Bernadette Ray (00:00):
My first memories of the University of Puget Sound are when I was in high school, and I had students who rented the house across the street from my childhood home. So there were Puget Sound students who lived across the street from me, and I was absolutely fascinated by them, just their comings and goings, what cars they drove when they seemed to be leaving for class or work or whatever. I think there were five of them who lived in the house and I, as a high school student, I just watched them, not in a creepy way, but in a really curious way about what their lives were like.
Narrator (00:41):
This is Greater, We Ascend, a podcast from the University of Puget Sound about Loggers reaching to the heights.
Bernadette Ray (00:51):
Hello there. My name is Bernadette Ray. I am a graduate of 1999 from the University of Puget Sound with a degree in English Creative Writing, and I completed my Master's of Arts and teaching in 2001. I am principal at Dr. Dolores Silas High School, which is the school closest to the Puget Sound campus actually, or the high school closest to the campus. I always knew I grew up 10 blocks away from Puget Sound, and so I knew it was a beautiful campus. I knew that it was a respected university, but the students across the street made it real for me, just sort of watching their experiences from afar. I thought, well, they're just normal. They're not smarter than I am or better looking than I am, or whatever. They may or may not have had more money than I don't know about our financial aid packages and how they compared, but it just made it a little bit closer for me because while the university was just down the street, it was, and I think to an extent still is somewhat insulated, and so I had been on the campus, but I didn't really know the inner workings of the university.
(02:09):
It's funny that when I think about how the university's evolved, the first thing I think of is the physical space. There are multiple buildings that were not there when I was a student, and we just celebrated my 25th reunion last weekend, actually just last weekend. And in that 25 years, gosh, four, five new buildings, maybe four new and one renovated. And that's been really fun over the years to see how the university has grown. And with that, there have been some changes in, I think now freshmen and maybe sophomores are required to live on campus, and that was not the case when I was a student there. So it seems like that physical, the changes in the physical space have also made some changes to programming a planning for the university. So for instance, having underclassmen on campus, that's a good thing. They have access to the library. It helps to create a culture at the university, which I think is really important. And then I think it's important to mention the race and pedagogy initiative and all the work that that's done, not just for the local community, but nationally. That conference every four years is a huge draw to the university that Puget Sound is attempting to do some really good work with equity and how we treat one another.
(03:48):
And all that said, there are still a lot of challenges. There's still, in my opinion, not enough faculty of color. Student of color experiences are still something that the university is working on, but I do think that there is a commitment to improving experiences for all students, faculty, and staff at Puget Sound. I stay involved by continuing to work with the Black Alumni Union. That's a very important part of my continued Puget Sound experience through alumni programs and the offices and the good people there. And then I really enjoy going to concerts once in a while or lectures on campus. -
(04:34):
Living near a university is such an opportunity for inexpensive and high-quality entertainment. Everything from, like I said, music to lectures and ways to really stay engaged as a learner. The Black Alumni Union is working to figure out how to best support the Black Student Union. So the Black Alumni Union wants to have visibility to every student on campus, but the primary goal is to support the experience of students who are involved in the Black Student Union. And it's important to know that not all black students on campus are involved in the Black Student Union, and that's always been the case. In fact, there's somewhat of a divide between students in the black student union, black Greeks, black athletes, because I think that students come to campus and they find their people and their people are not always people who look like them or share skin tone or melanin.
(05:37):
So it's interesting, that's been a conversation of late is how to provide different supports to students on campus and to gauge what they need. There was a time where the Black Alumni Union was trying to put monies on student accounts in the bookstore so that we could help pay for student books. And then in talking with the Black Student Union, we tried to better assess what are really the needs. Is that a need or is it really a quarterly Sunday night dinner? Right, just to gather and break bread. So Black Alumni Union continues to help determine what are the needs of the Black Student Union and how does that change year by year and with different groups of students.
(06:26):
I was an English major while I was at Puget Sound with an emphasis in creative writing, but that shifted my junior year. Initially I was a sociology major and I got to college and was fascinated by the idea of sociology. I didn't even know that was an area you could study. I remember I did a project, two specific projects that were really interesting to me in my time at Puget Sound. One was on gang culture and the experiences of young people who are involved in gangs. It was the nineties and in Tacoma there was a lot of gang activity, and I was just fascinated by what that meant. And with sociology being the study of people in their environments, I was just really moved by what is the draw? There's stereotypes of, well, kids and gangs just are looking for family. Well, is that really true? And then the other project I remember specifically was the drug culture within local bands. So I did a project on how much were kids who were doing basement and garage band concerts, how much were they using drugs and what drugs were they using? But when I determined that I wanted to become a teacher, that's when I switched from sociology to English because I knew that there were not a lot of public high schools that had sociology within their social studies departments. And so English made more sense to me after that. As a teacher though, I always selected literature that I felt like really had a social bent to it, and so I majored in English but had a minor in sociology. I am so thankful as a public high school principal now that I had a liberal arts education.
(08:31):
My work in sociology helps me day-to-day in working with all the different stakeholders in a school, right? Students, of course, parents, board members, community members, the guy who lives across the street from the baseball field who calls all the time and says, "There are baseballs in my yard," and just how to work with folks in the community who have any connection at all to the school. My sociology studies really help with that, but also the clubs. I was an ASUPS Senator when I was at Puget Sound. My work with the Black Student Union, just learning how to engage with folks was such a big part of a liberal arts education that I really value. And then I also just learned how to work with a lot of different types of people, whether it was how sitting at the president's house, which I did while I was a student there to volunteering and working with people who lived on the street that was all very much a part of a liberal arts education.
(09:45):
And I think the university continues to try and improve their community relations and involvement. This balance between being an ivory tower and a community hub, I think is something that the university continues to try and improve upon. Puget Sound's role within the city of Tacoma I think is really around academic excellence and being a model of what academia could and should look like for students. And that doesn't mean that Puget Sound always gets it right, but I think they're always working toward getting it right for the students who come there and for the experience as faculty members as well. Puget Sound is this example of academic excellence and how do we as a society continue to really value education and educators. I think some of that has changed even since COVID when people were at home educating their own kids and figuring that out. But also the way things are changing with online learning, I'm still, and maybe it's because of my liberal arts education, I don't want to learn online. God bless institutions like Western Governors University. That's a great space for a lot of people. But I want to be in a classroom with someone with a PhD who studies this all day long and is going to frame probing questions for me and others in the classroom so that we as learners can really engage and dig deep into material.
(11:31):
Beyond that, I think that Tacoma, as a Tacoma native, I love this place and we can have conversations about homelessness or the cost of housing or all the things that are challenges right now in Tacoma, but I think that Puget Sound's role is to continue to be a part of those conversations as well, and to figure out solutions for problems that we're experiencing in our community. What people would be surprised to know is that it's actually not a snooty place. Not at all. In fact, and when I returned to campus ... for alumni Reunion Weekend a couple of weeks ago, there's these beautiful tents everywhere and these gorgeous meals, but people are welcoming and warm and want to engage in conversation. And so I think folks might be surprised that Puget Sound's actually not a snooty place, despite it being what I think is really a beacon of academic excellence.
Narrator (12:43):
Greater, We Ascend is a production of the University of Puget Sound. This episode was produced by John Moe. Our theme music is by Skylar Hedblom, Puget Sound Class of 2025. Learn more at pugetsound.edu/greater.