The Michigan Daily- Tuesday, August 9, 1983 - Page 7 Vivian Shapiro, an assistant professor at the School of Social Work, is also the to do is sometimes difficult, she says, but she enjoys meeting interesting wife of the University's president. Finding time to do everything she wants people as the president's wife as well as having her own career. Campus life suits Shapiro By CHERYL BAACKE Vivian Shapiro remembers feeling awkward and ill-at-ease when her family moved into the stately white house on South University with its stiff for- mality and Victorian furniture. Living in the campus White House puts the family in the public eye, but Shapiro says she has grown used to the loss of privacy since 1979. PROFILE SHE ENJOYS the crowds trooping through the house for parties and honors convocations, and even the less formal visits, such as students protesting budget cuts on her front lawn. Shapiro enjoys living in the middle of campus because she can watch the cycles of the University where things are always changing, but still remain the same. "I used to say that living in Ann Arbor was like living in a comic book because only the readers gets older - the students are always the same age," she said. "IT'S NOT JUST whether the leaves turn orange, brown or whatever. (It's) students coming to town in the fall season, and graduation, and tours of new freshmen coming by - there's a nice feeling about that." Dressed casually in a striped blouse and blue skirt, Shapiro sips iced tea and talks about the kind of juggling act she's had to master since her husband JIused to say that living in Ann Arbor was like living in a comic book because only the reader gets older - the students are always the same age.' -Vivian Shapiro became University president in 1979. When her husband first became president, she says, she was concerned that it would be difficult to keep her roles as a social work professor and the wife of the University's top administrator apart. "IT HAS BEEN a complicated thing to be a part of the academic community and to then also become the president's wife," she says. "I think a major problem is time, and also for my own colleagues to know that when I participate I'm really participating as myself and not as part of my husband or as part of the administration - and that's a complicated separation." Now, however, Shapiro is more comfortable balan- cing the two, and she says she keeps them "quite separate." IN HER ROLE AS a faculty member, she has researched the mental health of children under three, trying to determine ifa child could have developmen- tal problems and helping the family work with the possibility. She has also taught classes in the School of=Social Work dealing with clinical and counseling methods. Beginning this fall, she will serve as a liason between the School of Social Work and the Children's Psychiatric Hospital, exploring how student training programs in child welfare can be improved. Career women like Shapiro weren't too common in her hometown of Montreal, Canada. "In my generation there was not an expectation that you would work, that you would necessarily want to w6rk, or that you would have to work," she said. IN 1957, SHAPIRO received degrees in English and history from McGill University in Montreal. She came to Ann Arbor with her family in the mid-'60s, and earned her masters degree in social work in 1969. For nearly 10 years, in the late 50s and '60s, Shapiro shelved her career to work on raising her family. Af- ter making the sacrifice, Shapiro says she sym- pathizes with ambitious young people trying to strike some sort of balance between a career and a family. "I think that young women especially are struggling with these issues and I think young men are as well," she said. "I think we don't pay enough attention to how hard it is for men to cope with that." "I'm probably pretty-old-fashioned in terms of my own priorities;" shetcontinued. "If I had to say what would I hang on to the most, I think it would be my feeling of providing a center for my family and my children." Her oldest daughter, Anne, 25, works as an ad- ministrative assistant to a hospital planner; Marilyn is in the University's Medical School; Janet is an honor's psychology student at the University, and Karen will begin her first year at New York Univer- sity inthe fall. Profile appears every Tuesday.