As a student archivist, one of my primary projects is writing biographies for the more than one thousand individuals listed in the News and Communication Services Records. These individuals are primarily faculty and staff who were associated with Oregon State between 1940 and 2004. Oftentimes, the collection only holds an administrative document related to the individual. If I’m lucky, there might also be a CV or an article related to their professional work. While I do perform additional research to fill out a brief biography meant to communicate their birthdate, academic and professional history, and association with Oregon State, as well as to differentiate individuals with the same name, I’m still often left with only a snapshot of their life. I wish I could write detailed life stories for each individual in this collection, but alas, I am limited by time.
Margaret Palen is an example of the many individuals I wish to learn more about. The News and Communication Services Records hold two newspaper clippings related to her suspension and eventual termination from Oregon State in the 1970s. Reading these, I wished to understand her life beyond these events as well as share her professional accomplishments. As much as this blog post is about Palen, it is also about the privilege of doing the research and filling in the historical record.
Who was Margaret Krug Palen, and what more can we learn about her life?
Margaret L. Palen (née Krug) was born on May 14, 1931, in Iowa. She attended Iowa State College (now Iowa State University), where she earned a bachelor’s degree in home economics in 1952. After graduating, Palen was a textile chemist for one year before becoming a home extension agent in Iowa from 1953 until 1955. That year, she joined the Oregon State staff as a county extension agent for 4-H. She resigned in 1957 after her marriage to become a homemaker, working temporarily from 1958 to 1959 to aid Marion County as an extension agent. According to Palen’s employment records, her supervisors found her work to be effective and of quality. Palen returned to Oregon State in 1966, becoming a home economics extension agent in Tillamook County. She also became a master’s student at Oregon State in the early 1970s.
Despite her tenured status, Palen was suspended, then terminated, from her job in 1972 due to ten charges filed by Lee Kolmer, head of the Cooperative Extension Service. From August-September 1972, a five-person committee conducted hearings to evaluate Kolmer’s complaints, although the members of that committee are unknown.
During these hearings, several witnesses appeared before the committee. Among them were a number of Tillamook County residents who spoke in favor of Palen’s work in their community. Even so, the committee found four of the charges to be proven and just cause for dismissal.
In October 1972, the faculty committee recommended that the matter would be best resolved by termination. Upon hearing this decision, OSU President Robert MacVicar fired Palen. This decision is included in the article, “Tenured Assistant Terminated” published by the Corvallis Gazette Times on December 21, 1972.
This is where the story ends in SCARC’s holdings. However, Oregon court records indicate that Palen did not succeed in protesting her suspension before the faculty hearing committee. In 1974, she appealed via the Oregon Court of Appeals, where the Board maintained that the university had just cause for dismissal. While we do not know the original seven charges, we do know these four because they were discussed in this case. They include that:
- Palen reportedly made unsupported claims of improper and sometimes criminal conduct on the part of University administrators
- Palen reportedly was unwilling to cooperate with 4-H and Youth staff and leaders (that is to say, failing to adequately perform her responsibilities to the Tillamook County 4-H program)
- Palen reportedly was unwilling to live in Tillamook County, and while the Extension Service did not present evidence of a formal written policy regarding place of residence, “Mrs. Palen had been informed of the desirability and necessity of living near her place of employment”
- Palen reportedly refused to respond to direction from and provide a schedule of her activities to her County Chairman, claiming that she was on special assignment and not required to report to the Chairman
The Oregon Court of Appeals found the first and last charges and last “could properly conclude that petitioner’s conduct constituted cause for termination”. In the second, the Oregon Board of Education was found erred. In the third, the charge could not be sustained “because it was not proven to be one of the petitioner’s responsibilities to do so”. Therefore, the OSU president’s decision to fire Palen was upheld.
While only listed as a staff member in Oregon State General Catalogs until the 1972-73 academic year, Palen’s name is listed in the 1974 Oregon State commencement program as a Master of Science in Education recipient (she likely graduated in Fall 1973, causing her to be listed in the 1974 program, because other documents in Oregon Digital list her graduating class as the Class of ‘73). That is to say, it appears that she still graduated from Oregon State after her termination.
It’s difficult to trace the next decade of Palen’s life. She likely continued her career in community-oriented work outside of Oregon State. She also likely continued to raise and support her family. It’s possible that she spent some time traveling with her husband, Kenneth Palen, as his obituary states that the couple traveled to every continent and seventy-five countries of the world – an endeavor that would certainly take time to complete.
A simple internet search of Palen’s name reveals that in the 1980s, she began her writing career. Inspired by her German family and her husband’s Scottish family’s immigration to Iowa, she authored Genealogical Research Guide to Germany in 1988, a guide for those individuals interested in tracing their ancestry. She would go on to write three related works: German Settlers of Iowa: Their Descendants and European Ancestors in 1994, Genealogical Guide to Tracing Ancestors in Germany in 1995, and Germany and Scotland Immigrants to Iowa in 2019.
Searches in Oregon Digital reveal that Palen also continued her extension work as a volunteer executive with the International Executive Services Corporation. In 1996, she returned from a trip to Ghana, where she designed a clothing construction course for the African Women Entrepreneurial Training Centre. An image from this trip was even featured in the Oregon Stater in 1996.
In 1999, she worked with the US Agency for International Development in Mozambique, featured in that year’s Oregon Stater.
In both editions, Palen is referred to by her graduating class of 1973 and without reference to her prior employment with the university. She also continued international extension work to improve food production, textiles, and clothing, through travel to countries including Ghana, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Belarus, Bolivia, and Jamaica, described in her 2018 book A Different World: My Life and Making a Difference in the World.
When I first stumbled upon Palen’s name, I feared that she would only be remembered incompletely. Her story illustrates how important it is to paint full pictures of individuals in history, and how sometimes, preservation can be biased. Simply because the News and Communication Services Records only contains materials related to her termination, an individual utilizing these records might have a partial view of Palen. Further research shows that her dismissal from Oregon State did not stop her from continuing her career in extension work. Palen continued home economics work internationally for several decades, even earning recognition for this work from her alma mater and previous employer. It also shows other career-oriented pursuits, writing four books on the topic of genealogy and a fifth on her own life and work.
~ Grace Knutsen
Grace Knutsen is a student archivist at Special Collections and Archives Research Center. She is an Oregon State alumna and Master of Library and Information Science student.