The Lazarus Woman

22 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Barbara B. Lazarus, Barbara Lazarus, Brandie Weston, Carl Zimring, Death, Friendship, Graduate School, Harold Meltzer, Joe Trotter, John Hinshaw, Life and Death, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Mentoring, Politics of Academia, Politics of Graduate School, Sarai Washington, Susan McElroy

Barbara B. Lazarus, obituary picture, July 17, 2003. (http://cmu.edu).

Now that my book’s been out for a couple of months (between two and four months, depending on the e-book platform, actually), I’ve found that my thoughts sometimes drift toward those that are no longer around to read it.

Not so much my family or nemeses, though. Sarai, my only sister, who died in July ’10, would likely have never read a word of Boy @ The Window — it would be too honest an assessment of life at 616 for her. My late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington was already unhappy with my numerous posts about his borderline personality issues and constant psychological and physical abuse of me and family when I picked up the phone one day that same week my sister passed.

As for my former classmate Brandie Weston — to whom I’ve dedicated my memoir (actually, a co-dedication that includes my son) — maybe, if she had been well enough. My favorite teacher, the late Harold Meltzer, though, would’ve begun reading Boy @ The Window five minutes after it had gone live on Amazon.com!

But of all of those folks who are no longer a part of this corporeal world (or who have gone into some state of seclusion from it), one other person stands out today. My dear friend and mentor from my Carnegie Mellon years (and the six years after I finished), Barbara Lazarus. I’ve discussed her here before, but not lately. Probably because I do tear up sometimes when thinking about her support of me specifically and her work at CMU in general. Barbara helped make my otherwise rough and dehumanizing experience at CMU manageable and even career-affirming.

As I wrote about Barbara for the memorial service at CMU in September ’03:

I want to communicate to you that I am in complete solidarity with everyone who attends the gathering at CMU on October 17. For me, Barbara’s work was more than about women’s equity in the engineering and science fields. She was about ensuring that all (regardless of gender or race, and regardless of the degree) who attempted the grand enterprise of competing for a degree actually made it through the process … Barbara was a dear friend and mentor who truly believed in me, even in spite of myself. I loved her, and I will surely miss her, as I am sure you will also.

That only approximated how much she meant to me during and after my four years of doctoral success and failures at CMU. The months immediately before my advisor Joe Trotter and my committee approved my dissertation were the worst, as is well documented on this blog. Barbara convinced me to not become hot-headed and drop-out of the program with a completed first-draft of my dissertation under my belt. She also managed to keep me from requesting a change of advisors so close to the finish line. She did offer to “step in” as her duties as Associate Provost would’ve allowed, but warned me that this political solution would delay my graduation. My connection with Barbara kept me from meeting Trotter in one of CMU’s parking lots late at night wearing a ski mask and dark leather gloves!

She became my best reference professionally and otherwise after those dark days ended with the end of ’96. She read my articles and my first book before they went to print. We swapped stories about family and life and religion. We stayed in touch even after I moved to Silver Spring, Maryland in ’99. Barbara died on July 14, ’03, just sixteen days before my son Noah was born. It’s been a decade, a month and eight days since she passed, nearly as long as I actually knew Barbara (roughly between October ’92 and July ’03). Boy, I wish I could’ve shared my first photos of my son with her!

There were a few people like Barbara at CMU during those years. Susan McElroy (now at UT-Dallas), John Hinshaw (at least prior to my Spencer Fellowship), Carl Zimring (before the O.J. verdict), the Gants and the other Black doctoral students I’d met there (all fourteen of us) were my CMU lifeline beyond multiculturalism and Trotter tired sense of migration studies.

But Barbara Lazarus and I had a friendship that went well beyond academia and career, and went undamaged by petty jealousies or sudden bursts of outrage from jury verdicts. I’d been to her home, met her husband and her kids, learned something about her as a person, and in the process, managed to be my better self even in the worst of circumstances. That is being a good mentor, friend and person. I just hope that I was the same to her, and that Boy @ The Window proves to be the same to others.

December Doctoral Decisions

13 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Advisor-Student Relationships, Advisors, Bruce Anthony Jones, Carnegie Mellon University, Doctoral Research, Graduate Fellowships, Graduate School, Joe Trotter, Larry Glasco, Lawrence Glasco, Multiculturalism, PhD programs, Pitt, Politics of Education, Politics of Graduate School, Quantitative Analysis, Quantitative Methods, School of Education, Strategy, Tactics, Tokenism, Transfer, University of Pittsburgh

Saint Wolfgang and The Devil [Faustian Bargain], by Michael Pacher, ca. 1471-1475, Munich, Germany, February 19, 2009. (The Yorck Project via Wikipedia). In public domain.

