Carlos Rodríguez-Vidal (Class of 1979) interviewed by Rachael Wong (Class of 2024)

0:00:18.5 Rachael Wong: It's Friday, December 13th, 2021. This is Rachael Wong, Class of 2024, conducting an interview as a part of the Documenting Student Life Alumni Oral History Project. Could you begin by introducing yourself with your name, class year, and major?

0:00:34.3 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: Yes. Hello, my name is Carlos Rodríguez-Vidal. I'm a member of the Class of 1979. And I am in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

0:00:45.7 Rachael Wong: And what do you currently do for work?

0:00:48.5 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: I am an attorney. I have been an attorney since 1983. And I am the managing member of the law firm which is called Goldman Antonetti & Cordova in San Juan.

0:01:02.2 Rachael Wong: What did you major in during your time at Haverford?

0:01:05.8 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: I double-majored in philosophy and Spanish.

0:01:10.5 Rachael Wong: Great. And what was your reason for applying to Haverford? What interested you about the college?

0:01:19.2 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: I didn't know very much about colleges in the United States when I was deciding how to apply to colleges. And I only knew about sports because I was... I played baseball and basketball. And I ran track and did other things. And I only knew about schools that were publicly known in the sports world. However, I learned about the José Padín Scholarship. And as a result of the José Padín Scholarship, I learned about Haverford. And I applied for admission at a couple of schools which were of interest to me because of the sports, not because I was going to actually play Division 1 baseball or basketball, but because I was really interested in the sports that they had. And I also applied to Haverford because of the scholarship, which to me meant that Puerto Rico was serious about attracting Puerto Rican students.

0:02:20.6 Rachael Wong: Could you give some background on what the José Padín Scholarship is?

0:02:26.5 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: Yes. José Padín was the first Puerto Rican to attend Haverford at the beginning of the 20th century. He had been born in Puerto Rico and initially schooled in Puerto Rico and finished high school after the sovereignty over Puerto Rico changed from Spain to the United States, as a result of the Spanish-American War. He was able to receive a scholarship to finish high school in New Jersey. And in New Jersey, I think his counselor, who apparently had been a Haverford alumni, oriented him and counseled him to apply to Haverford. So he attended Haverford. He graduated from Haverford with a bachelor's and a master's degree, and worked in education for a long time as well as in publishing. When he passed away, his widow bestowed the José Padín Scholarship in the 1960s with the direction that at least one Puerto Rican would receive the scholarship to attend Haverford. And her purpose or her intention was to have these Puerto Rican students receive this education at Haverford for the benefit of Puerto Rico. And it became... I think initially, the admissions office began working with the College Entrance Examination Board's office in Puerto Rico and with the Department of Education in Puerto Rico to try to identify schools and students who could qualify to apply to Haverford and perhaps receive the scholarship.

0:04:12.9 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: So at the time that I applied, there had been at least six or seven José Padín scholars who had already attended Haverford. And in my year, I was awarded the scholarship. It was the first and only time I ever received a telegram, which you may not know about. Because in this day and age of e-mails and immediate communications, a telegram was as immediate as you could receive a communication. Because it was a little faster than the US Post mail. But I received a very favorable and enjoyable telegram that told me that I had been not only admitted to Haverford, but also received the scholarship.

0:04:57.9 Rachael Wong: Upon arriving to Haverford, what were your initial impressions of the college?

0:05:05.6 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: I am one of five children. None of my older siblings had attended college outside of Puerto Rico. So I did not know what to expect. And I had never actually traveled outside of Puerto Rico when I went to Haverford. So I was curious, avid to be independent, very interested in the information that Haverford provided me as to its admissions brochures and the type of education that one would receive there. But I had no preparation really as to, for the first time being outside of Puerto Rico or for the first time being in the United States in any context. I really didn't have very many relatives that lived in the United States. So it was a bit of a cultural shock that was a little tempered by the fact that I was so interested and avid to earn an education in that context.

0:06:12.3 Rachael Wong: Over the course of your time at Haverford, how did your feelings change?

