2005 Learning Communities Institute

"STEAL AWAY"

2003 Learning Communities Institute Plenary Session

by Featured Speaker

J. Herman Blake, Ph.D.

Director of African American Studies

Iowa State University

Ames , Iowa

INTRODUCTION

Thank you for the invitation to share some thoughts with you this morning as you go into a second full day of deliberations on learning communities—another program that has brought Iowa State University to a position of national leadership in higher education. I am honored to be selected, and am particularly grateful to Corly Brooke and Doug Gruenewald for their kind consideration. I have had extensive interactions with both of them this past year and my respect and admiration for each of them grows with each passing day.

You have chosen as the theme of your conference “The Road Less Traveled…And That Has Made All the Difference.” The theme speaks to issues of movement, change and progress—the sense of a journey that is just beginning. The theme also speaks to issues of vision and the courage to follow that vision. There is a lot we can learn from thoughtfully reflecting on the theme and the Robert Frost poem from which it is derived.

I have titled this presentation “Steal Away” as I have been inspired by your theme. The title is drawn from the traditional Negro spiritual that is well known to many of you. It is my way of linking the inspiration of my personal life and my cultural roots to the inspiration of my intellectual and academic life as reflected in this Learning Communities Institute. Those who years ago would quietly sing “Steal Away” were motivated by visions of freedom and courage to take another road, another path to liberate their personal selves from the burdens of oppression and humiliation. Today the same vision and courage motivates me to fully participate in the Learning Community Program at Iowa State University, to take the load less traveled in pursuit of the freedom that comes for knowledge and a commitment to liberal education—constant learning and growth.

In approaching this theme I ask that you permit me a brief moment of personal privilege. My life as an administrator, a learner, and a professor has been extraordinarily rich—and particularly the past few years. As I bask in the accolades, I am taken back to origins and roots—constantly reminded about how I got to this place and time. Therefore I would like to take a moment and speak to those foundations by dedicating these remarks to two people who really made it possible for me to be here this morning.

DEDICATIONS :

Lillian Tinsley : I grew up in a small community just north of New York City . My mother and her seven children lived in a converted store on a busy street in Mount Vernon . Our lives were organized around the monthly arrival of the welfare check. However, too many months we would run out of money before the next check arrived. Going door to door to “borrow” 5 dollars or a “cup of rice” to help us make it was a very humiliating experience. Poverty and welfare are hard on the soul.

When my older brother Henry reached the age of 16 he decided to drop out of school to get a job and contribute to the survival of the family. I clearly remember the day the truant officer came to the house and in front of my mother and the rest of the children he told the gentleman he would not be returning to school, and the officer said there was nothing he could do about Henry’s decision. For all of us Henry was a hero larger than life. He had stood up to the truant officer, and he was going to help the family. We were all so very proud of him and looked forward to the day when we would follow his lead.

Lillian Tinsley was a member of our church. She was unmarried and had no children. She did what was then known as “Day Work” which meant that each day of the week she went to a different home of a white family where she would clean and carry out menial tasks. It did not pay much.

Shortly after hearing of Henry’s decision she visited my mother and asked her to “Send that boy back to school because he needs his education.” She promised that if my mother would do so she would give my mother the same amount of money Henry could earn from her meager earnings.

My mother accepted her offer. Henry went back to high school, graduated, and went on to junior college. Ultimately (many years later) he completed his bachelor’s degree. A new path was broken for all of his siblings. Out of my mother’s 7 children, all completed high school and 6 of us have completed the baccalaureate. 5 have achieved master’s degrees and 2 of us have doctorates. This is an extraordinary record for a humble domestic worker and I want to pay tribute to the vision and commitment of Lillian Tinsley.

Alexander Baltzly : He was professor of history at New York University and I met him on my first day of college in 1955. I enrolled in his course on European History. I knew nothing about college, and enrolled because I had just been laid off from my new position as a machinist, and I had the GI Bill to support me as a result of military service during the Korean War. At 21 years of age I was the oldest student in the class, the only one married, and I felt like I was the “dumbest” as I listened to the learned conversations among youth who had attended private schools in Manhattan .

