Marya’s World

28 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Admiration, African American History, Afrocentricity, Black Washington DC, Catherine Lugg, Community Space, Dissertation, Earl Lewis, Friendship, Joe William Trotter Jr., Leisure, Marya McQuirter, Multiculturalism, Public Historian, Research, Saab 900 GLE, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program, Temple University, University of Michigan, Veganism

Marya McQuirter, circa 2011. (http://twitter.com).

The most fun part of grad school for me was once I officially began my dissertation research and writing. Especially when I was on the road, or stuck in at the Library of Congress, or meeting folks at conferences or other events. Otherwise, as I’ve written about here many times, it was a single-minded, often solitary pursuit, with known and unknown enemies either trying to put me in a box or rooting for my failure. Really, if a university as a whole could be any less supportive of their students’ success than Carnegie Mellon University, it’s probably a for-profit institution with a nine (9) percent graduation rate.

That’s how my CMU experience had been even before the Spencer Foundation had awarded me my dissertation fellowship in April ’95. But I did take advantage of one generous dispensation by my department chair Steven Schlossman. My becoming ABD within a year of transferring from Pitt to CMU made me eligible for a one-semester sabbatical from teaching to pursue my dissertation research while still on my $4,000-per-semester stipend, starting in January ’95. I made sure to use it, borrowing $4,000 in student loans for that semester as well, so that I could live in DC without living in a box on a corner for a month or two.

That fall, my advisor through one of his colleagues at the University of Michigan had given me the name of a promising doctoral candidate, one who was from DC and also doing her dissertation research on Black DC. I had first called her in October ’94, to learn that her research was on leisure activities and public history in Black Washington, DC in the first half of the twentieth century. It sounded more interesting than my own research on multiculturalism in Black DC, but there were parallels. So many leisure opportunities for Blacks who lived in Uptown communities like U Street and Le Droit Park included public works on Black history, on the connections between Black history and US history. It meant that our projects were actually more connected than not.

Saab 900 GLE, 1st generation (made between 1983 and 1993), UK, May 3, 2012. (SilkTork via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

So once I came down to DC to work like a monk in archives scattered across the area in February ’95, I contacted her. I’d meet her for the first time about three weeks into my eight-week stay in the area, near the end of February. Between my first few days staying with a former high school classmate and meeting a stranger-peer, I had nearly two-and-a-half weeks of eating, sleeping, and drinking dissertation, with a few moments in a shared kitchen listening to older men talk like we were in a barber shop about exploits and life’s lessons.

When we finally met that last Saturday in February, it was a welcome change. It helped that the doctoral candidate had her own car, a used any pretty worn blue-gray, two-door, stick-shift Saab 900 that had seen better days in the 1980s. For her part, despite grad school, the twenty-nine year-old looked younger than my twenty-five years. At five-eight and change, I wouldn’t have to look down at her in order to see the top of her head.

What impressed me the most about Marya, though, was that I could have a conversation with her about my dissertation research without her eyes glazing over, knowing full well that she understood every word coming out of my mouth. Even most of my fellow grad students at CMU and Pitt didn’t really understand my approach to multiculturalism, Black DC and African American history, and education policy. But she got it immediately.

I loved talking to Marya about her research, though. Looking at leisure and the use of space in Black communities for leisure, for everything from reading newspapers and used libraries, to literally how people walked and conversed in public. I found her work, and the way she talked about her work, fascinating. I wondered if I could ever be in love with a topic as much as her. It wasn’t that I didn’t like writing about multiculturalism. I just wasn’t star-crossed over it.

I learned so much not only during my first time hanging out with Marya, but over the next few years. I really didn’t know DC’s neighborhoods and the history of individual neighborhoods until she came along. She introduced me to the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Museum on local Black DC history. She took me to the Washington Historical Society off Dupont Circle, where I found additional materials on Black activities that were educational but outside the formal structure of Howard University and the segregated DC Public Schools.

Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, SE Washington, DC, February 28, 2016. (http://www.thecapitalnews.com).