0:06:17.8 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: Initially, I started questioning whether the education that I was receiving was relevant to my reality as a Puerto Rican. I was not aware of... As a freshman, of course, of how the courses that I was taking were going to really be applicable to a future professional experience in Puerto Rico. So I started questioning that during my first year. I did take courses in political science, in comparative politics. I took a freshman writing seminar, which was very good in teaching me how to better write in English. I remember taking, actually, a Spanish course in Latin American poetry. I took courses that... I took an astronomy course. I wanted to fulfill my natural science requirement, which was something that was not in my forte, and that I knew I had to check that in my checklist. So those courses weren't particularly things that I could relate to my existence. So I started questioning whether it would be relevant to receive an education at Haverford and return to Puerto Rico. I did speak to faculty. I spoke to counselors, and was able to sort out that Haverford had the flexibility for you to adjust your educational experience to your needs. And I started trying to orient myself and choose topics within certain courses that would have the relevance that I was seeking from the Haverford education to Puerto Rico.

0:08:18.4 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: So I wrote about different things that I was learning about and trying to adapt them or to investigate and analyze them from the Puerto Rico perspective, or trying to apply it to Puerto Rico, so that it would make me a little more comfortable that the education that I was receiving would be more relevant. Eventually, obviously, I stayed at Haverford. Although, I initially thought that I would be a political science major. The analysis of political science from the viewpoint of the United States was not something that interested me. I started thinking about other subjects. And that's how I reached philosophy. Philosophy from different perspectives allowed me to analyze things and learn how to learn, learn how to think issues in metaphysics, issues in epistemology, were things that stimulated my intellect in ways that were more interesting to me, and gave me a framework to think about things and to write about things. So that change was something that was really good, academically. And I'm not thinking about grades. I'm thinking about just the interest in maintaining my attention in what I was studying, while at the same time, I kept taking courses in Spanish, in Latin American literature, which was certainly closer to my reality and in other types of literature in Spanish, that kept me close to my culture.

0:10:06.4 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: And that's the way I handled it academically, actually. That was in terms of my education. Obviously, there were other things happening at Haverford that were important that we were thinking about as students that I also became very involved in. But academically, that's really the way I approached it.

0:10:29.2 Rachael Wong: Where did you meet your first friends at Haverford? And how did you find community?

0:10:36.1 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: Haverford at the time had a Bi-College summer program, which was a pre-freshman summer program for students of what were called... We were called minority backgrounds, for us to get acclimated to the Bi-College community. It was organized together with Bryn Mawr. So there were students who were... At the time, the term was Blacks. There were African-American from different areas of the United States. There were some Latinos, mostly Puerto Rican. And there were some foreign students from Bryn Mawr as well. And we came during the summer for six weeks. And in that program, we lived together at a... In that year, it was a Bryn Mawr dorm, Haffner Hall, and took courses during those six weeks. Some courses were similar to the freshman writing seminar. Other courses were similar to the math courses that were going to be offered, and a sociology course. So we actually attended classes and lived in what was going to be a college community. So that's how I was introduced to Haverford and Bryn Mawr. And that's what became my first community at Haverford, the students who attended that pre-freshman summer program in 1975.

0:12:13.0 Rachael Wong: Could you describe Haverford's relationship to Bryn Mawr during the time that you were there?

0:12:18.7 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: It was very close. It was very close. Haverford was single-sex. Bryn Mawr was and still is single-sex. But it felt as a single community from the very first day to me. I couldn't really think of attending a single-sex college or university. Although, I could understand intellectually that it has its value specifically for women, because of the way they are treated generally in society. But it was excellent for me that Haverford had as close a relationship with Bryn Mawr as it did then. I ended up taking half of my courses at Bryn Mawr. I ended up living in Bryn Mawr dorms exactly half of my time in college.

0:13:11.0 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: For different reasons, one was not just to be in the Bryn Mawr women environment but also because their offering in dorms was a little different from Haverford. Haverford concentrated in either having roommates or in suites while at Bryn Mawr most of the dorms had single rooms. And to me, that type of privacy was attractive as a young teenager or someone in college. So that was attractive. And at the same time, it was easy, it was easy. I could take the Blue Bus, which was the way it was called at the time, from Bryn Mawr to Haverford to attend classes, to go to the dining center, to do other activities and return back. And that bus would run almost all night or all day. And then the... In the weekends, there was something called the Social Bus, which also ran fairly frequently. So there was a constant back and forth. In addition to that, we could also walk, we could also take the train to one campus or the other. So it was... The proximity was good, and I developed relationships with Bryn Mawr students that were just as valuable as those with Haverford students.

0:14:43.2 Rachael Wong: How would you say the students of color were received at Haverford by either your peers or faculty members?