Professor Baltzly was a superb teacher and I enjoyed the course very much, actively participating in the discussions since I always read the material before class. However, I knew nothing about taking essay examinations—the essence of our final. When I went to see the grade listings I had an “incomplete”. I went to his office to get an explanation. He was very direct in his answer: “Mr. Blake” he said, “you are much too intelligent to flunk my examination or my course, and I will not let you out of this course until you write me a “B” final. I did so and received my first “B” in a college course—there were to be many more.

Years later, upon completion of my preliminary examinations for the Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley I wrote to Dr. Baltzly to tell him of my achievement. I was so excited and reminded him of his confidence in me and the ultimate result—I was on my way to becoming a college professor with his example as a role model.

Some weeks later a reply came from him—living in retirement. The handwritten message had a clearly arthritic scrawl. It opened with these words: “Dear Mr. Blake: I have no idea who you are.” The letter went on to say he did not remember me, he did not remember the incident, and he did not remember our conversation. However, he wrote that one of the pleasures of growing old was receiving such letters from former students whose lives had been touched by him even though he did not remember them. I was very moved by his letter and his loss of memory did not reduce my respect and appreciation.

My presentation this morning is dedicated to the memory of Lillian Tinsley and Alexander Baltzly .

‘STEAL AWAY’—THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED

In approaching the theme of your conference the memories of these and other important role models and mentors throughout my entire life guide my thinking. In many respects when I reflect on Lillian Tinsley I think in terms of a strong sense of recognition of one’s roots, one’s social origins, and how so many wise—even if unlettered—people can guide one along a path that has marvelous rewards at the end. [NB: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2002 Annual meeting of the Association for General and Liberal Studies in Louisville , KY. ]

When I reflect on Alexander Baltzly, and countless others like him, I think in terms of the development of the intellect with a strong sense of social responsibility. Both of these guides had a strong sense of moral character, both had a strong sense of their strengths, they did what they could do from the place where life had brought them. Indeed, both of them took the road less traveled and by doing so they made a major difference for many others

Now as I stand before you to reflect on liberal education, higher education and learning communities I understand that through this entire journey along roads less-traveled I have never been alone. For that I am profoundly grateful.

Beginnings

I would like to reflect on both beginnings and endings in articulating some of my own perspectives on education and learning. It was almost 4 decades ago that I started my academic career at the University of California at Santa Cruz . I was appointed to the faculty in 1966 while still completing my doctorate at UC Berkeley. Until that time, life for me had been such an amazing and rapid process of development and growth that I accepted any opportunity with enthusiasm. The rapid progress—in retrospect—was amazing.

Between 1966 and 1973 a period of seven years, I had accomplished the following:

1. Completed a Ph.D. dissertation on social change in Mexico

2. Wrote and published a book on the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

3. Founded a new college at the University of California at Santa Cruz

4. Wrote a monograph on The Woodlawn Organization a unique pattern of community development in Chicago

5. Wrote a monograph on community development and the Citizen Education Schools in Coastal South Carolina—a program that became the backbone of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council

6. Maintained an active and full teaching load at the University of California Santa Cruz .

These accomplishments are significant but I do not want to focus on them in particular. What I want to stress is how the impact of both Lillian Tinsley and Alexander Baltzly combined to give me an approach to my work that was personally significant, and perhaps transformative—that helped me to “Steal Away” and take the road less-traveled.

When I started studying Black Panther Party youth I was impressed with the obvious contradictions in their lives. I found them to be some of the most delightful and enjoyable youth one might find in the inner cities of any urban area. They had a joie de vivre that was infectious. I spent days in their headquarters in West Oakland observing their activities in support of the surrounding community.

Yet when the evening came and the shadows lengthened these same joyous youth would become quiet and very serious. From closets they would extract shotguns and pistols, and prepare themselves for the night when they felt the local police might attack them. During the day they enjoyed living but every night they expected to die and they prepared to die. I remember one burly young man reacting to my facial expression one evening as he placed several shotguns in strategic places around the walls. Brandishing a shotgun like a spear he said, “You know Doc most people decorate their walls with vases of flowers—we decorate our walls with the ‘Revolutionary Tool’”.

Then I would leave Oakland and drive the 75 miles south to the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California where I was working on the development of Oakes College , with a lot of student participation. My students at Santa Cruz were equally as delightful and enjoyable as the Panther youth, yet they had a hope for the future that led them to apply themselves to academic pursuits. I found the similarity in spirit, contrasted with the difference in hope led me to some profound reflections about the circumstances of life.

