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Alma Bingham (right) didn’t take her Columbia University advisers’ advice when she completed graduate school in 1955. She accepted a position training teachers in the Education Department at Portland State College, a new four-year institution just getting started in downtown Portland.

“They didn’t want me to come to Portland,” she explains. “They said, ’You’ll get out to Portland and there’ll be nothing there.’ But that’s just what appealed to me. I said, ‘That’s the beauty of it. Just think, they’ll be nobody around saying we’ve done it this way for years, so this is the way you’ll have to do it.’”

Bingham arrived in time to cheer PSC’s first graduating class—predominantly education majors—in 1956. Today the Graduate School of Education is celebrating its 50th anniversary as the University approaches its 60th.

Professor emeritus Mike Fiasca, one of Bingham’s colleagues in the formative years of the education program, said many faculty members were drawn to PSU for the same reason. “They were quality people who had other choices, very talented with a kind of adventuresome spirit. A desire to go somewhere where they could make a difference.”

“It was absolutely fascinating,” says Bingham, who is now 85, of those early days. There were nine faculty in the department, not all full-time, and a secretary. The entire department, in fact the entire college, including the library and gymnasium, was housed in what is now Lincoln Hall (pictured below). “I can hardly believe it myself, today,” she says.

In the first few years of Portland State’s existence, the college offered only two undergraduate degrees— general studies and education—so the Education Department was a major part of the college. Even so, academic materials were limited at first, Bingham says. “So we knocked out a small wall,” and, using their own books, the faculty set up a “mini-library” for education faculty and students in Old Main (Lincoln Hall). There also was a lot of inter-institutional cooperation among education faculty, with a sharing of materials and ideas among the Portland-area colleges, Bingham recalls.

Her initial assignment was mainly supervision of student teachers (she had as many as 125 advisees), a task that often took Bingham from Central Oregon to the coast and down the valley. She says she felt more like a traveling salesman than a professor, but the job did have its perks. “The college had two cars at that time,” she says. “One was the president’s and the other was mine. If someone wanted to use ‘my car,’ they had to come and ask me.”

As her first decade at Portland State passed, the programs and the college kept growing. Construction of the physical campus was a constant, often creating difficult classroom conditions. “You know,” Bingham says, “depending on what they were doing and what kind of tools they were using, we might end up holding class in the Park Blocks.” Sometimes, even committee meetings were moved. “We’d just go out and meet in someone’s car that was parked in a quiet spot away from the construction.”

“It was a hurley-burley kind of existence,” Fiasca remembers. “There were constant interruptions, but what could you do?” Eventually, the Graduate School of Education benefited from the construction when it moved out of Lincoln Hall and into its own building on Broadway. “We languished in those facilities for 20-something years and so we felt euphoric when the new building opened,” he says.

The Vietnam era brought its own challenges with shifting student attitudes and demonstrations. Bingham remembers when demonstrators interrupted one of her classes, asking other students to go out on strike. “I pointed out to them that I was teaching this class, and when I was finished, they could make their announcement. But, until then, they could stand aside and let us go on.” The demonstrators did just that.

Fiasca has his own memories of that era. He had just arrived in Florida for a science teaching conference when he was called back to campus. Someone had firebombed his office. “It was a mistake,” he says. “They were trying to get the student recruitment office next door.”

Bingham also was active in teacher education on a national level, particularly in early childhood education. She was a founding member of the National Association for Education of Young Children. The West, she says, was slow in adopting early education. “We started from scratch out here, but once you see the potential for learning in younger children you just have to see that it’s done. You look back now,” she says, “and you wonder, Why was it not always considered important?”

When asked about the bright spots or memorable times in her career, Bingham always mentions the students. “We always had such a mix.” Most of her classes were electives; people from other majors “brought their own points of view,” she says. And although she taught and influenced thousands of students and teachers during her career, Bingham remains modest. “Well,” she says, “I enjoyed it.”

I began as an English literature major,” she says, “and had no idea I would end up in teacher education. But once I saw the possibilities I couldn’t leave it. You have this wonderful opportunity to develop skills and attitudes in the students you work with, but also to develop teachers who already are in the classroom and, through them, their students.”

Bingham’s students appreciated her dedication, as Mike Fiasca can attest. His daughter, Anna, earned a degree in education at PSU and had Bingham as a teacher. “My daughter thought the world of her. She graduated in 1970 and they still communicate. Alma’s a gem.”

Even after retirement Bingham has remained involved with Portland State, most recently as a member of the Graduate Committee. “It has been wonderful being at Portland State and seeing it develop,” she says. “I firmly believed, and still do, that we need a university in Portland. Being part of it was really exciting. It’s hard to describe it to someone who wasn’t there.”

Education School reunion: Classes of 1956-1969

Education grads are invited back to campus for a 50th year celebration Saturday, Oct. 22, during PSU Weekend. The day’s festivities include a reunion breakfast from 8 to 9:45 a.m. in Smith Memorial Union and a seminar at 10 a.m. Prof. Julie Esparza Brown will discuss “Cultural Competency: A New Approach to Classroom Management.” Grads are welcome to stay for free PSU Weekend seminars.

For breakfast and seminar reservations, please email wiscars@pdx.edu or call 503-725-4789. For a listing of all PSU Weekend events, go to www.alumni.pdx.edu.

First class: We’d like to hear from you

As the University approaches its 60th anniversary in 2006, we’d like to hear from its first graduates, members of the class of 1956. There were 72 of you, and we’re only missing contact information for four grads: Lorean Hornshuh Brooks, Anne Byrd Michener, June E. Norgard, and Michael Charles O’Neel. Let us know if you know of them. Class of ’56, if you would like to share your memories of Portland State College, give PSU Magazine editor Kathryn Kirkland a call at 503-725-4451 or send her an email at kirklandk@pdx.edu.

Clarence Hein is former director of community relations at Portland State.