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Page took his sabbatical and was replaced by Acting Dean John Schuchman. For more than fifteen years, Stokoe's appointment had been renewed by Detmold, who as dean, was required to "consider" the recommendations of the department members in making the decision. At first, those recommendations were favorable to Stokoe. Dorothy Casterline describes the department during the early years of Stokoe's chairmanship as a nice place to work. I realize that I wasn't privy to all the interactions, political or otherwise, and I know we had some uncomfortable times. But by and large, we had a good group of people, and we were all friends. I still remember the whole department taking the English majors out to lunch. At that time we only had a few majors, and the department was small, so it was easily managed. In time, things changed we had more students and more faculty members. I don't remember when we stopped the lunches, but I do remember that I was both on the receiving end as a student and on the giving end as an instructor, and how much fun it was. But Stokoe's popularity among the members of his department declined steadily for several years. Stokoe was aware of this, and explained it in this way:
I insisted that exposure to good literature was really secondary to the task that faced us all with most of our students to make sure that their ability to read English and their ability to write English had reached a point where they were competent to become critical consumers of literature. I kept insisting on that too much, and of course I was notorious for doing sign language research and belonging to the linguistics club. I suppose the other members of the department thought I was trying to make the Department of English into a Department of Linguistics. That wasn't the case, and I
didn't insist that everybody use The Calculus of Structure, but I suppose there was some tension there.11
It was inevitable that the members of the department who had been there before Stokoe arrived would resent him, but by not many of those were left. Robert Panara had resigned in

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