0:14:53.0 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: By the time I was admitted and enrolled at Haverford, Haverford had already lived through the first group of confrontations with minority students, because Haverford had been fairly aggressive in the '60s, late '60s, very early '70s in attracting Black students and attracting students from Puerto Rican backgrounds mainly. There wasn't a significant amount of other Latinos, it was basically Blacks and Puerto Ricans. And as a result of that initial confrontation, where there was even a student boycott of classes and other activities, Haverford had begun to implement a few things that made it pay more attention to those groups. As a result, the pre-freshman summer program was instituted, and I thought that was very valuable. As a result, there was an admissions officer who spent a lot of time attracting or identifying where to attract minority students from. There had been a few isolated efforts in attracting faculty to Haverford. So there had been certain things that were begun, but by the time I was in my sophomore and junior year, we had to inform Haverford that the progress that it had done in the decade before we got there wasn't sufficient.

0:16:32.3 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: So we addressed Haverford in a very Haverfordian day... Way. We organized among ourselves, we created what was called the Minorities Coalition, which included the Black American... The Black Student Association, we included the Puerto Rican students at Haverford, included the very few Asian students that were there at the time, there were less than a handful in my time, and some White students who were very supportive of our needs and thoughts. And that coalition put together a series of demands to confront the community, to confront the community in the way... In the Quaker way, in the way in which you would do so under the honor code. And that began, or that developed into a series of... A list of demands that required more affirmative changes in the college. That eventually was implemented in many ways. We had a college committee on faculty appointments with a very specific objective of trying to diversify the faculty, not only racially and ethnically, but also by gender, there were very few women who were tenured at Haverford at the time.

0:17:58.0 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: We also demanded a position of a Director of Minority Affairs who would not just serve the minority community but also help teach the entire community as to some of our cultural upbringings, as to some of our cultural offerings and serve as a venue to really assist the students in their ability to adapt at Haverford. Because there was... It was one thing to deal with it academically, and it was another thing to deal with it socially. So that... It was a very organized effort, and some of the demands that we made began to be implemented. The Admissions Office was very proactive with William Ambler, who was excellent, excellent. I have to recognize that he was just really responsive whenever we would point things like that out, and I have very fond memories of Bill Ambler. At the same time, there were some efforts to diversify the curriculum, we were very interested in that. Because there were things like a course called The Sociology of the Family, but it was the sociology of the family as the professor had really studied and researched and investigated it in a very particular neighborhood in Philadelphia, so it wasn't the sociology of the entire family from a multicultural perspective. And we thought that if there were courses that were going to be titled that way, that it should be a lot more inclusive.

0:19:44.0 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: Courses were created to address that. I remember receiving one course from Professor Vernon Dixon of the Economics Department, where it was a course on worldviews and different views of the world from different cultures, which was very well attended. So there were changes, and there were changes that were useful, but it had to get to the point where we had to confront the community, and the community meaning not just the board of governors or the Board of Managers, not just the faculty, not just... It actually had to get to the point where we had to confront our fellow students. And we had a demonstration in particular where everybody who had to go to the dining center was carded because some of the Black students were being carded on campus. Students were Haverford students, other students would demand that they show their Haverford ID while they were walking on campus.

0:20:51.2 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: So to illustrate the insult, we just gathered at the dining center, blocked all entries, and carded everybody as they were coming in for lunch one day. Faculty, students, staff, everyone, and that made an impact. Obviously, we also had to address the administration and in conversations with the administration, many things were implemented as well to propitiate changes that now seem very normal at Haverford and seem to have become institutionalized. Obviously, history has shown that there still are many, many things that need to be improved, but at the same time, I'm just illustrating some of the things that we were doing after the student boycott of 1971, '72, and the things that we had to do in 1977, '78, and maybe have had to be repeated since then.

0:21:56.3 Rachael Wong: Where did you find comfort at Haverford? And what made you uncomfortable?

0:22:09.1 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: I found comfort in different ways. I think the academics were comforting to me. The feeling of really learning how to learn and learning new things that I could later adapt to my professional environment were exciting to me. I found comfort in relationships with friends, both Haverford and Bryn Mawr. The relationship with Bryn Mawr was very valuable to me because coming from Puerto Rico, which is a very macho society, where as a young teenager, I may have been immature. A lot of the Bryn Mawr women taught us or taught me in particular, that they were as intellectually capable and rigorous and to be contended with as anyone else, and that to me was something that became very valuable and I really felt comfortable, which is the question you're posing. Interacting with them in class and socially and in just discussing things outside the classroom, so there was comfort in that. Things that were uncomfortable, I think the food. [chuckle] The food was some of a cultural shock. Our dining center food was not very good in those years, there wasn't much variety, there were things that you would really question what they were, there were things that we would call mystery meat.