She also introduced me to a vegan lifestyle, one that actually seemed sustainable. Matter of fact, when I stayed with Marya for three days in August ’95, I was on a vegan diet. I saw the appeal, but my gastrointestinal tract, well on its way to IBS-land, could only handle but so much in raw fruits and vegetables. Still, Marya introduced me to so many neighborhoods and restaurants, to Ethiopian food in Adams Morgan, to vegan Chinese food in Rockville, to fellow grad students worked on public history dissertations, to young, intellectual DC in general.

Marya also unintentionally helped me see a side of Black thought that I hadn’t seen before. That she survived the Afrocentricity wars at Temple University while earning her master’s there made her tough but also made me weary of discussing my many criticisms of Molefi Asante and his grand entourage of followers. I was so relieved to learn that though she liked some aspects of Afrocentricity, Marya didn’t follow it blindly like so many others I knew in the ’90s. I’d met someone who also marched to the beat of her own drum.

Maybe I would’ve met these folks, made these connections, and gone to these places anyway. Maybe not. But if the former, it would’ve happened much more slowly and cautiously. Marya, for better and for worse, might have been one reason I thought of the DC area as a potential home after more than a decade living and earning degrees in Pittsburgh. Marya McQuirter, though, enriched my life in the years in which I needed it most. I’ve always admired her and her work, and will always see her as a friend.

Aside

Past Labor’s Opportunities Lost

07 Monday Sep 2015

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

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Advisor-Student Relationships, Anger, CMU, Dissertation Completion, Howard University, Jealousy, job search, Joe William Trotter Jr., Labor Day, Mentoring, NYU, Post-Docs, Rage, Running Interference, Spencer Foundation, Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program, Steven Schlossman, University of Maryland, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Title page of the first quarto of William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598), uploaded May 2, 2011 (Tom Reedy via Wikipedia). In public domain.

One of the more gut-wrenching periods of my career began right after Labor Day 1995. In some respects, that period of my career has left a stain over the past two decades. Not so much in terms of what I have done or in what I’m doing now, as much as in setting limits on the range of possible outcomes with which I could’ve begun my career.

Right after Labor Day, I saw an ad in The Chronicle of Higher Education for an open-ranked (tenured or tenure-stream) position at NYU’s school of education in US education history. I hadn’t thought about teaching in a school of education before, but after meeting my friend Cath and having received my Spencer Foundation fellowship, I understood that this was likely a better choice for me than a history department. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. My department chair Steven Schlossman had received a letter and a telephone call from his equivalent peer at NYU asking if there were any graduate students in the pipeline who could apply for the position. Schlossman apparently told that department chair about me and my multiculturalism dissertation, and caught up with me that same week to give me a copy of the letter and encouraged me to apply for the job.

I was two-and-a-half chapters into my planned eight-chapter dissertation, and I still had some US Census data to look at and interviews to conduct as part of the process. I knew that my advisor Joe Trotter wouldn’t be happy about the idea of me applying for a job so soon into the process, but Schlossman and I also knew that the job — if I somehow got it — wouldn’t start for eleven months. That was more than enough time for me to write, revise, revise again, polish up and defend my dissertation. I was on a Spencer fellowship, after all!

A defensive pass interference penalty not called, Detroit Lions v. Dallas Cowboys Wildcard Game, January 4, 2015. (http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2319198-refs-pick-up-flag-after-pass-interference-on-cowboys-in-4th-quarter; FOX Sports).

Of course Trotter thought otherwise. He was incensed that Schlossman had discussed the NYU job with me, that I hadn’t talked with him about the position first. Of course Trotter said that he needed to “run interference” on my behalf, to protect me and my career. By “running interference,” Trotter meant that he would not write a letter of recommendation on my behalf. He told me to put the job out of my mind, to focus on my dissertation, and that we could revisit the prospect of apply for jobs when I was much further along.

A few months later, in February ’96, I saw another job ad in the Chronicle, this one for a history of education assistant professorship at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Schlossman saw that ad as well, but I was still the dutiful ABD student with Trotter as my patron. I decided this time to approach Trotter before meeting with Schlossman about the job. Trotter flipped out again, telling me, “you’re not ready,” that he had seen too many of his own peers not finish dissertations when taking jobs, only to end up unemployed. Keep in mind, I had written six of my eight chapters at this point, and had started working on number seven that month.

