would be an exciting choice to become
director. I don't think Ann and the
dean of social sciences, Deane Neubauer, knew each other
personally before he talked with her about helping out in
Women's Studies, but once they met they evidently liked each
other enormously. Ann had tremendous faith in Deane, and
Deane gave her and us good support. She came into a
difficult situation with her usual gusto and her usual
frankness. It was splendid. She did the Women's Studies
Program a world of good, and being appointed Director had a
well-deserved validating effect on her that her own College
had failed to give her. I see four of her
accomplishments at Women's Studies as especially important.
She restored the confidence of the Dean in the ability of
Women's Studies to run its own affairs responsibly. She led
the faculty in completely revamping and reorganizing its
curriculum, making it coherent and up-to-date. She oversaw
the founding and first years of the Office of Women's
Research (which, unfortunately, the UH budget catastrophe of
the nineties eventually reduced to a shell). And she again
established warm, caring, rewarding relationships with a
series of very bright students. Two of those students
decided that Women's Studies should have a student-run
newsletter that would tackle women's issues on campus. They
decided to call it Voices. Not surprisingly, Ann was one of
their most consistent and energetic supporters. Equally
unsurprisingly, they got themselves into trouble. The most
dramatic instance was when they had the chutspa to publish
verbatim an interview with an (anonymous) student who
described her experience of being sexually harrassed by a
professor. On a late afternoon the day
before Christmas Eve, Ann and I were abruptly summoned to
Bachman Hall, the central administration offices, and
lectured there by the University's lawyer about how
irresponsible we were to allow such material to be published
&endash;and distributed across campus. On one level, Ann and
I were shocked and amazed at such an attack on us and such
disregard for the student's description of the way her trust
in the student-teacher relationship had been abused. On
another level, the whole experience reminded Ann of her
participation in a Bachman Hall sit-in many years before,
something she often mentioned as a pivotal experience in her
relationship with the institution. Ann had no taste for the
minutia of rules and regulations (her mailbox at Women's
Studies often remained stuffed for weeks with
administrivia), but she was wonderfully attuned to
institutional hokum and adored scoffing at it. Ann was a wonderful
maverick; she loved her field and yet was receptive to
change when she moved to Women's Studies. She gave wonderful
parties and enlarged her deck to make the parties even more
inviting. She was friends with people from all over the
community. We loved her. We miss her. Aloha, Ruth Dawson
Honolulu,
Hawaii