Jim Pabarue (Class of 1972) interviewed by Bethany Ho (Class of 2023)

0:00:03.7 Bethany Ho: It's Wednesday, April 28th, 2021. This is Bethany Ho, Class of 2023, conducting an interview as part of the Documenting Student Life Alumni Oral History Project. What's your name, class year, and major? 

0:00:20.5 James Pabarue: My name is James Pabarue. I was Class of 1972, and I was an English major.

0:00:28.1 Bethany Ho: Where did you grow up? 

0:00:30.7 James Pabarue: I grew up... Well, I lived in Erie, Pennsylvania, till I was 12, and then I went away to boarding school in Massachusetts. And came to Haverford when I was 17.

0:00:42.6 Bethany Ho: Why did you apply to Haverford? 

0:00:45.4 James Pabarue: Several reasons, I wanted to go to a... the boarding school I went to was a small men's boarding school. I wanted to go to a small men's college. My father, who was a doctor in Erie, happened to have three colleagues who all had been... All doctors who had gone to Haverford. One of the sons of those doctors, who was a very good friend of mine, had gone to Haverford the year before. So I was very interested in doing that. I looked at other colleges, I looked at Wesleyan, I looked at a number of other places, Trinity, and I did the obligatory application to Harvard, but Haverford is what my first choice was.

0:01:33.1 Bethany Ho: So were you thinking about how you would come out from Haverford after you finished your schooling there? 

0:01:43.8 James Pabarue: No. 'Cause it was 1968, and we didn't know if we were gonna go to Vietnam, or get drafted, or what the world was going to be like. It was a pretty tumultuous time. And then the year I graduated from high school, the spring of that year, I... Martin Luther King got killed in April, Bobby Kennedy got killed in June. They had the Chicago Democratic Convention, where the police rioted and beat everybody up. Then I got to Haverford in September and Richard Nixon got elected in November, and that was all within seven months. So it was pretty crazy.

0:02:19.8 Bethany Ho: Yeah, so did people talk about those events while you were on campus then? And were there any other effects that you could have felt from those events, or not so much? 

0:02:28.7 James Pabarue: Oh, yeah. That was very big. Haverford was a real hotbed of activity, anti-war movement, we participated... I participated in marches up to Bryn Mawr to draft... to the library, where people burned their draft cards. We took over Houston Hall at Penn, University of Pennsylvania, in support of the students’ action to keep Penn from expanding into the Black neighborhood around Penn for their University Science Center, University City Science Center. So there was a lot of activism going on.

0:03:09.6 Bethany Ho: So about your time at Haverford, were you involved in any student organizations? 

0:03:14.5 James Pabarue: I was not involved in any student organizations. I had the hot rock and roll band on campus, so that was what I spent a lot of my time doing, practicing and playing and doing that, and my senior year... My junior year, I ran for student council president, but I lost.

0:03:40.3 Bethany Ho: So about act... So about your time being an activist, was there an... How do you hear about being involved and just decided to do those things, did they... Because I was wondering if there were like... If you heard about it on campus or if you heard about... If you heard about the document leak? These things are happening outside of campus.

0:04:07.2 James Pabarue: Most of 'em, I heard on campus. First of all, you have to remember the campus was much smaller back then. We only had 750 men. We were very close to Bryn Mawr, we had a lot of cross-pollination there in term... My wife is a Bryn Mawr grad, a lot of cross-pollination there. So the word about what was going on and the actions that were being taken spread pretty quickly, either through the Haverford-Bryn Mawr news, or by word of mouth, or that kind of thing.

0:04:43.9 Bethany Ho: Okay. So where did you find your sense of community? 