0:23:55.2 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: I can't remember what the formal name for it was, but there were things that we would have to supplement by ordering pizzas or cheesesteak hoagies or different types of food from outside campus. There were a few situations, in my case, there weren't as many situations where I would be confronted by other students in a way in which I would feel discriminated literally. Some of my fellow friends who did not have the facility in the English language coming from Puerto Rico suffered a little more because they were treated that just because they may not fluently speak English, they may be somewhat less adept at the academics. I didn't have that problem. So there were things that I... I was open to be comfortable, to tell you the truth, and I wasn't taking things as hard as other students felt, they were slighted, for example. There were perhaps incidents, but 40-something years have passed and perhaps I don't remember the ones that were the most uncomfortable as well as I would have remembered them maybe 30 years ago.

0:25:29.8 Rachael Wong: What would you say your experience was like within the Spanish and Philosophy Departments?

0:25:44.5 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: Starting with philosophy, philosophy, had a superb Philosophy Department in my time, that most of the professors from that era had come to Haverford as a result of a schism that occurred in Yale University's Philosophy Department and Haverford gained from that, a few professors who had taught at Yale, who were extremely dedicated to teaching, not just to doing their own research, but they were really devoted to their students. Since I sort of changed my view of what I would like to major in the middle of my first semester sophomore year, I couldn't enroll in Philosophy 101 at Haverford, immediately. So I enrolled at Bryn Mawr’s Philosophy 101 course, which was a requirement to become a major. And I spoke to Ashok Gangadean, Professor Gangadean was, I believe, the department chair at the time, and I told him I started taking philosophy because I really think I want to major in it, I started taking it at Bryn Mawr because I wasn't sure I wanted to major at Haverford.

0:27:06.3 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: And at the time that you wanted to select courses, there were certain philosophy courses that were so much in demand that people have to spend overnight at Founders Hall to try to enroll in the list that would allow them to get into those courses, and I didn't do that. But in the middle of this semester, after having enrolled at Philosophy 101 at Bryn Mawr, I went up to Professor Gangadean, and I told him that I really wanted to major, and he allowed me to take the second semester of philosophy 101 with him, in his class. Without having done the line of that, and it was a concession that He made simply because I was serious about being a major in it, and it was because a lot of people took Philosophy 101 just because it was a very popular course And then they would major in other things, but it was attractive to me and the openness with which Professor Gangadean dealt with me I thought was excellent.

0:28:14.1 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: I kept taking courses at Bryn Mawr too, but I remember fondly, our junior seminar, which was a seminar that was taught by Professor Aryeh Kosman, who passed away recently, and Professor Kosman was just excellent in fostering a philosophical conversation or a conversation about philosophy among the junior major students. That to me was really, really enthralling. And we had an excellent relationship after that too, even as an alumnus, those were things that I enjoyed in the Philosophy Department, I also... There was also a new professor who came, I thought that she may have been the first woman professor in the Philosophy Department, Kathleen Wright. And Kathleen Wright taught courses in phenomenology and continental philosophy that I was very interested in, on Descartes, Spinoza and Husserl, Phenomenology of Husserl. So I took courses with her too that were really interesting. And I enjoyed that a lot.

0:29:30.1 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: In the Spanish Department, we already had not just one professor at the time we already had three full-time professors, Professor García-Barrio who I think was an department chair and specialized in Spanish Philosophy, professor García Castro, Ramón García Castro, who specialized in Latin American Literature. And there was a third professor, and it was a lady who I think she taught part-time because she taught baby languages as well as some other courses. And they were very devoted to the students as well. Certainly Professor García Castro, although he didn't live on campus, he lived in Philadelphia, so he wasn't part of the residential environment that we had with so many other faculty members, but he was really interested in teaching and learning and having us learn how to be active readers. And he was very open to our analysis coming from different countries, because eventually by my junior or senior year, there were a few other Latinos, both from Bryn Mawr and Haverford, who weren't just from Puerto Rico, but it was the department where I could do a lot.

