Hope Psychology
Tracing the history of the department
Tracing the history of the department
After completing my graduate school work in California, My wife and I moved back to Michigan in 1959 because I accepted a position at Hope College as Instructor of Psychology and Philosophy. The inclusion of philosophy was something left over from 19th century thinking. But then I had known all along that Hope College was behind the times. So, also considering that I received better-paying offers from a California college and a New Mexico college, the logical question is: why did I want to go back to Hope College?
There were at least four reasons. The first one was that, in Miriam’s and my opinion, southern California had become too unstable to raise children. The neighborhood concept didn’t seem to exist anymore. People were moving in and out like nomads. The second thought was that Michigan was closer to the Netherlands, and probably more user friendly for my parents if they decided to visit or live there. The third reason was that I saw the Hope College job like a challenge, almost like a mission. I believed that Hope’s preparations for graduate training had been marginal, to put it mildly. I wanted to prove that Hope could do better and build a state-of-the-art, nationally known liberal arts psychology department. The final reason was Bill Vander Lugt, my former professor and advisor, and now Dean of the College. I knew that I could work with him.
My first year at Hope went well. I enjoyed being a professional and living in a home with mostly new furniture. Bob De Haan, my boss and only other full-time person in the department, and I worked well together. We divided the teaching load according to our interests, and spent quite a bit of time getting to know each other. Occasionally, I helped him with his research grant from the US Office of Education, but I spent most of my extra time eagerly developing Hope’s first-ever experimental psychology course (which is still on the books as Research Methods).
Bob and I also spent quite a bit of time considering the future. We knew from population indices that college enrollments were going to go up. Anticipating the higher enrollments, we needed more full-time staff and space. We very much wanted to get out of our one-room Van Raalte Hall office, that accommodated both our desks, the desk of Bob’s secretary, the desk of Bob’s student assistant, and filing cabinets. We targeted the Mc Bride place (or Shields Cottage, as the College had named it), a beautiful home on the northwest corner of 12th Street and College Avenue. At that time the College had designated it for woman student housing.
One Saturday morning President Lubbers scheduled a meeting for all department heads with departments in Van Raalte Hall. After his customary lengthy introduction, he told the group that Van Raalte was a wonderful building, but getting too small. He strongly suggested that at least one department should volunteer to go elsewhere on campus. After some painfully silent memonts, Bob raised his hand and stated that his department was willing to make such a “sacrifice,” providing he could pick his new place. Lubbers was so relieved that someone said yes to his request, that he immediately granted Bob’s wish. Shields Cottage was ours.
While working on my prelims in California that summer, I drew up complete plans for office spaces, laboratories, an animal room, a workshop and a classroom (the former two-stall garage). I also had a great time making my Experimental Psychology course a truly lab course. With the remodeling of Shields, I really got to know the Vander Meulens, the wonderful craftsmen who also worked on the Peach Belt schoolhouse many years later. For bookcases and other supplies I had a very close relationship with Rine Visscher, the College’s procurement officer.
Upon my suggestion, we asked Lars Granberg, who was Dean at Fuller Seminary in California at that time, to come back to Hope and set up a much-needed counseling service. He agreed. We gave him a wood-paneled office that used to be the Shield’s dining room. Lars was a wonderful teacher, a good counselor and a team player. It was great having him in the building.
During that same period Bob De Haan recruited Bob Brown to collect data for his grant by working with Holland’s elementary schools. Having Lars and Bob Brown on board were the first steps in our faculty expansion program. Bob was a good talker, sociable, and endeared himself by being generous. At that time Bob also worked for the Admissions Office and directed the Counseling Service. To fill out a full work load, he also taught a couple of developmental psychology courses.
The first nine years on the job were exciting and fulfilling. It was great to see the department grow in numbers and strength. We added staff and course offering almost every year. First, Les Beach joined, followed by John Barlow and Dave Myers. By that time Bob DeHaan had gone over to Hope’s Education Department, and I had become the Psychology Department’s chairperson.
