Hope College Psychology Department History

Tracing the history of the department

Phil VanEyl 1993 PSI CHI Initiation Talk

Talk given at PSI CHI Initiation -- April 8, 1993

Thoughts and reflections on the history of the Hope College Psychology Department.

When I was Hope’s first Psi Chi advisor some 28 years ago, I always appreciated that function because it was such a wonderful opportunity to get to know a group of fine students such as you. Unfortunately, presently I don’t know some of you and I certainly don’t know you as well as I would like to. But I am sure that you are fine students and that you will be a credit to psychology. I congratulate you on being a member of Psi Chi.

I find it an honor to be the speaker for this special occasion. The invitation to be your speaker did not come because of some special achievement on my part, however. As a friend of mine pointed out in a letter recently:

"I do not feel exactly right about offering congratulations, since retirement is something that happens to you rather than something you accomplish."

Something else that you want to realize is that I did not pick the topic. Frankly, I wish I could have talked about some other things but I will do my best to recall certain aspects of the Department’s history that you may find interesting and give you some idea how I experienced them.

The name of the friend who wrote the letter is D. Ivan Dykstra, a former colleague who retired some ten years ago. For years he was the chair of the philosophy department. Besides being a fine philosopher he was also an excellent educator. The reason why I mention some particulars about him is because he came to Hope in 1947, which is even before my time. In other words, even then we had teachers who were exceptional and gave the College a reputation of distinction. Other interesting features about him were that he had a Dutch heritage, graduated from Hope in 1935, and got his ministerial degree from Western Theological Seminary before going on to Yale for his PhD. Those were the days when the College was much smaller and tied in with Dutch heritage and the Reformed Church in America. In fact, when D. Ivan had almost finished his degree from Western, he took a summer preaching assignment at the Monarch Reformed Church in western Canada. Monarch was and still is a small farming community on the prairies of Alberta. Its Reformed church was the oldest reformed church in all of Canada. While in Monarch D. Ivan stayed with one of the church families that had a nine-year old daughter named Minty. It was her job to awaken him in the morning. She’d stand at the foot of the steps and called :Dominee!“ Minty thought he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. She’d peek through the window as he practiced the piano. She was so impressed because she had never known a man to play the piano. She developed a real crush on him. When I married Minty, now called Mickie, a few years ago, D. Ivan said “I hear you married my little girl!”

D. Ivan also had a reference to psychology.

"When I was a student in the thirties, psychology at Hope consisted of a single course contained within the Philosophy curriculum, plus a course in 'Abnormal Psychology,' taught by a sociologist who used it as a vehicle for preaching to us that we were all nuts."

What he described was pretty much the norm for psychology offerings from the very beginning of psychology at Hope, which goes back to the turn of the century, until the end of World War II. It wasn’t until the end of that war that the Department started having two full-time people, both trained psychologists. When I came to Hope as a student in 1953 one of the men, Dr. Havercamp, had left but the Department still had two people. One was Dr. Lars Granberg, trained in Chicago by Carl Rogers, the other Mrs. Barbara Wilson who had an MA in child psychology. Before Hope Barb had worked at a school for the blind.

What may surprise you is that I was not at all interested in psychology. I had studied advanced economics in the Netherlands and because I wanted to be an economist I assumed that I could continue taking econ courses at Hope. The primary reason why I came to Hope was that I hadn’t finished my European education and needed an American degree badly. At that time very few Americans knew anything about European education. Therefore, nobody could figure out how to employ me. Perhaps you can understand my first unfavorable reaction to Hope when the faculty introduced me to liberal arts. Nobody could explain what they meant but everybody said that they were necessary. The only things I saw were courses that were of no interest to me and/or I had already taken in Dutch high school.

One such a no-interest course was “Psychology for Every Day Living” taught by Dr. Lars Granberg. I figured all it was worth was a C grade and that is what I got. However, near the very end of the course I got interested because I began to see relationships to economics. Of course, it was too late to bring up my final grade but I did decide to take a second course called “Industrial Psychology.” That time I earned an A and, more importantly, became so excited about psychology that I changed my major. Because I had come to Hope as a junior, my entire senior year was devoted to psychology courses.