0:30:48.9 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: We had our differences with Professor García-Barrio, he was the professor who lived at La Casa Hispanica as it was called in those years, and he enjoyed control of certain things that the student groups weren't necessarily willing to yield control over. So there were some differences with him. He wasn't tenured. He didn't get his tenure, so he had to leave Haverford, professor García Castro did get tenure and he taught for decades after I left. But that was my experience with philosophy and Spanish departments.

0:31:37.5 Rachael Wong: What activities in community groups did you participate in?

0:31:44.3 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: Many. I was obviously in Puerto Rican Students at Haverford, which was the only Latino organization at the time. We also had another organization that was called Casa Hispanica, which attempted to have not only the members of Puerto Rican students at Haverford, but also to add those people who had an interest in the culture of Spain and Hispanic America. I was active in both. I was active one year in the Customs Committee, I was active obviously in the Minorities Coalition, I was one of the student members elected to the College Committee on Faculty Appointments to implement the change of the composition of the faculty. I played baseball. That was sort of a fun thing to do at Haverford. I played intramural basketball.

0:32:56.6 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: I did different things. I can't remember all of them right now, but I did different things to keep myself involved in the community. I even ran for office with a fellow student. We were, I think, the first ones to run together for presidents of... Co-presidents of the Student Council. And we made it to the run-off, but then we lost to a classmate of mine, a very nice guy, Carl Sangree. But I did many things even at Bryn Mawr, I mean, when I was at Bryn Mawr at Haffner Hall, I was elected social chairman, which was an interesting position to have there.

0:33:46.9 Rachael Wong: What kind of events did the groups that you were a part of hold?

0:33:52.1 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: Some were political, internal politics of Haverford, trying to implement change, trying to implement change in our educational environment as well as in the social environment. Some were purely social, some were cultural. So it was a different... Some were just... I mean, sports is something that's in and of itself different. It's a different type of community, and it's a different type of competition, but something that I was very familiar with before I got to Haverford, so it was something that I enjoyed as well. Intramural basketball, I think most of the teams we fielded were teams of Puerto Ricans with Black students. And we had a lot of fun in those. And we had very, very, very close relationships with our Black fellow basketball players and students. In fact the first time... The first two times I visited New York City was to go on a break with two of my classmates. One of my classmates, Kevin Long, who majored in history and still lives in New York City and who at the time lived in one of the projects on 125th Street in Amsterdam. And the other time I visited New York before I went to law school there was with another classmate, Greg Jones, who lived in the South Bronx in a project. So it was... Those were very, very fun people and people I enjoyed spending time with and playing sports with who also were Haverford students.

0:36:04.7 Rachael Wong: How would you describe the relationship between Puerto Ricans students of Haverford and other Latinx students on campus?

0:36:12.9 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: Well, initially, that's all there was. There weren't very many other Latino students or Latina students at Haverford certainly. And at Bryn Mawr, most were treated as international students. There were a few, but not that many. So put together, there may have been 10 students, maybe, in the entire Latino community. So it was... That was it. Eventually, it started growing a little, and then we expanded our views and horizons, but it was mainly social and cultural. And obviously we tried to mentor those who came after us. So it's... It became different as soon as student... As soon as the changes that were necessary in the admissions office were implemented by Bill Ambler and his team, and they started attracting more students from more varied backgrounds. And then we started getting Chicanos, we started getting Dominicans, we started getting different types of people.

0:37:20.6 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: I mean, the Latino community, you have to understand, it's a community very much like the Asian community, we come from 30-something different countries. So it never was monolithic, it was just we were fewer than 10, that we just had to stay together and were very, very close to each other. And there weren't very many divisions between us, because we were so few, and we tended to agree on many things, even if later on professionally we did many different things. So I think the relationship is... The type of organization had to develop first as a result of co-education. Obviously, the female Latino students feel very different about... Must feel very different about Haverford and how things ought to occur and how they approach their own education. And the fact that people from other countries other than Puerto Rico started attending Haverford also made those organizations change. I'm not fully familiar. I mean, 40 years out, 30-something years out, I'm not fully familiar with how exactly they have developed, but I believe that the progressive nature of the issues that are addressed has developed over time and has, at the same time, remained very important to those organizations.

0:39:05.0 Rachael Wong: Did you have the opportunity to study abroad during your time at Haverford?