Trotter’s “you’re not ready” pronouncements rang even more hollow in March, when I requested a letter from him to apply for a post-doctoral fellowship in African American Studies at University of Maryland, College Park. He refused at first, then agreed, with the caveat that he would write in his letter his belief that I wouldn’t complete my dissertation in time to begin the fellowship at the end of August ’96. With that kind of endorsement, of course I didn’t apply!

When we finally had our blow-out argument that April 4th, I was frustrated, he was actually angry, for reasons I didn’t put together until I considered my age and his HNIC status and age later on. Most of Trotter’s stonewalling occurred after he found out that I was still only about to turn twenty-six at the time of the NYU job prospect. Between that and the limited mileage remaining in his proletarianization hypothesis, I was working for and with an advisor who was giving me mixed signals and mediocre advice. Both were based in part on jealousy, and in part on Trotter’s own bad experiences at University of Minnesota and on the job front in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Danger Bad Advice Ahead fake sign, September 7, 2015. (http://wordspicturesweb.com).

Trotter didn’t understand that in blocking my first attempts to begin my career, he had helped set up a struggle for me to have even a semblance of a career before I had completed the first draft of my dissertation. As it was, I finished the first draft in June ’96, the second at the end of July, and polished it up before Labor Day Weekend ’96. That fact that I was done with all major revisions to my dissertation in time for any job that year made ready to strangle Trotter at that point.

Still, it would be only fair to say that my career moves — good and bad, smart and stupid — have mainly been of my own making. It would also be unfair to blame Trotter for any moves that I have made or didn’t make that didn’t work out after 1996-97. But every career has a beginning. And in the beginning, Trotter was there, making a mess of my first steps. It took until the spring of 2000 before Howard University offered me a tenure-track position in Afro-American Studies, to which I did say no. I didn’t need any more Joe Trotter’s in my life at that point, and working in the nonprofit world paid my bills better than teaching at that time.

My overall advice would be to make damn sure that you choose an advisor who cares about your whole career and about you as a person. Don’t choose someone to advise and mentor you out of convenience, and make sure that your advisor isn’t someone who just wants to mold you into a mediocre version of themselves. After all, it’s not their career trajectory or reputation that’s on the line. It’s yours.

Before and After Spencer

14 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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Academia, Ambivalence, Barbara B. Lazarus, Catherine Lacey, CMU, Faith, Hypocrisy, Joe William Trotter Jr., John Hinshaw, Multiculturalism, Selection Committee, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, Sign from God, Spencer Foundation, Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program

Seattle Seahawks’ Jerome Kearse making great catch off tipped ball while on the ground on final drive of Super Bowl XLIV, Tucson, AZ, February 2, 2015. (http://reddit.com).

This week marks twenty years since the now-retired Catherine Lacey called me up on a Friday morning while I was brushing my teeth to tell me that I’d been selected to be a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow for the 1995-96 year. I’d hoped and prayed for that day for more than twenty months, after my fellowship and teaching plans for the summer of ’93 fell through. But I’ve talked about Catherine Lacey and some of my Spencer experiences already, as well as about the reaction of Joe Trotter and some of my Carnegie Mellon grad school mates to this news.

This post is about the days before I received Lacey’s call, before I knew that I would be on the fast track to a doctorate. Because before I’d been selected for the Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, the selection committee had rejected me, with a 6-1-1 vote (that’s six in favor, one not in favor, and one abstaining). I knew this because Catherine had sent me a rejection letter with a handwritten note at the bottom of it, one that I received after two months away in DC doing my dissertation research. My suspicion was that most of the Fellows had received an 8-0 or 7-1 selection vote.

That was all on March 31, ’95. Catherine’s note, though, was encouraging. She said to “stay tuned,” that she was “looking into other alternatives.” So there was still a chance that I’d get the fellowship. Still, I didn’t want to do what I did two years earlier, when assumptions and hope led me to six weeks of joblessness and an eviction notice.

John Hancock Center, Downtown Chiicago – The Spencer Foundation is on the 39th Floor, April 14, 2015. (http://milenorthhotel.com).

So I did what I’ve done best throughout my work experiences. I scrambled to make sure I had work during the summer and upcoming school year. I didn’t want to be stuck borrowing more in student loans or teaching more of Peter Stearns’ version of World History courses — really, World Stereotypes — for entitled CMU freshmen.

