Llyn De Danaan aka Lynn Patterson

Llyn De Danaan aka Lynn Patterson

I, with my Burmese cat Portable, moved to Olympia in the summer of 1971. The Evergreen State College would open in September of that year and I was a member of the first faculty cohort. I was a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of Washington and had lobbied for a job until Dean Merv Cadwallader at last gave me an interview. I wanted to stay in Washington and wanted badly to participate in rethinking higher education. I was cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, at the Ohio State University and had been in the Peace Corps in Sarawak, Malaysia. I had worked in farm labor camps in Yakima and on community development projects in Washington and Oregon. I had worked with planners at the Puget Sound Governmental Conference, had studied Saul Alinsky, belonged to Radical Women in Seattle, had marched in anti-war rallies, and had been fired three times for being what one boss called, “insolent, impudent, and insubordinate,” a portrayal I accepted proudly. In 1973 I became an Evergreen academic dean, the first woman to hold that post. This job allowed me to search for and hire faculty, especially women and men and women of color, to design fresh new initiatives, and to support the development of the Tacoma Campus and Indigenous studies. I was not fired from Evergreen. I left voluntarily in 2001.