0:39:08.9 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: I did, but I did not take that opportunity.

0:39:14.0 Rachael Wong: And we already touched on this a bit, but what are your memories of the 1977 boycott and what was your involvement like?

0:39:23.1 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: So the original boycott, I wasn't there, but we had files on what had happened, and the senior members of our organization had remained in touch with some of the students who had participated so they shared information with us, we were familiar with the issues. We studied and researched some of the issues. At the time, we had the Bi-College News, the student newspaper, and there were issues of the Bi-College News that were kept in the library and you could actually go to the library and do your own investigation and research about the issues that had been reported in the Bi-College News of '71, '72. So we became familiar with what they had been doing, not only by interacting with the alumni, but also by reading what the issues had been in the news, in the college news. At the time that it became our turn to point out to the college its shortcomings in dealing with our communities, we also blazed our own trail in many ways by being very specific about changes that needed to occur. And it was very important to us, not just for the college to be able to deal with us on a personal basis, but our education. We were really interested in making sure that our education would be relevant to the communities that we would be serving as after we left Haverford.

0:41:06.8 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: So that's part of what I was referring to when we made a series of demands, we attended faculty meetings, we attended board meetings to try to make them understand that we had a series of demands that needed to be changed and we had meetings with the administration for them to be able to understand some of the things and eventually, many, many things were implemented. We didn't get everything we wanted but there was a more diverse offering of scholarships, for example, there was a more diverse way of approaching recruitment of students, there was a better approach to doing national searches for faculty members and being more open to people who weren't exactly like the members of the departments that were at Haverford then. Very good steps were made by hiring female professors, some of whom may have by now retired, but it was... We didn't know it at the time, but it was fruitful. It wasn't perfect, nothing has ever been perfect, but it was fruitful and we thought that we had made inroads into helping not just us, but future generations of students of diverse backgrounds.

0:42:36.8 Rachael Wong: Could you summarize the demands made to Haverford college?

0:42:42.1 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: Admissions recruitment, the appointment of an admissions person who would be mostly in charge of organizing, targeting communities from which to recruit students for Haverford, a five-year plan to diversify the faculty, that became first the College Committee on Faculty Appointments under, reporting to the president of the college. Slowly but surely, the faculty took back ownership of that to make it less of a college committee and more of a faculty committee. There were some challenges by a few professors who did not block consensus but stood out of it, in particular, the natural science professors elected someone to that committee who was opposed to affirmative action within the faculty, but there were inroads and there were things that were successful.

0:43:49.5 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: So we had admissions, we had faculty composition, we had a Director of Minority Affairs appointed, we had a review of the curriculum to diversify the curriculum and get courses that would be more relevant to our realities, better budgets for our organizations. Some of our budgets were coming from Students' Council, but there was some money set aside for the Director of Minority Affairs for activities that would be more relevant to our reality. The pre-freshman summer program was bolstered. There were different things, I can't remember all of them at this time, but those are some of the most important ones that were implemented fairly quickly. Although the diversity and the faculty took some years, at least the effort to try to identify where, in which departments, what topics should we be looking faculty to teach about were things that were done.

0:45:12.7 Rachael Wong: Was there any disagreement among the leaders about what the demands should be?

0:45:24.5 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: I wouldn't say disagreements. I think everybody was approaching it from different angles. I mean, those students who had been carded on campus felt that that was something that had to stop, that students had to understand that Haverford was a more diverse community that they'd thought, and that just because people don't look exactly like them doesn't mean that they're not members of the community. So those people had that in front and center. At the same time, others were more focused on the academics, on making sure that the faculty reflected society at large, that the course offerings reflected something that was more open to our own cultures and realities. I don't remember differences about the demands. I think we gathered almost all from all groups. What we differed about, and I am not fully certain that this is my best recollection, was about tactics, when to do certain things, whether certain things could be done to wake up the college.

0:46:46.9 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: Eventually, we did do another boycott and we did do a sit-in, in the president's office. There were discussions about whether that was the best tactic. And there were things that we would have differences about but didn't really divide us. I think we were very united in many of these things and in making sure that the college would pay attention to us. And I was frankly surprised that we were so rigorous and so thoughtful about the things that we were discussing with the college, and the contributions that we could make to implement them, because I became an intern in the first Director of Minority Affairs Office along with a fellow student of ours, to help that person start her work in developing certain things for Haverford, so that Haverford could have a more open cultural offering, social offering, and academic offering, to supplement our education. But I don't really remember that we were so divided on any one issue. I think, there were just discussions about certain tactics, but eventually we reached agreements and we did what we did with everybody on board, basically.