0:04:50.8 James Pabarue: Well, I went... First of all, being a person of color and who grew up in the... I was born in 1951. Although I was living in the North, my grandmother had the only hotel that Blacks could stay in, in the 1940s, '50s and '60s in Charlottesville, Virginia. And I spent a fair amount of my time in the summers down in Charlottesville. And obviously there was a... You had to be a community down there if you're a person of color, and so you learned the sense of community from the people and the other merchants and people... My grandmother was a business woman. And so there was a sense of community and... You there? 

0:05:41.4 Bethany Ho: Yes, I'm here.

0:05:42.5 James Pabarue: Okay.

0:05:42.9 Bethany Ho: My camera just doesn't work sometimes.

0:05:45.5 James Pabarue: That's alright. Yeah, that's alright... And we... So I think that was the first place I developed a sense of community. I developed a sense of community obviously from church, my father was very active in our church, and I participated in choir and that kind of thing, so you learn community through there. Obviously, my boarding school was only 240 men when I went in 1963. There was a very close sense of community there. And then when I got to Haverford, we still had mandatory Fifth Day meeting where I learned more about Quakerism and how Quakers operate. And that was probably where I had my first real experience with an openly expressed sense of community as a sense of community.

0:06:44.9 Bethany Ho: Do you mind if I ask what the mandatory Fifth Day meetings were and what you had to do during them? 

0:06:51.4 James Pabarue: Well, do you know what Fifth Day meeting is? 

0:06:54.2 Bethany Ho: No.

0:06:55.2 James Pabarue: Okay, Quakers have two services during the week. One is on Thursdays, which is Fifth Day meeting, and then they have... On Sunday, they have their Sunday meetings. Have you ever been to a Quaker meeting? 

0:07:12.1 Bethany Ho: There was the one that we had to go to during freshman year where we basically talked about stuff as... I guess during customs, but not much else other than that.

0:07:25.7 James Pabarue: There was a much stronger Quaker influence at Haverford in 1968 when I came. Of course, with the anti-war movement, the Quakers were very much pacifists and anti-war. And so the Fifth Day meeting is just like a meeting. You'd go there and the students would have... There would be a period of silence. And we'd have elders who were professors who were Quakers who would guide the meeting. And for an hour, we'd sit there and people would get up and talk. We had a lot of social issues to talk about at the time and... But a lot of time for reflection and time to develop that sense of community. I think it was easier to do so when we could all fit in one room, and we could sit there and talk about the issues in a Quakerly fashion, rather than sort of getting angry at each other and yelling at each other or accusing each other, things like that. So that's what Fifth Day meetings were, and we had to go there every Thursday morning and attend the meeting.

0:08:41.4 Bethany Ho: So were the focus with these meetings on social issues, more driven towards the issues on campus or were they more driven towards outer world issues? 

0:08:51.3 James Pabarue: At the time, I think they were really driven towards outer world issues than they were on campus issues. The issues on campus were not really sort of in your face until our junior and senior year. You have to understand that my class was the first class that had any significant number of people of color in the class. The class before me, I think they had two African-American students, and maybe one Asian student or two Asian students. The year I came we had, out of 170 men in our class, we had 17 African-American students and five or six Asian students, also a Latino student or two. So this was the first time that all white male, upper middle class, white Haverford had exposure to people who were not like them. Even though many of us went to prep-school backgrounds, we still did not have that same sense of privilege, etcetera, that the white students did, and that all came to a head in 1972.

0:10:15.6 Bethany Ho: So would you mind discussing, I guess, some of the things that kinda led up to 1972? And I guess that there is this running background of tension among the people of color on campus? 

0:10:32.0 James Pabarue: I think that there wasn't, at first, a running battle of tension, when I... I certainly didn’t notice it. But as the... Over the years, as the classes were admitted and more and more students of color were admitted... And I'm talking about everybody... Also there were class differences. There were students like me who were... My dad was a doctor and I went to boarding school, but then there were people who were from very, very different backgrounds, not as economically successful and also not the kind of education among the parents... Sorry, I have a little cold…that others of us had. But as the numbers grew, I think... And also the other thing that happened was, there began to be a great deal of attrition, excuse me, among the Black students especially. When I started, as I said, there were 17 African-American students who entered with my class. When I graduated in 1972, only five of us were there.