Les was hired as a social psychologist. When Dave came, also a social psychologist, Les shifted to personality psychology. I also managed to attract Floyd Westendorp, a psychiatrist, to teach adolescent psychology. There was no other small liberal arts college anywhere in the country that had a psychiatrist on its teaching staff. Later I recruited Roger Steenland, our first bona fide clinical psychologist, from Pine Rest. He took over the Counseling Service and taught the Behavior Disorders class. The only other clinical psychologist we ever hired before Pat Roehling (who came in 1987) was a young woman who stayed at Hope just one year.
I loved building and starting new programs. As such, I already mentioned the move to the remodeled Shields Cottage, the development of laboratory courses, and the start of Hope’s Counseling Service. As we grew in staff and course offerings, it was my aim to always represent the psychology curriculum in the liberal arts tradition. Contrary to some other colleges and universities, I wanted a good mix of developmental, personality, social and the more scientific psychology, rather than an emphasis on one or two areas. As I encouraged everyone to develop his or her area of expertise as far as possible, I also insisted on having a harmonious and unified approach to our curriculum. Part of my strategy was to have everyone teach a section of Introduction to Psychology from the same textbook, and periodically review, as a group, what and how we were doing in our other courses.
Although my personal interests lay in the more scientifically oriented psychology, my earlier training in clinical psychology and its related areas allowed me to understand and respect them. Aside from research-based psychology, my other favorite topic was the history of psychology, going as far back as the early Greek philosophers. I started a course called History and Systems of Psychology. What I liked most about the subject was putting so many apparently separate old and new theories in perspective and meaningful relationships to each other. I wanted students to have “ah-hah” experiences.
Over time, I brought SAT, GRE and Miller Analysis testing to Hope, arranged for a Hope College Psy Chi chapter, started a Psychology Club and experimented with different teaching methods for our introductory psychology course. When B. F. Skinner became a national hotshot, I duplicated his teaching machine manual and tried it for a while in my classes.. Then there were several ways in which I tried the team teaching method. Neither Skinner’s behavioral approach nor any of the team-teaching methods survived. But they created excitement, new insights, and motivation And we were on the cutting edge of our trade.
In the early sixties I launched the Hope College soccer program. At that time chairpersons did not get a reduced work load for being an administrator, let alone a volunteer coach. In addition to a ten-hour workday, including daily soccer practice, I spent several evenings and some Saturdays in my office or was coaching a game somewhere.
In 1965 I became the first director of Hope’s Japan summer program for Meiji Gakuin University students. I had a ball organizing lectures, courses, field trips and home stays. I think that everything worked out because everybody seemed happy. The following year, I also became director of Hope’s lackluster summer school. I still think that my changes in the curriculum, faculty, and advertising were significant improvements over the past. However, I made the mistake of excluding Cal Vander Werf, the president, from the planning and decision-making process. Cal was good for the College, but he was also a control freak. Furthermore, I spent too much money on a rather ambitious entertainment program. For instance, one of the featured artists was Ella Fitzgerald. The following year the summer school and Japan programs were re-assigned to someone else.
Being released from the Japan and summer school programs did not significantly reduce my workload, and I began to feel like I was drowning. I simply had to cut back. That proved very difficult, however. Every time I suggested leaving a committee or some other group, people led me to believe that I couldn’t be missed. They stroked my ego and I believed them. But, I had to do something. So, not being able to drop just one or two things, I decided to cut everything and go somewhere else for a while.
As I gave thought to a leave of absence, my first choice was doing something in the Netherlands. I had done research on the moon illusion phenomenon and found someone at a Dutch research institute who had also. I wrote but never got an answer.
My second choice was a one-year teaching appointment at another college or university somewhere in the US. There were several opportunities, but I was particularly interested in a call from the Dean at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, who wanted me to come for a year or longer. I was just about to accept his offer when John Barlow, my Hope College colleague, told me about a two-year position in Turkey. That opportunity sounded more adventurous. It also provided an opportunity to see my parents as we traveled by way of the Netherlands.
In Turkey I was a visiting professor of psychology at Hacettepe University, Ankara. Although the University selected and employed me, the appointment was made possible by the Ford Foundation. The most unusual aspect of the appointment was the way I received my monthly remuneration. It came in three parts. The first part came from the government, like everybody else in Turkish education. The second payment, in cash, was made by the university’s medical school. Without ever teaching there, I was on its payroll for reasons only known to the administration. The third payment came in the form of checks drawn on the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York! I suspect that the money came from the Ford Foundation grant that was supposed to pay for my total salary. By providing part of my salary in Turkish money, there was some hard -currency grant money left for other needs. Also, by keeping the account in New York, the Turkish government couldn’t touch it.
