42 More Working Days Left - Old Papers

Last week I was in the basement looking for financial paperwork more than six years old -- shreddable paperwork.  Among the boxes of old checks I also found two boxes of notecards covered with references to books and articles.  I used these boxes for my dissertation.  I don't know how they survived the first burn through I made 10 years ago when I through out all the photocopies of useful articles.

There were around 500 cards. Maybe a few more, maybe a few less.  I tossed them into the recycling. 

23 year old notecard.

LY #135 Following Directions and Dissertating

A. Ray Olpin Student Union, U of Utah

Today is the first day of my last spring break.  I just posted my grades into Banner, now operating under the friendly appellation of "Bobcat Web."  (Banner is the super software that runs the school.)

Although I had many friendly, likable students, this wasn't my favorite quarter ever, as previous posts will attest.  Besides the poor choices I made in delivering my classes, I also had students who were making poor choices.  For example, the failing students who asked me to clear them to drop the class.  I did so and then sent them emails telling them that they had to finish the process by contacting the admissions office.  They never did so I was giving out Fs this morning, something I don't like to do.  Or the student who wanted an incomplete but who was not willing to fill out the incomplete contract form in order to get the "I" on the transcript.  And finally there were the students who seemed to choose not to read the directions for assignments. 

Why do people choose not to read the directions or not to follow the directions?  I  usually put everything a student needs to know about what is required for an assignment in the assignment directions.  When I don't, I'm always ready to hear student arguments about their grades.  I used to work with another teacher at COCC who would say, "I can't say what an 'A' speech is but I know it when I see it."  I thought this was and is a deeply immoral way of managing classroom economics.  Students should be able to figure out just what they need to do to get an A.  What I can't figure out is why students with grade concerns don't read the directions.  So, this wasn't a great quarter.

But it doesn't compare with the horrible winter of 1993.  I was reminded of that quarter last night when I went out to dinner at the Tumalo Feed Company with my friend Carolyn.  She said when we first met, "You didn't like me."

I begged to differ.  I said, "I may have been brusque and rude, but I didn't not like you.  I can just be an asshole sometimes."

She said that at the time I was really focused on my dissertation.  And then I remembered that period and realized, though I didn't want to say, that I probably wasn't thinking about anyone but myself at the time.  That was the winter when I got my worst ever student evaluations.  I believe that one reasons for the low evaluations was that  I was focused on defending my doctoral dissertation and also editing my only journal article based on one of its chapters.  

The defense marked the end of a long struggle with my doctoral committee and chair.  I wasn't sure I was going to make it.  The academic hazing that would not be complete until I survived two hours of questions.  I knew that the 350 pages of writing weren't going to stand up for themselves and that I  needed to prove that I was worthy of entering the gang.  Even as I was flying down to Utah (not as fun as Flying Down to Rio) my Chair was calling my spouse trying to get him to stop me because one member of the committee was having a family emergency.  Once I got to Utah and checked in I found that the defense had to be moved up a day.  So I unscheduled and rescheduled a room in the Olpin Union and ordered coffee and a fruit and pastry plate.  Then, on a Friday or Saturday morning (I forget which) I got to the union early and placed 4 talismans (good luck charms) in the four corners of the room.  Oh, yes, I was calling on all possible forces to aid me in my endeavor.  I remember that Dr. Fox met me at the Olpin coffee shop both before and after the defense, each time giving me a hug - the first for good luck and the second as "Congratulations!"

So the academic pressures I was under that winter sadly slid into my classrooms.  I was quite cranky and sarcastic at times.  Oh my, did I get some low low scores.  Deservedly so.

This morning after I input grades I looked for those two-decades-past evaluations so that I could share them with you.  A cursory examination of the appropriate file drawer did not reveal the 1993 forms.  I did see some from earlier and later in my career.   That led me to think about what I'll be doing with those files.  Perhaps I'll share some on my return from break and then burn them.

On Monday, March 31, I'll start the final countdown of my last 55 working days.  

LY #118 The Joe Louis Chapter

Back in the early 90s I spent a year working with an organization that is now known as Oregon Humanities  as what was then called an Oregon Chautauqua speaker.   During that time I went on five or six jaunts to various colleges around the state talking about the second boxing match between Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, and the German Heavyweight Champion, Max Schmeling.   Of course I did most of my traveling in February, Black History Month.  I remember the biggest paycheck I got for this activity was around $800 (paid by the Humanities Association) for a trip to Rogue Community College where I wound up giving a formal speech to a very small audience (fewer than 10 people, as I remember).

