Sweet MUMories Oral History Project - Jeff Sommers
Title
Sweet MUMories Oral History Project - Jeff Sommers
Description
Date
March 3, 2017
Duration
59:42 minutes
Transcription
Sweet MUMories Oral History Project
Transcript: Jeff Sommers, March 3, 2017
Donation Record #Sommers.J.3032017.1
Transcribed by Jade Smallwood 08/11/2017. Approved for deposit by Marsha Robinson on 4/25/2018.
Copyright Miami University. All rights reserved.
MRR My name is Marsha Robinson and we are recording an oral history with Jeff Sommers as part of the Sweet MUMories Oral History Project. This project marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Miami University Middletown, Ohio, campus. This interview is taking place on March 3, 2017, at the Gardner-Harvey Library, Middletown campus. Dr. Sommers, do I have your consent to proceed with this interview?
JS Yes.
MRR Thank you. Would you please tell us how you came to the Miami Middletown campus and when?
JS I was living in Finneytown which is a part of Cincinnati and I was finishing my PhD at NYU. This was in 1979 or so. And I was teaching at the University of Cincinnati in what they, charmingly, called a terminal position. It was three years and then you were out. When I finished the degree the degree, in two years, I started looking for work. By that time, I had decided. My previous teaching experience included a community college in western Maryland. I’d been there for three years and when I compared those three years to the two years at University of Cincinnati, I realized I wanted to go back to a two year campus because I greatly appreciated the age diversity of the student population. And so they just happened to be advertising assistant professor in the English department here at Middletown. And I looked at the description and I said to my wife, “This job, I couldn’t have written a better description of a job for myself. If I don’t get this I’m probably not employable in the English field.” So I threw my hat into the ring and I got the job. Now, the job search was interesting, well the job visit. I got invited for a campus visit and I drove to Oxford because the English department was housed in Bachelor Hall. Bachelor Hall, is that right?
MRR I think so.
JS Okay. Bennett Hall was at the University of Pennsylvania where I was at undergrad and where I live now so I got confused. So I went to Bachelor Hall and had a series of interviews over there, I met with the department chair whose name was Bob Johnson, who subsequently became the provost. Very nice guy. When that portion of the day was over it was time for me to travel to the Middletown campus. And to give you some sense of how things worked in those days, there was no lunch. There was no escort. They gave me a map and I was asked to return a couple of books to a faculty member if I didn’t mind. I drove over here and I had my interview with the search committee, basically all the English faculty that were here. Our coordinator at the time was Mark Plageman who was the French teacher but he was in charge of languages and English. The interview went really well. I felt that it had because of my experience at the community college, I felt like I knew what this place was going to be like. It’s not a community college but the student population is similar. So I felt like we were connected. I thought it went really well. Afterwards I was supposed to meet Gene Bennett who was the executive director at the time and Mark Plageman walked me down there. So I said to him casually, “How much input do you folks have in this hiring decision?” And he says, “Oh, well we pretty much tell them who we want and that’s who we get.” And I thought it’s a good thing this went well because nobody ever told me that. So then I met with Gene Bennett who spent most of his time interviewing me emphasizing if you get a job here, it is not the way to get to Oxford. It is not the road to Oxford. You can’t expect to transfer to Oxford. And I kept assuring him that I’ve been in a four-year college and I want to be here. I don’t know that he really believed me but anyway that’s how I got the job. If you jump ahead a few years, I learned fairly quickly although I worked here, the tenure decisions and the promotion decisions were made in Oxford and I was a member of the English department. I just happened to be located here. So it made sense to me that I needed to become a known quantity in my department at the very least, if I hoped to progress. I think I was hired at the same time as John Heyda, I don’t know if you ever knew John or not.
MRR We have.
JS He just retired I think last year. I expect he’s going to be at the talk tonight. John and I began on the very first day actually. Together, on the first day in 1981. I know we talked it over, we both kind of got the same sense which was we have to become, we have to integrate ourselves in the department at Oxford if we hope to get anywhere. The department was pretty welcoming. In particular, though, the people who taught writing, the composition people, were very welcoming because I think they recognized that’s what we taught. The majority of our teaching load was in freshman composition and it was a way for them to grow the freshman composition faculty without having to hire anybody. So they were pretty welcoming. In particular, Don Daiker, whose going to be there coming tonight I believe. Don Daiker and Max Warrenburg were, I would say, my mentors while I was here. Max passed away a couple years ago which was sad. They were very welcoming and we looked for all kinds of ways to get integrated over there. I was about to say, I also learned that when I published something or would give a talk at a conference, that it was worth sending a little notification over to the PR people and it would appear in whatever the vehicle was that went out to faculty. I wanted my name to be known in circulation. So I got to be known in the English department. I had one really interesting conversation on the staircase at Bachelor Hall when I was chatting with someone, I didn’t know him really well but he apparently knew who I was. He leaned forward and in sort of a whisper and said, “And you can’t get yourself transferred here?” and I said, “I don’t really want to do that. I’m happy where I am.” I don’t think he could relate to that. I understood that he was complimenting me, in his mind he was saying “you’re good enough to be with us.” So that was nice to hear but I don’t think he could fathom the idea of why would you want to be over there where you teach a lot more courses than we do. Anyway, that was a story that I always remembered because it was pretty indicative of something.
MRR I’d like to go back to the idea of the age diversity in the classrooms.
JS Yes, right.
MRR So you walk into a classroom and who do you have and what are the challenges and what did you do with that?
JS Well, what happens is, the median age is twenty-six or twenty-seven then. It probably still is. In any given class you would expect to see three or four or five people who were twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five. If you taught after hours the percentages would rise. And those folks: a) are coming to school in spite of all kinds of other things that they have to take care of like work, family. And many of them are trying to compensate for the fact that they couldn’t go to college earlier, weren’t ready to or couldn’t afford it. And so they’re highly motivated as a group. Many of them were actually very, very bright and the fact that they hadn’t gone to college before this had nothing to do with their level of their intelligence. They enriched the class. Of course there were good traditional-aged students as well. But this is what I miss. The last ten years I’ve been at a four year college in the suburbs of Philadelphia and it’s very rare that I encounter older students. I was telling John this before. I’m teaching a literature course now that has one woman who’s in her mid-thirties with three little kids. That cries out Middletown to me. Then I have two people, husband and wife, who are auditing the class. They’re retirees. They’re actually older than I am. And the class is great. It’s like being back here. Some of the stories that I remember are, we would be reading this one particular story that I like to use because it’s really short and it’s a way to start talking about literature. In this story the narrator refers to his romantic partner as “the woman I love” five times in a story this long. It leads to a debate over what’s the nature of their relationship. In one class meeting one of the younger students said, “Well, I mean, of course, they’re married because he keeps saying ‘the woman I love.’” At which point one of the thirty-five-year-old woman chuckled and said, “Well, of course, they’re not married because he keeps saying ‘the woman I love.’” And they all looked at each, you know. The life experiences were so dramatically different. I’m going to talk to this in the talk tonight. I taught a course here I developed in true crime novels, true crime books. We read Truman Capote’s famous In Cold Blood and a number of other books. That was an evening class and one of the students in the class, he didn’t always show up in uniform, but during the day he was a security guy on the police squad at the Oxford campus. We would periodically turn to him, and I’m going to use his real first name tonight but I won’t now. We would turn to him and say, “Well Joe, are the detectives, can they really do that?” and he would say, “I don’t think they have probable cause. They probably can’t be doing what they’re doing.” So we would get this expert read on what the detectives of the book were doing because he had that expertise. It was really kind of cool.
MRR Let’s keep talking about student preparedness and how do you know which class a student should be assigned to and what difference does that make to student success?
JS That was an interesting, difficult issue around here because most campuses have what they call, in less enlightened times it would be called remedial English. Now it’s become basic writing or developmental English. We had such a course but our course listings, at the time anyway, had to correspond to what was in the main course catalog for the Oxford campus. And they like to delude themselves over there that there were no developmental writers or basic writers there which is nonsense. There’s actual published literature in my field about what they used to call the awkward squad at Yale, I mean even the Ivies, decades ago, had courses for such writers. Anyway, there was no official basic writing course listed in the course catalog. So we developed our own stuff here but we had no power to place the students into that course. All we could do was recommend that they take it, which sometimes they would, sometimes they wouldn’t. The disincentive was that it wasn’t credited and didn’t count towards graduation. The incentive was that it would’ve presumably helped them. This COMPASS business that John was talking about, we had a benighted administrator, whose name I won’t use, who unilaterally decided that we were going to be more quote unquote efficient and judge incoming students’ preparedness for different English writing courses by using what’s known as a COMPASS test. COMPASS was an automated, it was online, editing test. I took it just to see what it was about and it tested editorial skills. It’d be a sentence with four options for how to edit it. That has little to do with what we were doing in our writing courses and that says very little about writing ability. And we objected to it. We objected vigorously and for a long time. Eventually we got the permission to develop our own model for these kinds of evaluations. John was actually involved in this. John Tassoni and I and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson actually wrote and published an article in the Writing Program Administrator, WPA Journal, about the writer’s profile. Traditional students would be asked to come to campus, and lots of campuses, and given a prompt, “You’ve got an hour. You’ve got a blue book. You’ve got the prompt. Write us something. ” And judgements would be made based on that which is better than using short answer tests because at least it’s a direct model, a direct evaluation of a piece of writing. That timed writing with no time to prepare is not what we do in writing courses either. So, what we did is we came up with a writer's profile which asked them a series of questions about their writing experiences and gave them an opportunity to do this writing at home and to bring in draft materials and the final draft and give it to us. Among the questions we asked them to address are, “Here are the descriptions of the writing courses that we offer. Which one do you think is going to be best for you?” We would then, two of the English faculty, we got some money, people were getting fifteen dollars an hour I think, and two people would read and decide. The options were, “You belong in writing,” what did we used to call it here? “English 111.” Or “You ought to be in the basic writing course.” Or “You ought to be in this hybrid thing we made up which was a combination of the English 111 with studio on it.” But again, it was just a recommendation. When we were making those judgments it wasn’t based entirely on the quality of their writing. It was often based on the content of their writing because sometimes the students would be saying, “I lack confidence. I need close attention.” And it was all the cues to suggest that we really ought to put you in this course where you’re going to get some additional help--the writers’ studio. I don’t know if you’ve done one of these with John Tassoni, but you ought to and that’s what you should get him to talk about is the writers’ studio, the whole studio approach. That was a course that met once a work for no more than an hour with eight students in it. There was no particular content. They would work on the projects they were doing for the English 111 courses. So that was the model that we used here and eventually COMPASS sort of fell by the wayside, thankfully. What made me angry was that when it came time to use this test the administrator in question never asked anyone in the English department what they thought of it, which seems kind of odd because they’re the people on campus who would’ve known. And then we surely would’ve voiced some objection to it at that point. And I’m not sure that it really was cheaper for them at that point. Also what we really argued was this conveys a message to incoming students that this is what our English course is about. It’s editing sentences. That’s not what it’s about and students often has a misconception of writing courses coming in anyway.