0:48:23.3 Rachael Wong: Did you have any moments of leadership during the strike?

0:48:37.2 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: I cannot remember. I was one of the leaders of the Puerto Rican Students at Haverford, that I do remember. We didn't elect president, vice president, treasurer or secretary. We only elected a secretary treasurer and that was my position, at the Puerto Rican Students at Haverford. So I spoke for the Puerto Rican Students at Haverford in certain ways, and the minorities coalition included that group. So in discussing things that needed to be changed, I was a member of that leadership group as well, we didn't elect any president or... It was very egalitarian in many ways, and we had a number of students who were very articulate discussing their own issues and their own strengths.

0:49:27.1 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: And it was a very Haverfordian way of approaching these issues that we had and we had a number of leaders, there wasn't a single leader who you would say would be the only one to whom the administration would pay attention to. They needed to deal with many of us who each had something to contribute to the conversation. Obviously, later on, after things got settled down and the college committed itself to implementing things, I was elected to be one of the student members to the College Committee on Faculty Appointments, and the Director of Minority Affairs asked me to be one of her first interns. So in that sense, there was a little bit of a leadership role, apart from the Puerto Rican Students at Haverford.

0:50:20.0 Rachael Wong: Do you think that... Did you feel like the strike impacted students of color's relationship to the rest of the student body and to administration?

0:50:36.6 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: Well, with the administration, it realized it needed to pay attention. I think our articulation of the issues and our proposal for solutions was sufficiently well thought out that they engaged with us seriously and approached it in a positive way in most cases. They did mention whatever potential legal implications some of the changes may have and whatever potential limitations they may have. But we thought it was well-received. The students, I would say that...

0:51:21.3 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: The wide majority were supportive. There were one or two cases of people, like for example, when we confronted the campus and carded everyone coming into the dining center, there were one or two students who tried to sneak into the dining center without showing their IDs, just because they didn't want to, and they weren't obviously in support of what we were doing. I think eventually they understood what we were doing, maybe they didn't support it, but most students understood and showed their IDs. There were some college-wide conversations, I don't remember whether there was a plenary as such where these issues were discussed, but there were open meetings where these issues were discussed and we did get feedback, some of it very positive about what we were doing and how it was being received by the rest of the community. There were always some different opinions about certain things because people just come in with different preconceptions of what is... Whether it's preferential or whether it's diversifying, and then they were concerned that their own interests would be in jeopardy if other people's interests would be taken into account. But I don't remember there being a push back, a significant push back in any way.

0:53:00.9 Rachael Wong: Is there anything else that you would like to share about the 1977 protests?

0:53:12.7 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: We felt at the time that it was as militant and as important as the prior boycott of 1971-72. We felt that we had actually done our homework and built upon the efforts of our predecessors, and we're refining some of the things that they were advocating in a way that it adapted to our then-current reality. So in a way, it was similar. It was similar. And I thought that they achieved certain things, and we achieved certain other things. It just seems to me that those who were in my generation of these protests didn't necessarily stay close to campus and don't go to Haverford as often to tell this story, and certain alumni from the '71, '72 generation have kept going back to the college and explaining to current students, what they did and what their experience was, so some people are more familiar with the first boycott than with the others.

0:54:38.7 Rachael Wong: Thank you. What interested you in partaking in this interview?

0:54:46.8 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: What interested me in participating in this interview?

0:54:50.5 Rachael Wong: Yeah.

0:54:51.6 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: I was asked. I was asked and Haverford still has a close place in my heart. I think time heals all wounds. I remained active in Haverford matters. I have been an admissions representative for a very long time. I have been a member who has been active in the Alumni Association. I participated in its Executive Committee. I was president of the Alumni Association. I later became a member of the Board of Managers, first as a representative of the Alumni Association, and later on as a board appointee. I spent 12 years as a Manager of the Board of Managers, which my tenure ended in 2010. So I have remained close to the college, not in the last decade or so, although I did participate with MAAG, the Multicultural Alumni Group, and organized a celebration of the 50 years of the José Padín Scholarship. So I have stayed in touch with the college, and I view the college as a very valuable educational institution that has trained and educated so many, many, very good people, and I see the value in that.

