LY #39 Time Passages

Right now, as I write, a person I first met as a young graduate student at the University of Utah is giving the B. Aubrey Fisher 27th Annual Memorial Lecture.

The blurb from the University of Utah Communication Department says,

• "War Scholar to Discuss Communication's Role in National Security

  Professor Bryan Taylor, a renowned communication scholar with a specialty in studying the nuclear and (post-) Cold War rhetoric and culture, will present the Department of Communication's 27th annual B. Aubrey Fisher Memorial Lecture, titled War Voice: Exploring Communication's Intrinsic Resources for the Study of Security on Thursday, October 24th at 7:30 p.m."
  
  I first met Brian back in 1984.  I fear that when I was introduced to him my goofiness erupted and I jumped up a couple of times and commented on his tallness.  This was very poor impression management.  But that side of me seems to come out in the workplace, that goofiness.  I think I get it from my mom and her love of vaudeville.
  
  

  

  From the proceedings of the NCA Ethnography Pre-Conference

  I worked along-side young Bryan as we taught breakout sections of a large class called "Introduction to Human Communication."  The class was divided into large lecture classes and smaller, graduate-student-led discussion sections.  We taught in the mornings and took our graduate classes in the afternoon.  It was my second quarter teaching, the first being at Idaho State.  I was also living on my own for the first time in my life.  It was a scary time.  But Bryan didn't treat me like an idiot. 
  
  
  
  I have a vague memory of Bryan using his height one day in one of our graduate student bullpen.   When an extremely irate male student came to my office and started to raise a hand above his head and talk to me in a very loud voice.  I felt some fear and also some embarrassment that I'd let a student appointment get so heated.  I don't remember whether I asked the student to leave...probably not.  I do remember Bryan standing up from his desk (his back had been to us the whole time) and making his physical presence known.  It could be that he also said something to the student.  It could be that the student just walked out.  I just know Bryan had the guts to just be present and
  
    Bryan was a very nice, extremely smart young man and I'm not at all surprised that he has become "Distinguished Lecturer Bryan Taylor, Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado." 
  
  
  I, of course, am not a "scholar" but rather an evoker of understanding.  I haven't had an academic article published since 1993.  I've had papers at conventions, of course, but never did the hard, time consuming work of submitting any new original research to the tender mercies of the editor of a communication journal.  Frankly, once was enough.   I just didn't have the energy and personal fortitude to continue as a researcher. 
  
  I've been fortunate to be a teacher, to have my work-life judged not by the collection and submission of "new knowledge" but by teaching and service.  And I think it may be easier to be a goofball when one is a teacher than when one is a researcher.