MRR I’d like to go back and pick up another idea. You talked about navigating the regional campuses versus the main campus.
JS As a faculty member, yeah.
MRR So what happens if you’re assigned to both campuses? This is not what was featured for the first generation of faculty that only worked on the regionals. Can you tell us what it looks like to do both?
JS No, because when I left here that’s how it was. I mean, my interaction with Oxford was once I became a known quantity there, the department chair, Barry Chabot, who was such an excellent department chair that he chaired our English department which is a huge, noisy, obstreperous group of people for I think, ten years. And when he was done with that the dean asked him to be like an emergency step-in to save this department, I think it was the Communications department. He chaired that department for two years while they got themselves organized and then he did the same thing with Anthropology. He was great but he asked me to be the, I taught for six years in the summer the four week summer intensive preparation course for new graduate TA’s coming in to teach freshman comp for the first time. That was summer school, you know, I got paid extra for that. I did a lot of work for the Ohio Writing Project which Helane Androne is doing now. So I had connections with Oxford but I kind of forged them all on my own. I was never really assigned there. I did teach occasionally in Oxford. I taught a couple of times. I found a congenial Oxford person who wanted to teach a course here and so we swapped. There were a couple of years where, we’d actually chat in the parking lot here. She’d be driving over to teach and I would be driving over there to teach. I got to teach one graduate course in writing but that was a summer class. I don’t remember that there was anybody who was a dual appointment to the two campuses, not during my time here. I left in ‘08 so if there’s a new model I’m not really familiar. When I left it was three discrete and separate campuses so now I understand that Whitney Womack is the chair of the English department and it spans both campuses and that was not the case even when I left in ‘08. Those things were all about to happen.
MRR What would’ve been some of the advantages if there had been a regionalization prior to ‘08?
JS Well there was regionalization prior to ‘08.
MRR Well, if the campuses.
JS Oh, I’m not sure what even the answers are now. You mean why they did this? I don’t know why they did this.
MRR Okay, the descriptions that we have our Hamilton campus was distinct from Middletown Campus.
JS Correct.
MRR Sometimes there’s duplication. Sometimes they were heading in different directions. Did you have any sense of that between the two campuses?
JS Well, probably a skewed perception. There was one year, maybe four or five years into my time here, where both the Middletown and Hamilton campuses were doing job searches. And we both narrowed our list down to several candidates, brought them in for campus visits but we both had the same guy as one of our finalists and eventually we both made him an offer and he had to choose which campus to pick. He picked the Hamilton campus I think because it was a little closer to Oxford and I don’t know whether it was common field interest of mine. I knew he had made a mistake because he was here primarily to teach writing and at that time the people at the Hamilton campus were more interested in literature than they were in writing. Here, I and John Heyda were already actively involved in writing and then Tassoni showed up and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and we had quite a big core of people devoted to writing instruction. Then this particular fellow took the job over there and within three years left and went to Ohio U or something. I always felt that if he had taken the job with us he’d still be around but that was his decision.
MRR So what was it that bonded the four of you that you just mentioned? John Heyda, John Tassoni.
JS I think we all, because we took a professional interest in the courses that we had to teach all the time anyway. I didn’t study to be a composition person. I went to, I got a PhD in Victorian Literature but all I was ever teaching at the community college was composition stuff and then that became what I started teaching here. I grew to like it and it just sort of became part of what I did. When we would hire people we would look for generalness, meaning you’re going to teach a number of different things. One semester there was nobody really available to teach American Literature so I said, “I’ll do it.” and at the level we were teaching, which was the introductory level, that was good enough. I think what happened was that John and I and then Cindy and John were interested in this stuff. So we would hire new people, they’d get interested in it. We used to hear about it from our department chair over in Oxford, Keith Tuma, he would say “There’s something going on over there because everybody keeps getting involved in this,” in this writing stuff that we’re doing. And I don’t think, I mean Cindy went on to become, her later interest became disability studies. She became actually nationally prominent in it. A lot of these people had other things on their plate but they all were devoted to the writing instruction in way that I don’t think the older group over in Hamilton, at the time, had been. The primary journal in the field for composition people is called, it’s the three c’s, College, Composition and Communication. They published a fiftieth anniversary issue, actually it was two issues in a row because it had so many articles. And it was a point of particular pride to me that the only English department in the entire country that had more than once piece in those two journals was right here because Cindy and I had an article we wrote together and John Heyda wrote an article that appeared in the second of the two issues. When you consider that we only had like six people in the department, I felt that was a pretty impressive accomplishment.
MRR Let’s talk about some of the student transformations.
JS Okay.
MRR You spoke about their confidence level. They needed more support. Without naming any students by name, can you give us some stories over the years of transformations you saw?
JS Yeah, the best composition student I ever taught showed up, this would’ve been pretty early on in my career because at one point he made a joke. He said to me “You must’ve worked on the McGovern campaign” because he could sense that I was politically liberal but these days that’s a meaningless joke. So it had to be close enough to the 1972 election. He was an out of work plumber, he’d been working on construction sites and he lost his job so he came back to college. It turned out that he was an inveterate journal keeper and he already had like twenty-four boxes of journals in his basement and he was just an incredibly gifted writer who subsequently went on, eventually wound up getting a PhD in composition at the University of New Hampshire. I encountered him periodically at various times. I wrote my first textbook for composition courses, I recruited him to write a piece for it. I haven’t seen him in a long, long time but he just blossomed when he got here. It was the right place for him. There’s a lot of those stories. There’s another one who, a woman who was returning to school, who had a friend who had been in my class, several of them. She went on to become, I think, a middle school teacher, the original one. The second one started taking classes with me and we wound up collaborating on articles together. She wound up getting a PhD at Oxford I think, I think she’s still at Bowling Green now. Just by sheer coincidence, it turned out that she and I, she and her husband and I and my wife got married on exactly the same day. Because I had come back from a weekend trip to celebrate our anniversary and we were married on the day of the Watergate break in, historically a big moment. And I said something about that and this student said, “Us, too.” She was a lot younger than I was. Those are not atypical, obviously all students can get into those things. But those were two that certainly stick out in my mind.
I do want to tell you a story about bringing my kids to campus before I forget. I was just reminiscing about this with my wife. We were living in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati with my wife, who was at that time a nurse, decided to go back and get a PhD. They had just started a PhD program at Ohio State. She was in the first class and it required her to take a number of classes in Columbus. There was, for one or two semesters, there was sort of an overlap that didn’t work out very well for us. So my kids would get out of school. I had two sons, probably six and eight at the time. I would pick them up. We would have dinner somewhere here in Middletown. And I had a night class so we’d go teach the night class. It would start at whatever, seven o'clock and she would drive down from Columbus when her class ended and get here maybe 7:30 or so and pick them up. There was this half hour when I was in class. So I put them, they would be in the class, in an empty classroom across the hall from where I was teaching my class. They were good kids so I could put them there. I discovered, I asked them later. So my wife would come down and then the next thing I’d know at 7:30 I’d see her face at the window and she’d wave and off they’d go. They told me, I don’t think they told me then but years later, they’d invented some kind of a game. A lot of the classes had chalk boards on all four walls so they would start at opposite ends, each of them had a piece of chalk and would put it on the board, and they had to try to draw a line around it and they would be erasing each other’s lines. I never understood the rules of the game but that’s how they kept busy. The reason it stuck in my mind is if you jump ahead, they’re both college professors now. And I’m sure it’s not that experience but still, there’s that kinda cool idea that when they were six and eight, there they were in a college classroom writing on a board and now they’re actually probably using a laptop anyway. Now they’re both in their own classrooms all these years later.
MRR I’d like to speak to how you managed to keep a scholarly life with such a high teaching load.
JS I think what happened was, well, let me see. I’m trying to think of how to explain this. When I left here, the reason I left here, by the way, was because my wife had gotten a spectacular job offer at the University of Pennsylvania, so we were going to move. For the final year that I was the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, I commuted from Philadelphia weekly. When that year was up, I didn’t really want to continue to commute. I wanted to be with her and so I found this other job. Now I’ve lost my thread of my thought on why I’m talking about this. What was your question?
MRR Scholarship.
JS Oh yeah. Oh yes, so I was looking for work. And we always hired generalists and I thought of myself as a generalist because I taught literature courses, too. But you can’t get a job doing that at a four year institution. So I answered adds for a composition specialist, which is what I primarily had been publishing in. Although, I was pretty pleased, anything I taught I eventually usually published something about. I knew where I was headed. I’ve been on enough search committees now at my new institution to know that we only hire specialists and they come in and one of their obligations is to give a job talk. It’s often so highly specialized that I don’t know how you could be interested. You just pretend to be. I never had that kind of specialized research agenda. My research has always been: Here’s something that’s really interesting that’s happening in my classroom, here’s how I approached it and here’s the outcome. It’s pedagogical research and as long as the classes were interesting and the pedagogy was interesting, there was always something there to write. So I would write it and I’d do the writing in the summer. I got in the habit, I save stuff. Sometimes I would be conscious while it was happening that I’m going to be able to write something about this so I would have the students anonymously write reflections on what we were doing that I could draw upon. I was doing this a long time ago, before there was much in the way of IRB-attention paid to it. Then I modified and adjusted. Only one in my career did I ever have a planned study, maybe twice, where I went through the IRB approval process before it happened. I had a year as a Carnegie Scholar in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship for Teaching and Learning and for that I had a formal study that I did. But most of the time, I would just after the fact, file for an exemption and they would approve the letter I was going to send to the class anything that I want to use your stuff, is it ok if I do. I enjoyed writing these things because I wanted to share the stuff I was doing for other people. I just made the time for it I guess. I don’t know how else to describe it.
MRR Did that inspire you to develop the Center for Teaching and Learning?
