Dis-Remembering

One of the strange aspects of working on this book are the different anecdotes told by different people about the same event. The problem for us, of course, is trying to decide which are true.

For example, I was recently listening to a group of faculty discussing the earliest days of the college. When the state bought the 1600 acres the college sits on, they got many houses and barns -- it had been an area of small truck farms and family dwellings -- and some of these were new enough to be converted into administrative spaces. My office was in a structure called the Scott House which had been owned by the Scott family when the state bought the land. It was a new house -- single story rancher -- and was quite usable for academic offices. Each of the academic deans and the VP of Academic Affairs had their offices there.

At the faculty discussion, I heard one faculty swear that the building was used as a "motel" to house visiting candidates for a night or two. Now I worked in the Scott House for 15 months and can draw -- if asked -- its exact floorplan. There were no extra rooms where visiting candidates might sleep. Yet this faculty stated that he remembered candidates saying they had stayed there.

Who knows the truth?

We run into this sort of thing on a daily basis. Memories change over 40 years (mine do also!); perhaps I have forgotten that the Scott House was used as a motel. Is there any documentation that would prove which of us has it right? Would it be worth the considerable time it would take to find such documentation - - assuming it exists? Probably not.

We both have to keep in mind the following:

The plural of anecdote is not data.

kt