In one instance young people were picking up the gun because they had no hope, and in another instance young people were picking up books because their hope was endless. Both groups were joyous and delightful young people, yet the difference in origins and opportunities led to very different behavior patterns.

This is where the examples of Lillian Tinsley and Alexander Baltzly came together for me. The challenge was how to build on my own lower class origin, and the empathy it gave me with the Black Panther youth, and combine it with the example of liberal education Alexander Baltzly inspired in me. I saw no contradiction between the loftiest principles of liberal education and the intense search for meaning in life of oppressed youth. The question was could I convince youth from inner cities? It became a life long challenge that still motivates me today. To me it was the challenge of how to merge the roots of one’s origins with the leaves and branches of one’s new circumstances to create hope in youth whose lives have been stifled by poverty and lack of opportunity in such a manner that they become productive citizens.

Eighteen years of service at the University of California at Santa Cruz were followed by academic and administrative stints at Tougaloo College in Mississippi , Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania , Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis , and finally Iowa State University . So I have served in large and small institutions, very wealthy as well as resource-starved institutions, research and teaching institutions, liberal arts and land grant institutions, urban and rural institutions. Across this incredible range there has been one constant—the students. I have yet to find a single institution where I did not find the students hopeful, committed and willing to be challenged by the combination of high expectations and respect for their intellectual potential. Indeed, my present academic environment here at Iowa State University is one filled with some of the finest students I have encountered in my career.

The Constant Challenge

Motivated by the example of dozens of examples of teachers I encountered in my undergraduate and graduate studies, as well as even more examples of hopeful and also pessimistic citizens of grassroots communities I encountered in every decade of life, I have wrestled with the constant challenge of liberal education, academic opportunity and high expectations. To me this has meant teaching from a liberal education perspective and utilizing the knowledge gained thereby to enhance the education of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The pattern of education must be enhanced in such a manner that students from humble backgrounds whether the barrios of Los Angeles, the inner city of Chicago or the prairies of Iowa ultimately understand and appreciate the value of liberal education. This leads them to look beyond the practical and applied approaches to education and focus on a pattern of constant growth and learning. This means to “Steal Away” and follow the road less-traveled.

Toward this end I find I must constantly look at myself and critique my own teaching and learning. To do this I must stay in touch with the subject matter I teach and continuously upgrade my teaching with new knowledge and understanding.

I would assert that the idea of the road less-traveled challenges all of us to not only assess our external environment, we must also assess and continually reassess our internal environment. Not only must we traverse a different road, that road must be a path of constant learning if we would expect to remain central to the learning process of constantly changing and dynamic cohorts of undergraduates in our learning communities.

Even more important I find I must constantly study my students and get to know them so I can relate to their new perspectives and how they see the world. Indeed, I can only reach them in the way I wish if I can somehow link their perspectives, their origins, and their goals and values, with an understanding of liberal education.

I face a critical challenge on that front in my teaching today. In the Multicultural Learning Community I teach a survey course to first year students from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. There is little in the nomenclature and concepts of previous teaching experiences that can be used with accuracy in this current student group. Just a few years ago I might have said I have students who are Black, White, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian. Those concepts, while still accurate at one level, are no longer sufficient descriptors. They simply will not work with much efficacy. Within these traditional categories there is as much internal diversity as there is diversity between the groups. There are bi-racial and bi-cultural students who resist any effort to categorize them, they must be seen for who they are as humans and unique individuals—the categories do not work for them. There are students who are recent immigrants. Among them there are students who are not only immigrants, they were once refugees or displaced persons, and the trauma of those events shape their present perspectives on life. Then there are those whose parents are immigrants but they were born and raised in the United States, making them products of two and sometimes three cultures—truly marginilized youth. What is more, there are the students who come from fairly comfortable backgrounds but who have been raised by parents who came from poverty backgrounds. In their families and general social situations they must incorporate competing and sometimes conflicting value frames, and as a result they are unique. To add to this mix, there are students from all backgrounds who have been adopted and raised by mainstream middle class families in the Midwest, and they claim cultural heritages that are both intimate and foreign to them, and they want both heritages. On top of this, there are students who are of a wider range of faith traditions than we have usually encountered in the academy.

There is no way one can look at a student’s face, name, or any other feature of identification and know anything substantive about the student’s identity. Indeed, my students are so diverse within their racial/ethnic groups, and then so diverse internally, that one has to almost totally abandon all previous analytical categories in order to effectively communicate with them.