I talked with both then associate provost (and also an eventual) mentor) Barbara Lazarus and fellow but further along grad student in John Hinshaw about me taking his job as a part-time assistant to Barbara. John really wanted to finish his dissertation and move on (who could blame him, given that Trotter was his advisor as well), and Barbara would’ve liked me for the job. So I gave them both a tentative yes, knowing that the job was contingent on John’s timetable for leaving it and finding an academic job elsewhere, all while completing his dissertation.

The thought occurred to me, though, that I may need more than a 15-20-hour-per-week job to get through the dissertation stage. Especially if I was to avoid teaching for the mercurial Stearns again. So I scheduled a meeting with Trotter to see if he any research project he needed help with.

We met at 2 pm on Thursday, April 13. Trotter was as excited about us meeting as he had been when I first decided to transfer to Carnegie Mellon to work with him as my advisor two and a half years earlier. He had at least three migration studies projects with which he wanted my labor. All the projects were about extending his grand proletarianization thesis. All would be dreadfully boring drudgery compared to my dissertation, but would keep me in additional pay checks for a year or two. I faked a smile, and tentatively said yes to Trotter as well.

Dikembe Mutumbo putting the wood to the. LA Laker Andrew Bynum, April 14, 2015. (http://fortheloveofgif.tumblr.com).

Eighteen hours later came Catherine’s call about me being offered the Spencer Fellowship! I took it as a sign from God, that at the very least, I’d finish my dissertation and my doctorate without the need for working on it an extra two or three years. Unfortunately, neither John Hinshaw nor Joe Trotter saw my great fortune the way I did. When John found out, which was a week later, he didn’t talk to me for nearly three years. And from reading my previous blog posts, you all already know how my work with Trotter devolved after the Spencer award announcement.

The one thing that fellowship did for me as a person — and not just as an academician, researcher or education — was to give me the space to question academia and my role in it. Even two decades later, I’m still ambivalent about the academic method of obtaining tenure, of the publish-or-perish paradigm, of the hypocrisy that exists in such a cloistered world. Even as I still hold a job and play a role in this world.

What I’ve come to learn is that hypocrisy is everywhere, in the nonprofit world, in romance, and in academia, too. We could all start with, “Did you hear the one joke about how merit and hard work alone can lead to a prosperous life?” That’s the hypocrisy that I had to learn to see in academia, and began to, thanks to the space that the Spencer Dissertation Fellowship gave me that year. More on that later.

Easter Seder 1995

08 Wednesday Apr 2015

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

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Alan, Black Jew, Carl, CMU, East Liberty, Easter Sunday, Hypocrisy, Identity, Jeff, Judaism, Manischewitz, Mogen David, Passover, Pesach, PhD Dissertation, Point Breeze, Raw Horseradish, Redemption, Seder, Self-Reflection, Spencer Foundation, Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program, Susannah, Whiteness

Matzo and a cup of wine in a Kiddush cup for first evening of Passover, April 7, 2015. (http://www.timeanddate.com).

Like most of my posts, this is a story of irony, sarcasm and identity. It may be a bit out of time, since the first night of Passover and Easter already occurred last weekend. But it’s still Passover week for those who do more than eat matzos and chicken liver paste with a glass of Manischewitz on the first night.

In all, I have been present, prayed, dined, wined and whined at four Passover Seders. Three of them were during the Hebrew-Israelite years, 1982, 1983, and 1984. All of them involved a roasted leg of lamb, bitter herbs, and chewing down raw horseradish while chugging super-sweet wine to chase away the five-alarm-fire in my mouth, throat and stomach. Endless praises to Yahweh, too many exhortations of Moses, and awkward snorts toward being strangers among strangers in a strange and oppressive land. That was my Passover experience in a lifetime and timeline determined by my Mom and idiot stepfather Maurice, before I turned to Christianity, before I gave up on the idea that I could be from one of the Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel.