JS I didn’t develop that. I mean you want to give credit where it’s due. It’s Kelly Cowan who deserves the credit. Kelly was the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs under Mike Governanti and I can’t remember, I knew this was a topic I was going to be asked to talk about and my memory is a bit fuzzy. I do remember that there were several mass meetings of all who were interested and huge numbers of faculty turned out. Kelly chaired those meetings. And it was a grassroots kind of thing. There seemed to be a growing interest that we ought to have a Center for Teaching and Learning and so forth. We, as a group, grew it and made it happen and came up with a structure for it and that included having some people run it. I don’t remember how I became the Director, I wanted to be and I guess, I don’t know if I got elected. Somehow I was fortunate got to do it and I liked doing it. I only did it for one year because the second year, by then, Kelly had moved up to become the acting or Interim Dean or Executive Director and she asked me to be the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. And as an administrator it made no sense for me to run the CTL so I actually became the guy to whom the Center reported. But I only got to run it for the first year. The highlight from the first year on my standpoint was we, once a month, had what we called Conversations about Teaching which took place, on I think, Friday’s at noon. And we had a modest budget so we would provide a boxed lunch for the first twenty people who came. We would say and we drew twenty to twenty five every single time. I remember I would usually bring the food. One time I remember going to Qdoba and bringing in twenty assorted burritos or whatever. We had different topics. One that I do remember was an article, a famous article by an English professor, Randy Bass, called “What’s the Problem Here.” It’s sort of a seminal piece in the whole scholarship of teaching and learning field because what he poses in this article is the notion that teaching problems, rather than looking at them as things to be solved, why don’t we look at them as research opportunities? My agenda was: We’ll have a Friday conversation about this. Please read this. We’ll come and we’ll talk about it. Afterwards, I had intended to see if I could put together a working group on the scholarship of Teaching and Learning and I did. I sent out an announcement that said “who wants to join this?” and we rounded up about eight or ten people including Cathy Bishop-Clark and Beth Uhler. I don’t know if Beth’s still around here or not, if not she was in Sociology. The two of them did a lot of collaborative work in the scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Very different kind of work then I do because they’re social scientists. But that group met, I would say, for two or three years. I know that a couple of the members went and did presentations and went to other universities to study the scholarship of Teaching and Learning. It was very rewarding to do the center and I was happy that it continued and it morphed and developed in lots of different ways. I’m not quite sure what they’re up to now. I understand from John Tassoni that when they were trying to figure out who to bring in to give this fiftieth anniversary talk, he mentioned my name as the person who had been the first director and got nothing but blank stares from the people in the room because I guess all of them had gotten here after I was gone and didn’t know who I was which is fine, I understand that. I continue to be proud of the fact that this campus developed that center and when I got to my new campus in West Chester, which is a four-year institution that is truly committed to teaching, that’s for real. They didn’t have a Center for Teaching and Learning, I couldn’t figure it out. It took a while for me to figure out that they had a committee, which had an odd name, that was sort of that and so I got myself appointed to that and then I got myself to be one of the two co-chairs of it. Then in a meeting we were having with the Associate Provost, who’s the person in charge of it, she said, “Well what do you guys need to keep going?” and I said, “We need a better name then we’ve got” and when they said what kind of name should we have? Have you got any ideas? I suggested CELT, which is a long answer to ????. They went for it. So, we now have a center for, at West Chester (Pennsylvania), with the same name as here, at Miami. I felt pleased with that.
MRR So I’d like to talk some stories about colleagues, some stories about Gene Bennett, John Heyda. If you want to tell any funny anecdotes.
JS Alright, yeah, yeah. John Heyda and I started on the same day and for that year people somehow couldn’t keep us straight. What time is it?
MRR We’re fine, it’s just twenty after three.
JS Okay. So, John Heyda and I start on the first day in 1981 and got to be pretty good friends pretty quickly but if you know John, he and I are roughly the same size and that and plus we were new, people constantly kept calling him Jeff and calling me John. My joke used to be, well I mean, you got two guys with a similar name, both really tall, really good looking, of course. Anyway, we were driving to a conference, Bowling Green or something, with our department chair Bob Johnson, at the wheel. We tell him this story that everyone keeps confusing us and when we got to the conference at Bowling Green you go to the registration desk to pick up your name cards and we pick them up and one says Jeff Heyda and one says John Sommers so even they screwed it up. John and I were pursuing tenure pretty much at the same time and we never passed up an opportunity to get another line on our CV. I remember one time there was some conference up in Milwaukee and we both got on the program. We finished teaching on a Friday afternoon and hopped in his car and if you ever interview John you can get him to describe his mix tapes. He had fascinating mix tapes that we would play. He had one that was all songs that had Jared in the title. Anyway, we drove, I think it was an eleven hour drive and we went in the session the next day and it had, I don’t know, like ten people in it, got back in the car and drove all the way back down. We stopped somewhere in northern Indiana at a Mexican restaurant. It was the first Mexican restaurant I had ever gone to and I think we ate seven baskets of chips and salsa because I had never had it. It was unbelievable stuff. One of these trips that he and I took, this is a long time ago, we were in the lobby and I think we were the only ones that recognized Bono, and The Edge and the whole group from U2, they were walking through the lobby, they were doing a concert. They were pretty new but we knew who they were. That was exciting. There was another conference where a whole bunch of NBA players walked in and we recognized them. John and I would do the chasing around. That was one of the things that was so wonderful about getting tenured because we understood now you can say no, you don’t have to do everything anymore. It is kind of crazy to drive twenty-two hours to do a forty-five minute presentation to eleven people but it gets you a line on a CV. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, we hired, I think in 1990. I invited her because we got to be pretty good friends and she was good to collaborate with. So I had an idea for a textbook and I asked her if she wanted to work on it with me and she did. We actually published a textbook with Saint Martin’s Press. But it was a good experience working together. I’ve done a lot of collaborative work and there’s lots of ways to do it. But we did the four hands on the keyboard model. We would have a chapter on the screen, one of us would be typing and one of us would reach over and type something else. What I also remember is she had her son, my kids were in school and her youngest son was in school and we had an absolutely atrocious winter with snow and cancellations. It was very difficult for us to get together and work on the book but we trudged through it and got it done. The concept of the book, I had done a book on my own that hadn’t really sold very well. It helped me get tenured and I got an advance so it’s okay. I was talking to an editor sometime later from St. Martin’s and she said, “Well, do you have any other ideas in mind?” And I said, “Yes, I do actually. I want to do a collection of essays that we would call the Two-Year College Reader and it would essays about life at the two-year campus and about the students at the two-year campus and it would feature writing by students at the two-year campus. She encouraged me to write a book on it. So we did and I think it was a pretty well conceived book. I kept saying to Cindy, “They’re never going to let us publish this with this title” and they never said anything so we kept working for a couple years and they would send out the manuscript. We had pretty good reviews. Then one day all of the sudden, two years into this we get a little note, “We’re having second thoughts about the title.” We asked them to ask some of the reviewers about it and that produced some mixed response. But even some of the two-year campus reviewers said, “I would never order a book from my campus with this name.” The implication being, it must be something inferior if it was called that. You know that nobody at four-year institution is never going to buy a book with this title. We said to our editors that we didn’t expect it to be used there. Anyway, they finally said, “You’ve got to change the title” and I got so fed up I just sort of resigned from the title discussion and Cindy handled that, she was more even keeled. We wound up calling it From College to Community, I think. The college and community were bigger letters in the title, it was pretty clever, I thought. There was a sort of self-loathing on the part of some of the two-year college faculty and a sense that this is not really academic world. But that’s not how we felt about it. We did that book and subsequent to that she came up with a project and we co-authored this article that I mentioned earlier thatappeared in the Three C’s fiftieth anniversary edition. And that’s had a long shelf life because a book just came out in the past six months called, I can’t remember the title but it’s intended to be a collection of vital readings for those who teach at two-year colleges or train people to teach at two-year colleges. It features reprints of important articles including that one which is very nice to see. And it’s frequently cited. It was Cindy’s baby and I worked on it with her so that’s good.
MRR Congratulations on that…
JS Yeah, thanks.
MRR That’s very inspiring. I’d like to talk about some of the literary vehicles on campus, whether it’s the radio station or the newspaper KAOS. Do you remember that?
JS Well, I didn’t have anything to do with the radio station, that was John Heyda who worked with them for years. I was the advisor to the newspaper, is it still called KAOS?
MRR It’s out of print KAOS.
JS Apparently the name KAOS came about in the turmoil of the nineteen sixties. It was chaos with a K. It was incredibly stupid name that was meaningless. Whatever meaning it had evaporated when the time period passed and the only people on campus who really knew why it was called KAOS were people who had been here forever, whose history went back far enough. I wanted them to change it to something more newsworthy, like a journal, you know? Not fake news, but real news. I kept agitating with the different editors, whenever we’d get new editors, go in there and try to get this changed and the administration was very resistant. I’m not surprised to hear it changed but I don’t think that change happened before I left. I remember we got real close at one point and one administrator seemed to have some say in it and said, “No, let’s keep it.” It was just dumb.
MRR Talk to us about some of the writers because reading through some of the past issues it seemed as if there were some very lively personalities. Can you describe what some of the editorial meetings might be like?
JS Well, I didn’t go to the editorial meetings.
MRR You didn’t go to those? Okay.
JS My job was ceremonial, I think, as the advisor. I know one of the people that was heavily involved was a student in a ot of my writing classes, a returning student. She was an incredibly gifted writer but I don’t know if I have anything else I can really remember about that.
MRR I’d like to talk about some of the student activities and student life that you witnessed. What did students do here besides go to class? Did you see anything else, any organizations?
JS There was I think, one thing I do remember was a picnic that we had out behind the library and Johnston Hall to end the, to commemorate the end of each academic year. There was always one of those, I’m forgetting what to call it. You know where somebody is sitting on a seat above the pot of water and you throw, the dunking booth. Faculty would take turns sitting in the dunking booth and a colleague named Elizabeth Krukowski, who had been here many years when I came in here and was a real gentle and wonderful soul and she was so distraught over those dunking booths every year. We kept explaining to her, nobody is being forced to participate. It’s all in good fun. The faculty in there are enjoying it and want to do. She thought it’s so humiliating and so degrading. She was overcome. It was very interesting. I don’t think she went anywhere near that activity but it was going on.
MRR Another topic we need to discuss is the Artist and Lecture series. Do you recall any particular events?
JS No, but I do recall, as we neared 1984, Virginia Palmer, who was the Library Director, and I got a grant. It was an Ohio, some kind of grant in the state. We put on a series of activities related the book 1984 which culminated with a panel discussion where we brought in, we brought in four of our faculty, each from a different discipline. One I remember, Bob Seufert. Is he still here?
MRR I think he just retired last year.
JS He ran that research, he had a little research group. It wasn’t little. Anyway, Bob was on it because he was a sociologist. I don’t remember the other faculty. There was probably one of the English faculty, too. It was a panel discussion to talk about 1984 and it was a pretty successful event. When it was over Virginia and I wrote it up and got it published in the Teaching English in a Two Year College which was a journal that I wound up being the editor of before I left here. My last three years here I was the editor of the journal and continued for another seven. I just finished about a year ago. There’s a picture, if you’ve seen the advertising for this talk tonight, there’s a bunch of pictures that I’m in. There’s one where there’s four of us sitting around a table and the reason that picture was taken is that all four of those people at that time were editing different professional journals which is pretty impressive for a campus this small and a two year campus at that. Eric Melby was in the picture because he was doing the Segue online creative writing journal. Brian Domino, who I think is still a member of the faculty, I think he was editing the Nietzsche Letters or something like that [Journal of Nietzsche Studies]. I’m trying to remember who the fourth one was. There was a fourth person and I don’t remember now but I was also editing a journal. It didn’t include Mickey Sarquis, who’s a legend around here, I don’t know if you ever heard about her. Mickey Sarquis was the editor of a chemistry education journal designed for secondary teachers and got millions and millions of dollars for her grant activities year after year after year. Mickey retired, I think just about a little bit before I left here but it was quite a big operation. And again pretty spectacular for a campus like this to have something based here. I think there was some question about when she left what was going to happen to it. I don’t know what happened to it but I think it was pretty much going to be scarfed up by Oxford and I don’t know if it continued or not.