This is a major challenge to the professor; it is a major challenge to the academy. These are the students we longed for when we sought social change in the previous century. As one seeks to challenge them with the principles of liberal education, those same principles challenge the professor to look at the world in new ways.

I find myself approaching each class reciting the African proverb “You don’t build a house for yesterday’s rains.” The challenge is how does a professor who comes out of a mid-20 th Century perspective, teach students how to lead and live in a mid-21 st Century society? Indeed, I would say this is a major challenge of liberal education and the road less-traveled.

Moreover, the students I find most exciting and challenging are not only from a wide range of backgrounds and are unique and special, they are truly the products of our past efforts of social change. I see this when I realize they do not want to live in a society characterized by the divisions or limits of previous social frames of reference, previous value frameworks used to assess people or circumstances. Therefore they reject the nomenclature; they reject many of the ways we perceived the world. They see a changed world—because we have changed it.

Yet in rejecting the past ways thinking and doing, they have yet to develop new ways of thinking and acting in place of the old. Thus they are good at articulating what they do not want, but they have yet to shape another way of being. In the process they tend to rely on the very outmoded frames of reference they reject because they have yet to shape new frames of thinking. There is a tendency to replace old nomenclature with new categories, but when they think about it they realize they need to dream dreams that have never been dreamed, and articulate ideas that have never been articulated, while recognizing the impact and often the limits of their historical knowledge.

This becomes another challenge to issues of liberal education and the road less-traveled. How do we teach them in such a manner that they can develop the intellectual capacity to be thoughtful, and critical, while also being visionary and idealistic?

From the example of Lillian Tinsley I endeavor to create a sense of empowerment, a sense of confidence they can shape a new world. From the example of Alexander Baltzly I try to teach them from a framework of high expectations of myself and of them as students. Those high expectations particularly include critical thinking, liberal learning and issues of character such as humility, self-respect, and respect for others. I stress the capacity to know oneself; to know how one is perceived by others; and how one perceives others.

This means that the pedagogy is as important as the content—indeed they are embedded in each other. This means that my teaching requires me to be ever diligent in understanding how students are receiving my words and how they are understanding my ideas. As Todd Newberry said to me years ago at UCSC, “It is all of me, teaching all of you.”

The Full and Unbroken Circle

Given my own personal experience in becoming an educator, I tend to speak in social terms about liberal education and its consequences. Those social outcomes can be seen as issues of moral and civic responsibility—issues of character. In taking this approach, however, I am particularly mindful of the need to maintain a strong sense of humility for in spite of great intellectual knowledge, we have much to learn about social perspectives that reflect and also impact the intellect. In much of my work I use the perspectives of those at the bottom to inform my academic work.

For example, I am struck by how the Hopi tradition intersects with the African American tradition in such a way that it spurs thinking about life and character in creative ways for me.

In an essay about her tradition, Noreen Sakiestewa (Center for Excellence in Education, Northern Arizona University) wrote: “As I reflect upon who I am, I look at myself first as a Hopi, and then as a Hopi educator who looks at teaching from a Hopi perspective. In terms of a Hopi methodology, Hopi elders say that we always go in a full circle. They never think in a linear perspective. All aspects and interpretations of a situation are to be considered when making a decision. In the Hopi way of life, learning never ends.” [Journal of Negro Education, Volume 67, No. 4, Fall 1998, p. 450]

Principles of liberal education abound in this personal statement. The idea that learning never ends, the idea that one must take all aspects of a situation into consideration are certainly perspectives of liberal education. Yet students from the Hopi perspective often find they are “out of place” in our institutions. What is lacking here is a real understanding of the way they see the world, and the way we can make the link between a full circle and an educational experience that is most often linear and even “teleological”. Yet if we really mean what we say about the road less-traveled we must develop ways to fully understand, appreciate and incorporate these students into our midst. In other words the faculty, other students and the University must change even more than the American Indian students should be expected to change.