0:12:01.7 James Pabarue: There were very... For sundry reasons, people dropped out because it was the '60s and they wanted to try other things, but also I think there was a feeling that the Black students... Many of the Black students weren't really equipped to deal with what Haverford required in terms of academic prowess. I think that there was certainly no organization or no part of a college that was there to provide assistance to those students who had this lack of background in terms of academics and that sort of thing. For somebody like me who had gone to school with... Private school all my life, mostly with white kids and dealt with that... In fact, my elementary school, I was the only person of color until my sister came. We were pretty able to navigate through the white majority system, but there were a lot of others who weren't able to.

0:13:21.5 James Pabarue: So I think the... There wasn't so much hostility among the students. But it was just this clear feeling that the Black students weren't being given an opportunity, the ones who needed the remedial help weren't being given the opportunity. Now, you can argue back and forth, saying, "Well, they shouldn't have been given because they should have been prepared when they came." But given the historical nature of the substandard education that many Blacks who did not go to private school, back in that time, had, it was not surprising that they were not as well equipped as somebody who'd gone to Groton like I had. So I think there was a feeling like, it's really not fair to admit these students, to give them this chance, and then not help support them.

[pause]

0:14:34.6 Bethany Ho: So I was wondering if there were any BIPOC professors on faculty at the time... BIPOC, being Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and if there were, if there were efforts that they made to effect the social atmosphere on campus? 

0:14:49.9 James Pabarue: When I came, there was one African American professor. I don't think there were any Latino or Asian professors at the time. I think that there had been, and in fact, I'm working with some alums from even before my time, on maybe getting a documentary together about Ira Reid, you've heard of Ira Reid. Ira Reid was the first Black professor at Haverford, who came in 1947 or so, '48. Well-known American sociologist, became the head of the sociology department. And he was a force that influenced a lot of the Black students who were there before I came. He retired in '68. No, sorry, he retired in '66 and he died in '68. So I never had an opportunity to meet him. The one professor that was there, I'm sure he was very good. I never... I don't know what... he may have been in economics. I never took a course from him. But he was not very involved in the... In actions in social activities, social justice activities.

0:16:15.3 Bethany Ho: So I'm a little curious about the professors that were... That would have directly been, I guess, more involved with the social activities on campus and...

0:16:24.5 James Pabarue: There were some and they were all white, tended to be younger. My advisor, Jim Ransom, who was in the English department, was one of those people, Aryeh Kosman, who was in the philosophy department, Sarah Shumer, who was also a science professor. There were a number of them who were in fact... The guy who... I can't remember his name right now, he was involved in the break-in of the Media FBI office years ago. You may have read... Have you read about that? I don't know if you've heard about that.

0:17:02.1 Bethany Ho: No, I haven't. [chuckle]

0:17:04.2 James Pabarue: There is a professor who was involved with a group of people who broke into the Media FBI office, and they chose the night of a heavyweight fight between Muhammad Ali and somebody else because they figured the guards would be distracted. And they broke into... This was a great story, you're going to want to read it. They broke into the FBI office and they got away with it, they never got caught. And they found out that the FBI was doing all sorts of illegal surveillance, etcetera, etcetera.

0:17:45.0 Bethany Ho: Okay, so during your time at Haverford, were there any BIPOC students involved in Student Council and Honor Council? And I was wondering what kind of focus did both councils have at that time? 

0:17:58.4 James Pabarue: Yeah, I'm not aware of any BIPOC students who were involved in the student government or any of that. It just didn't... First of all, there were few of us, so in terms of affinity voting, there was not going to be much of that. I was the first non-white student to run for Student Council president, at least, to my knowledge, when I was there, but I had a pretty... I had a broader constituency because not only did I have Black students who were on my side, but because I was the lead singer in the rock and roll band and knew all the... All the hippie freaks there. I got them, I managed to motivate them to go out and vote for me. [laughter] So that was... Yeah, but before that, there weren't many and you asked about the role of the Honor Council and what else? 

