Tag Archives: Department of HIstory

Last Dance, The Last Class

09 Friday May 2014

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The late Donna Summer, album cover, circa 1979, May 9, 2014. (http://digboston.com/).

The late Donna Summer, album cover, circa 1979, May 9, 2014. (http://digboston.com/).

Twenty years ago on this date was my last formal class as a formal student, a grad course at Carnegie Mellon with Kate Lynch on Comparative Urban History. I spent that evening of my last day of classes polishing up a twenty-five page research essay that compared the development of public housing practices in Toronto, Berlin and Chicago. It was too ambitious a paper, especially given that I did all the research for it in the final four weeks of that semester, after spending a week at AERA (American Educational Research Association) in New Orleans presenting on a panel and networking, and two days meeting the Gill side of my extended family for the first time. I just wanted to get it done, though.

I made my final edits to my introduction and argument and to a few of my citations and references just before 9:30 pm that second Monday in May ’94. I was working in a computer lab in Wean Hall, using one of the rare PCs on campus. Rare because Carnegie Mellon had made a ridiculous deal with Apple back in ’83 to be a Macintosh campus — a terrible move if you were using Macs in the 1990s.

Apple Macintosh II Computer, April 15, 2004. (Alexander Schaelss via Wikipedia). Released via GNU FDL/CC-SA-3.0.

Apple Macintosh II Computer, April 15, 2004. (Alexander Schaelss via Wikipedia). Released via GNU FDL/CC-SA-3.0.

Normally I wrote my papers on the University of Pittsburgh’s campus, as my alumnus status gave me access to computers and Hillman Library. Plus, it took Pitt almost a year to shut down my grad school accounts, allowing me to make thousands of copies of materials that I would’ve needed a month’s worth of my stipend to make at Carnegie Mellon’s Hunt Library. And, even after a year of torture and courses, nearly all of my friends and interests remained across the bridge connecting Oakland and Pitt with Schenley Park and the southern end of Carnegie Mellon’s campus.

Once I completed my paper, I walked over to Baker Hall, went up to the second floor, and dropped it off for Lynch to review and grade. It was all over but the dissertation overview defense and the dissertation itself. I was happy, but I was more relieved than happy. The last year of transferring to and doing coursework at Carnegie Mellon had taken a toll on me. For the first time ever, I found myself actually hating classes and school in general. Sure, there were individual teachers and professors I despised. Dr. Demontravel. David Wolf. Estelle Abel. Dick Ostreicher. But not the formal process of classroom learning itself. It took a year of redundant courses at CMU at the insistence of the powers that were to steal that immutable joy of learning from me. At least, temporarily.

I thought about it the next day. My first day of kindergarten was September 8, ’74, which meant that I had experienced twenty school years between the ages of four and twenty-four. For virtually all of my life, I’d been a student, from kindergarten to PhD, between Presidents Nixon and Ford and Bill Clinton. I had done several thousand assignments, hundreds of exams, and dozens of papers and essays. Combining undergrad and grad school, I’d taken fifty-eight (58) courses. It’s a wonder I hadn’t tired of listening to mercurial professors any sooner.

Keep Calm and Hate School poster, May 9, 2014. (http://keepcalmstudios.com).

Keep Calm and Hate School poster, May 9, 2014. (http://keepcalmstudio.com).

I spent the next few days doing something I normally didn’t have time for. I slept in late, took lots of naps, and watched my Knicks play and struggle with the Jordan-less Bulls in the NBA’s second round of playoffs. It would be the most rest I’d have for the rest of ’94.

Two decades later, and I’ve taught nearly as many courses as I took to earn my bachelors, masters and doctorate. I do like the view of a classroom — in-person or virtual — from the instructor’s perspective. But I learned so much about being a teacher, too, from what to do and what not to do, long before my final semesters at Carnegie Mellon. Ms. Griffin, Mrs. Shannon, Mrs. O’Daniel, Mrs. Bryant, Harold Meltzer were great counterbalances to the teachers/professors who were as inspiring as watching paint dry in a desert.

