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- Title:
- Michael Kalton interview
- Interviewee:
- Kalton, Michael
- Interviewer:
- Williams, Charles Thomas
- Date Created:
- 2018-05-24
- Role:
- Faculty
- Department:
- Liberal Studies; School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Science
- Subjects:
- Jesuit Confucianism religion philosophy Korea interdisciplinarity Interdisciplinary education faculty governance curriculum planning research
- Biography:
- Michael Kalton (b. 1940) is a scholar of Korean Neo-Confucianism and a founding faculty member of University of Washington Tacoma. He was a Jesuit for 12 years, during which he completed his master’s degree in Greek and a licentiate in philosophy at St. Louis University. After teaching Greek and philosophy at a Roman Catholic Seminarian in Korea for three years, he became interested in East Asian cultures and worldviews. In 1970, he started his doctorate program at Harvard University, and there he met his wife, Margaret Kalton. By the time he completed his PhD, a joint-degree in Comparative Religion and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, in 1977, he had a two-year-old son, Max. He and his family then moved to Kansas, where he became a tenured professor of East Asian religions at Wichita State University and taught for 12 years. His daughter, Annaka, was born there in 1979. In 1990, he was offered professor positions at both University of Southern California and at University of Washington Tacoma. He chose the latter, more interdisciplinary option. At UW Tacoma, he founded the Faculty Assembly and chaired the organization for two terms. He was also the director of the Interdisciplinary Arts and Science program from 1996 to 2000. He retired from his 34 years of teaching in 2011. He has translated four books, including To Become a Sage: The Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning (1988) and The Four-Seven Debate: An Annotated Translation of the Most Famous Controversy in Korean Neo-Confucian Thought (1994). He co-authored the book Principles of Systems Science (2015) with George Mobus, UW Tacoma professor emeritus of computer science. He has received many honors in his career, including the International T'oegye Studies Award in 1987 and UW Tacoma’s first Distinguished Teaching Award.
- Description:
- In this interview, Michael Kalton shares his experience as a founding faculty member at University of Washington Tacoma, shedding light on the tight-knit initial faculty, the growth of the institution overtime, and relationships with the university administration and local community. He begins by tracing his own academic background and explaining how, as a specialized expert in Korean Neo-Confucianism, he had come to choose an interdisciplinary, flexible career at UW Tacoma. He characterizes the dynamic among his first colleagues as natural, easy, and without a sense of hierarchy. He praises the nontraditional student body in the early years and remarks on how the University was concerned about diversifying the faculty, noting Michael Honey as a strong advocate. He goes on to explain the problems with scaling up interdisciplinarity and how that became an issue as the University grew. In the second half of the interview, Kalton recalls in more detail his motivation for organizing the faculty, which led him to establish the Faculty Assembly. While the University was backed by strong, high-level support from the South Sound community, he admits that he and his colleagues were overall too absorbed in building the institution to devote much to community outreach and developing relationships. He recalls his time as the director of the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program, as well as his academic interests in tackling the natural sciences from a religion and philosophy perspective. Closing the interview, Kalton reflects on UW Tacoma’s inevitable direction toward departmentalization, diverging from the innovative, liberal arts approach he and many others had envisioned and hoped for. He concludes that his tenure at UW Tacoma was a dream job representing something he truly believed in.
- Location:
- United States--Washington (State)--Tacoma United States--Washington (State)--Seattle United States--Kansas--Wichita
- Type:
- Sound; Text; StillImage
- Format:
- cpd
- Preferred Citation:
- University of Washington Libraries, University of Washington Tacoma Library, UWTOH201806