My fourth Seder, though, came eleven years later, in mid-April 1995. I’d been a Christian for as long as I hadn’t commemorated Passover as part of my religious birthright. I wasn’t sure about the idea of attending this celebration, as it wasn’t even at sundown on that year’s first day of Passover, Saturday, April 15. My friend Carl and his/our respective Carnegie Mellon history grad school mates Alan, Jeff, and Susannah were holding their little Seder on Easter Sunday, April 16, as the first two rented a house together in the Point Breeze (really, the White end of Homewood-Brushton, which asked for a race-based divorce in 1961) neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

Picture of the Henry Clay Frick Mansion, or “Clayton”, located at 7200 Penn Avenue, Point Breeze, Pittsburgh, PA, March 21, 2010. (Lee Paxton via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

They had invited me a week earlier, a few days before my Spencer Foundation Fellowship application went from no-go to a go. I thought about saying no, but generally, I didn’t do anything on Easter Sundays, anyway. Even as a member of Covenant Church of Pittsburgh, the one Sunday I didn’t attend church was Easter Sunday. It the holiest of days, like Passover, and for so many people, the only day all year they attended church. For so many, it was show-off-my-new-spring-clothes day, not Jesus’ Resurrection Day. I didn’t like the overcrowded-ness that came with an Easter Sunday or Christmas service. It smacked of hypocrisy, my own included.

So I decided for one Sunday to attend a Seder prepared by folks who’d only known themselves as Jews both ethnically and religion-wise their whole lives. Except the stern, orthodox, full of bitterness and tears, joy and triumph that were the Seders of my Hebrew-Israelite days was a lighthearted affair. It was as unorthodox a Seder as could’ve expected, with lots of conversation about grad school, about my dissertation fellowship, about life and sports and music in general. No raw horseradish, but lots of chicken liver paste. No Manischewitz, but some Mogen David, along with more traditional red and white wines, and an empty seat for Elijah.

Manischewitz wine, in bottle and a wine glass, September 11, 2012. (http://tabletmag.com/).

Carl and Alan, of course, expressed surprise when I did ask questions or make comments. Like about the kosher-ness of eating mashed-up chicken livers, or the differences in taste between the traditional Pesach beverages, or how peanut butter and jelly went well with matzo crackers. Alan, about to be a one-year-and-done CMU history doctoral student, did ask me, “Where did you learn about Passover?” I said, “This is my fourth Seder.”

I knew better than to fully unlock everything I knew about Pesach, Judaism, Jewish history, the Ten Lost Tribes, being a Hebrew-Israelite, and the racial privileging that I had observed growing up in Mount Vernon between “real” Jews and us “weird” (read “not White”) Jews. For a few hours, though, I had to confront a part of my past that I’d all but locked away by the beginning of ’90. Not just locked away. I’d taken everything from between April 13, ’81 and July 23, ’89, wrapped it in Saran Wrap, put that in a Ziploc bag, thrown it in a safe, locked it, and then built a force field to keep out intruders.

I was relieved when I finally left Carl and Alan’s Easter Sunday/Passover Seder and walked back to my apartment in East Liberty. I wasn’t ready yet to take a look back at what I lived through during the Reagan Years. I was all about moving forward, and the previous days and weeks of dissertation research followed by a major-league dissertation fellowship made me feel like the completely different person that I believed I actually was. At least ninety-five percent of the time.

Running Interference

04 Monday Apr 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, race

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Academia, Academic Suicide, Advising, Advisor, April 4th, Bad Mentoring, CMU, David Montgomery, Dissertation, Doctoral Thesis, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter Jr., Manning Marable, Mentoring, Michael Nettles, MLK Assassination, Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program

Joe Trotter, circa 2008.

Today is the forty-third anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee. But for the past fifteen years, April 4th has also had the dubious distinction of reminding me of a big argument between me and Joe Trotter. He was my doctoral thesis advisor at Carnegie Mellon and, until that day, someone I considered a mentor in my becoming an academic historian.

Below is an excerpt from my book Fear of a “Black” America (with some minor additions) in which I recount what happened that day:

‘I’m looking out for your best interests’ was what my dissertation advisor typically said in discussing my future with me. As far as Trotter was concerned, he was in charge of the rest of my academic career, determining everything from whether I would finish my doctorate to where I would live and work after I graduated. But as I’d already discovered in the months leading to this moment, he was not nurturing my career at all. Virtually all of my achievements as a graduate student occurred despite my advisor rather than because of him.