Dr. Granberg left Hope to become Dean at Fuller Seminary in California and Dr. Bill Vander Lugt took his place. Interestingly, Bill was a philosopher, not a trained psychologist. But, you know, I simply loved his courses and consider him one of the most important influences in my Hope education. Frequently I would go straight to the library after one of his lectures because I wanted to know more. I definitely put him in the same class of excellent educators as D. Ivan Dykstra.

While in graduate school in Claremont, which is not far from Fuller in Pasadena, my wife and I and the Granbergs became good friends. Bill Vander Lugt and I also kept in touch. I mentioned both the Granbergs and Bill Vander Lugt because several years later Bill invited me to return to Hope as a faculty member and, a year after that, I was the one who suggested that we contact Lars to see if he wanted to come back to Hope to set up a counseling service and teach a few courses.

When I came back to Hope in 1959 I did so as an instructor of psychology and philosophy. The philosophy part is interesting because that was a left over from the days when psychology was considered part of philosophy.

The only other person in the Department was Dr. Robert DeHaan, a Chicago PhD with a specialty in child development. He had studied under Havighurst and written a book on the gifted child. That may explain why he took over as chair of the Education Department a few years later.

My first year back at Hope was really fun. Bob and I got along just fine and we had a great time planning the future. Because all the baby boomers were in high school we knew that Hope’s enrollment had to grow dramatically. We were bound to need more staff and larger facilities. In 1959 Bob and I shared one office on the third floor of Van Raalte Hall which was a big building that burnt down ten years ago. It was located between the Chapel and the Music Building. It housed all the College administration offices and the departments of education, English, speech, political science, history, math, and psychology. Bob had gotten a grant from the US Office of Education which allowed for a part-time secretary who also had a desk in our office. And we were able to buy our very own typewriter. I still remember Paul Fried, chair of the History Department and director of Hope Vienna Summer Program, coming into our office to look at that typewriter. Not only was it brand new but aqua in color. At that time no department owned its own typewriter or employed a secretary. He was visibly envious.

We also began to make curricular changes. Because I helped Bob with the data collection and data analysis of his grant project he had realized the importance of experimental skills. Therefore, when I suggested a course in experimental psychology, he was immediately in favor. In those days experimental psychology was synonymous with learning, perception and motivation. With the exception of social psychology, there wasn’t any meaningful hypothesis-testing type of research going on in the rest of psychology. Subsequently, the books available on psychological research typically reported important research as it was conducted in learning, perception and motivation but had scant mention of how it was done. As a result, I did the course without a textbook and had daily handouts with home-made exercises. The other part of the course came at the end when I asked students to write a research proposal. I told the students that although we couldn’t do a real experiment, at least we could prepare for one. Little did I know that this would be a keeper because it still is part of our current Research Methods course.

As just mentioned, we had neither a laboratory nor any equipment. But we made do with demonstrations and paper-and-pencil type exercises in the classroom.. We acquired some equipment when I had one of the students make wooden mazes and a Lashley Jumping Apparatus in the basement of my home. We also bought some rats that the students kept in the dorm rooms, which was strictly against regulation, of course. I am sure you wouldn’t do something like that.

As you can understand, we were in great need of more office and lab space. We got a real break the following year. We had gotten wind of the fact that President Lubbers had concluded that van Raalte hall was getting too crowded and that somebody had to move out. Subsequently, Bob and I began to look for alternative spaces. So, when one Saturday morning, Lubbers called all the Van Raalte Hall chair people together to carefully explain how it had become necessary for at least one department to volunteer for a different space, Bob immediately offered to be the sacrificial lamb. Bob said later that there were audible sighs of relief from the other chairpersons present!