0:19:00.6 Bethany Ho: Student Council at the time, like what kind of issues they focused on.

0:19:05.0 James Pabarue: They went and did their thing, 'cause most of the things they dealt with at the time were academic misconduct, or like cheating, that type of thing. We didn't have women on campus as students. We had women on campus from Bryn Mawr as girlfriends, etcetera, etcetera. But at that time, it was the dark age as far as understanding the horrible male dominance that took place and the discrimination against women and the treatment of women. And it's long, long before me too, and all of that stuff. So I'm sure that there were plenty of incidents that could have gone to the Honor Council that just were never raised because people just didn't think about doing that back then.

[pause]

0:20:23.5 Bethany Ho: I guess, I think I might probably turn my focus to just talking about the protest in 1972, I guess. I can just...

0:20:33.7 James Pabarue: The what of 1972? 

0:20:34.9 Bethany Ho: The protest and the boycott that happened during 1972.

0:20:38.9 James Pabarue: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was sort of on the periphery of it. Although, the people who really were behind the organizing of it, were very good friends of mine. I sort of had my own group of freaks that was an interracial group. We had Black and white, and again, we had very few Asian students on, and we certainly didn't have any people of indigenous background at the College. So I had this little group of... Basically, we were the hippies and all. Sex, drugs and rock and roll freaks, right? But we weren't that politically involved, and they came to... The people who were organizing, my friends, came to me and my friends and said, "We're doing this, will you join us with... Join in with us." And we said, "Of course." And so we got involved. The strike was... Or the... Yeah, it's strike. It was a strike. I'm thinking like it's... I was involved in talking to the students and during the last strike last year and helping them figure their way out. I don't know if you've seen the piece that we did for the Haverford... I guess it was... We did it through MAAG. You know what MAAG is? MAAG is the Multicultural Alumni Action Group that is for all people of... All BIPOC people who want to join, alumni. We organized just before the strike in September of... I guess that was 2019, '19 or '20. When was the strike, '21? 

0:22:25.1 Bethany Ho: '20.

0:22:25.2 James Pabarue: The strike was '20. The strike... Before that, we put together a program talking about the issues that led to the 1972 strike, complete with all the documents and newspaper clippings and things like that. And we held that back in September. I think it's an... It will be an interesting thing for you, for people who are doing work on this project to look at, 'cause the guys who were really intimately involved, were... Talked about the strategies they used. I know that one of the things that I did was when the strike was announced at plenary, it was announced by a friend of mine, and myself and another African-American student were flanking him on the stage. And when he finished his declaration, all these students came up, started pressing him to see what... To talk to him and ask some questions. And we were sort of the body guards and just pushed our way through and got him out of there. But it was a very interesting thing because what the strikers... What the protesters at that time did, is they tried to use as much as possible, the lessons they had learned from their professors. The method of thinking, the analysis and everything, 'cause they were all... We were all seniors and juniors, and we've been educated in this fashion, and we made sure that we had very tight intellectual arguments in terms of what our complaints were based on.

0:24:18.4 Bethany Ho: So there's probably a lot of discussions going around surrounding... How to react to the fac... To the faculty and also just how to bring to attention this issues on camp... On campus. So I was wondering what these discussions would have probably been like, unless they're more within certain student groups and not necessarily color... I don't know.