This was because my advisor discouraged my attempts to publish, to obtain grants for my research, to participate in major conferences, and to apply for jobs when it was apparent I had nearly completed my doctoral thesis. My advisor would frequently say ‘You’re not ready’ to take on a particular project or to apply for a grant or job to hinder my efforts. Yet Trotter never pointed out what he thought I needed to do to be “ready.”

One of our last official meetings as advisor and student covered this particular issue. Six chapters into an eight-chapter dissertation, I was still being told that I was ‘not ready’ to apply for jobs or to attend major conferences. Trotter had in fact contradicted some of what he had said about my work in a previous meeting. So when he declared for the eighteenth time in this particular meeting that he was not giving me his support because he was ‘looking out for my best interests,’ I sarcastically replied ‘Yeah, right! I don’t believe you!’ I decided that I could not abide the hypocrisy of an advisor who cared little for my future while at the same time professing to care very deeply.”

There was an eerie silence. Trotter actually didn’t know what to say. Neither did I. Mostly because I wanted to strangle him with his own blue neck tie. So I did something less dramatic but far more legal. I said, “I don’t have anything else to say to you,” picked up my stuff, walked out his heavy dark wood door, and slammed it as hard as I could. “Stupid ass,” I said under my breath as I walked out of Baker Hall that day. I was talking about myself as much as I was talking about Trotter.

For any academic scholar who reads this, they’ll likely conclude that I committed academic suicide by exhibiting such defiance to my advisor that day. Not true — I have a doctorate and years teaching in academia to prove otherwise. Not having the support of an advisor — whether that support’s official or in the reality of a friendship or a mentorship — does make building a career harder. But given what I’d learned about Trotter’s lack of support for a Spencer Fellowship that I ended up receiving as an award anyway, despite him, I knew that even if everything had been okay, it wouldn’t have been after graduation.

The reality is that my former advisor and thousands like him commit a form of academic suicide every day by refusing to promote at least one student’s career development. Besides having one’s work published and obtaining grants, developing new talent is key to creating a legacy as a successful professor. It’s why I can go to any history conference and hear stories about David Montgomery, or to an education conference and hear folks discuss their wonderful mentoring relationships with Michael Nettles. Or why so many responded across all of the social networks after learning that Manning Marable had passed away on Friday, April 1st.

I’m not holding these examples up because these professors were saints. Hardly. Just pointing out the fact that when a professor maliciously and deliberately attempts to hold back students otherwise deserving of moving on out of jealousy or some other reason, it puts a pox on their house as well.

Golden State Spencer Fellows

12 Saturday Feb 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic

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Academia, Academic Arrogance, Ambivalence, Berkeley California, Catherine Lacey, Fellows, Misfits, Morgan Freeman, Publish-or-Perish, Shawshank Redemption, Spencer Foundation, Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program, UC Berkeley, West Coast

Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellows Retreat, Berkeley, CA, February 17, 1996. Donald Earl Collins (psst - I'm the young and cute Black guy in the white turtleneck in the back row)

Fifteen years ago this week I went on my first trip to the West Coast. It was for a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellows retreat in some villa of a conference center just off UC Berkeley’s campus. It was our second meeting as a cohort, presenting some of our doctoral thesis work in front of a group of professors from Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA and other places. It was also a chance for the thirty-three of us to meet the selection committee that had made it possible for us to be Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellows in the first place. We spent so much time in Berkeley and in Oakland that most of us didn’t bother to take the BART into San Francisco, so the trip was a failure in that area — not really.

But it was very important in one aspect above all else. I learned during our three days of meetings how I wasn’t alone in the world of academia. That I wasn’t the only misfit was the first revelation. There were other Fellows whose departments and classmates had shunned them and their work because it touched on the “soft” field of education. Or because it wasn’t hardcore quantitative analysis. Or because they weren’t thirty years old yet. Or even because of the age-old academic issues of looking at educational issues through the trifocal lens of race, gender and class.

Some of us talked about our dissertation advisors and their lack of support for us and our work. We were individuals who had won a prestigious individual award and a $15,000 grant to research and write a doctoral thesis, but somehow had managed to do this without the support of tenured faculty at major, even elite, universities! I found that fascinating. I also would’ve found that unbelievable if my advisor hadn’t been Joe Trotter. We didn’t have any obvious solutions to the problem of asshole advisors who may well not have supported us on the job market. Nor did we have a solution to their midlife crises or male pattern baldness. Yet it was good to spend significant time talking about this.