The person in charge of making my finances work was Mr. Kum, the university librarian. We had numerous meetings about when and how I would be paid until the three ways, as described above, finally fell into place. At first I only received advances. But all advances were actually loans, subject to repayment if, at some point in time, the Turkish government decided to kick me out of the country, as actually happened to a British guest professor.
My primary functions at Hacettepe were to establish a psychology laboratory for a new building, teach a few courses, and help plan a more complete psychology undergraduate curriculum. When the department’s faculty and I presented the president with a carefully-thought-out new curriculum, he unceremoniously nixed it without telling us why or offering alternative ideas.
My plans for the new psychology lab fared better. I submitted drawings and descriptions rather early, but had no clue what happened to them until the building was completed several months later. Surprisingly, my plans had been executed perfectly.
My courses went well. Particularly the graduate students were attentive and inquisitive. Their command of English was remarkable. The exams for the undergraduate students were given by my Turkish colleagues. I provided the questions which they translated into Turkish. My Turkish colleagues also did the correcting and grading. What a deal! I especially enjoyed a graduate seminar in industrial psychology that was part field study. Most of them had never been in a factory or talked to managers, foremen or businessmen.
I also enjoyed getting to know Sirel, one of the graduate students who was my assigned assistant. She very much wanted to be an experimental psychologist. We had several good discussions and I helped her design a neat experiment for the advanced degree. She was charming, bright and the wife of a Turkish senator in charge of facilitating the transfer of Turkish workers to Western Europe.
All my colleagues were very dedicated people. They worked co-operatively and, whenever they had a birthday or celebrated some other special event at someone’s home, Miriam and I were invited. They sang and danced and had a wonderful time. So did we. I especially admired Husnu Arici. He was born in a village where he grew up barefoot. Some astute teachers recognized his intelligence and moved him along. Subsequently, he made it through high school, a Turkish college and Northwestern University on a Fulbright scholarship. I always considered him Turkish secretary-of-education material, but he was not interested in politics. Because none of our university’s classrooms had blackboards, Husnu bought a tiny 12x16” chalkboard - the only size available - on the black market to teach statistics!
When we came to Turkey, we did so with the expectation to stay for two years. However, near the end of the first year I felt that I had done as much as I could for Hacettepe. A second year would be like marking time. As a new university, Hacettepe’s library had only two years of professional journals, and the new laboratory was void of equipment and a budget. So, rather than going back to Hope, Miriam and I decided to spend our second year abroad in the Netherlands.
My appointment to the Instituut voor Zintuigfysiolgy, or Institute for Perception, in Soesterberg was such a contrast from my work in Turkey. I didn’t have to teach but just be a researcher. Half my time was practical research requested by the Dutch government or a state-owned industry, the other half was up to me. My colleagues were the brightest and the best in Europe and the administrative and technical staff was ingenious and super efficient. Very supportive to the life of the institute were the electronic, woodworking, and metal shops with superb craftsmen that designed and produced anything you needed from scratch. Other wonderful features about the institute were the library and its full-time librarian, a full-time photographer, a draftsman/artist, and a statistician. Assigned to just me was the institute’s most experienced assistant. Although he was a master technician rather than a psychologist, he often offered good suggestions for constructing what I needed, based on his profound understanding of psychology. After delivering or installing the new equipment, he’d typically wait a week before asking if it lived up to my expectations. It always worked just fine. However, I often had afterthoughts. I’d tell him that it worked great but, if I had thought about it earlier, I would have asked him to include such and such. He’d smile and say: “I thought so.“ By throwing a switch or quickly moving two parts around, he gave me exactly what I should have asked for in the first place.
I worked on two assigned projects and an experiment of my own choosing. The first assigned project was redesigning the national air traffic controllers course. Recruiters usually picked from only the top 10% of prep-school graduates. Because only 5% successfully completed the training, someone had figured out that there had to be something wrong with the course. That’s where William Albert, my colleague, and I came in. After extensive study, the course underwent a drastic overhaul. In doing so I learned to be an air traffic controller myself. We set up a mock control situation in one of our laboratories and used experienced controllers to test our changes. It was a neat and successful project.