MRR It did go to Oxford. Any stories about Mark Plageman? Any stories you’d like to add?
JS Well, I already told you one. I told one story about Mark Plageman which was his role in my hiring here. Mark was a really kind, gentle person who was our Coordinator of Humanities and English and French and whatever. Then after he retired he continued to come back for many years and teach one or two courses of French. And he was always a good kindred soul, a happy guy. He was very nice to new faculty. I appreciate how nice he was to me. I haven’t seen or heard from Mark in ages.
MRR You just missed him by a couple of weeks. I’m sorry. I think the other person you mentioned would be Gene Bennett.
JS Gene was the original Executive Director when we were here and I don’t know that I have any real stories about him. Mike Governanti is a little different.
MRR Go ahead, we’ve interviewed him, too.
JS For a while there was a dinner club thing that we did where eight or ten or a number of couples would go to dinner together somewhere and Mike and Sandy were included. I remember once, I guess we were living in Loveland which the part of Loveland we were in was closer to Warren County, Mason. I think everybody came down to a restaurant near us and came to our house and we had drinks first. And I remember, and the reason it sits in my mind, we had a headlight that was burned out and Mike was the one who pointed it out to me. He had some nickname for that, which I don’t remember anymore except where he grew up it was, if you had this they used that nickname. Mike was also a very nice man and he helped me once professionally. They had sent these two faculty in other places were going to put together a book. They were pretty prominent people in the field of composition and they wanted to put a book together called When Composition Teachers Teach Literature and they sent out a call for papers. And I had an idea. I pitched my idea to them and they said, “Go ahead. Teach that course. Write this up.” And the course was on this listed and I think only five people signed up for it. And they don’t really want courses going with only five people. I wrote a letter to Mike and I think I went to see him, basically saying, “I’ve got a commitment from these people that are doing this important book but I can’t write about it if you don’t let the course go.” So he let it go. And I wrote the piece up and it got published. In fact, it’s going to be part of what I’m talking about in my speech tonight, actually. I appreciated that. I mean, he was willing to, I don’t know economically if it made any sense but professionally it was good for me to be able to write about this particular teaching experience that I was on the verge of having. He was very supportive in that way. Whoever was in that office was always very supportive. Whenever I got the scholarship, the Carnegie thing, there was a pretty big splash in the media around here about that and I think Kelly had a lot to do with that so I appreciated that. It was nice. One of the things I remember, one of my fondest memories here, I won two awards that were university-wide for teaching. One was the, what was it called? Distinguished Educator, Arts and Science Distinguished Educator and then the Knox Award which is for outstanding instructor, period, across campuses. When I was, this is one thing I will talk about when I was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, my sense was that this campus had some really brilliant teachers who did brilliant things in class and we needed to look for any opportunity we could find to get them the honors they deserved. So I collaborated with an English faculty member named Kate Ronald and we nominated and got John Tassoni the Distinguished Educator Award. A couple years after that I nominated Cathy Bishop-Clark for the Knox Award and she got that. I also nominated Rob Schorman for that award and he deserved it but they found somebody else. I thought if the administrators don’t look out for these kinds of honors for the faculty, who’s going to do it? That part of the job I liked.
MRR Are there any other stories you’d like to make sure that are recorded to be viewed say ten or fifty years from now?
JS Oh that’s interesting. I’m sure I’ll remember stories after I finish here. I’ll tell one story I’m going to tell in my talk tonight. I learned early on when I was teaching here that the seating arrangement in the classroom is pretty important when it comes to trying to have class discussions. The fact that I’m giving a lecture tonight is pretty odd because the only other lecture I ever gave in twenty-eight years was when I got the award from the Dean. I had to give a talk. Otherwise I don’t do lecture classes. We sit in a circle. And in one particular class, about halfway through the class meeting, one of the women in the class, one of those thirty-five year old returning students, gets up, walks across the room and sits down on my lap, yeah. I did a double take and I looked at her and said, “Don’t you want to go back to your seat?” So she went back to her seat. I later found out, she told me after class, that she was fulfilling a class assignment. Jean Lynch, who was in Sociology was teaching a course, in Social Deviance probably. And the assignment was to go out and violate a social norm. See what the reaction is. I got an email from Jean later that day, she said “I intended them to go the library and break into song or get in the elevator and face the back of the elevator. Not doing what this student did.” And she said, “I asked the student, whose class were you in?” And when she told me it was yours, I said, “Oh thank God. He’ll know how to handle that.” What I learned from the experience was that the student had that same thought. She thought, “I can do this and he’ll figure out a way to handle it appropriately.” What I learned from that, this is what I’m talking about tonight, is that yeah, the students have to fill out course evaluations. They do it every semester. But they’re perpetually making judgments about us. It seems like maybe we ought to be aware of that because I’m not sure I always was. In this case, she had formed that I can trust him to not go crazy or do something stupid or whatever and that was important. The story that goes along with that, I’m not supposed to be naming names, I’d like to, because this is a co-author. I invited one of my undergraduates, who’s now a high school teacher I think somewhere in the area, to co-author an article with me. For a long time when students hand it their written work to me, I don’t write comments. I record comments. Initially it was tape cassettes. Now it’s screen capture software. I wanted her to co-author a piece about that with me and give a student’s perspective on what it’s like to receive this audio response to your writing. And one of the things she talked about in it was that after she had heard the first of these, she realized that, “Okay, I can trust what he’s saying. He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.” It never really dawned on me that I had to prove that to the students. I kind of figured that my name is on the class list. I got a PhD in English. I took for granted that they would just assume that I knew what I was doing. In her mind, I had to sort of establish those credentials. It was worth knowing that. And that piece that she did, it’s a smaller part of a longer article that I wrote is, I think, really valuable and in fact I have my students now reading it. They read what she has to say. One of them said to me recently, “Was she in your class? She must've been in your class” and I said, “Yeah, we were doing tapes in those days.” I don’t know how I got on to those stories.
MRR Well, there’s one more question that might inspire such stories. We’ve been talking about the last fifty years of MUM. What is it you hope will remain from the first fifty years and into the next fifty years?
JS Well I hope, I know things have changed here and I know that there’s an emphasis on completion degrees and all that. But what I treasured about my time here was the students who blossomed when they got an opportunity to come to college who had, for a variety of reasons, never come before. That I don’t think, describes people who have already gotten degrees somewhere, two year degrees, and wanted to complete them. I hope that never disappears. One of the other stories I’ll tell tonight is about, things have, from my perspective, worsened. More and more high school students and even younger are attending college classes because they can collect credits and get out of college sooner and I’m sure there’s much to be said for that educationally but at one point, Ellen Marie Wahlrab a colleague and I decided we want to investigate this. We got IRB approval or whatever and we were interviewing some of these high school kids to try and find out. I was interviewing some in her class and she was interviewing some in mine. And what we were learning was that the ones who succeeded here were the ones who, in a sense, cut ties with high school. The ones who were struggling, at that point there was some screening you had to be academically suitable for. But the ones who were spending their time here wondering what’s going on across the street, what am I missing, were struggling. The point of the story is that we had to get, because they were minors, we had to get permission from the parents. I got to know one of these moms and she came back to become a student and she was in like six of my classes subsequently, she was just great. At one point she tells me this story, that she’s back in college and she said I went to a family picnic and her dumb brother-in-law says, “You’re going to college? Why are you going to college? You’re fifty two years old.” and I said, “So what did you say to him?” And she said, “I said to him, ‘I can be fifty-two years old and uneducated or I can be fifty-two years old and become educated. And that’s what I’m going to do.” Which I thought was the right answer, the smart answer. I hope this campus never changes so much that that is not still the case. That there are people that realize at various points in life, college is okay for me now and I’m ready to do it now. I think she was not atypical because she had in fact started college right out of high school and didn’t last. That was the story for a lot of them. A lot of folks would come and something else would get in the way and they’d leave and then they’d come back and discover if you’re here at the right time it’s important. It really works out.
MRR Well I’d like to let our readers know, what is the event that’s happening tonight?
JS Tonight there is the, I gather that all year long there has been a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary. When I was the Associate Dean we were celebrating the fortieth anniversary and I don’t think we spread that celebration over the course of a year. We just had a big blowout one weekend with all kinds of things happening. And apparently they decided they wanted to have a speaker so I’m giving a talk tonight, in whatever that big room is over there, in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary which I’m very pleased to have been invited to do. And I’m hoping that I run into all kinds of people that I haven’t seen in a long time in the audience. That’d be great.
MRR Well, I’m now looking forward to attending. I had already had it on my calendar and I don’t want to wear you out because I want to make sure your fresh and I don’t want you to blame this interview for being tired. So do I have your permission to discontinue recording?
JS Oh yeah, sure.
MRR Thank you.
5.09 JS Sure.
Indexing terms:
Age
Androne, Helane Adams
Anthropology Department
Art and Science Distinguished Educator
Associate Dean of Academic Affairs
Bachelor Hall
Bass, Randy
Bennett, C. Eugene
Bishop-Clark, Cathy
Bono
Bowling Green University
Capote, Truman
Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship for Teaching and learning
Carnegie Scholar
Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL)
Chabot, Barry
Children
Cincinnati, Ohio
College Credit Plus (CCP)
College, Composition and Communication (Three Cs) journal
Columbus, Ohio
Communications Department
Community College
COMPASS testing
Conversations about Teaching
Cowan, Kelly
Crime
Daiker, Donald
Dinner
Distiinguished Educator Award
Diversity
Domino, Brian
English 111
English Department
Finneytown, Ohio
French Department
Governanti, Michael
Hamilton campus
Heyda, John
In Cold Blood (book)
Indiana
Internal Review Board (IRB)
Ivy League
Johnson, Robert (Bob)
KAOS Newspaper
Kids, children
Knox Award
Krukowski, Elizabeth
Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia
Loveland, Ohio
Lynch, Jean
Marriage, married
McGoven, George
Melby, Eric
Middletown Campus
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
New York University (NYU)
Non-traditional student
Ohio University
Ohio Writing Project
Oxford campus
Palmer, Virginia
Pedagogy
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Picnic
Plageman, Mark
Public Relations
Radio station
Research
Retiree
Ronald, Katharine (Kate)
Sarquis, Arlyne “Mickey”
Schorman, Rob
Seufert, Robert (Bob)
Social Deviance
Sociology department
Tassoni, John
Textbook author
Traditional student
Tuma, Keith
U2
Uhler, Beth
Undergraduate research
University of Cincinnati
Wahlrab, Ellen Marie
Warrenburg, Max
Watergate
West Chester University, Pennsylvania
Womack-Smith, Whitney
Writing Program Administrator, WPA Journal
Yale University
Transcript: Jeff Sommers, March 3, 2017
Donation Record #Sommers.J.3032017.1
Transcribed by Jade Smallwood 08/11/2017. Approved for deposit by Marsha Robinson on 4/25/2018.
