Carole Gatz

When Carole R. Gatz joined Portland State University in 1964 she became the first woman hired in the Chemistry Department with a PhD. Prior to coming to Portland, Gatz was at Stanford Research Institute where she worked large portions of eight to five days alone in a darkened laboratory, performing chemiluscenescent experiments. “I always liked school,” Professor Gatz notes, “and teaching at Portland State was like a homecoming. I worked hard on my lectures and even looked forward to reading all the student papers.”

According to former student and CLAS advisor Frosti McClurken-Talley, Professor Gatz was a “devoted and pretty unforgettable teacher who fed students home-baked muffins and let them into her life.” A physical chemist, Carole taught the general chemistry sequence for science majors and is remembered for her opening lecture. Looking out over two hundred upturned and anxious faces, she’d clear her throat and begin with tension-breaking reassurance: “an atom is a tiny, tiny thing.” Many pre-medical and pre-dental students also took her classes, and she acted as faculty advisor for the pre-med support group.

Carole characterizes her home as “science positive.” Her father was a mechanical engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad. As a child Professor Gatz liked to make prints, “to do things with my hands.” During WWII the family followed her Army father from Nebraska to California to Alabama to North Carolina and back to Omaha where at Benson High School she recalls having good female math instructors who encouraged and supported her. After graduation she majored in physics at Iowa State. The competitive climate of the 1950s persuaded her there would be more jobs for women in chemistry than in engineering. She went on to the University of Illinois for doctoral study in chemistry, completing her degree in 1959, just in time to take advantage of opportunities opening up in basic research as the U. S. sought to compete with the U.S.S.R. in the post-Sputnik era.

Professor Gatz’s gift for teaching abstract and difficult concepts in a simple and straightforward manner earned her the respect and devotion of her students. However, like many female scientists of her generation, she had to fight for her promotion to full professor. As a result she lost her cherished Physical Chemistry course, and she took a year off to rethink her life. “I realized that what mattered to me most was teaching. I made a choice,” she says in her quiet manner. “I chose happiness over ambition.”

In phased retirement she liked teaching classes on nutrition where she had the satisfaction of knowing that the information she presented on the chemistry of foods actually changed students’ lives and the eating patterns of entire families. She points with pride to the police officer who came up to her on the last day of class to report that he had stopped eating junk food on his breaks.

Professor Gatz derived what she calls “psychic income: from teaching.” Little wonder that she urged her students to go into professions that help people. “The culture of science,” she observes, “emphasizes objectivity and is not people-oriented. I always enjoyed school, but the general devaluation of teaching has had an effect on the number of students who can see themselves as teachers of science in the schools.”

Carole Gatz is a believer in public education and sees that the future lies in reversing the downgrading of teachers and learning by making education more available and relevant to those who need it most. This will, she says, involve the rethinking of how we teach our basic courses.

As for the younger women coming up in the sciences, Gatz says she is glad that they don’t have to be the fighter she was. For her the battleground has only shifted: she is a cancer survivor, though she does not know for how long. For many years, her home has been a ranch-style house set amidst tall timbers, flower and vegetable gardens, and fruit-bearing trees where she enjoys working in stained glass, building furniture, theater-going, letter writing, and composing the occasional poem. “I find,” she says, “the intellectual satisfaction of understanding a complex idea is comparable to writing a good poem.” As a measure of their regard, when Professor Gatz first was undergoing chemotherapy, her graduate students pruned the fruit trees and worked the gardens for her.