Grad School & My Most Special Summer Reading List

31 Saturday Aug 2013

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Just a small sample of the books I read/re-read summer before grad school in 1991, August 31, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Just a small sample of the books I read/re-read summer before grad school in 1991, August 31, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

For me, August 28 this week was significant for any number of reasons. It wasn’t just that it was fifty years to the exact day and date that the March on Washington occurred and MLK gave his “I Have A Dream” speech. Or that is was fifty-eight years to the date that White supremacists lynched Emmett Till for allegedly whistling at some flat-butt White girl. This past Wednesday was also twenty-two years to the day and date that I began my first day of graduate school as a master’s student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of History.

Of course, I didn’t discuss this earlier this week (it would’ve been incredibly arrogant on my part to bring this up three days ago). My big steps for myself were infinitesimal when in measured comparison to the beginning of the two-year height of the official Civil Rights Movement. But even on an afternoon in which I attended my first course and meeting about teaching/advising assignments for the semester, it did feel like a bit of a triumph. Especially when considering what I had to do that spring and summer to get into the program with funding in the first place.

I didn’t learn that much that day. Except the low contempt Joe White and some of the other professors held toward pedagogy and teaching. “You already know more than your students,” White said as advice to us who’d be TAs that semester. I was lucky to not be among them for my first year. I was a GSA assisting in the advising of history majors, some of whom were my fellow undergrads just a few months before. But even then, I thought two minutes’ worth of advice on viewing students as empty vessels was insufficient training for learning how to lecture and facilitate conversations with upwards of 100 students spread out over several discussion sections each week.

I had other things on my mind at that moment, though, including the relief that I’d survived a summer making $5.20 per hour as a full-time employee with a Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic project in which the project investigators were far more psychotic than the patients. Aside from that, I thought about how the previous four months had served as my preparation for the White world of grad school.

I’d done a lot of reading that late spring and summer, spurned on by boredom, disappointment in my weirdly evolving friendship with Elaine, and a sense that I needed to read to fortify myself against the neo-Marxists in my eventual field. So I read. I started off with Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), believe it or not, the first time I’d ever read it. Like so many before me, it made my views of the man less black and white than it had been before. I then picked up W. E. B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk (1903), the first time I’d read that book since I wrote a book report on it for Mrs. O’Daniel’s class in fifth grade. Unsurprisingly, I got much more out of it in May ’91 than I did in May ’80.

I didn’t stop there, as my reading took me on three different tracks in June, July and August. One was the “I didn’t get to read this before” track, as I read Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, Song of Solomon and Beloved (didn’t understand it then, and still don’t get the big deal about it now). Along with Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (1969), bell hooks and several others on Black Women’s literature. Then, I decided to go back and reread some James Baldwin and Richard Wright that I’d first read for high school, and added Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) to the mix. On the non-literature track, I ended up reading Franz Fanon, Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction (1935) — at least, I put a significant dent in it — Derrick Bell’s And We Are Not Saved (1987), and other writings on Black history and culture (broadly speaking).

But the third track would end up taking me on a path toward my dissertation topic and my first book, Fear of a “Black” America (2004). It started with articles on multicultural education that took me to James Banks’ theoretic constructions of what multicultural education ought to have been, but wasn’t. I also found myself reading books like Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities (1991), Molefi Asante’s The Afrocentric Idea (1987), Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (completely indecipherable in a circular firing squad of a thesis kind of way) and Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-education of the Negro (1933). I was reading anything that could inform my thinking about K-12 and higher education and how it played the role as both equalizer and oppressor for so many Black folks over the years.

It was easily the most reading I’d done on my own since the year before I’d gone into seventh grade, middle school and the Humanities Program. I wanted to read all I wanted to read before spending the next few years drowning my brain in hundreds of books and articles that I’d absolutely need to read as a historian. In the process, I may’ve radicalized myself a bit for the otherwise hum-drum experience of reading mind-numbing accounts of history in which the authors didn’t seem to see their own sense of high-brow White maleness.

