Succeeding through “Failure”, Or When Oral History Doesn’t Happen
by Elisa Miller, Student Historian 2022/2024
Sometimes projects go off without a hitch, executed flawlessly from start to finish to manufacture a perfectly wrapped product the creator can take pride in. And sometimes projects never take off. Yet, having experienced the latter this semester, I’ve learned that a “failed” project can be fulfilling and something to be proud of. There are disappointments and frustrations, sure, but there’s something oddly satisfying about doing all the early work and preparation for essentially no outcome. So, here’s the story of my failed oral history project.
I entered my second year as student historian with a dilemma. I’d spent the summer roaming through the UW Digital Collections and going into the archives to find a new topic. This had been a struggle for me during my first year, so I wanted a head start going into the semester. After the Supreme Court overturned Affirmative Action, I began thinking about UW admissions and how they’d applied Affirmative Action over the years. So, I went into the archives and pulled boxes on admissions, Affirmative Action, anything I could find related to this issue. As an Asian American, I was particularly interested in admissions policies regarding Asian Americans due to the infamous notion that U.S. universities discriminate against Asians. After a few weeks of this, I realized the confidential nature of admissions was going to be a major roadblock. There was simply too much information I’d never be able to access.
As I was having this realization, I also had a major change of plans in my academic life. I had a last-minute opportunity to study abroad in Dublin at Trinity College in the spring, meaning I’d have to give up the position. Luckily, my wonderful supervisor, Digital and Media Archivist Cat Phan, was incredibly supportive and flexible, giving me the space and time to decide how to move forward. I decided to try and do a semester-long project instead of a year-long one. We talked through it and found the perfect way to tie everything together: an oral history project. It was a great way to work around the confidentiality of admissions by directly talking to Asian American students about their admissions experience and could also be completed in a semester if planned efficiently. I also already completed an oral history interview last February, so I was familiar with the process. I got the go-ahead from Oral Historian Troy Reeves in mid-September and immediately dove into preparing.
Given my condensed timeline, it was imperative to first find interviewees. I wrote up a proposal and sent it out to a few Asian American student organizations and Professor Lori Lopez, the director of the Asian American Studies program. I never ended up hearing back from any of the organizations, which was perhaps a bad omen from the onset, but Professor Lopez graciously agreed to send it out to all the students participating in the program. Here was my first success! Two students emailed me from Professor Lopez’s announcement indicating interest in my project. I got back to them and started preparing for the pre-interviews, interview topics, and my oral history “elevator” speech.
Some of the topics I wished to cover in the interviews:
Statistics: ACT/SAT scores, GPA, class rank
Why choose Wisconsin, as well as asking about any other schools they applied to
Asian American identity: how they understand this identity, how it plays a role in daily life/overall, how it did or didn’t impact admissions
With two students officially interested and two or three of my friends as backups, I had enough for a project. Troy had explained that three was the minimum number for a project, and with my timeline I’d ideally record around five or six interviews. I had a vague date for a pre-interview with one of the students, and the other had yet to respond, so it was time to play the waiting game. As October came and went, I continued to formulate my questions/topics for the interviews and think about how to center the project. What was the priority, their Asian American identity or the admissions process? I wanted to balance both, to dissect when the two intertwined and if they could ever truly be separated. The Affirmative Action question was difficult for me to tangle with. I didn’t want to catch people off guard and force them to take a stance on the issue, but I was genuinely interested in their thoughts. I decided to float it at the pre-interviews and gather a sense of the student’s comfortability.
Come Halloween, I had yet to hear back from either of the students who’d initially reached out and no other students responded. I started to panic, worried my project was falling apart before it even truly began. I reached out to both again, hoping I didn’t sound desperate. My friends were looking like they’d have to do some heavy lifting. All I could do was wait some more and keep working. I continued to research UW admissions and general Asian American admissions trends across the country: statistics, news articles, personal stories, I looked through everything. My project was becoming clearer and clearer in my mind, and I yearned to fill the gaps of my research with student’s voices.
But nobody got back to me. Disappointed, but not necessarily surprised, I was left with a few friends to turn to at the start of November. The clock was ticking as I had wanted to get all the interviews done by Thanksgiving in order to have enough time to finish processing the audio files by Christmas. I had the great misfortune to time all of this with midterms. My friends were, understandably, wishy-washy and hard to nail down with specific times. After two weeks of trying to rally them, I accepted defeat. There was nobody to participate in my project. My project was not going to happen. I had all the questions ready to go, I knew how they would create a cohesive narrative, the coffee shops for pre-interviews were chosen as well as the rooms for the interviews, the research was solid, and I was more than refreshed on oral history. Basically, everything was good to go, but now nothing was going to come of months of work.
I was disheartened, to say the least. It wasn’t even that I had done all this preparation for nothing, it was the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to do my project. I was genuinely interested in the topic and really felt I was targeting a group of voices that haven’t been heard on this campus. It was going to be a good project. Within all these feelings, there was something kind of amusing about the whole thing: it died because nobody wanted to participate. I had to accept that it was out of my hands, I couldn’t force anyone into an interview. That wouldn’t be fun for anybody.
So, I made peace with it. I realized I’d still done something. All that research and preparation may not have led to interviews, but I still learned a lot about admissions policies and their complicated relationship with Asian Americans. It also prompted a lot of questions, perhaps even more so than answers. Questions I would’ve loved to discuss with my peers, but nonetheless were ones for me to reflect on. The skeleton of the project still existed; it just never came fully to life. Would I have loved to give it a shock of electricity to the project’s heart? Of course. But that was impossible, and ultimately, I was still proud of everything I’d done this semester. Perhaps one day someone else will come along and revive my beloved oral history project, in a time when people are ready to share.