0:56:25.1 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: So if I can share my experience in a way in which the college can feel that it... That others feel that it has been worth attending Haverford and remaining close to Haverford, I'm happy to contribute to it. I was, however, and this goes beyond that question, but I was a little disheartened about the latest strike. I'm not fully familiar with the facts. I think it's a little bit of a reflection of the United States more than of Haverford, but at the same time, I have always felt that Haverford should transcend the United States because it is a learned institution, because it is an institution and they're a community that is populated by very serious, thoughtful, sensitive, sensible people. That's been my perception of Haverford, and to read some of the statements by some of the students made is a little disheartening that these things are still happening, obviously because of the many things that were happening in the broader United States culture.

0:57:55.8 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: So it pained me a little bit, but I haven't become so familiar with the issues to understand very well exactly what are the key things that need to occur so that another strike doesn't need to happen.

0:58:16.4 Rachael Wong: What advice would you give to current and future Haverford students of color?

[pause]

0:58:32.8 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: Focus on your education. Work hard. Haverford has a lot to offer. Whether you believe in the Bi-College community or the Tri-College community. Get the best education you can from Haverford. There is a very valuable education to be received there. And there are relationships that you can develop at Haverford that may develop, it may last a lifetime, basically. At times when you're living it, it may feel hard, it may feel challenging. But life is like that.

0:59:18.6 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: The outside world is even worse. I attended a very different university when I went to law school after Haverford, which I attended immediately after Haverford, and it was Columbia University in the City of New York, as it likes to be called. And that was a very different cultural shock. And I think I learned to appreciate more some of the things that occurred at Haverford, some of the opportunities, some of the receptiveness of the community to our articulation of how it could do better. And at the same time, I would tell students, "Don't be shy about telling Haverford how it can better address your needs." Whether it be academically, socially, personally, because one thing I learned about Haverford is that all those sensible, devoted, sensitive people do care about the students, and maybe one or two may not, but you will find someone in the faculty, in the administration, in the staff who will go out of his or her way to guide you, to help you. And I thought that was invaluable because I found many, not just one or two, who were willing to take their time to assist my education basically, which is their mission.

1:01:14.5 Rachael Wong: How has Haverford shaped your values and how you've spent your life after Haverford?

1:01:24.8 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: Let me show you something I have in my office still, because it's relevant to the answer to this question. First of all, I grew up as a Catholic and I still am a Catholic, but the closest... The religion that I feel has been closest to my Catholic upbringing has been Quakerism. And let me just get a quote, and it's a quote from a former President of Haverford that I have in my office and I have given as a gift to two other fellow alumni. Hold on one second.

[pause]

1:02:23.2 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: This is a quote that used to be in the room where the Board of Managers met in Founders. And it's a quote from Isaac Sharpless from the commencement of 1888. And it's a quote that I have taken to heart, let me put it that way, "I suggest that you preach truth and do righteousness as you have been taught, where in so ever that teaching may commend itself for your consciousness and for your judgments we have not sought to bind and see to it that no other institutions, no political party, no social circle, no religious organization, no pet ambitions put such chains on you as would tempt you to sacrifice one iota of the moral freedom of your consciences or the intellectual freedom of your judgments." That's a teaching I take very, very, very close to my heart. And that, I think, is an enduring view of Haverford and it's to its students.

1:03:38.8 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: So I think those are values that transcend my religion. And it's not just an issue of individualism, it's an issue of knowing yourself and being able to stand for what you think, because what you think is something that you have deliberated within yourself, with the benefit of an education, with the benefit of so many positive things that you can get from an education. Because if you have a conscience, if you have judgments that are formulated based on those thoughts and research and information, you're entitled to fight for, you're entitled to keep them and not let anyone else affect them in a negative way.

1:04:32.8 Rachael Wong: Thank you for sharing that. Those are all of my questions. Is there anything else that you'd like to share before we end this?

1:04:38.7 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: I would just like to thank you very much. I'm happy that you're willing to hear from us. I know it's very much of an extracurricular activity and it may not necessarily count for credit in your academic life, but I think it's a valuable, valuable effort, and I'm really grateful that I was able to help you and to contribute to it.

1:05:08.0 Rachael Wong: Thank you so much. Right.

1:05:10.3 Carlos Rodriguez Vidal: It's been great to meet you.