And with all of it, I surprised myself. I realized once again that my Black classmates and 616 neighbors were wrong about me not being Black enough. Their “Black” wasn’t my “Black,” of course. But all those books confirmed for me that there were many ways to be Black that folks who didn’t read could barely understand.

Transfer Anniversary

21 Thursday Mar 2013

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Viewing Pitt's Cathedral of Learning from Carnegie Mellon's mall (with Hamerschlag Hall in foreground), March 29, 2003. (http://post-gazette.com)

Viewing Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning from Carnegie Mellon’s mall (with Hamerschlag Hall in foreground), March 29, 2003. (http://post-gazette.com)

March ’93 was an interesting month for me, to say the least. Just about the biggest thing happening for me that month was my transfer from Pitt to Carnegie Mellon (or CMU) to finish my doctorate. After nearly two years of grad school in the History Department, I knew I needed to leave. Especially with Larry Glasco as my well-meaning but sometimes absentee advisor and with a bunch of professors who never hid their disdain for me as a masters and then a doctoral student. I’d also been at Pitt for six years between undergrad and grad school, most of those focused on history, Black Studies, or education foundations and policy as areas of research.

I knew that Carnegie Mellon wasn’t an ideal situation. I was sure that had I desired, I could’ve applied to and been accepted by doctoral programs as far and wide as NYU, University of Maryland, University of Michigan and other places. All were places where history didn’t simply consist of working-class historians who believed in the supremacy of class and neo-Marxism above all else – race and racism be damned! What I didn’t know, though, was whether those departments would accept my doctoral credits, cutting my coursework time in half. What I couldn’t be sure about was whether I’d be able to move toward PhD comprehensives and my dissertation proposal within a year of enrollment.

See, these were the things that Joe Trotter, my eventual advisor and John Modell, the graduate coordinator for the department, had promised me as part of my deal for transferring across the bridge to CMU. Those promises, along with the idea of working with an enthusiastic professor whose research didn’t seem out-of-date in a department that seemed to fast-track its students toward doctoral completion. That really appealed to me at the time.

Pitt and Carnegie Mellon (with Forbes Quad & Baker Hall included) as seen from Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, PA, March 21, 2013. (http://milliverstravels.com).

Pitt and Carnegie Mellon (with Forbes Quad & Baker Hall included) as seen from Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, PA, March 21, 2013. (http://milliverstravels.com).

When I finally broke it to Larry at the beginning of March that I’d made this decision, he didn’t exactly try to convince me to stay. I think he knew why. An audit of the program in ’98 confirmed officially what I had learned anecdotally over my six years at Pitt. That there were students in the program who’d been ABD (All But Dissertation) since Nixon and Watergate. That fully half of my cohort from ’91 hadn’t even completed their master’s degrees, and only three of us (counting myself) out of twenty-one would ever go on to complete our doctorates. That no Pitt History grad student had obtained substantial research funding from outside the university since my Mom potty-trained me back in ’72-’73. And that politically, the powers that used to be in the department didn’t take my or Larry’s work with me seriously. Even if Larry didn’t see that, I sure did.

Off then, I went. Into the unknown known of CMU, conservative, elite and elitist, not sure if I’d ever be comfortable on the lily-White and honorary-White-as-Asian campus. Still, I reminded myself that Pitt was really only a couple of blocks away at the closest point between the two campuses, that I still had lots of friends and acquaintances there. I also knew, though, that my relationship with Trotter as my advisor would be crucial to my successful navigation of this drab and stuffy world. Too bad I wasn’t clairvoyant!

Cath The Great

05 Monday Nov 2012

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Catherine A. Lugg, circa 2009, November 5, 2012. (Catherine A. Lugg via Facebook).

I define serendipity as the ability of hard work to create what others would consider good luck, fortuitous chances, random opportunities for success. I’ve managed to do just that over and over again over the course of my life, particularly as a student and occasionally as a writer. But as a human being in search of real, positive, life-changing connections and friendships, serendipity has been very hard to make happen. When it does occur, at least for me, it becomes one of those moments that I seal in my mind, like a note in a time capsule.