0:24:44.8 James Pabarue: Oh, it did involve the whole campus. It involved the whole campus. And there were students who... White students who just absolutely objected to us doing this. I don't think there were any people of color who were outspoken against it. The faculty was divided. There were certain faculty members that declared themselves completely on the side of the protesters, of the protesters. And then there were other faculty who were just absolutely abhorred by the fact that, here, Haverford had given the opportunity to these people, and they were turning around and saying, "Hey, not good enough." And it was interesting also, because it was the first time that this group of white liberal Quakers had ever been confronted with their own racism. They'd always thought of themselves as being very liberal, and open, and even-handed and everything. And for them to find out that no, there was a lot of... There were a lot of problems, that was a shock to a lot of people.

0:26:13.8 Bethany Ho: So I was wondering if there was any reaction towards the censors of protest? 

0:26:17.5 James Pabarue: If there were any reactions to the what? 

0:26:20.7 Bethany Ho: So like on the basis of you saying that there was white people that disagreed with you...

0:26:27.2 James Pabarue: Yeah, yeah.

0:26:27.5 Bethany Ho: I was wondering if people, during the strike, reacted against it.

[overlapping conversation]

0:26:32.9 James Pabarue: Yeah, and there were articles written, I think, in the Bryn Mawr... Haverford and Bryn Mawr College News. I remember one in particular that we used in our presentation in September. Obviously, you're talking almost 50 years ago. So there are not a lot of records. I think there may have probably... I'm sure there were discussions that were never memorialized with people on both sides. But I think there also was probably a little bit of trepidation on the part of the non-protesting Haverford students to take this on because what did that say about them? I think that the atmosphere of this recent strike is different only because the country in terms of its attitudes toward liberalism was very different. We had... Back then we had Nixon, and yeah, but we had a big, liberal contingent, and it... But we didn't have Trump. Trumpism led to something completely different, and it emboldened people to come out and speak their minds about how they felt if they opposed the advancement of BIPOC students. They were emboldened.

0:28:15.2 Bethany Ho: So for people that were protesting, what were the... What were the most... I guess, biggest focuses on during discussions about how to push forward? 

0:28:30.0 James Pabarue: Yeah, the demands... Well, there was a list of demands that were made, including an office to provide assistance to the BIPOC students. There were other... I can't remember all of the demands that were made. But there was an actual document that was created, that was signed by the College, agreeing to take certain steps similar to what Wendy Raymond has done, this time getting... We didn't go, we didn't have anything called the chief diversity officer back then. What was diversity? But there were a list of demands and which the College eventually acceded to and said that they were going to meet.

0:29:22.8 James Pabarue: One of the reasons we formed MAAG is because it's very easy in an institution like Haverford or any college or university, the students are transients and the faculty and the institution remains the same. So every time you have... Every four years you have a turnover of students. And you don't have that history handed down to the students necessarily... sorry…to the students necessarily of the history and what had gone on, what agreements have been made. So one of the things we did by starting MAAG in 2015, was to allow, have alumni present to advise current students, in terms of what's been going on and provide a continuum of knowledge of what had happened in the past, what had worked in the past, what hadn't worked in the past and that type of thing.

0:30:33.2 Bethany Ho: So what did discussions with the faculty look like during the protest? 

0:30:38.7 James Pabarue: Well, there are all sorts of discussions that took place. There were faculty discussions among themselves. And I heard from some of the faculty involved that they became very heated, very loud arguments and people just declaring, teachers, professors declaring themselves, "We are with the protesters." The meetings with Jack Coleman, who was the current president then, were certainly, I'm sure, contentious. I know when I confronted Jack at a meeting one time, he looked at me and he said, "Jim, all I want you to do is trust me." And I said, "Jack, all I want you to do is do something because you can tell me to trust you but until you do something to further the goals that we have, that, trusting you doesn't do anything." So there... It was intense, and I don't remember a lot of shouting and yelling and screaming in the meetings with the faculty, between students and faculty. I think there was much more, greater dynamic as... Dynamic and conflict in the faculty meetings themselves.

0:32:07.8 Bethany Ho: If you don't mind discussing more about your feelings about trust during the protest.