I was not a very good speaker in those days.  I read too much and didn't make enough eye contact.  But it was a good experience and helpful in my development as a teacher of public speaking because I learned a lot more about what not to do.  At the time I also had a very poor copy of film images of Louis on videotape.  The vast storage house I'm typing onto would make a presentation given today so much more lively!

 My presentation was based on the largest chapter in my doctoral dissertation, the one that focused on "The Fight of the Century."    It's not my intention here to review the history of the fight.  If you want to know more about it, follow the links.   I just wanted to say a little bit here about the chapter, the challenges of writing it, and the good it did me.

As I mentioned, a major part of the good was that I was able to turn the chapter into a public presentation which, though usually ill attended, brought in some extra money and built my own public speaking skills.  (Didn't hurt my Report of Service, either!)

Though the speech was a relatively simple historical presentation, the chapter on which it was based was a very difficult one to write.  It finally wound up coming in at 80 out of a dissertation total of 388 pages -- indeed a heavyweight chunk of a chapter.   It was one of the three chapters I wrote that focused on "social dramas" or public events that engaged the focus both the national and the African-American press.  For each of these events (the Fight, the Detroit Riots of '43, and the Texas Primary Decision of '46) I reviewed stories written for both white and black audiences and compared them, focusing most closely on the voice of Life magazine.  I called these the "horizontal" or "longitudinal" analyses.  The "vertical" or "latitudinal" analysis was the chronological page by page coding of every African or African-American face in every issue Life magazine printed between 1938 and 1946.  I wound up looking at over 40 thousand pages and coding every image in a variety of ways. 

Oh, yes, if I had to do it all again I would have chosen some single photographer who wasn't very well known and focused in on his or her images.  But I didn't, Blanche.

But back to the Joe Louis chapter.  Not only did I have the history itself and my analysis of a few dozen articles to review.  I also gave myself a thorough grounding in the ideological analysis of sports and read everything I could find on the meaning of boxing.  I had stacks of quotes from Joyce Carol Oates!  I had so much stuff and I couldn't figure out how it all went together.   For three hours one morning I kept trying to figure out what the weather had been like on the day of the match!  I wanted to start with that.  Or perhaps I was avoiding actually trying to write anything substantial because I was just stuck.

Then I was saved by a dream.  One night, after a few days of struggling with the material, I dreamt that I saw myself sitting down and writing an outline for the chapter.  In the dream I looked over my own shoulder and realized, "Hey, that will work!"  When I woke up in the morning, I immediately sat down and recreated the structure I'd "seen" in my sleep.  After gift from my unconscious, it just took me a few weeks actual conscious labor to write the chapter out.

Thinking back to that experience is a good reminder to me that a Muse (in this case Clio, the muse of History) is always waiting in the wings of the unconscious for that particularly desperate moment when her help will be most appreciated.

LY #93 White or Black Studies?

My doctoral dissertation was an interrogation of whiteness through the lens of images of African-American history.  I wanted to discuss in part how a corporate liberal white identity was constructed during the WWII in part as a response to pictures and stories about black folk. It was a loose, baggy monster of a dissertation (though that dedication language, with love to my spouse, was cut out of the final draft). 

I thought about dragging it out and quoting it here but I think not. 

I wrote about images of African Americans in Life Magazine and other national and African-American periodicals partially as part of an unexpressed argument with my mother who told me about the Second World War that sometimes she missed those days because, "We all worked together back then."  She was possibly decrying the constant cultural disruption of the late sixties, early seventies.

Thus, there were three kinds of anger that gave me the motivating energy to complete all 388 pages of the darned thing.  One was my anger with my mother for either lying or being stupid enough to buy into the propaganda of the period.   The second was my anger with some of the history I'd been taught that left out both the continuing role of segregation in the American military as well as the African-American contribution to the war effort.  The third was my angry response to my own guilt for being white. 

Of course, I understand now, over twenty years since my Mom's death and just 13 years younger than she was at her death, I understand how sometimes it's just simpler to speak in cliches to people who could not possibly understand what a certain period of life was really like. 


For various reasons my dissertation did not become a book.  Mostly the cost of copyrighted material and the implausibility of Life magazine publishing a book of post-Marxist critical cultural studies.  I also was brought up short by a comment made by one of my colleagues in the early nineties.  While coming back home from a convention in Seattle, she questioned the validity of a white person focus on issues in Black Studies.  So after my first (and last) major academic publication I gave up doing very much more with my dissertation and turned my attention to other issues that interested me.