Copyright Miami University. All rights reserved.
MRR My name is Marsha Robinson and we are recording an oral history with Jeff Sommers as part of the Sweet MUMories Oral History Project. This project marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Miami University Middletown, Ohio, campus. This interview is taking place on March 3, 2017, at the Gardner-Harvey Library, Middletown campus. Dr. Sommers, do I have your consent to proceed with this interview?
JS Yes.
MRR Thank you. Would you please tell us how you came to the Miami Middletown campus and when?
JS I was living in Finneytown which is a part of Cincinnati and I was finishing my PhD at NYU. This was in 1979 or so. And I was teaching at the University of Cincinnati in what they, charmingly, called a terminal position. It was three years and then you were out. When I finished the degree the degree, in two years, I started looking for work. By that time, I had decided. My previous teaching experience included a community college in western Maryland. I’d been there for three years and when I compared those three years to the two years at University of Cincinnati, I realized I wanted to go back to a two year campus because I greatly appreciated the age diversity of the student population. And so they just happened to be advertising assistant professor in the English department here at Middletown. And I looked at the description and I said to my wife, “This job, I couldn’t have written a better description of a job for myself. If I don’t get this I’m probably not employable in the English field.” So I threw my hat into the ring and I got the job. Now, the job search was interesting, well the job visit. I got invited for a campus visit and I drove to Oxford because the English department was housed in Bachelor Hall. Bachelor Hall, is that right?
MRR I think so.
JS Okay. Bennett Hall was at the University of Pennsylvania where I was at undergrad and where I live now so I got confused. So I went to Bachelor Hall and had a series of interviews over there, I met with the department chair whose name was Bob Johnson, who subsequently became the provost. Very nice guy. When that portion of the day was over it was time for me to travel to the Middletown campus. And to give you some sense of how things worked in those days, there was no lunch. There was no escort. They gave me a map and I was asked to return a couple of books to a faculty member if I didn’t mind. I drove over here and I had my interview with the search committee, basically all the English faculty that were here. Our coordinator at the time was Mark Plageman who was the French teacher but he was in charge of languages and English. The interview went really well. I felt that it had because of my experience at the community college, I felt like I knew what this place was going to be like. It’s not a community college but the student population is similar. So I felt like we were connected. I thought it went really well. Afterwards I was supposed to meet Gene Bennett who was the executive director at the time and Mark Plageman walked me down there. So I said to him casually, “How much input do you folks have in this hiring decision?” And he says, “Oh, well we pretty much tell them who we want and that’s who we get.” And I thought it’s a good thing this went well because nobody ever told me that. So then I met with Gene Bennett who spent most of his time interviewing me emphasizing if you get a job here, it is not the way to get to Oxford. It is not the road to Oxford. You can’t expect to transfer to Oxford. And I kept assuring him that I’ve been in a four-year college and I want to be here. I don’t know that he really believed me but anyway that’s how I got the job. If you jump ahead a few years, I learned fairly quickly although I worked here, the tenure decisions and the promotion decisions were made in Oxford and I was a member of the English department. I just happened to be located here. So it made sense to me that I needed to become a known quantity in my department at the very least, if I hoped to progress. I think I was hired at the same time as John Heyda, I don’t know if you ever knew John or not.
MRR We have.
JS He just retired I think last year. I expect he’s going to be at the talk tonight. John and I began on the very first day actually. Together, on the first day in 1981. I know we talked it over, we both kind of got the same sense which was we have to become, we have to integrate ourselves in the department at Oxford if we hope to get anywhere. The department was pretty welcoming. In particular, though, the people who taught writing, the composition people, were very welcoming because I think they recognized that’s what we taught. The majority of our teaching load was in freshman composition and it was a way for them to grow the freshman composition faculty without having to hire anybody. So they were pretty welcoming. In particular, Don Daiker, whose going to be there coming tonight I believe. Don Daiker and Max Warrenburg were, I would say, my mentors while I was here. Max passed away a couple years ago which was sad. They were very welcoming and we looked for all kinds of ways to get integrated over there. I was about to say, I also learned that when I published something or would give a talk at a conference, that it was worth sending a little notification over to the PR people and it would appear in whatever the vehicle was that went out to faculty. I wanted my name to be known in circulation. So I got to be known in the English department. I had one really interesting conversation on the staircase at Bachelor Hall when I was chatting with someone, I didn’t know him really well but he apparently knew who I was. He leaned forward and in sort of a whisper and said, “And you can’t get yourself transferred here?” and I said, “I don’t really want to do that. I’m happy where I am.” I don’t think he could relate to that. I understood that he was complimenting me, in his mind he was saying “you’re good enough to be with us.” So that was nice to hear but I don’t think he could fathom the idea of why would you want to be over there where you teach a lot more courses than we do. Anyway, that was a story that I always remembered because it was pretty indicative of something.
MRR I’d like to go back to the idea of the age diversity in the classrooms.
JS Yes, right.
MRR So you walk into a classroom and who do you have and what are the challenges and what did you do with that?
JS Well, what happens is, the median age is twenty-six or twenty-seven then. It probably still is. In any given class you would expect to see three or four or five people who were twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five. If you taught after hours the percentages would rise. And those folks: a) are coming to school in spite of all kinds of other things that they have to take care of like work, family. And many of them are trying to compensate for the fact that they couldn’t go to college earlier, weren’t ready to or couldn’t afford it. And so they’re highly motivated as a group. Many of them were actually very, very bright and the fact that they hadn’t gone to college before this had nothing to do with their level of their intelligence. They enriched the class. Of course there were good traditional-aged students as well. But this is what I miss. The last ten years I’ve been at a four year college in the suburbs of Philadelphia and it’s very rare that I encounter older students. I was telling John this before. I’m teaching a literature course now that has one woman who’s in her mid-thirties with three little kids. That cries out Middletown to me. Then I have two people, husband and wife, who are auditing the class. They’re retirees. They’re actually older than I am. And the class is great. It’s like being back here. Some of the stories that I remember are, we would be reading this one particular story that I like to use because it’s really short and it’s a way to start talking about literature. In this story the narrator refers to his romantic partner as “the woman I love” five times in a story this long. It leads to a debate over what’s the nature of their relationship. In one class meeting one of the younger students said, “Well, I mean, of course, they’re married because he keeps saying ‘the woman I love.’” At which point one of the thirty-five-year-old woman chuckled and said, “Well, of course, they’re not married because he keeps saying ‘the woman I love.’” And they all looked at each, you know. The life experiences were so dramatically different. I’m going to talk to this in the talk tonight. I taught a course here I developed in true crime novels, true crime books. We read Truman Capote’s famous In Cold Blood and a number of other books. That was an evening class and one of the students in the class, he didn’t always show up in uniform, but during the day he was a security guy on the police squad at the Oxford campus. We would periodically turn to him, and I’m going to use his real first name tonight but I won’t now. We would turn to him and say, “Well Joe, are the detectives, can they really do that?” and he would say, “I don’t think they have probable cause. They probably can’t be doing what they’re doing.” So we would get this expert read on what the detectives of the book were doing because he had that expertise. It was really kind of cool.
MRR Let’s keep talking about student preparedness and how do you know which class a student should be assigned to and what difference does that make to student success?
JS That was an interesting, difficult issue around here because most campuses have what they call, in less enlightened times it would be called remedial English. Now it’s become basic writing or developmental English. We had such a course but our course listings, at the time anyway, had to correspond to what was in the main course catalog for the Oxford campus. And they like to delude themselves over there that there were no developmental writers or basic writers there which is nonsense. There’s actual published literature in my field about what they used to call the awkward squad at Yale, I mean even the Ivies, decades ago, had courses for such writers. Anyway, there was no official basic writing course listed in the course catalog. So we developed our own stuff here but we had no power to place the students into that course. All we could do was recommend that they take it, which sometimes they would, sometimes they wouldn’t. The disincentive was that it wasn’t credited and didn’t count towards graduation. The incentive was that it would’ve presumably helped them. This COMPASS business that John was talking about, we had a benighted administrator, whose name I won’t use, who unilaterally decided that we were going to be more quote unquote efficient and judge incoming students’ preparedness for different English writing courses by using what’s known as a COMPASS test. COMPASS was an automated, it was online, editing test. I took it just to see what it was about and it tested editorial skills. It’d be a sentence with four options for how to edit it. That has little to do with what we were doing in our writing courses and that says very little about writing ability. And we objected to it. We objected vigorously and for a long time. Eventually we got the permission to develop our own model for these kinds of evaluations. John was actually involved in this. John Tassoni and I and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson actually wrote and published an article in the Writing Program Administrator, WPA Journal, about the writer’s profile. Traditional students would be asked to come to campus, and lots of campuses, and given a prompt, “You’ve got an hour. You’ve got a blue book. You’ve got the prompt. Write us something. ” And judgements would be made based on that which is better than using short answer tests because at least it’s a direct model, a direct evaluation of a piece of writing. That timed writing with no time to prepare is not what we do in writing courses either. So, what we did is we came up with a writer's profile which asked them a series of questions about their writing experiences and gave them an opportunity to do this writing at home and to bring in draft materials and the final draft and give it to us. Among the questions we asked them to address are, “Here are the descriptions of the writing courses that we offer. Which one do you think is going to be best for you?” We would then, two of the English faculty, we got some money, people were getting fifteen dollars an hour I think, and two people would read and decide. The options were, “You belong in writing,” what did we used to call it here? “English 111.” Or “You ought to be in the basic writing course.” Or “You ought to be in this hybrid thing we made up which was a combination of the English 111 with studio on it.” But again, it was just a recommendation. When we were making those judgments it wasn’t based entirely on the quality of their writing. It was often based on the content of their writing because sometimes the students would be saying, “I lack confidence. I need close attention.” And it was all the cues to suggest that we really ought to put you in this course where you’re going to get some additional help--the writers’ studio. I don’t know if you’ve done one of these with John Tassoni, but you ought to and that’s what you should get him to talk about is the writers’ studio, the whole studio approach. That was a course that met once a work for no more than an hour with eight students in it. There was no particular content. They would work on the projects they were doing for the English 111 courses. So that was the model that we used here and eventually COMPASS sort of fell by the wayside, thankfully. What made me angry was that when it came time to use this test the administrator in question never asked anyone in the English department what they thought of it, which seems kind of odd because they’re the people on campus who would’ve known. And then we surely would’ve voiced some objection to it at that point. And I’m not sure that it really was cheaper for them at that point. Also what we really argued was this conveys a message to incoming students that this is what our English course is about. It’s editing sentences. That’s not what it’s about and students often has a misconception of writing courses coming in anyway.
MRR I’d like to go back and pick up another idea. You talked about navigating the regional campuses versus the main campus.
JS As a faculty member, yeah.