0:32:14.0 James Pabarue: Well, it's a matter of, people will ask you to trust them, that they're going to do the right thing, and that they know what the right thing is. First of all, there's a question as to if they really know the right thing, or are they or do they not know what the right thing is, or that they're going to actually follow through on what they say. You can promise me anything today, but in two years when these programs are supposed to come into existence or be in existence, who's funding, whatever happens, and that type of thing, it changes. A lot of the reaction of the... Of a lot... I won't say a lot. Some of the reaction of faculty members was that it was a mistake to let BIPOC people in. "It was a mistake. This was just a failed experiment to let these people who were not... Did not have the same background and were not as capable of academic success and fitting in."

0:33:25.8 James Pabarue: That maybe the whole thing did, was to scrap the whole program. I once talked to a history professor who's still around on campus. He lives on College Lane, and he's been involved in many conferences on diversity at Haverford. And I said to Roger at one of these conferences during Alumni Weekend that I was chairing... I was hosting, and we had a panel. I said to Roger, I said, "Roger," I said, "Let me ask you a question. What was your plan when you admitted all of these students of color to Haverford in 1968?" He said, "Well, the plan was that you guys would come in and you'd get education, just like all the white students would get educations, and then you'd go out and you'd get jobs, just like all the white students who graduated from Haverford. And that you would be just like the white students, except you'd be people of color."

0:34:28.3 James Pabarue: And I said, "So there was no plan." I mean, it was just like, "Oh yeah, throw these people in here from different backgrounds, with a lot of tension around racial and ethnic divisions. And it's all just gonna work out." Right. Not easy. It's like admitting women to the College and not really doing anything to address the difference between women and men. That's... I would hope that when they... I wasn't really active at Haverford in the late '80s or early '90s when co-education happened but I know some of the women who came in the first classes and it was difficult for them. So that's what I'm talking about, about trust. They think... A bunch of white guys think they know what's going to be good for the women. Well, they don't always know. And can you trust them? 

0:35:39.7 Bethany Ho: I feel like I should have asked this earlier, but what was the perception of, I guess, the... The power of the student body versus the power of the administration? 

0:35:50.9 James Pabarue: There was certainly an imbalance of power. When I came, the faculty and the administration had the power to let you stay, to get rid of you, to do anything they wanted to, fail you.

0:36:09.3 James Pabarue: You had very little power at all. And I think that the strike of '72, protest of '72 was a way of saying, "No, we do have power." There actually had been a earlier action not involving race, but involving Nixon's bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam war. And in that situation, the students in the College, this was the first time they ever recognized this, that...they recognized that if we all banded together and refused to take exams because Nixon bombed Cambodia, they couldn't kick us all out. What would they do? If they kicked us all out, they would have no students. Maybe a freshmen class, but what are they gonna do as far as juniors and seniors and sophomores groups are concerned? 

0:37:13.3 James Pabarue: So that dawning made us all more aware of the power we had. So I thought Haverford handled it in a very imaginative way though when we said, "We are refusing to take exams because Nixon bombed Cambodia, and we are against this war, and it's immoral." And the College said, I'm sure not unanimously, but said, "Well, guess what, if that's what you're gonna do, then we are going to hire buses, and we are going to take all of the students down to Washington. And we are going to have all the students go to their Congressman and their Senators, and go to their offices and ask for meetings and put forth their objections," which I thought was a very smart way of handling it. It gave us an opportunity to do something. It was part of... Some people might say, I've read some statements of parents of students in the last strike that were complaining that their children were missing two weeks of classes. But I think there was a feeling that this was just as valuable, this experience was just as valuable as having two weeks of classes or exams.

[pause]

0:39:00.0 Bethany Ho: I think the one other question that I wanted to ask was, I guess if you had the... If you had seen any changes on... If you felt like there was change on campus right after the strike, or did those changes come after you graduated? 