The second assigned project came from the NATO Air Force. It had been noted that sometimes fighter planes crash without evidence of mechanical or human failure. Why? After lengthy interviews with pilots and aeronautical experts, I advanced the hypothesis that the accidents were due to unwanted reactions to the Coriolus effect, originating in the vestibular (balance) system. When banking a plane to the left or right at high speed and turning the head in the opposite direction, the pilot experiences a very strong tumbling effect. The tendency is to quickly move the joy stick counter to the tumbling experience. Most pilots know better than to do so and ignore the phenomenon when in full mental control. But when the head-turning movement is caused by a moment of uncertainty about the whereabouts of a nearby wingman, the brief moment of doubt or lack of concentration could result in unnecessarily moving the stick sideways. When flying at low altitude at very high speed, left or right movement of the stick, however brief, could be sufficient to wind up in the mud.
The hypothesis was accepted and I set up a training program in the next-door Institute for Space Travel. I used their gondola-attached centrifuge to make pilots more aware of the Coriolis effect by pacing them through a series of flight-related maneuvers, including “look to your right (or left).” Instrumentation monitored their responses, especially those with the joy stick.
On my own time I did a very extensive experiment on the Moon Illusion in a huge, windowless room in the above-mentioned Institute for Space Travel. The results were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
I really enjoyed my time at the Institute. Without question, it was the best professional experience I ever had. It was so gratifying to work with top people, have all the resources I wanted or needed, and seeing outcomes being used in very practical situations. When the Institute asked me to stay, I was very flattered. It was time to go home, however. Miriam was looking forward to being back in Michigan and Lyn needed to start Middle School. Whereas elementary education is pretty much the same all over the world, this is not necessarily so for the following grade levels. Because there was no thought of making the Netherlands our permanent home - even if we did stay a few more years - it was best that Lyn started the post-elementary level in the US.
When I returned to Hope’s campus, I was no longer chair of the department or on any committees. Les Beach was the first department’s chairperson to serve on a new three-year rotation basis. It was a freeing experience, but also one that left me out of positions that bring about change. Also, two other members of the department, Jim Mottiff and Jim Reynierse, had been hired during my absence. I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me. Therefore, there were few opportunities to function in a leadership position or bring about changes.
However, I was happy to coordinate the Research Methods course with both Jims and myself. This allowed me to make sure that all sections were taught approximately the same way. Since I was a proponent of and advocate for team teaching our Introduction to Psychology course, I became the course coordinator.
About five months before returning to the US, the Donnelley Mirrors Corporation, a Holland, Michigan, company that manufactured mirrors for most American and many European cars, offered me the human factors position in their Research and Development department. I declined this tempting offer, but I expressed interest in being a consultant or doing an occasional research project. I worked well with the Donnelley people and had the satisfaction of doing several experimental studies spread over several years. The work kept me involved in practical research and provided opportunities for Hope students to work with me as assistants or subjects. Invariably, the projects had to do with human responses to different types of car mirrors.
When I started teaching at Hope in the late 50s, the department, like every other college in the country, had a course called Child Psychology. Later psychologists and educators noticed the unique behavior of adolescents and added Adolescent Psychology to the curriculum. Still later we included people in their more mature years and realized that psychological development is a continuous process. Thusly, we lumped all age groupings together and called the new approach Developmental Psychology. Finally, we also realized that older people were part of a life span approach to development. To discover how this could be done best, I organized some grant-supported workshops on aging for community services and academics. With that experience, I developed Hope’s first course, a seminar, on aging. When Tom Ludwig, a developmental psychologist with aging as a specialty, joined the department, the seminar topic became fully integrated in the already existing Developmental Psychology course.
When the department was scheduled to move into the new Peale Science building and architects came to talk with us, I was asked to design the desired psychology laboratories and a classroom specifically for our use. I really enjoyed that job. When we moved in, we really had a state-of-the-art teaching and research environment. It was nationally noted. When psychology departments of other institutions asked the American Psychological Association for advice on how to develop or increase laboratory space, the Association told them to talk to the people at Hope College.
