May 5, 2005
From punch cards to the Web: Washburn looks back
The weekend after he took up his duties as UW registrar in 1969, Tim Washburn took his family on an outing to dig razor clams. As the family returned home on Sunday, June 29, they were shocked by a news story on the car radio: The Administration Building (now Gerberding Hall) had been bombed — presumably by anti-Vietnam War protesters. Washburn rushed to campus to see how his office — then on the first floor of that building — had weathered the blast.
“The place was a mess,” Washburn recalled. “There was a lot of water damage from broken pipes. And our copy machine, which was just inside the door, had been blown to pieces.”
Luckily, no one was injured and nothing of major importance was lost. But it was an explosive beginning to Washburn’s long career in Admissions and Records — one that is soon to end. He will retire May 31 from his current position as assistant vice president for enrollment services.
It is perhaps fortunate for the University that registrar was not Washburn’s first job here. The bombing incident was followed by several tense years during which he was treated to the sight of police in riot gear running past his office window and was once forced to evacuate his home after a death threat. None of this was quite what he had in mind when he came to the University as a systems analyst in 1967. A graduate of Whitman College with a degree in economics, Washburn had started his career at IBM.
“But in those days IBM stood for ‘I’ve been moved,’” he said. “To get ahead with that company, you had to be willing to be transferred. Well, I’m a native Northwesterner and I didn’t want to move.”
So, Washburn tried to think of a local institution where he could contribute and decided that the UW was a good bet. The new office he joined — called the Office of Management Systems — was taking a first crack at long-range planning for the University, something that hadn’t been high on the agenda before that time. But soon, Washburn was being asked to help design a new computer system for admissions and registration, and before long he was named registrar. Eight years later, he became the director of both admissions and records.
The changes since then have been phenomenal. “When I came here, there were very few people who even knew what a computer was,” Washburn recalled. “So if you knew anything about computing, you were somebody who knew something that nobody else did. Today it’s unusual if you’re an employee of the UW and don’t have a computer. And you can do all the things from your desktop that it used to take a trained person to do.”
In his early days as registrar, Washburn said, each student received a pack of computer punch cards with his or her name and student number on it. Students would go to a large room with a bunch of tables, each with a departmental representative who had section cards for each section of a course. When a student registered for a course, his or her punch card would go behind the section card.
Washburn said one of the fears of that turbulent time was that violence would erupt in the registration room and that tables would be overturned, destroying the organization represented by the cards. So his office actually made duplicate copies of the cards each night in order to have a backup in case it was needed.
Punch cards gave way to an optical scan system in which students filled in bubbles on a form to indicate their class preferences. But, Washburn said, probably half the students wanted to change something after they received their class assignments, and the process reverted to a fieldhouse sign-up to add and drop classes.
For years registration moved around on campus. When Washburn started as registrar, it was at the then Administration Building. He remembers the line snaking across Red Square, up the steps to the flagpole, around the flagpole and back again. After Schmitz hall opened in 1970, registration was held on the first floor there. Then it moved to the old Hutchinson Hall gym (now the Cabaret Theater), and finally to an underground area next to By George where the roof leaked.
In time, the fieldhouse arrangement gave way to terminals for adds and drops, but even then students had to stand in line to get it taken care of.
“We thought that there would always and forever be registration lines,” Washburn said. “In fact, Schmitz Hall was designed to be larger at the top so students could line up around the building and be sheltered from the rain.”
The breakthrough came in the late 1980s with the development of voice recognition software. The UW purchased the software and went to a telephone registration system called STAR in 1987. That was followed by today’s Web-based system, which Washburn lauds for giving students more and better information about course availability.
The changes in admissions during Washburn’s tenure have been equally amazing if less technological. When he started, the University had an open admissions system, accepting any student who met minimum qualifications. But by 1974, it became obvious that the University could not serve all the qualified students. So admissions worked with the faculty to develop what was then called a “probability number,” based on high school grades and test scores.
Was there a protest against the change? Washburn said no — “There’s always been a sense that the University was a special place and unique among state institutions,” he said. But a flap did develop when the faculty proposed using the high school GPA from the core courses only, which excluded the arts.
“There was a large community meeting in Kane Hall where educators from high schools came out and talked about the importance of the arts in our community, saying that by restricting the GPA to core courses, it would turn students away from the arts,” Washburn said. “After this fiery public hearing, the faculty went back to the drawing board and did some analysis, which showed them it didn’t make a whole lot of difference whether you took the overall GPA or one in the core. So the overall GPA was used.”
Washburn said the UW was able to avoid accusations that the more restricted admission system would deny access to underrepresented populations because the Educational Opportunity Program was already in place. “For all my career, a major effort from the registrar’s area to track students and understand how they are impacted by various systems has included a concern about access to students from non-traditional backgrounds,” he said.
Once the more exclusive admissions system was in place, the Admissions Office needed to consider how to evaluate grades coming from a wide variety of high schools, so they began tracking how students from those high schools performed at the University. The result is a system that is “increasingly complex,” Washburn said. And of course it got more so after voters passed
I-200, an initiative that abolished racial preferences in college admissions. The UW had to scramble to modify its practices while still providing access to underrepresented students.
“I’ve always considered the admissions and records area to be a service office to the University faculty,” Washburn said of his job. “We exist to support the instructional effort. Whether it’s scheduling classes or doing studies to help faculty understand why students are or aren’t staying at the University — our efforts are all designed to create an educational environment that is as supportive as possible to students.”
Washburn has extended those responsibilities out to colleagues at other universities, holding a variety of positions on the College Board, including chairing the committee that revised the SAT to include a writing component. Last year he was given the Distinguished Service Award by the board’s Western Regional Assembly.
Supporting his nomination for that award, Susan Wilburn, director of undergraduate admissions for the University of California system, wrote, “Tim Washburn is a champion for students as well as a good friend to many in the local, regional and national admissions community over the years . . . He can be counted on for his expert advice and wise counsel, his clear focus on meeting institutional and student needs, and his steady hand during tumultuous times. He is a valued asset to the admissions community.”
Soon, that valued asset won’t be around any longer. This June, Washburn will miss his first commencement in 36 years. He’ll be on his 32-foot power boat, Angelena, heading for the northern end of Vancouver Island. After that, he said, he’s promised to spend the rest of the summer helping his daughter and her family remodel their house. Then he’s off on a series of trips. In fact, he’s booked through the end of the year. After that, he doesn’t know.
Looking back on his nearly 38 year career with the University, Washburn feels satisfied. “I like the people that I work with and I like what we work for,” he said. “What I most enjoy about the University is that our accomplishments aren’t measured in the bottom line at the end of a year. They’re measured in improved service to our faculty and students.”