The beginning of November ’94 was one of those weeks filled with serendipity. It started with the chair of the History Department at Carnegie Mellon, Steven Schlossman. He had decided that he couldn’t make it to the 1994 History of Education Society annual meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. But because he had already booked a room and a flight, Schlossman apparently figured that he could simply transfer both the airline tickets and room to me instead (back in the pre-9/11 days when you could do such things without creating a potential terror alert). So Schlossman met with me a week before this conference and said that I should go “to represent the department” and because he thought it “a great opportunity” for me.

Carolina Inn at night (its better side), Chapel Hill, NC, 2007, November 5, 2012. (http://booked.com).

I wasn’t so sure, with the HES meeting being held in a mansion-turned-hotel, not quite on the University of North Carolina campus. Once I arrived from Pittsburgh on that first Wednesday in November, though, I felt at least free from the burdens of grad school at Carnegie Mellon. The weather was perfect, in the low eighties, and my World History sections for that Thursday and Friday were being covered by other teaching assistants. So I gave myself a tour of Chapel Hill, all the while wondering why didn’t I apply here for graduate school.

That was only the prelude to the four-day conference that began that Thursday. And since Schlossman had charged me to attend four sessions and to take notes on them on his behalf, I went to as many conference offerings as humanly possible. Back then, I had a much higher tolerance for boring academician-speak. So I was easily able to take detailed notes. I asked questions on topics in which I knew little. I even smiled and introduced myself to the mostly over-fifty White male crowd.

By Saturday, I had one mandatory session to attend. It was something about education in Japan and Germany post-World War II and how Japanese textbook makers left Japanese atrocities during World War II out of the nation’s history textbooks. During the Q & A, I asked what I thought was a pedestrian question, pedestrian because I forgot it five minutes after I asked it. Yet several people afterward told me that I’d asked a great question, as if I had some unique perspective or something. “It’s not even my subject matter,” I thought, adding in my mind that “Maybe some of these folks thought that the Black guy in the room didn’t really know anything.”

History of Education Society 1994 Annual Meeting program, November 3-6 1994, November 5, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

Or, as it turned out, my dedication to Schlossman’s charge made me seem 1,000 times as enthused about the HES meeting as anyone else attending. For two women did in fact notice me during that session. That Saturday evening, during beer, wine and spirits time in a cramped conference/ball room space, after pleasantries with a couple of older professors, I bumped into the two women again. They immediately engaged me in conversation, because they wanted to know how I managed to remain upbeat during such a boring ass conference.

Barbara and Catherine were both grad students in the School of Education at Penn State, as it turned out. Both were also PhD candidates in the midst of doctoral theses, and because of my being only twenty-four, couldn’t believe that I was a PhD candidate also. What I thought was going to be just another one of thirty conversations with older White male professors and kiss-ass grad students turned into a nearly ninety-minute discussion of research, pop culture, the HES conversation, and the ironies of life, and all with a snarkiness that only someone like me (or Rachel Maddow) could fully appreciate.

It might’ve ended there. Except that Barbara and Catherine’s research on federal education policy and achievement gap data for Latinos (especially Mexican immigrants) dovetailed pretty well with my work on multiculturalism and Black education in Washington, DC. Plus, the three of us saw an opportunity to use next year’s HES meeting as an opportunity to expose the hypocrisy of the old boys’ club and their petri-dish sense of educational issues for women, for communities of color, and for immigrants. We titled it, “Educational Historiography and Diverse Populations: Why Research Isn’t ‘Bringing a Pet to Class’.” Somehow the powers who ran HES accepted our proposal, giving us a chance to present at HES in Minneapolis in October ’95.

A skunk (something a teacher shouldn’t bring to class), November 5, 2012. (http://animal.discovery.com).

By that time, though, Barbara couldn’t make it, having recently married and having moved across the pond to the UK. Catherine ended up taking her place, and ended up doing two presentations in less than twenty-four hours. She’s been there for me as a genuine friend in academia and in my aspirations as a writer ever since.

