Leona E. Tyler - Academic Career

Academic Career

Tyler started her university teaching career at the University of Oregon as an instructor in 1940. She joined the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon in the fall of 1940. She became Dean of the Graduate School in 1965 and remained so until her mandated retirement at the age of 65 in 1971. However, she remained active even after the retirement. She remained at the University of Oregon till her death in 1993. A new life began for Leona in a summer course in individual differences at the University of Minnesota with Donald G. Paterson who recognized her ability and persuaded her to enter the PhD program in psychology. In that department, she was also particularly influenced by Florence Goodenough whose developmental textbook Leona later revised. For her doctoral dissertation she chose to study the development of interests in high school girls. The interest test she constructed was a project that reflected her many years of working with adolescents in the course of self-discovery and much of her subsequent research, teaching, and practice. She was granted the PhD from Minnesota in 1941. Throughout her career, Leona continued to counsel students on their professional and personal concerns. Her view was that the purpose of counseling was to encourage natural, life-long developmental processes as distinguished from psychotherapy which, she felt, was more appropriate to clinicians' dealings with disturbances of personality. In 1965, Leona became Dean of the Graduate School and remained so until her mandated retirement at the age of 65 in 1971, still very active intellectually and professionally, as she was to remain for the next 20 years. Leona's thinking and views never stopped. Her early concerns about professional interests led to a longitudinal study of the broader question of the directions of development that interests and personality take. A major research finding was that, as people thought about careers, dislikes and avoidances were more important than likes. This research led to the study of how choices organized peoples' lives. She developed the Choice Pattern Technique, that, required people to indicate their choices of occupations and free-time activities. In a study done by Tyler, she compared 3 similarly selected samples of early adolescents from the United States, the Netherlands, and India using the choice-pattern procedure, a sorting technique designed to reveal the nature of the concepts a person uses to select from the possibilities available to him the courses of action that determine the direction of his later development. Numerical scores and style and content features of the sorting of occupational titles were compared. Results indicate that concepts for thinking about occupations and the self were most numerous and highly differentiated in the American group, and least numerous and differentiated in the Indian group. All 3 groups emphasized intrinsic rather than extrinsic aspects of the work tasks. It was generally hypothesized that external structuring of the environment and internal structuring of possibilities are inversely related. Leona was a very skilled writer. Her books were written to clarify and organize her own thinking for her courses and her students. Her concern for clarifying the human puzzle of personal change moved, over time, from individual differences to individuality, and from a psychometric perspective to a systems-ecological view of real-world choices. Her textbooks were highly regarded and widely used, and the three editions of The Work of the Counselor were perhaps the leading influence on the development of the counseling profession in their day (Sandburg, 1994). Leona was disciplined but also a warm, generous, and idealistic person. She took friendship and duty seriously, and so it is no surprise that in addition to her teaching, counseling, research, and writing she seemed always to have time and energy for community and professional service and administration. She served on many local and state boards and was an active participant in national groups and movements to better peoples' lives. Everyone respected and trusted her rationality, directness, honesty, fairness, and decisiveness in both conflict and agreement. Psychology is definitely better for Leona's services. There were numerous honors and recognitions for Leona. She was successively elected president of the Oregon Psychological Association, the Western Psychological Association, and the Counseling Division of the American Psychological Association, and finally, she served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1972-73. She was only the fourth female to hold that position in the APA She received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the University of Minnesota, an honorary doctorate from Linfield College, the Distinguished Service Award from the University of Oregon, a University colloquium series in her honor on her eightieth birthday in 1986, and the American Psychological Foundation's Gold Medal for Life-time Achievement in the Public Interest. She was committed to the improvement of human possibilities through teaching, writing, research, and caring for psychology and its contribution to society. Her work has emphasized the importance of individuality as it exists in systems that change over time. Leona Tyler was strong and organized in thought and action and generous and caring in her sentiments. I believe she left a great legacy of significant ideas and views in psychology. Her view was that the purpose of counseling was to encourage natural, life-long developmental processes as distinguished from psychotherapy, which she believed was more appropriate to clinicians' dealings with disturbances of personality. It is noted that Tyler's concern for clarifying the human puzzle of personal change moved, over time, from individual differences to individuality and to a new system of a view of real-world choices. Psychologists who chose the counseling specialty in its early days are concerned about a change of focus that seems to be occurring today. Originally, counseling psychology was concerned with helping individuals to understand themselves, make important choices, and plan their lives. It is now closer to clinical psychology and helps individuals to recover from mental illnesses, change unsatisfactory habit patterns, or solve personal problems. The loss of the separate identity of counseling psychology leaves some important human needs unmet. There are many indications that the crucial difficulty for individuals in our time is a search for identity. Ironically, it seems that if counseling is to help people with this major problem, it must become less problem-centered than it presently is. I find myself questioning more and more the assumption that for counseling to be effective the client must take the initiative in seeking it. This is, after all, an assumption, not a conclusion based on evidence. Instead of taking it for granted, perhaps we should do some serious thinking about how we might open channels of communication with persons who now see no need for our assistance.