I also discovered through this retreat that I wasn’t the only one of us ambivalent about having a career as a professor. It didn’t help that we had a freshly minted associate professor from U Chicago talking to us about her average work week. Not because a forty to forty-five hour work week seemed anywhere close to arduous. At least to me. The half of the Fellows who really did want academic careers moaned quite loudly at the prospect of teaching, research, writing and serving on committees for so many hours. I, among others, looked at the list and found it rather mundane and restricting.

Many of us were concerned about becoming institutionalized, kind of like the way Morgan Freeman’s character “Red” talked about it in Shawshank Redemption. My own fear was that I could make myself a successful academician, molding my imagination and writing more fully into the forms of academic prose. Meaning that I wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone outside of my subfield or field, and certainly not with the general reading public, who usually wouldn’t use words like fait accompli unless they were French speakers. There were a few other Fellows who didn’t want to write or do research at all. They wanted to teach, to change the world of K-16 education somehow.

Catherine Lacey, the director of the Dissertation Fellowship program at the time, concluded with a lofty and philosophical speech about our bright futures. It was a good speech. It made me begin to think about what to do with my life if I didn’t get a full-time gig as faculty at an elite university. For many of us, though, this would also be the last time we could be this honest about our hopes, fears, and warts when it came to our doctoral theses and post-doctoral careers. If only I had known about the Ford Foundation’s associate program officer program when it existed back in ’96.

On Catherine Lacey

22 Wednesday Apr 2009

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Work, Youth

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Catherine Lacey, Friendship, Mentoring, Self-Discovery, Spencer Foundation, Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program

Me with Catherine Lacey at the Spencer Foundation, June 25, 2002. (Angelia N. Levy).

This month marks fourteen years since my plans for earning my doctorate were all but assured by a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. It was a one-year fellowship, only $15,000, but it meant that I didn’t have to teach for a year, that I didn’t have to do grunt work for my advisor Joe Trotter, and that I wasn’t beholden to the history department at Carnegie Mellon for much of anything. It was a great triumph in my little world of graduate school. But of all the things that resulted from that award, one thing that I didn’t count on was another mentor and friend. Without a doubt, Catherine Lacey has had the longest lasting impact on my career and on my thinking, in and out of academia.

Catherine was the Senior Program Officer and Director of the Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program when I applied for it in the fall of ’94. She had taken over the program in ’93, with the apparent charge of making the program more inclusive and more dynamic for its participants. I’m not sure what the foundation’s dissertation fellowship program was like before. All I know is that Catherine’s seven-year-long tenure running it was one in which she practiced compassion, humility, optimism, and quiet leadership. She never sounded like an academician in directing the work, although she was a bit philosophical at times. She never sounded like a bureaucrat or a senior foundation officer who practiced the power of “No,” even though that was certainly a major part of her job. Almost from my first conversation with Catherine, I realized that she was different from anyone I’d met with an academic background or in the foundation world.

Her background was as a Catholic nun who at one point was a Catholic school teacher, at least through the late ’70s, if I remember correctly. At some point she decided to go back to school, to eventually earn a doctorate in education from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Even though she was no longer a practicing nun (whatever I mean by that, I’m not entirely sure), I’m sure that this training and philosophical approach to life and work helped her a lot in her position at the Spencer Foundation. Maybe it was also the fact that she grew up in the Midwest, North or South Dakota I believe. Whatever the case, I think that this combination of experiences made her a more flexible and generous person than most of the foundation program officers and academic bureaucrats I’d met before and have come to know since.

The first time I ever heard from Catherine was right after a two-month research stay in Washington, DC and visit home in Mount Vernon, New York. I’d just come off of weeks in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Moorland-Spingarn Research collection at Howard University, the Sumner School Archives for DC Public Schools, and several other places doing research on my dissertation topic, multiculturalism in philosophy and practiced among Black Washingtonians. It was the end of March ’95, and it had been five months since I’d submitted my application packet for the Spencer fellowship. When I went to my Carnegie Mellon mailbox in the history department, there it was. A standard #10 envelope with only a one-page letter inside, which I knew because of the envelope’s thinness. I knew it was a rejection letter. Except that it wasn’t, at least not entirely. It had a handwritten note at the bottom of it from Catherine, asking me to give her a call as soon as I received the note.