The HES meetings  were the start of an eighteen-year friendship with Catherine, one that actually survived despite the tendency of the academic life to kill more friendships than one could ever start. I think we’re friends still because we share a same sense of the world, and both are willing to snark our way through the madness of it all.

Facing The Tooth

14 Monday May 2012

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My front teeth, including slightly darker lower tooth (right/my left), two root canals later, May 14, 2012, (Donald Earl Collins).

A funny series of events occurred on the transition from Pitt PhD student to Carnegie Mellon doctoral student in the spring and summer of ’93. Well, not really funny at the time. Nineteen years later, the months between April and October ’93 look like a semi-hilarious blip on my screen of life compared to what I’d gone through before and have faced since. But for a three-week period in April and May of that year, one of my teeth helped me both begin grad school at Carnegie Mellon and brought home the truth of my impoverished existence at the same time.

The week before the end of spring semester at the University of Pittsburgh — as well as the end of six years of undergraduate, master’s and doctoral work there — I woke up with a throbbing that went around the left side of my jaw. It radiated up through my left cheekbone, ear and temple. It was a toothache, one that I assumed was stress-related. Between the transfer to Carnegie Mellon, my efforts to move out of my crappy studio in East Liberty, and my search for summer work, I assume that it was just me grinding my teeth.

I relieved my stress and pain the way any normal twenty-three year-old male would. I took some Advil, went to sleep, hung out with friends and at hole-in-the-wall bars once the semester was over, and had myself a pretty good time. I took the approach that “everything will work itself out” to all the worries I had.

I also met with Carnegie Mellon’s History department’s graduate advisor that first week, John Modell (I learned later that he had been Joe Trotter’s dissertation advisor back in the mid-1970s). Modell cleared me to take the written part of the PhD comprehensive examination that the department’s second year students could take at the end of the year, which in ’93 was on May 14. Modell cleared me despite the fact that my first course as a Carnegie Mellon student wouldn’t begin until the end of August.

Then, after a week or so pain-free, I woke up a little after 5 am. I snapped up in my bed, knowing that

Severe premolar tooth decay (abscess), December 17, 2006. (Lycaon via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons 3.0 license.

something was wrong. Then, the pain came. It was like Mike Tyson had punched me in the left side of my jaw and I’d fallen head-first onto a boulder. The pain shot up and around like a puck in an NHL playoff game in overtime. The toothache was back, and it wasn’t going away.

Dumb-ass me, who rarely took meds for headaches, much less a rare toothache, tried to gut it out for a couple of days without much medicine at all. I went to Pitt that Monday and Tuesday to see if there was any chance to pick up a course to teach for the summer. There, I discovered how cold the History department administrators were regarding my time there. It turned out that there were two courses available. Even though I technically could’ve taught those courses, they held my transfer to the “other program” against me.

That made my pain worse. I couldn’t eat without a construction team of bacteria pounding my jaw. I couldn’t have a conversation without feeling brass knuckles punch my face in. I certainly couldn’t sleep more than four or five hours, and then only sitting up in a chair. By Wednesday afternoon, I couldn’t think straight anymore.

I finally walked across the bridge on South Highland Avenue to a dentist’s office next to the local neighborhood laundromat, and after an hour, scheduled an appointment for 2 pm that Friday, and picked up a prescription for 800 mg Motrin pills. For someone as drug adverse as me, it might as well have been heroin. I was taking two at a time — the equivalent of eight Advil tablets — between Wednesday evening and Friday morning. In doing so, it became obvious that my lower left front tooth was the culprit, and that my dentist was correct. I needed a root canal procedure to drain the abscess.

Second floor of Baker Hall, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, December 2, 2010. (Daderot via Wikimedia). In public domain.

So it was that on that fateful May 14, with three more horse-sized Motrin pills in my system, that I took my written comprehensives on the second floor of dark and factory-like (with its sloped floors) Baker Hall. I hadn’t studied at all, and all I really wanted to do was sleep. I chose two questions: one on women’s history/rights and historiography, the other on immigration history. From 9 am until about 12:30 pm, I wrote page after page on both subjects and conjured all the books and articles that I knew on both topics, which turned out to be quite considerable. I found the comps quite easy. Easier than any hoop that I had to jump through while at Pitt.

