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BATESON: After the Philippines I got a job teaching anthropology at Northeastern University. Before we went to the Philippines I was teaching Arabic at Harvard. But that was obviously not a very marketable skill in Manila. The teaching I have done since the Philippines has been in cultural anthropology. Then a few years later we went to Iran. My husband was interested in international management training but I was not interested in going to a country where I would have to start again from scratch in terms of knowledge of the language and culture. I argued that if he wanted to be involved in international management training, I was willing to go abroad if we went to the Middle East.

We went to Iran — I had wanted to learn Persian for quite a while anyhow. We were in Iran for most of the next six years, where I did various jobs in educational planning and some field work. This was before the revolution. There's a good deal about Iran in Full Circles, where I'm trying to set the experiences of these American women in comparison to other cultures. I was there while the revolution was heating up. At the point where my daughter Vanni and I left Iran, all public educational institutions were closed down by strikes.

I came back to the United States in January, and started looking for a job. It was clear that the best place at that time for me to look was in administration, since senior teaching posts were overloaded, but I also agreed to write a memoir of my parents. Then I became a Dean at Amherst College for three years.

EDGE: Let's talk about that.

BATESON: There are two things to be said about that experience. One was that it was an opportunity for me to think about how whole systems function. Think of a college. It has a physical aspect, a financial one, there are human beings involved in it, their ideas, information flows around it. But very few people in a college think in terms of that whole process. Looking at that was very useful to me; I learned a lot from it. And got a lot of pleasure out of trying to understand the sub-cultures, the different departments, and what were the various kinds of cultural lags and blockages in the institution. For instance, I took the lead when I was there in moving from a situation where only a few scientists were using computers in rather advanced ways, to really bringing computing into the life of the institution. It was extremely interesting to see the blind spots of people, and the way they went about their business in terms of competition between the different units of the college instead of understanding that effective synergy of all of those units was what they depended on. That's the positive side — it was a situation where I was able to learn a lot, and in a sense it's good that I got out of it because one's capacity for being a participant observer is eroded by the pressure of a job like that. My ability to analyze it in those terms was fading as I was trying to keep up with the day-to-day stuff.

Now the negative side of it is that Amherst College had just become coeducational, and department after department had chewed up and spit out the women they had hired for faculty positions. I was in many ways caught between senior members of the faculty who didn't welcome women, particularly not in positions of authority, and the women who thought everything should be solved for them overnight, which it wasn't going to be. That was a very stressful position. Amherst is a place that is very suspicious of administrators anyhow. Then when the president died, without warning, of a heart attack, a few senior people, acting in an "advisory" role, saw the opportunity to stage a coup. And it became untenable for me.