Two years after my return to Hope, I took a sabbatical leave to study the dimensions of environmental psychology, a new field. I had become interested in environmental issues and wondered how I could address them as an experimental psychologist. I decided rather quickly that the natural environment could best be served by leaving it alone, and that specialists in social psychology could be helpful in that respect. I also decided that, with my background in perception, my best bet was to see if anything better could be done with the human-made environment. Or, how can we construct a human environment that best serves our needs without being intrusive, obstructive, demeaning, frustrating or dangerous? I was familiar with ergonomics, the application of psychological principles to human-made objects like tables, telephones, cockpits of airplanes, etc; and saw my new direction as an extension of ergonomics. Instead of studying only the just-mentioned man-made objects, I wanted to include larger structures like homes, apartment buildings, college dormitories, hospitals, libraries, malls, airports, and neighborhoods.
There were four different but related outcomes of my sabbatical. The first one was a team-taught course on the functions and structure of a city, the most ubiquitous human-made environment. Four of my colleagues from different disciplines and I volunteered to lecture on historical, economic, political, sociological and psychological aspects of the city. What makes a city and what makes it work? We had a summer stipend to prepare, which made for a good course. Students liked it, but the administration did not commit to a continuation.
Secondly, I also designed and began to teach a course called Environmental Psychology -which I also taught as a University of Michigan extension course. Thirdly, I developed a May-term in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France and England. While in Europe, a small group of students and I looked at cities of various size and age and discussed what seemed to make some cities more or less desirable from psychological perspectives. We tried to determine how well every city’s structure, design, and services seemed to satisfy human needs. In addition to psychological principles, we talked about historical, political and economic aspects of what they observed or remembered from other courses. The course was my most favorite teaching experience.
Fourthly, I undertook research on the human-made environment, specifically high-rise buildings. It had already become known that quite a few US as well as European high rises were totally inadequate from human-need perspectives. I knew that the high-rise concept was here to stay , but there had to be ways to design them better if we kept human needs and behavior in mind. My question, how can we do that?
I had a good time with the research and the interesting people I met. But after a while all my new efforts petered out. I quit offering the May-term, because it became too much work, and was too much time away from home. The research didn’t get very far because it did not seem sufficiently relevant or important to architects, city planners and developers. Another thought is that they didn’t want anything to do with psychologists. Perhaps the research would have fared better if I had been in a metropolitan area and positioned at a large, and well-known, university. Another handicap was that environmental psychology, as a specialty, became absorbed by social psychologists who were mostly interested in how urban environments affect human interactions. My question was how, and to what extent, do certain human-made aspects of the environment facilitate or obstruct human needs.
My final sabbatical leave in 1989-90 was in Vellore, an Indian city west of Madras, where I taught at Voorhees College. Because the college had no psychology department, I taught some variations of industrial and organizational psychology for the Commerce Department. The teaching schedule was light. I don’t know what I accomplished because I never gave a test and wasn’t always sure that I was getting through to them. But they were very sweet students and seemed to appreciate that Mickie and I had come all the way from wonderful America to spend time with them.
The president of Voorhees also asked me to talk to junior faculty about the art of teaching, and he invited me to do the commencement address for that year’s graduating seniors. On my own I tried to get some insights into the way Indian culture, especially Indian religion, influenced people’s behavior. The overriding finding was that Indian family structure and family rules of behavior were the most influential factors. It was evident in child rearing practices as well as career and marital choices, and leadership appointments. The caste system, although officially outlawed, is another behavioral determinant, even among the Christians.
The only new thing I started upon my return from India was a psychologically-slanted Senior Seminar on values. We read and talked about cultural differences in values (including Indian ones), how they may change over time, how they can account for different behavior patterns, and how often they are need-related. For instance, what were the dominant values and needs in the American Revolution as compared with those in the Russian (Bolshevik) Revolution?
I liked my turn as president of Hope’s Sigma Xi chapter. Quite a few of my colleagues in the natural sciences and the psychology department were members. My primary contribution was starting a student research poster session at the end of the school year. The way the students’ papers were prepared and presented was, and still is, very similar to poster sessions at professional meetings.
A year after my retirement, Tom Ludwig had to be out of town for a day and asked me to teach three consecutive sections of Introduction to Psychology. That was the very last time I stood in front of Hope College students.