Our new home was the beautiful, older house at the corner of 12th Street and College Avenue, the very corner of the Peale Science Center. In the community it was known as the McBride home. The College had renamed it Shields Cottage and used it for women’s housing before we moved in. I designed the ground floor for office space and the top floor and basement for lab facilities. Upstairs we had two big rooms that were connected with a one-way mirror (similarly as between Rooms 27 and 28 downstairs in the Peale Science Building) and the downstairs had four experimental rooms, a small lecture area, a workshop and an animal room for rats and pigeons. I also had the College convert the two-stall garage into a classroom. All of it meant that Hope College had its own laboratory at a time when only big universities had such luxury. Michigan State and the U of Michigan were the only institutions with psychology labs in the entire State of Michigan. Both of them were started by perception people, I may add.

When Bob and I did our long-term planning we concluded that, in addition to more teaching staff, we also needed someone in counseling. Students quite often turned to us for counseling but we didn’t really have the time to do so. When Bob asked me if I knew someone who could fit the bill I immediately suggested Lars Granberg. He came, started our counseling service and taught Behavior Disorders. More staff was hired the following years. First came Dr. Les Beach who retired last year. Then Dr. David Myers.

Another new member who didn’t stay long was Dr. John Barlow. He was a very big help in the development of our program. He was another experimental psychologist, like me, in the area of learning. For those of you who know the difference, he was not a reinforcement theorist but an associationist in the Guthry tradition. He and I taught what is now cognitive psychology by having “Perception, Learning and Motivation I and II.” John did PLM I and I did PLM II.

When John Barlow came, I knew that he wouldn’t last very long because he had a reputation of moving around. But I also knew that his professional reputation would help us. He had written a book (not all that common in those days), had been in Thailand as a Fulbright Scholar and had been the recipient of a grant. In other words, he substantially strengthened a more scientific aspect of the curriculum and the Department. To show another way he helped us I need to back up a little.

Just before John came, I became good friends with Dr. Phil Crook, chair of the Biology department. At that time his department and the Chemistry department were located in what is now Lubbers Hall. Biology and Chemistry were also feeling the need for more space and Phil Crook and I decided that, if new space became available, it would be so nice if Bio and Psych shared the same animal facilities under the same roof. In fact, we drew up plans for such a Bio-Psych building. Opportunity came knocking around 1967 when the College made a grant application for a new natural science building. An interesting aspect of the grant’s conditions was that part of the structure had to be used for something other than the natural sciences. Guess which department volunteered!

Needless to say, none of the natural science people, with the exception of Phil Crook, were all that excited about the idea of having psychology in their midst. But that is where John Barlow played an important role. Whenever there were discussions about the grant, like wording and what to include, I sent John. As the science people got to know him and learned more about scientific psychology, they began to respect him and psychology. The new building became the Peale Science Center, enlarged and remodeled in 2003-4.

Unfortunately, John Barlow left before the grant materialized but I was given the exciting task of designing all lab space and the classroom we would use the most. When finished in 1973, the facilities were ideally suited for all the research and lab-type teaching we were doing at that time. Dr. Myers was in the middle of his social psych research, Drs. Reynierse and Motiff were doing experiments with rats, fish, cockroaches and monkeys, and I did my thing in the perception labs. It was a truly exhilarating time that I remember with great fondness.

I see that I am almost out of time so let me quickly mention just a few more items of interest. First, in order to build Peale, Shields Cottage had to be vacated and demolished. So, for a few years during destruction and construction, we assumed temporary quarters in the basement of Van Raalte hall and the main floor and the third floor of Voorhees Hall. The third floor in Voorhees was totally available for experimental use. During that time Drs Motiff and Dickie joined the faculty and between 1975 and 1983 Drs. Shaughnessy, Ludwig and Green came on board. Finally, six years ago Dr. Rohling became a member of the Department and two years ago Dr. Kasimatas joined.

Well, time is up and we want to eat. Let me conclude by saying that I enjoyed being with you and having had the opportunity to talk about your department since I have been here. Let me also express the hope that in the years to come psychology will be a blessing to you and that you will be a blessing to psychology.