I found it easy to comprehend the Hopi way of the full circle as I contemplated the African American tradition of the unbroken circle, and even the power of the “double negative”. In my research in the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia I have frequently heard people speak of their desire for social unity with the expression, “May the circle be never unbroken.” For many years I thought this was poor grammar and a reflection of the Gullah culture in which I was involved. As I learned to listen, I came to realize that while it was improper English to an observer, it was a profound expression of social unity to those participating in the cultural events. I learned I could not reach my respondents on a profoundly intimate level until I had changed my perceptions of them, and thereby their perceptions of me. It was an experience of liberal education and character. It was the road less-traveled. [For another view on the double negative see: Cheryl H. Keen, et. al., Common Fire: Lives of Commitment in A Complex World, Beacon Press, 1996].

In my judgement it is an important aspect of liberal education and the road less-traveled to be able to learn from those who have very different views of the world, and even challenge our sense of how one lives life, or accomplishes goals.

In thinking about the unbroken circle and learning from the unlettered I think of an example I never tire of sharing with others. In my pioneering efforts in Service Learning (35 years ago) I placed my students in some of the most isolated and impoverished communities in the United States. There they lived in the homes of the people and worked with them in an extraordinary effort of service and learning. There I learned about the road less-traveled from a grassroots community perspective, and the lesson and its meanings are profound.

On one occasion one of the students arrived with all his belongings on an isolated island only to find that his host family had left for two weeks on the mainland. Since there were no telephones on the island and most of the residents were functionally illiterate communication had been difficult and our arrangements had gone awry. So the student found himself on the dock of an island where there were no public accommodations, no stores, no telephones, and he had no place to stay. One of the residents—a single mother—took him to her home where he stayed until his host family returned. Further when he attempted to compensate her for room and board she refused any payment.

Curious about her action, I talked with her on a subsequent trip to learn the rationale behind her decision to take in a complete stranger. I asked her directly “Why would you take a complete stranger into your home and keep him for two weeks?” Her first answer was “It is just so, I meet that when I come here,” meaning it was a part of the tradition of the community. However, after my third or fourth attempt to get an explanation she exclaimed, “Professor, I look at that boy, and I say that’s a mother’s son. Boy come home with me.”

This is the unbroken circle and the full circle at work—and it is an example I often use in my teaching as I try to get my students to think beyond their limits. This woman, without formal education, did not say I looked at that “white boy” or I looked at that “colored” boy as she had been trained to think because that was not what she saw. What she saw was a young man who was separated from his family—she saw a mother’s son. In that action this woman saw her connection to every mother on the face of the earth. She knew that the mother of the young man—whoever she might be, regardless of her culture or nationality—would want someone to look after her stranded son. She saw something of herself in the other, in a complete stranger, and as a result formed a bond that transcended all divisions. When I attempt to teach liberal education and character I attempt to think from the perspective of the full circle, the circle that must be “never” unbroken.

What is of great interest to me in this present day—30 years beyond that incident, I still have students going into that community. An Iowa State University student spent the fall semester 2002 in that same region and interacted with the community in most unique ways. The ISU student worked with local residents who had eventually graduated from my college in California , and together they gave care to this same woman who is now victimized by the maladies of age, poverty and illness. However, now she is a son’s mother and the road less-traveled does makes all the difference. It is good to “Steal Away.”

Endings

As I enter the sunset of a long and productive career I have begun to experience an unexpected phenomenon that gives me another perspective on liberal education and character, in the spirit of Alexander Baltzly. Recently I received a rather bulky package in the mail. It was addressed by hand and I did not recognize the name or address of the sender. Since it came during the anthrax scare I was really reluctant to open the package, but curiosity got the best of me. Upon opening it I found a textbook on demography—a subject I had once taught. The author had sent it to me. Inscribed in the book was an expression of thanks to me. The author wrote how he took my class on demography many years ago at the University of California, how he was fascinated by my passion for the study of demography. He continued in study and subsequently entered graduate school to pursue demography. This book—the 3 rd edition—was his way of thanking me for what I had contributed to his life. What is more, he told me he met his wife in my class, and now they had three grown children and one grandchild. It was a long and glowing inscription.

Friends, I have no recollection of this person. I do not remember the conversations with him. I do remember teaching the course, but that is all. Now I know how Alexander Baltzly felt when he received my letter years ago. The circle is unbroken and learning never ends. However, there is more. The lesson of this experience for me is that like my encounter and exchange with Professor Baltzly, I now understand that liberal education and learning communities are much more than ways of organizing and transmitting ideas. In some ways the theme of this conference is about ways of being and in that existential quality is the full circle, for learning never ends.