MRR So what happens if you’re assigned to both campuses? This is not what was featured for the first generation of faculty that only worked on the regionals. Can you tell us what it looks like to do both?
JS No, because when I left here that’s how it was. I mean, my interaction with Oxford was once I became a known quantity there, the department chair, Barry Chabot, who was such an excellent department chair that he chaired our English department which is a huge, noisy, obstreperous group of people for I think, ten years. And when he was done with that the dean asked him to be like an emergency step-in to save this department, I think it was the Communications department. He chaired that department for two years while they got themselves organized and then he did the same thing with Anthropology. He was great but he asked me to be the, I taught for six years in the summer the four week summer intensive preparation course for new graduate TA’s coming in to teach freshman comp for the first time. That was summer school, you know, I got paid extra for that. I did a lot of work for the Ohio Writing Project which Helane Androne is doing now. So I had connections with Oxford but I kind of forged them all on my own. I was never really assigned there. I did teach occasionally in Oxford. I taught a couple of times. I found a congenial Oxford person who wanted to teach a course here and so we swapped. There were a couple of years where, we’d actually chat in the parking lot here. She’d be driving over to teach and I would be driving over there to teach. I got to teach one graduate course in writing but that was a summer class. I don’t remember that there was anybody who was a dual appointment to the two campuses, not during my time here. I left in ‘08 so if there’s a new model I’m not really familiar. When I left it was three discrete and separate campuses so now I understand that Whitney Womack is the chair of the English department and it spans both campuses and that was not the case even when I left in ‘08. Those things were all about to happen.
MRR What would’ve been some of the advantages if there had been a regionalization prior to ‘08?
JS Well there was regionalization prior to ‘08.
MRR Well, if the campuses.
JS Oh, I’m not sure what even the answers are now. You mean why they did this? I don’t know why they did this.
MRR Okay, the descriptions that we have our Hamilton campus was distinct from Middletown Campus.
JS Correct.
MRR Sometimes there’s duplication. Sometimes they were heading in different directions. Did you have any sense of that between the two campuses?
JS Well, probably a skewed perception. There was one year, maybe four or five years into my time here, where both the Middletown and Hamilton campuses were doing job searches. And we both narrowed our list down to several candidates, brought them in for campus visits but we both had the same guy as one of our finalists and eventually we both made him an offer and he had to choose which campus to pick. He picked the Hamilton campus I think because it was a little closer to Oxford and I don’t know whether it was common field interest of mine. I knew he had made a mistake because he was here primarily to teach writing and at that time the people at the Hamilton campus were more interested in literature than they were in writing. Here, I and John Heyda were already actively involved in writing and then Tassoni showed up and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and we had quite a big core of people devoted to writing instruction. Then this particular fellow took the job over there and within three years left and went to Ohio U or something. I always felt that if he had taken the job with us he’d still be around but that was his decision.
MRR So what was it that bonded the four of you that you just mentioned? John Heyda, John Tassoni.
JS I think we all, because we took a professional interest in the courses that we had to teach all the time anyway. I didn’t study to be a composition person. I went to, I got a PhD in Victorian Literature but all I was ever teaching at the community college was composition stuff and then that became what I started teaching here. I grew to like it and it just sort of became part of what I did. When we would hire people we would look for generalness, meaning you’re going to teach a number of different things. One semester there was nobody really available to teach American Literature so I said, “I’ll do it.” and at the level we were teaching, which was the introductory level, that was good enough. I think what happened was that John and I and then Cindy and John were interested in this stuff. So we would hire new people, they’d get interested in it. We used to hear about it from our department chair over in Oxford, Keith Tuma, he would say “There’s something going on over there because everybody keeps getting involved in this,” in this writing stuff that we’re doing. And I don’t think, I mean Cindy went on to become, her later interest became disability studies. She became actually nationally prominent in it. A lot of these people had other things on their plate but they all were devoted to the writing instruction in way that I don’t think the older group over in Hamilton, at the time, had been. The primary journal in the field for composition people is called, it’s the three c’s, College, Composition and Communication. They published a fiftieth anniversary issue, actually it was two issues in a row because it had so many articles. And it was a point of particular pride to me that the only English department in the entire country that had more than once piece in those two journals was right here because Cindy and I had an article we wrote together and John Heyda wrote an article that appeared in the second of the two issues. When you consider that we only had like six people in the department, I felt that was a pretty impressive accomplishment.
MRR Let’s talk about some of the student transformations.
JS Okay.
MRR You spoke about their confidence level. They needed more support. Without naming any students by name, can you give us some stories over the years of transformations you saw?
JS Yeah, the best composition student I ever taught showed up, this would’ve been pretty early on in my career because at one point he made a joke. He said to me “You must’ve worked on the McGovern campaign” because he could sense that I was politically liberal but these days that’s a meaningless joke. So it had to be close enough to the 1972 election. He was an out of work plumber, he’d been working on construction sites and he lost his job so he came back to college. It turned out that he was an inveterate journal keeper and he already had like twenty-four boxes of journals in his basement and he was just an incredibly gifted writer who subsequently went on, eventually wound up getting a PhD in composition at the University of New Hampshire. I encountered him periodically at various times. I wrote my first textbook for composition courses, I recruited him to write a piece for it. I haven’t seen him in a long, long time but he just blossomed when he got here. It was the right place for him. There’s a lot of those stories. There’s another one who, a woman who was returning to school, who had a friend who had been in my class, several of them. She went on to become, I think, a middle school teacher, the original one. The second one started taking classes with me and we wound up collaborating on articles together. She wound up getting a PhD at Oxford I think, I think she’s still at Bowling Green now. Just by sheer coincidence, it turned out that she and I, she and her husband and I and my wife got married on exactly the same day. Because I had come back from a weekend trip to celebrate our anniversary and we were married on the day of the Watergate break in, historically a big moment. And I said something about that and this student said, “Us, too.” She was a lot younger than I was. Those are not atypical, obviously all students can get into those things. But those were two that certainly stick out in my mind.
I do want to tell you a story about bringing my kids to campus before I forget. I was just reminiscing about this with my wife. We were living in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati with my wife, who was at that time a nurse, decided to go back and get a PhD. They had just started a PhD program at Ohio State. She was in the first class and it required her to take a number of classes in Columbus. There was, for one or two semesters, there was sort of an overlap that didn’t work out very well for us. So my kids would get out of school. I had two sons, probably six and eight at the time. I would pick them up. We would have dinner somewhere here in Middletown. And I had a night class so we’d go teach the night class. It would start at whatever, seven o'clock and she would drive down from Columbus when her class ended and get here maybe 7:30 or so and pick them up. There was this half hour when I was in class. So I put them, they would be in the class, in an empty classroom across the hall from where I was teaching my class. They were good kids so I could put them there. I discovered, I asked them later. So my wife would come down and then the next thing I’d know at 7:30 I’d see her face at the window and she’d wave and off they’d go. They told me, I don’t think they told me then but years later, they’d invented some kind of a game. A lot of the classes had chalk boards on all four walls so they would start at opposite ends, each of them had a piece of chalk and would put it on the board, and they had to try to draw a line around it and they would be erasing each other’s lines. I never understood the rules of the game but that’s how they kept busy. The reason it stuck in my mind is if you jump ahead, they’re both college professors now. And I’m sure it’s not that experience but still, there’s that kinda cool idea that when they were six and eight, there they were in a college classroom writing on a board and now they’re actually probably using a laptop anyway. Now they’re both in their own classrooms all these years later.
MRR I’d like to speak to how you managed to keep a scholarly life with such a high teaching load.
JS I think what happened was, well, let me see. I’m trying to think of how to explain this. When I left here, the reason I left here, by the way, was because my wife had gotten a spectacular job offer at the University of Pennsylvania, so we were going to move. For the final year that I was the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, I commuted from Philadelphia weekly. When that year was up, I didn’t really want to continue to commute. I wanted to be with her and so I found this other job. Now I’ve lost my thread of my thought on why I’m talking about this. What was your question?
MRR Scholarship.
JS Oh yeah. Oh yes, so I was looking for work. And we always hired generalists and I thought of myself as a generalist because I taught literature courses, too. But you can’t get a job doing that at a four year institution. So I answered adds for a composition specialist, which is what I primarily had been publishing in. Although, I was pretty pleased, anything I taught I eventually usually published something about. I knew where I was headed. I’ve been on enough search committees now at my new institution to know that we only hire specialists and they come in and one of their obligations is to give a job talk. It’s often so highly specialized that I don’t know how you could be interested. You just pretend to be. I never had that kind of specialized research agenda. My research has always been: Here’s something that’s really interesting that’s happening in my classroom, here’s how I approached it and here’s the outcome. It’s pedagogical research and as long as the classes were interesting and the pedagogy was interesting, there was always something there to write. So I would write it and I’d do the writing in the summer. I got in the habit, I save stuff. Sometimes I would be conscious while it was happening that I’m going to be able to write something about this so I would have the students anonymously write reflections on what we were doing that I could draw upon. I was doing this a long time ago, before there was much in the way of IRB-attention paid to it. Then I modified and adjusted. Only one in my career did I ever have a planned study, maybe twice, where I went through the IRB approval process before it happened. I had a year as a Carnegie Scholar in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship for Teaching and Learning and for that I had a formal study that I did. But most of the time, I would just after the fact, file for an exemption and they would approve the letter I was going to send to the class anything that I want to use your stuff, is it ok if I do. I enjoyed writing these things because I wanted to share the stuff I was doing for other people. I just made the time for it I guess. I don’t know how else to describe it.
MRR Did that inspire you to develop the Center for Teaching and Learning?