It was this time twenty years ago that I decided to transfer from the University of Pittsburgh to Carnegie Mellon to complete my PhD in history. It was a solid tactical decision on many levels. The strategy, however, was a bust, although the reasons for this failure wouldn’t become apparent for several years.

I made the decision to leave Pitt based on at least three deficiencies. One, I was a doctoral student who’s dissertation research would be about multiculturalism, education, and a Black urban community (I hadn’t decided on Washington, DC yet). The only person in the history department with expertise in African American history was Larry Glasco, my advisor, and it had become obvious by the beginning of the 1992-93 school year that his interests had shifted to Afro-Caribbean studies, specifically Afro-Cuban history (see my post “Larry Glasco and the Suzy-Q Hypothesis” from August ’11). Larry’s understanding of such things as Black migration studies, Black education and Black intellectual developments pretty much stopped with the year he took his job at Pitt, 1969 (the year I was born).

Two for moving on from Pitt came out of my interactions with other professors and grad students in the department and in the School of Education. It was obvious during the fall of ’92 that most of my professors found me an enigma, from Dick Oestriecher’s “exceptional Black man” allowances in class (see my post “Dairy Queens, Dick Oestriecher and Race” from February ’11) to some colleagues’ comments about how easy I made grad school look (especially since I had time to talk and go up the hill to shoot hoops).

Hammer & Sickle & Pitt Flag [symbolic of Pitt’s history department], December 13, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

I realized that in a department that placed a premium on American working-class studies, on the supremacy of class warfare and neo-Marxism above any other historical field, that my chances for graduating anytime before the year 2000 were slim. And forget about picking up a fellowship or grant to do my dissertation research or finding a job if and when I did graduate! There were still professors at Pitt — like Reid Andrews (now department chair) and the former department chair Richard Smethurst — who didn’t even think I was “grad school material,” and they said as much. I was an anomaly in an anomalous department (see my “Letter of Recommendation (or Wreck-o-mendation)” post from September ’10).

I did consider doing a PhD in education at Pitt, with possibly Bruce Anthony Jones as my advisor, or someone more senior like Bill Thomas. Bruce, though, discouraged me from that idea, as he was only an assistant professor at the time. It was obvious that Bill Thomas was a popular professor, so much in demand that I’d be lucky to meet with him three times in a semester to discuss his work, much less my own.

And I already had that kind of relationship with Larry. My third reason that led to my decision to transfer to Carnegie Mellon involved a very angry Larry at the end of November ’92. You see, one of the requirements for getting to the end of coursework status was the completion of a quantitative methodology course or the completion of a project in which quantitative methods drove said project.

I decided on the latter, but told Larry that between teaching four sections of US Since 1877 with over 100 students and taking three grad seminars with 1,500 pages of reading per week, that I wouldn’t be doing an independent study with him that fall. I said that I’d carve out time “on my own” to get started this fall, but wouldn’t be prepared to complete the quantitative methods project until the spring semester.

Cartoon on data points & regression analysis involving drug trials, December 13, 2012. (http://www.landers.co.uk).

So after I presented some of my early findings regarding 1910 census data and infant mortality rates among Black women in Pittsburgh to Larry’s History of Black Pittsburgh class, we met to discuss how far I’d gotten in my regression analysis. I hadn’t done much with the variables yet, simply because I hadn’t had the time in November to do any off-time work. Larry became furious, said that he was “disappointed in me,” and wondered aloud if I’d make it through this year as a grad student. When I pointed out for a second time that I was doing this work in my spare time — not as an independent study course, not for a grade — he finally remember what we had discussed in August.

Larry did apologize, profusely. But I was pissed. “You’re only advising one active student, and you can’t remember what I’m working on,” I thought. With Joe Trotter at Carnegie Mellon attempting to woo me into their program, with me already taking his grad seminar in African American history, and with the writing on the wall at Pitt (where I’d already earned my B.A. and M.A. in history), I set up a meeting with Joe in mid-December to explore the possibility of transferring.

Although it would’ve been a worse decision to stay at Pitt, leaving for Joe Trotter and Carnegie Mellon was just about the worst decision I’d made as an adult (see my post “The Audacity of Youth, Grad School Style” from August ’11). For it set up so many of my other career decisions and choices I’ve made in the two decades since.

A school of education would’ve made more sense for me and the research I wanted to pursue, after all. But I would’ve had to think beyond Western Pennsylvania, taken a year off, and then pointed at Stanford, Harvard, UPenn or Teachers College as possibly better choices, better situations. Chris Rock is right. “Life is long, when you make the wrong decisions.”