So I did. Catherine did most of the talking, asking me about my research stay in DC, about my definition of multiculturalism and how it had or hadn’t changed because of my research. Then she talked to me about the selection committee. Apparently out of eight committee members, six voted in favor of awarding me the fellowship, one against, and with one in absentia. The sticking point was how I defined multiculturalism in my research proposal, putting me on the fence between award and no award. Although I would learn later that there were some academic and cultural politics involved in the two non-Yes votes, at the time Catherine told me that she would do everything she could to see if she could still fund my work. “I’m not making any promises,” she said before we got off the phone.

I didn’t know what to make of the call, other than the fact that Catherine cared about funding my work. That it wasn’t everyday that someone with her responsibilities called a student who had technically been rejected was also something I took away from that call. Two weeks passed. On Friday, April 14 of ’95, I got a call at home, right after 9:30 am. I assumed it was my mother or one of my friends. I hadn’t even taken the time to spit and rinse my toothpaste when I answered the phone. After the pleasantries, Catherine excitedly blurted out the good news. And I swallowed my toothpaste in response before asking how and saying thanks.

It turned out that Catherine thought that in addition to the 29 awards that were granted fellowships by the committee, that there were four others (including me) who should also receive the fellowship. Catherine had spent the previous two weeks asking the foundation for additional monies for the other four of us, and found that at least two of the original 29 awardees had accepted other fellowships. As a result, she could then give out four additional fellowships as part of her discretion as the director of the program. I was happy, to say the least about the award. But I was even happier that someone would fight for me and others the way Catherine did.

As a Spencer fellow, I learned a lot from my “fellow Fellows,” as I constantly called our group. That I wasn’t the only one whose advisor was acting as a roadblock toward our degree and career aspirations. That our colleagues on our campuses stared us all down with daggers in their eyes after learning about our awards. That hours upon hours of lonely research and intense writing and editing didn’t make any of our significant others or spouses particularly happy. Still, I learned as much from Catherine as I did from my fellow Fellows. About balance between life and work. About the realization that academia wasn’t our only career option, even as much as we thought it was at the time. That it was all right to feel ambivalent about pursuing an academic career.

This last one was of great importance to me, because my worries about becoming a publish-or-perish professor had always been there. I wanted to do something useful with my degree and life, something to benefit others, something that would allow me to help people who grew up like me, poor, possibly abused, and with the world thinking that I’d sooner go to jail than graduate high school. The one thing that Catherine’s work revealed to me was that it was possible to have a job and career that you could fall in love with, that helps others, and that enabled you to prosper financial. Her job allowed her to do all three, and very well at that.

It was that realization that enabled me to stumble my way into the nonprofit world, doing work on everything from community computer labs and civic education to a social justice fellowship program and education reform work on college access and success. Even after my fellowship ended in June ’96, I kept in contact with Catherine, attended Spencer gatherings and asked for advice. I even took my wife with me on a business trip to Chicago once to, among other things, have her meet Catherine at the Spencer offices in the John Hancock Building. I haven’t had quite the same luck of finding work that is as fulfilling as Catherine’s work was with Spencer. But I haven’t given up trying, and hope that what I have done and am doing does actually help others.

I haven’t talked to Catherine since the end of ’04. Not for lack of trying, though. Catherine decided after two years as a high-level administrator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education that it was time for her to retire, to move back to the Dakotas, to live in seclusion, I guess. She didn’t particularly like Philly, or the grinding work that is almost pure administration. She missed Spencer, Chicago, and all of the people that she had met over the years. I think that the Bush years and 9/11 depressed her greatly

I miss Catherine. I miss asking her advice on everything from my job to whether I should turn Boy At The Window into a fiction novel instead of keeping it a memoir with narrative nonfiction elements (I know, that’s redundant) or even continue to pursue finding an agent. I miss sending her pictures of Noah or talking to her about her days at Spencer. Most of all, I miss telling her how much her friendship and unofficial mentoring have meant to me over the years. To Catherine, and really, all of my friends, many, many thanks.