Still, I felt the throbbing of my tooth. Not the pain — the Motrin did its job — just the nerve in the tooth and the blood supply pushing pass the well of abscess in that tooth. I handed in my essays (I filled out four booklets’ worth of essays) and meandered my way to my dentist’s office. The root canal surgery took about two hours, but it only seemed like a dream, as I fell asleep off and on throughout.

I floated the two blocks home to 6007 Penn Circle South, secure in the fact that I passed my comps (as it turned out, with high distinction, although one of the examiners was puzzled by the fact that I had used sources not taught by any of the professors in the department). Just before I hit my pillow, ready to snore for the next fifteen hours, I thought, “Boy, is this going to be a long summer!”

The Master’s – Too Young, Too Soon

14 Saturday Apr 2012

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The Masters 2011, 13th fairway and green, Augusta National Golf Club, Augusta, GA, April 6, 2011. (Ed-supergolfdude via Flickr.com). In public domain.

Twenty years ago today, I took my master’s oral exam and passed, and my committee recommended me into Pitt’s history doctoral program. It should’ve been a day of celebration, as I had knocked out a second degree two weeks shy of two semesters, in just seven and a half months. But, as with many euphoric events in my life, the other shoe dropped, one that led me down a road to a degree and betrayal from my eventual dissertation committee.

The two-hour comprehensive exam was easy enough. My advisor Larry Glasco (see my “Larry Glasco and the Suzy-Q Hypothesis” post from August ’11), along with Paula Baker (see my “Paula Baker and the 4.0 Aftermath” post from February ’12) and Van Beck Hall (department chair) made up my oral examination committee. Most of the questions weren’t about my research and coursework during the 1991-92 school year. They were about my potential dissertation topic and how I’d approach it from a coursework and research perspective. The first question was, in fact, “If we recommend you into the PhD program here, what would your research topic be?”

Needless to say, those questions put me at ease for finishing my master’s and moving forward into the world of the doctoral student. I waited anxiously for ten minutes before my committee came out of the conference room within the department to congratulate me on my performance. I managed to hide my smile as Paula and Hall shook my hand, knowing how easy it would be for professors to misinterpret relief and happiness for cocky arrogance.

NY Knicks' Jeremy Lin double-teamed by Dallas Mavericks, MSG, New York, February 19, 2012. (Trendsetter via Streetball.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of limited reproduction/distribution value.

It didn’t take long for Larry to burst my bubble, though. “You passed, but we’re going to have to slow you down,” he said. I was, according to at least one member of the committee, “moving way too fast,” at least that was what Larry followed up with. I was stunned. It was as if I’d done something wrong, as if I’d broken some golden rule around what age I should’ve been and how long I should’ve taken to do my master’s work.

I went home that Tuesday evening and tried not to think about what Larry had said. But that was all I could think about. How was it that I was to blame for knocking out a thirty-credit master’s program — including language proficiency requirement, master’s research and reading papers, and five graduate seminars — in two semesters? Or that I was only twenty-two when I did all of this? It didn’t seem fair that a history program as difficult as Pitt’s had professors who intended to make the path toward a PhD even more difficult for me.

I think that despite my DC trip and Georgetown University visit that March, that the night after my master’s oral exam was the first time I knew that it was time to leave Pitt for greener doctoral pastures. I liked Larry, and I generally trusted him. But given my history with the department (see my post “The Miracle of Dr. Jack Daniel” from May ’11), it seemed suicidal to try to complete a PhD there. I already knew that there were grad students there who had reached the dissertation stage in the early-70s — before I was in kindergarten — and had yet to finish. I also knew that Larry had about as much influence on departmental politics as I did.

Maybe it was too soon. Maybe I was too young. Maybe Larry was attempting to look out for my best interests. What I did know, though, flew in the face of all three of those assumptions. It really was time to move on.

