I am a forward-looking dinosaur. By that I mean that I feel a little out of place in today's world, as though I had been dropped from a passing time warp. At the same time, I keep looking forward to the changes we face as the story of history unfolds through the technologically bedazzled present.
First, I'm a fellow-traveler of the sixties. I wore the bell-bottoms, sympathized with the anti-war demonstrations even as I reported on them for the newspapers as a budding journalist, and experimented in ways sexual and pharmaceutical. The present great march to conservatism seems to me to be as idealistically naive as we were in the sixties. From my point of view, as the son of the son of a North Carolina dirt farmer, the grand ol' days the conservatives want to rediscover led us straight to the Great Depression. Many of us in the boomer generation, burdened with families and low expectations for financial success, are already in a Minor Depression.
Second, I'm an old-style Speech person. I was trained as an undergraduate in Journalism and Speech. The Speech program I experienced was based on skills --- Voice and Diction, Debate, Advanced Public Speaking, Oral Interpretation, Readers Theatre, and other practical courses. The Journalism instruction I had was largely practical, as well. We took writing, writing, editing, and more writing, all corrected by tough old editors seasoned in the schools of AP wire rooms and local newspapers. They pounded clarity, spelling, and simple style into my head over and over. [I had to unlearn a good bit of that so I could learn to speak PhDese.] I also got to experience the last of "college" life before the less intimate "university" approach took over. I saw professors daily, most of whom took time to talk to students. Professors acted in plays with students, marched with them in demonstrations, argued with them in columns for the student paper, and, general, were a part of their daily lives. Many of them were master teachers, people who would not have a prayer of getting tenure at a place like Penn State. Yet they had an important role to play in the training of people like Charles Kuralt, James Reston, Clifton Daniels, and Vermont Royster. Today's over-emphasis on the teaching of theory and the lastest research seems misguided to me, based on my understanding of what's happening to us today as our media of communication change so drastically and so rapidly.
That's because, third, much of my research is in the classical history of oral performance and writing. [Classical Rhetoric, now there's a REAL dinosaur for you!] As a graduate student in oral interpretation, my Classical Rhetoric professor, Richard Enos, said in passing that scholars felt the ancients always read aloud. The only reference I could find was a simple statement of that as fact in The Sound of Greek by W. B. Stanford. I began searching the literature of the Classical Period looking for references to writing, reading, and reciting. This was the origin of my dissertation, and led to the little book Orality and Literacy in Hellenic Greece (1989). My conclusion was that writing interacted with the memory and oral performance skills of the ancient world to give birth to the awareness of abstraction and categorical reasoning which led, through Aristotle, to the birth of "Western" culture. [We might better say "Written" culture.] This understanding is one source of my concern for today's students. Pseudo-oral media like film and TV are overpowering the balance between written understanding of abstract ideas like freedom of speech and the oral skills of communication. We are becoming as self-centered and "a- logical" as the Greeks were in many cases. I believe students desperately need to understand abstract thought in order to see themselves as part of a class of "human beings," each of whom has a right to their own point of view. Further, they desperately need communications skills to learn to reach out to those unfamiliar "others" through speech. As a result, my work in overlapping the teaching of writing and speaking is fascinating to me.
Finally, I am the rarest of all birds, a tenured assistant professor. Don't ask me how it happened; I did my job teaching oral interpretation and readers theatre, coached students through six to nine readers theatre productions a semester, wrote the little book, helped to set up the first public speaking class in India's history through the Food and Agriculture Organization, and did most of the paperwork to set up our Education Abroad program taking students to Greece. Still I find myself in professional purgatory.
Yet I have adapted to my fate. The conclusion that geometricallly-expanding expectations for publication preclude professional advancement, however, [how's THAT for PhDese?] has freed me to become a professor who actually knows and spends time with students. I've been using email in my classes for several years, coaching performances individually in my office, and allowing students to revise written assignments to make them better. I do still have daydreams of someday making as much as the average assistant professor at Penn State, as much as the average State College school teacher, or EVEN, in wild moments, as much as a state legislator. Most of the time, however, I focus on the enjoyment I have sharing my students' growing self- confidence as they learn to interact with an audience in a performance situation.
My true identity, ultimately, is that of "Dad." My wife is a nurse at the Rehab Hospital, and we share household responsibilities for laundry, dishes, lunch- making, house-cleaning, and childcare. I spend a good deal of time getting kids off to school, being a Cub Scout leader, a Troop Committee member, doing story-telling and readers theatre in local schools, and generally hanging out with my three handsome sons. I even write sappy poems about Dad and boy things, mailed to relatives at Christmas. [I've actually published a couple of little poems in odd places.] I strive to live up to the maxim, written by Paul Wilkes in "Truths My Father Never Told Me," that before you're a good father, you're a good man."
Sometimes I come close. Check out the sappy poem to see.