0:39:15.4 James Pabarue: Well, the strike happened... The protest happened in my senior years, spring of my senior year. I graduated and really wasn't involved at Haverford for several years. I took three years off and played rock and roll, tried to make it into the business, the business of bands, clubs and stuff like that, and then ended up going to Penn Law School when I realized I probably could make a better living at age 50, being a lawyer than a rock and roll musician, unless I made it to be a big star. And it was only until the '70s, maybe it was the '80s, maybe... No, no, no. First, it was first the '80s that I got involved. Somebody who is the head of the Alumni Executive Association... Executive Committee, they asked me to come in and talk to them and to be involved in this effort. And I was just like, it was just... To me, it was the same bullshit as we had before, and I just was like, "This is the same BS, I can't deal with this." And then in 2004, I was asked to give more money than I'd given before to a new diversity effort, and I said, "Well, if you're going to ask me to give this money, I wanna see what you're doing so far. Right. What are you doing that is any different?" So they told me about it, and I asked, "Well, what could I do to get involved?" And so I ended up mentoring students in the slums of Africa, who were in the Class of 2004, and we had a good time of that during that period of time, and that's when I started getting really involved.

0:41:18.6 James Pabarue: And one of the things that the people who are involved in MAAG from my generation feel, is that, in some ways, things haven't changed. They're the same issues being raised that were being raised 50 years ago, and that... We should have made more progress there. I mean obviously there is some progress, although I don't know how many more. Until then, I don't know how many more faculty of color there were. There are now more, but that's been after a long time of putting pressure on the administration to hire more faculty and administrators of color. As of three years ago, before Joyce Bylander and... Who's the other one that came? I can't remember the other dean that came. There were... For a while in the mid-2000s, there were no administrators of color, maybe four years ago, there were no... Not one senior administrator of color at the College, and that's just not acceptable. They did better on... In terms of faculty, but I don't know how many tenured faculty there are who are BIPOC, and I think that's still a problem.

0:42:48.7 James Pabarue: We always heard the excuse that, "Well, you know, we get these people, and then Harvard and Yale and Princeton lure them away," but we just haven't bought that as a group of alumni yet, that... Or we'd hear, "We can't find the administrators of color to come in and do that." And then our response to that was, "Well, then you should train those people, some people of color, to become those administrators. That's the way you do it, because there is an advantage to having to split points of view. It'd be like having all men running the College. What would the women feel if they had all men making all the decisions?" And until we had Wendy, we hadn't had a female president. We had an interim female President, but she was a placeholder, and by that time, years before, Swarthmore had had a Black woman president. So we're just looking at Haverford going, "What are you doing?"

0:44:07.3 Bethany Ho: So I kind of wanna circle back a little bit back, to the time of the strike, and I was wondering if there was any comparison made between Haverford and Swarthmore, because I've read a little bit about Swarthmore having, I guess, more high acceptance rates for Blacks. And if there's any comparison made between the two colleges.

0:44:26.4 James Pabarue: I don't think there was... There wasn't much comparison made. The Haverford strike in '72 was definitely a Haverford strike, Bryn Mawr also, because we were just so close to Bryn Mawr, and so the Bryn Mawr women at Bryn Mawr, the sisterhood there, had their own action and coordinated with us, but Swarthmore was really not involved in that at all. Now, we happen to have a provost at Swarthmore, who is a Haverford woman graduate of color, Sarah Willie-LeBreton. Well, how come we don't have that at Haverford? Now we do, I think, at least maybe the interim, but there were things like that we'd look at, and Swarthmore always seemed to be a little bit ahead of us on that. First of all, they had women from the beginning, and so in terms of male-female situation, they were far ahead of us. It wasn't the all-boys club that Haverford did then. And that might have had an impact on the earlier changes and increased diversity, because you have women who are in positions of authority, as opposed to all white males.

0:46:01.9 Bethany Ho: I also want to know a little bit more about how Bryn Mawr became involved with the 1972 strike.