JS I didn’t develop that. I mean you want to give credit where it’s due. It’s Kelly Cowan who deserves the credit. Kelly was the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs under Mike Governanti and I can’t remember, I knew this was a topic I was going to be asked to talk about and my memory is a bit fuzzy. I do remember that there were several mass meetings of all who were interested and huge numbers of faculty turned out. Kelly chaired those meetings. And it was a grassroots kind of thing. There seemed to be a growing interest that we ought to have a Center for Teaching and Learning and so forth. We, as a group, grew it and made it happen and came up with a structure for it and that included having some people run it. I don’t remember how I became the Director, I wanted to be and I guess, I don’t know if I got elected. Somehow I was fortunate got to do it and I liked doing it. I only did it for one year because the second year, by then, Kelly had moved up to become the acting or Interim Dean or Executive Director and she asked me to be the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. And as an administrator it made no sense for me to run the CTL so I actually became the guy to whom the Center reported. But I only got to run it for the first year. The highlight from the first year on my standpoint was we, once a month, had what we called Conversations about Teaching which took place, on I think, Friday’s at noon. And we had a modest budget so we would provide a boxed lunch for the first twenty people who came. We would say and we drew twenty to twenty five every single time. I remember I would usually bring the food. One time I remember going to Qdoba and bringing in twenty assorted burritos or whatever. We had different topics. One that I do remember was an article, a famous article by an English professor, Randy Bass, called “What’s the Problem Here.” It’s sort of a seminal piece in the whole scholarship of teaching and learning field because what he poses in this article is the notion that teaching problems, rather than looking at them as things to be solved, why don’t we look at them as research opportunities? My agenda was: We’ll have a Friday conversation about this. Please read this. We’ll come and we’ll talk about it. Afterwards, I had intended to see if I could put together a working group on the scholarship of Teaching and Learning and I did. I sent out an announcement that said “who wants to join this?” and we rounded up about eight or ten people including Cathy Bishop-Clark and Beth Uhler. I don’t know if Beth’s still around here or not, if not she was in Sociology. The two of them did a lot of collaborative work in the scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Very different kind of work then I do because they’re social scientists. But that group met, I would say, for two or three years. I know that a couple of the members went and did presentations and went to other universities to study the scholarship of Teaching and Learning. It was very rewarding to do the center and I was happy that it continued and it morphed and developed in lots of different ways. I’m not quite sure what they’re up to now. I understand from John Tassoni that when they were trying to figure out who to bring in to give this fiftieth anniversary talk, he mentioned my name as the person who had been the first director and got nothing but blank stares from the people in the room because I guess all of them had gotten here after I was gone and didn’t know who I was which is fine, I understand that. I continue to be proud of the fact that this campus developed that center and when I got to my new campus in West Chester, which is a four-year institution that is truly committed to teaching, that’s for real. They didn’t have a Center for Teaching and Learning, I couldn’t figure it out. It took a while for me to figure out that they had a committee, which had an odd name, that was sort of that and so I got myself appointed to that and then I got myself to be one of the two co-chairs of it. Then in a meeting we were having with the Associate Provost, who’s the person in charge of it, she said, “Well what do you guys need to keep going?” and I said, “We need a better name then we’ve got” and when they said what kind of name should we have? Have you got any ideas? I suggested CELT, which is a long answer to ????. They went for it. So, we now have a center for, at West Chester (Pennsylvania), with the same name as here, at Miami. I felt pleased with that.
MRR So I’d like to talk some stories about colleagues, some stories about Gene Bennett, John Heyda. If you want to tell any funny anecdotes.
JS Alright, yeah, yeah. John Heyda and I started on the same day and for that year people somehow couldn’t keep us straight. What time is it?
MRR We’re fine, it’s just twenty after three.
JS Okay. So, John Heyda and I start on the first day in 1981 and got to be pretty good friends pretty quickly but if you know John, he and I are roughly the same size and that and plus we were new, people constantly kept calling him Jeff and calling me John. My joke used to be, well I mean, you got two guys with a similar name, both really tall, really good looking, of course. Anyway, we were driving to a conference, Bowling Green or something, with our department chair Bob Johnson, at the wheel. We tell him this story that everyone keeps confusing us and when we got to the conference at Bowling Green you go to the registration desk to pick up your name cards and we pick them up and one says Jeff Heyda and one says John Sommers so even they screwed it up. John and I were pursuing tenure pretty much at the same time and we never passed up an opportunity to get another line on our CV. I remember one time there was some conference up in Milwaukee and we both got on the program. We finished teaching on a Friday afternoon and hopped in his car and if you ever interview John you can get him to describe his mix tapes. He had fascinating mix tapes that we would play. He had one that was all songs that had Jared in the title. Anyway, we drove, I think it was an eleven hour drive and we went in the session the next day and it had, I don’t know, like ten people in it, got back in the car and drove all the way back down. We stopped somewhere in northern Indiana at a Mexican restaurant. It was the first Mexican restaurant I had ever gone to and I think we ate seven baskets of chips and salsa because I had never had it. It was unbelievable stuff. One of these trips that he and I took, this is a long time ago, we were in the lobby and I think we were the only ones that recognized Bono, and The Edge and the whole group from U2, they were walking through the lobby, they were doing a concert. They were pretty new but we knew who they were. That was exciting. There was another conference where a whole bunch of NBA players walked in and we recognized them. John and I would do the chasing around. That was one of the things that was so wonderful about getting tenured because we understood now you can say no, you don’t have to do everything anymore. It is kind of crazy to drive twenty-two hours to do a forty-five minute presentation to eleven people but it gets you a line on a CV. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, we hired, I think in 1990. I invited her because we got to be pretty good friends and she was good to collaborate with. So I had an idea for a textbook and I asked her if she wanted to work on it with me and she did. We actually published a textbook with Saint Martin’s Press. But it was a good experience working together. I’ve done a lot of collaborative work and there’s lots of ways to do it. But we did the four hands on the keyboard model. We would have a chapter on the screen, one of us would be typing and one of us would reach over and type something else. What I also remember is she had her son, my kids were in school and her youngest son was in school and we had an absolutely atrocious winter with snow and cancellations. It was very difficult for us to get together and work on the book but we trudged through it and got it done. The concept of the book, I had done a book on my own that hadn’t really sold very well. It helped me get tenured and I got an advance so it’s okay. I was talking to an editor sometime later from St. Martin’s and she said, “Well, do you have any other ideas in mind?” And I said, “Yes, I do actually. I want to do a collection of essays that we would call the Two-Year College Reader and it would essays about life at the two-year campus and about the students at the two-year campus and it would feature writing by students at the two-year campus. She encouraged me to write a book on it. So we did and I think it was a pretty well conceived book. I kept saying to Cindy, “They’re never going to let us publish this with this title” and they never said anything so we kept working for a couple years and they would send out the manuscript. We had pretty good reviews. Then one day all of the sudden, two years into this we get a little note, “We’re having second thoughts about the title.” We asked them to ask some of the reviewers about it and that produced some mixed response. But even some of the two-year campus reviewers said, “I would never order a book from my campus with this name.” The implication being, it must be something inferior if it was called that. You know that nobody at four-year institution is never going to buy a book with this title. We said to our editors that we didn’t expect it to be used there. Anyway, they finally said, “You’ve got to change the title” and I got so fed up I just sort of resigned from the title discussion and Cindy handled that, she was more even keeled. We wound up calling it From College to Community, I think. The college and community were bigger letters in the title, it was pretty clever, I thought. There was a sort of self-loathing on the part of some of the two-year college faculty and a sense that this is not really academic world. But that’s not how we felt about it. We did that book and subsequent to that she came up with a project and we co-authored this article that I mentioned earlier thatappeared in the Three C’s fiftieth anniversary edition. And that’s had a long shelf life because a book just came out in the past six months called, I can’t remember the title but it’s intended to be a collection of vital readings for those who teach at two-year colleges or train people to teach at two-year colleges. It features reprints of important articles including that one which is very nice to see. And it’s frequently cited. It was Cindy’s baby and I worked on it with her so that’s good.
MRR Congratulations on that…
JS Yeah, thanks.
MRR That’s very inspiring. I’d like to talk about some of the literary vehicles on campus, whether it’s the radio station or the newspaper KAOS. Do you remember that?
JS Well, I didn’t have anything to do with the radio station, that was John Heyda who worked with them for years. I was the advisor to the newspaper, is it still called KAOS?
MRR It’s out of print KAOS.
JS Apparently the name KAOS came about in the turmoil of the nineteen sixties. It was chaos with a K. It was incredibly stupid name that was meaningless. Whatever meaning it had evaporated when the time period passed and the only people on campus who really knew why it was called KAOS were people who had been here forever, whose history went back far enough. I wanted them to change it to something more newsworthy, like a journal, you know? Not fake news, but real news. I kept agitating with the different editors, whenever we’d get new editors, go in there and try to get this changed and the administration was very resistant. I’m not surprised to hear it changed but I don’t think that change happened before I left. I remember we got real close at one point and one administrator seemed to have some say in it and said, “No, let’s keep it.” It was just dumb.
MRR Talk to us about some of the writers because reading through some of the past issues it seemed as if there were some very lively personalities. Can you describe what some of the editorial meetings might be like?
JS Well, I didn’t go to the editorial meetings.
MRR You didn’t go to those? Okay.
JS My job was ceremonial, I think, as the advisor. I know one of the people that was heavily involved was a student in a ot of my writing classes, a returning student. She was an incredibly gifted writer but I don’t know if I have anything else I can really remember about that.
MRR I’d like to talk about some of the student activities and student life that you witnessed. What did students do here besides go to class? Did you see anything else, any organizations?
JS There was I think, one thing I do remember was a picnic that we had out behind the library and Johnston Hall to end the, to commemorate the end of each academic year. There was always one of those, I’m forgetting what to call it. You know where somebody is sitting on a seat above the pot of water and you throw, the dunking booth. Faculty would take turns sitting in the dunking booth and a colleague named Elizabeth Krukowski, who had been here many years when I came in here and was a real gentle and wonderful soul and she was so distraught over those dunking booths every year. We kept explaining to her, nobody is being forced to participate. It’s all in good fun. The faculty in there are enjoying it and want to do. She thought it’s so humiliating and so degrading. She was overcome. It was very interesting. I don’t think she went anywhere near that activity but it was going on.
MRR Another topic we need to discuss is the Artist and Lecture series. Do you recall any particular events?
JS No, but I do recall, as we neared 1984, Virginia Palmer, who was the Library Director, and I got a grant. It was an Ohio, some kind of grant in the state. We put on a series of activities related the book 1984 which culminated with a panel discussion where we brought in, we brought in four of our faculty, each from a different discipline. One I remember, Bob Seufert. Is he still here?
MRR I think he just retired last year.
JS He ran that research, he had a little research group. It wasn’t little. Anyway, Bob was on it because he was a sociologist. I don’t remember the other faculty. There was probably one of the English faculty, too. It was a panel discussion to talk about 1984 and it was a pretty successful event. When it was over Virginia and I wrote it up and got it published in the Teaching English in a Two Year College which was a journal that I wound up being the editor of before I left here. My last three years here I was the editor of the journal and continued for another seven. I just finished about a year ago. There’s a picture, if you’ve seen the advertising for this talk tonight, there’s a bunch of pictures that I’m in. There’s one where there’s four of us sitting around a table and the reason that picture was taken is that all four of those people at that time were editing different professional journals which is pretty impressive for a campus this small and a two year campus at that. Eric Melby was in the picture because he was doing the Segue online creative writing journal. Brian Domino, who I think is still a member of the faculty, I think he was editing the Nietzsche Letters or something like that [Journal of Nietzsche Studies]. I’m trying to remember who the fourth one was. There was a fourth person and I don’t remember now but I was also editing a journal. It didn’t include Mickey Sarquis, who’s a legend around here, I don’t know if you ever heard about her. Mickey Sarquis was the editor of a chemistry education journal designed for secondary teachers and got millions and millions of dollars for her grant activities year after year after year. Mickey retired, I think just about a little bit before I left here but it was quite a big operation. And again pretty spectacular for a campus like this to have something based here. I think there was some question about when she left what was going to happen to it. I don’t know what happened to it but I think it was pretty much going to be scarfed up by Oxford and I don’t know if it continued or not.