James and the PAGPSA

29 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Activism, Afrocentric, Afrocentricity, Authentic Blackness, Black Action Society, Campus Climate, Carnegie Mellon University, Community, Diversity, Friendships, Graduate School, GSPIA, Isolation, PAGPSA, Pan African Graduate and Professional Student Association, Pitt, Pittsburgh, Politics of Graduate School, Retention, Self-Discovery, University of Pittsburgh

James and the Giant Peach photo art (1996), November 29, 2012. (http://disneymania.com.br).

About this time twenty years ago, perhaps for the first time in my life, I found myself around like-minded individuals, folks who seemed to understand me on an intellectual level. The fact that these were fellow graduate students, all at Pitt and all willing to form an association that would enable us to develop real connections across the campus, was inspiring to me. After four years of off-and-on involvement in the Black Action Society, not to mention my first year in the History grad program, I’d almost given up on the idea that I could form good friendships and acquaintance-ships through any formal gatherings.

But this was especially true regarding my thinking about my fellow Black students and other students of color. For the most part, I’d been around two kinds of students of color during my first five years at the University of Pittsburgh. One group was the semi-nerdy set, folks who cared deeply about their academic performance, but were also late-bloomers socially — people like me in more than a few ways. They tended to care little, though, about campus activism around diversity, retention or campus climate issues.

The other group was the Afrocentric set, people who often reminded me of my one-time Hebrew-Israelite brethren, whose views of Blackness were so limiting that I would’ve been a traitor just for listening to Chicago or Phil Collins. Those folks had virtually taken over the Black Action Society by my senior year. Forget mentioning popular folks, like sorors, frat guys, football, basketball and track guys and gals, or those fully invested in Pitt’s Honors College. I mingled with them all, and found little in common with them, intellectually or economically.

Me with Mark James, PAGPSA meeting, GSPH building, University of Pittsburgh, February 26, 1993 (Lois Nembhard).

That changed a bit my first year of grad school. Often in my walking and running across campus, I’d bump into a Black grad student here or there. At Hillman Library, the Cathedral of Learning, William Pitt Union, the SLIS building or other places. We’d recognize each other, we said hello, we even exchanged our names. Two of them in particular — Ed and Hayley — reached out to me at the end of the Spring ’92 semester, because they wanted to put together an organization that would represent our interests as grad students of color.

In mid-August, the emails began to go back and forth in earnest to establish what we’d end up calling the Pan African Graduate and Professional Student Association (PAGPSA) that fall. Through Jack Daniel’s office (see my post “The Miracle of Dr. Jack Daniel” from May ’11), we obtained the start-up funds necessary to make the new association go.

At our founding meeting that September, there were eight of us, all highly motivated to be as inclusive as possible, all feeling suddenly less isolated than we had felt a week, month or semester earlier. We decided on the “Pan African” part of the association’s name because we wanted to welcome as many graduate students of color as possible, particularly African and Afro-Caribbean students. The terms “Black” and “African American,” we agreed, wouldn’t be inclusive enough.

We also decided that despite the political implications of our new name, that this association would primarily be about bringing students together for social gatherings, for additional information and education beyond their course work and dissertations, but not to be campus activists. So many of the Black, African and Afro-Caribbean grad students at Pitt were in fact working on master’s or other professional degrees, and wouldn’t be on campus long enough to make lasting changes through activism, strictly speaking. Plus, there was the risk that activism would be so all-consuming — especially on issues like campus climate, long-term support for research and retention rates — that folks would fail to complete the work they came to Pitt to do in the first place.

CMU-Pitt mug, from joint PAGPSA/BGSO meeting on diversity and grad school, October 1992, November 29, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

By the time that first meeting broke up, I was content to have met folks like Mark, Hayley, Lois, Errol, Ed, and a couple of others, to find us all on the same page about something as serious as starting a new association of a significant cross-section of Pitt’s graduate students of color. But in the process, I’d made a new friend that fall through our meetings and our joint gatherings with Carnegie Mellon’s Black Graduate Student Organization (BGSO).

James came along and challenged PAGPSA in October and November regarding our campus activism stance, arguing that being a part of any organization of students of color meant being active. Of course the leadership disagreed, but that’s how I met the man. He was a charismatic Black Iowan preacher’s son, and more politically active than anyone I’d known under the age of thirty. James had ideas about everything, from the future of hip-hop to the implications of my research on multiculturalism and Black Washington, DC.

Though he was a GSPIA (Graduate School of Public and International Affairs) master’s student and ultimately finished his degree in ’94, we would remain friends through the rest of the ’90s. Between him and Matt (see my post “My Friend Matt” from September) and PAGPSA, I remained grounded even as I became buried in the minutia of US, African American and educational policy historiography over the next half-decade. Thankfully, I no longer felt like a lone wolf. Thankfully, I knew that I wasn’t alone in a sea of graduate school and faculty White maleness after that fall.