Paula Baker and the 4.0 Aftermath

01 Wednesday Feb 2012

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Paula Baker speaking (screen shot) in response to Donald Crichlow's book, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism at The New School, New York City, March 1, 2006. (http://fora.tv/2006/03/01/Women_and_Grassroots_Conservatism).

Of all the professors I worked with in grad school, there wasn’t a tougher one on me than Paula Baker. Or a better one. She wanted and expected more out of me than even my advisors, Larry Glasco and Joe Trotter. If it weren’t for her, I probably would’ve been content with earning all of my degrees at the University of Pittsburgh. But if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have discovered my ambivalence about academia in the first place.

I took an upper level history course in US history since 1945 and an independent study with Paula the semester after earning straight-As, the one that made my master’s program a seven-and-a-half month one instead of two years (see “The 4.0 Of It All” from December 2011). It was her second semester as an assistant professor in our department, and given the demographics of the ol’ White boys club, I thought it a good idea to take a professor whose graduate studies were still going on while I was in high school. That, and learning of Paula rare feat (at least for ’84) of publishing an article in the Journal of American History while still a grad student herself at Rutgers University, appealed to the competitor in me.

Paula Baker, University of Virginia, Miller Center, December 2006. (http://millercenter.org).

I sat down for my first meeting with Paula in her small, windowless office (except for a glass partition that she had covered up so students couldn’t look in), just across from the grad student cubicles on the third floor of Forbes Quad. She said, “What are you doing here?” I didn’t understand her question at first. What I soon realized was that Paula was asking me the kinds of questions I should’ve asked myself two years earlier, when I first started applying to grad schools. She said that there were better options for a doctorate in American and African American history than Pitt, including the University of Michigan and UCLA.

There were two things that made Paula, though. One, she regularly broke the law while anyone was in her office, including pre-asthmatic me. Paula smoked as if her life depended on it. For me, it was the first time I thought that I might end up dead before I turned thirty for second-hand smoke and lung cancer. Mind you, my mother, my father and my idiot ex-stepfather all smoked, but not in a space unfit for a sardine.

Two, and more important in my second semester of grad school, was her uncompromising perfectionism when it came to my research and writing. Obviously my writing was already good. But it wasn’t scholarly, at least not as scholarly as it needed to be. In writing my paper on the influence of Marxist ideology (perceived and actual) on the early Civil Rights Movement, I must’ve done at least seven drafts for Paula.

She probably used up about three ball point pens editing my drafts, crossing out whole paragraphs at a time, demanding that I raise my level of analysis ever higher. And when it was all said and done, Paula assigned me a grade of B+ in my independent study with her, the lowest grade I’d receive in three years of master’s and doctoral work. Still, she turned me on to Adolph Reed, Jr. and Theda Skocpol.

What Paula didn’t know was that by the middle of February ’92, I was mentally exhausted, mostly from the previous semester’s work and the lack of a holiday break. I wasn’t at my best in her class and in her office. Somewhere in the midst of struggling to stay on task, I learned how to read for arguments, how to use book reviews to supplement my lack of historiographical knowledge, and to expand my thinking to include other fields, like philosophy and sociology.

I also learned that I really didn’t like writing in scholarly-speak. It felt fake, as if I had to learn French and German and high English in order to make an argument that would make old White farts stand at attention. I didn’t blame Paula for this. I fully understood what she was doing and why she was doing it. But I also knew that this wasn’t me, the scholarly world wasn’t quite an exact fit for me. C’est la vie!

After April ’92, I took one other independent study with Paula, the following year, to get ready for the comprehensive exams for my doctorate. I took it as a non-graded course, as I knew I was about to transfer to Carnegie Mellon. She eventually left Pitt — not exactly a surprise.

I bumped into her once in ’01 right outside Union Station in DC, while she was a fellow at Woodrow Wilson Center and I was in my assistant director job with the New Voices Fellowship Program. Paula didn’t seem happy to see me, but then again, sarcasm and irony always seemed to be the key to getting her smile. Like the irony of me not using my degree in academia.