MRR It did go to Oxford. Any stories about Mark Plageman? Any stories you’d like to add?
JS Well, I already told you one. I told one story about Mark Plageman which was his role in my hiring here. Mark was a really kind, gentle person who was our Coordinator of Humanities and English and French and whatever. Then after he retired he continued to come back for many years and teach one or two courses of French. And he was always a good kindred soul, a happy guy. He was very nice to new faculty. I appreciate how nice he was to me. I haven’t seen or heard from Mark in ages.
MRR You just missed him by a couple of weeks. I’m sorry. I think the other person you mentioned would be Gene Bennett.
JS Gene was the original Executive Director when we were here and I don’t know that I have any real stories about him. Mike Governanti is a little different.
MRR Go ahead, we’ve interviewed him, too.
JS For a while there was a dinner club thing that we did where eight or ten or a number of couples would go to dinner together somewhere and Mike and Sandy were included. I remember once, I guess we were living in Loveland which the part of Loveland we were in was closer to Warren County, Mason. I think everybody came down to a restaurant near us and came to our house and we had drinks first. And I remember, and the reason it sits in my mind, we had a headlight that was burned out and Mike was the one who pointed it out to me. He had some nickname for that, which I don’t remember anymore except where he grew up it was, if you had this they used that nickname. Mike was also a very nice man and he helped me once professionally. They had sent these two faculty in other places were going to put together a book. They were pretty prominent people in the field of composition and they wanted to put a book together called When Composition Teachers Teach Literature and they sent out a call for papers. And I had an idea. I pitched my idea to them and they said, “Go ahead. Teach that course. Write this up.” And the course was on this listed and I think only five people signed up for it. And they don’t really want courses going with only five people. I wrote a letter to Mike and I think I went to see him, basically saying, “I’ve got a commitment from these people that are doing this important book but I can’t write about it if you don’t let the course go.” So he let it go. And I wrote the piece up and it got published. In fact, it’s going to be part of what I’m talking about in my speech tonight, actually. I appreciated that. I mean, he was willing to, I don’t know economically if it made any sense but professionally it was good for me to be able to write about this particular teaching experience that I was on the verge of having. He was very supportive in that way. Whoever was in that office was always very supportive. Whenever I got the scholarship, the Carnegie thing, there was a pretty big splash in the media around here about that and I think Kelly had a lot to do with that so I appreciated that. It was nice. One of the things I remember, one of my fondest memories here, I won two awards that were university-wide for teaching. One was the, what was it called? Distinguished Educator, Arts and Science Distinguished Educator and then the Knox Award which is for outstanding instructor, period, across campuses. When I was, this is one thing I will talk about when I was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, my sense was that this campus had some really brilliant teachers who did brilliant things in class and we needed to look for any opportunity we could find to get them the honors they deserved. So I collaborated with an English faculty member named Kate Ronald and we nominated and got John Tassoni the Distinguished Educator Award. A couple years after that I nominated Cathy Bishop-Clark for the Knox Award and she got that. I also nominated Rob Schorman for that award and he deserved it but they found somebody else. I thought if the administrators don’t look out for these kinds of honors for the faculty, who’s going to do it? That part of the job I liked.
MRR Are there any other stories you’d like to make sure that are recorded to be viewed say ten or fifty years from now?
JS Oh that’s interesting. I’m sure I’ll remember stories after I finish here. I’ll tell one story I’m going to tell in my talk tonight. I learned early on when I was teaching here that the seating arrangement in the classroom is pretty important when it comes to trying to have class discussions. The fact that I’m giving a lecture tonight is pretty odd because the only other lecture I ever gave in twenty-eight years was when I got the award from the Dean. I had to give a talk. Otherwise I don’t do lecture classes. We sit in a circle. And in one particular class, about halfway through the class meeting, one of the women in the class, one of those thirty-five year old returning students, gets up, walks across the room and sits down on my lap, yeah. I did a double take and I looked at her and said, “Don’t you want to go back to your seat?” So she went back to her seat. I later found out, she told me after class, that she was fulfilling a class assignment. Jean Lynch, who was in Sociology was teaching a course, in Social Deviance probably. And the assignment was to go out and violate a social norm. See what the reaction is. I got an email from Jean later that day, she said “I intended them to go the library and break into song or get in the elevator and face the back of the elevator. Not doing what this student did.” And she said, “I asked the student, whose class were you in?” And when she told me it was yours, I said, “Oh thank God. He’ll know how to handle that.” What I learned from the experience was that the student had that same thought. She thought, “I can do this and he’ll figure out a way to handle it appropriately.” What I learned from that, this is what I’m talking about tonight, is that yeah, the students have to fill out course evaluations. They do it every semester. But they’re perpetually making judgments about us. It seems like maybe we ought to be aware of that because I’m not sure I always was. In this case, she had formed that I can trust him to not go crazy or do something stupid or whatever and that was important. The story that goes along with that, I’m not supposed to be naming names, I’d like to, because this is a co-author. I invited one of my undergraduates, who’s now a high school teacher I think somewhere in the area, to co-author an article with me. For a long time when students hand it their written work to me, I don’t write comments. I record comments. Initially it was tape cassettes. Now it’s screen capture software. I wanted her to co-author a piece about that with me and give a student’s perspective on what it’s like to receive this audio response to your writing. And one of the things she talked about in it was that after she had heard the first of these, she realized that, “Okay, I can trust what he’s saying. He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.” It never really dawned on me that I had to prove that to the students. I kind of figured that my name is on the class list. I got a PhD in English. I took for granted that they would just assume that I knew what I was doing. In her mind, I had to sort of establish those credentials. It was worth knowing that. And that piece that she did, it’s a smaller part of a longer article that I wrote is, I think, really valuable and in fact I have my students now reading it. They read what she has to say. One of them said to me recently, “Was she in your class? She must've been in your class” and I said, “Yeah, we were doing tapes in those days.” I don’t know how I got on to those stories.
MRR Well, there’s one more question that might inspire such stories. We’ve been talking about the last fifty years of MUM. What is it you hope will remain from the first fifty years and into the next fifty years?
JS Well I hope, I know things have changed here and I know that there’s an emphasis on completion degrees and all that. But what I treasured about my time here was the students who blossomed when they got an opportunity to come to college who had, for a variety of reasons, never come before. That I don’t think, describes people who have already gotten degrees somewhere, two year degrees, and wanted to complete them. I hope that never disappears. One of the other stories I’ll tell tonight is about, things have, from my perspective, worsened. More and more high school students and even younger are attending college classes because they can collect credits and get out of college sooner and I’m sure there’s much to be said for that educationally but at one point, Ellen Marie Wahlrab a colleague and I decided we want to investigate this. We got IRB approval or whatever and we were interviewing some of these high school kids to try and find out. I was interviewing some in her class and she was interviewing some in mine. And what we were learning was that the ones who succeeded here were the ones who, in a sense, cut ties with high school. The ones who were struggling, at that point there was some screening you had to be academically suitable for. But the ones who were spending their time here wondering what’s going on across the street, what am I missing, were struggling. The point of the story is that we had to get, because they were minors, we had to get permission from the parents. I got to know one of these moms and she came back to become a student and she was in like six of my classes subsequently, she was just great. At one point she tells me this story, that she’s back in college and she said I went to a family picnic and her dumb brother-in-law says, “You’re going to college? Why are you going to college? You’re fifty two years old.” and I said, “So what did you say to him?” And she said, “I said to him, ‘I can be fifty-two years old and uneducated or I can be fifty-two years old and become educated. And that’s what I’m going to do.” Which I thought was the right answer, the smart answer. I hope this campus never changes so much that that is not still the case. That there are people that realize at various points in life, college is okay for me now and I’m ready to do it now. I think she was not atypical because she had in fact started college right out of high school and didn’t last. That was the story for a lot of them. A lot of folks would come and something else would get in the way and they’d leave and then they’d come back and discover if you’re here at the right time it’s important. It really works out.
MRR Well I’d like to let our readers know, what is the event that’s happening tonight?
JS Tonight there is the, I gather that all year long there has been a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary. When I was the Associate Dean we were celebrating the fortieth anniversary and I don’t think we spread that celebration over the course of a year. We just had a big blowout one weekend with all kinds of things happening. And apparently they decided they wanted to have a speaker so I’m giving a talk tonight, in whatever that big room is over there, in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary which I’m very pleased to have been invited to do. And I’m hoping that I run into all kinds of people that I haven’t seen in a long time in the audience. That’d be great.
MRR Well, I’m now looking forward to attending. I had already had it on my calendar and I don’t want to wear you out because I want to make sure your fresh and I don’t want you to blame this interview for being tired. So do I have your permission to discontinue recording?
JS Oh yeah, sure.
MRR Thank you.
5.09 JS Sure.
Indexing terms:
Age
Androne, Helane Adams
Anthropology Department
Art and Science Distinguished Educator
Associate Dean of Academic Affairs
Bachelor Hall
Bass, Randy
Bennett, C. Eugene
Bishop-Clark, Cathy
Bono
Bowling Green University
Capote, Truman
Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship for Teaching and learning
Carnegie Scholar
Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL)
Chabot, Barry
Children
Cincinnati, Ohio
College Credit Plus (CCP)
College, Composition and Communication (Three Cs) journal
Columbus, Ohio
Communications Department
Community College
COMPASS testing
Conversations about Teaching
Cowan, Kelly
Crime
Daiker, Donald
Dinner
Distiinguished Educator Award
Diversity
Domino, Brian
English 111
English Department
Finneytown, Ohio
French Department
Governanti, Michael
Hamilton campus
Heyda, John
In Cold Blood (book)
Indiana
Internal Review Board (IRB)
Ivy League
Johnson, Robert (Bob)
KAOS Newspaper
Kids, children
Knox Award
Krukowski, Elizabeth
Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia
Loveland, Ohio
Lynch, Jean
Marriage, married
McGoven, George
Melby, Eric
Middletown Campus
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
New York University (NYU)
Non-traditional student
Ohio University
Ohio Writing Project
Oxford campus
Palmer, Virginia
Pedagogy
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Picnic
Plageman, Mark
Public Relations
Radio station
Research
Retiree
Ronald, Katharine (Kate)
Sarquis, Arlyne “Mickey”
Schorman, Rob
Seufert, Robert (Bob)
Social Deviance
Sociology department
Tassoni, John
Textbook author
Traditional student
Tuma, Keith
U2
Uhler, Beth
Undergraduate research
University of Cincinnati
Wahlrab, Ellen Marie
Warrenburg, Max
Watergate
West Chester University, Pennsylvania
Womack-Smith, Whitney
Writing Program Administrator, WPA Journal
Yale University
Interviewer
Marsha Robinson
Interviewee
Jeff Sommers
Location
Gardner-Harvey Library, Miami University Middletown
Collection
Citation
“Sweet MUMories Oral History Project - Jeff Sommers,” First to 50 - Miami University Middletown Digital Archive, accessed April 20, 2024, https://mum50.omeka.net/items/show/994.