0:46:08.1 James Pabarue: Okay.

0:46:08.9 Bethany Ho: And how collaborative efforts worked across the campuses.

0:46:15.6 James Pabarue: By the time I graduated, not only did we take courses at Bryn Mawr, I think by the time I graduated, you could major in courses at Bryn Mawr and area in Bryn Mawr and vice versa. But we also had co-ed dorms with Bryn Mawr, so if you were an Haverford student that wanted to live at Bryn Mawr, you could live in a co-ed dorm at Bryn Mawr, and the same was true if you wanted to live in a co-ed dorm at Haverford, Bryn Mawr women could come over here. So there was a lot and lot of interaction, both academically, but also socially. So it was very easy for the communications between the Black students at Haverford and the Sisterhood who were friends of people over there to coordinate and to get together. I think it's more difficult now because I don't think the extent of the cooperation is anywhere near as high as it was back then.

0:47:24.9 Bethany Ho: And I was just wondering if you had anything else that you wanted to bring up that was possibly not mentioned? 

0:47:33.8 James Pabarue: No. I think that I'm cautiously optimistic. In talking to my fellow alums about this last strike and the reaction of the administration, some of it is a little bit, "Oh yeah, here's the same old story." But I spend, not a lot of time, a fair amount of time, talking to Wendy about these issues. And I think that her head and heart are in the right place. I'm not sure how, whether she knows... Well, I don't know if anybody knows. Whether anybody knows how to navigate the powers that be of the Board of Managers, the Corporation, the faculty, all of those constituencies that she is... And the alumni to which she is responsive. And looking at that, I don't know if she or anyone knows the way to take those good intentions and those good ideas and actually make them a reality. It's not easy. You have to find the right people to be in the positions of power in terms of chief diversity officer.

0:49:09.7 James Pabarue: I've seen corporations for years and years, I had my own law firm with 60 lawyers, and I know big people with big law firms, and there's been this constant effort on trying to get chief diversity officers in and put programs together and everything like that, and there just doesn't seem to be any solution that... Not solution, there are solutions, but solutions that can be implemented without stepping on other people's toes, because a lot of this is about power and people who have been in the majority for centuries, not wanting to give up that power. It's true. That's a whole lot of Trump. That's a lot of the whole situation that we've gone through in this country, of people who have been in power for centuries, they see the country changing, they see the College changing. If we look at the demographics of what's going to happen in the future, there could be a day that comes down the road where Haverford's a majority BIPOC institution, and the white people are the minority. They don't want that to happen. I think they're very worried about that because they're accustomed to having their place in the society and the amount of control they have in the society, and people don't give up power easily. That's about it.

0:51:00.2 Bethany Ho: Okay. Thank you again for doing this interview.

0:51:04.1 James Pabarue: Yeah, no problem, no problem. I enjoyed it. It's really great. One day, I hope I get to meet you when all this pandemic... I've gotten my vaccines. By the way, are they requiring vaccines for students coming back next year? 

0:51:17.5 Bethany Ho: Yes.

0:51:18.5 James Pabarue: They are. Interesting, I was reading about a place, a business, could be a daycare center or a huge sort of children's thing, where they were actually refusing to continue employment of people who actually got vaccinated, which is insane, but there's been a lot of back and forth as a lawyer, can an employer force everybody to be vaccinated? Well, in a college with students, it's easier to say one of the conditions of admission is that you be vaccinated against COVID-19, but if you're an employee of the institution, you have certain rights under the law, and it's that, something that your employer can force you to do, you know? But hopefully, once we get back to that, I usually hang out on campus, I just come over and... I live like 20 minutes away, so I often come over.

0:52:26.0 Bethany Ho: Okay, if you don't mind, I'm gonna stop the recording now.

0:52:30.1 James Pabarue: Yeah. Okay, okay, so great. I don't know... What's gonna be the...