Being asked to write about yourself for a project like this produces an uncomfortable feeling and a fear of narcissism. However, I found as I actually began to write the essay that it was a helpful exercise. We spend so little time in reflection, given the hectic pace of our lives, and this was an excuse to do that. I hope it proves to be at least an interesting quick read for those who read it and provides a bit of insight into why I did what I did as NCA President.
Family and Early Years
I was raised in a very small Kentucky town on the banks of the Ohio River. Much of the town's population was made up of transient military personnel from a nearby army base. This setting provided an odd mixture of small town stability and requirements to form new relationships continually.
My family was a pillar of the community and, although we were not rich by any general standards, I grew up feeling privileged. My peer group and friends changed yearly as their military parents came and went. Being born to older parents, my brother and I benefited from a family environment where we were highly valued (some might say spoiled) and expectations were high, despite the fact that neither of my parents and few people in the community were college graduates. There was never a doubt we would “do better.” The result was two sons with a Ph.D. and an M.D. respectively.
Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I was in many ways a classic baby boomer. I expected the world to be just and fair and believed that when it wasn't it needed to be and could be fixed. When it resisted that effort (as in the Vietnam War), the answer was not cynicism but anger, rebellion, and vocal efforts to challenge the status quo. Some combination of being born late to parents who saw me as a special gift, growing up as a youth minister, being a member of the baby boomer generation, and growing up in a volatile time when the injustices of the world were a part of my daily life (the civil rights movement, Vietnam, religious bigotry, political assassinations) left me with a deep and lifelong sense that I needed to make a difference. Some of that may have been ego but another part was idealism.
Defining Moment
The defining moment of my youth was the sudden and unexpected death of my father when I was 16. Because of that loss, my mother gave both her sons greater freedom to explore, rebel, and be treated as adults. I now understand what a pillar of strength and wisdom that quiet, shy person was in those years. My choice of a small private college in my home state was influenced more by my sense that I needed to stay close enough to support my mother than the fact that all my expenses were covered by scholarships. Otherwise I might have attended schools like Michigan State or Princeton, where I was accepted, but which seemed far away.
In my high school years I was bused 30 miles to a high school in another city where the small number of students from my home town were the only students bused in. I decided from day one that I would not be a “river rat” (a less than affectionate name ascribed to us) or an outsider. It was another “communication” challenge in my younger years that for good or bad focused me on being effective in winning others to my cause. I was student government president for two of my four years in high school, and wrote for the school newspaper. For days at a time, I never made the long bus ride home, staying with friends instead, so I could be involved in high school life.
And then more death happened. John Kennedy's assassination was one of the most vivid memories of my childhood. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy's assassinations were more than a memory. They were transformative for an impressionable adolescent. Beyond the sadness and trauma, they cemented my commitment to somehow impact a society that killed its best and that traded hope and inspiration for the dark side of public manipulation. I entered college full of motivation to push back against the dark forces that kept extinguishing hope.
Early Mentors
Despite attending a conservative Baptist college, I was fortunate in finding mentors who taught me to read and think critically. One was a Princeton-trained historian who taught me to read the best intellectual works, value critical reasoning, and be intolerant of relativists and dogmatists. Although I had read vociferously throughout my life, he helped me move from the Bible and Readers Digest condensed books to Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class and Kolko's Triumph of Conservatism. A second mentor in the speech discipline not only provided great moments of joy and life-changing moments traveling with an oral interpretation performance group, but also helped me learn key lessons about life from great literature and her own life experience.
However, lest it seem I was all about great books, I should own up to having found great friends in a fraternity that prided itself on not toeing the Baptist party line (although we thoroughly supported a party line). Sometimes that rebellious spirit led us to political activism and accepting openly gay members. Other times it took the form of extreme partying with all that implied in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was a debater, traveled the country in an oral interpretation performance troupe, and formed a conscientious objector counseling service while student government president. The latter was not well received by the college but did more good than my effort to create co-ed dorms (yes, I was young and naïve). The Baptist ministers on the Board of Trustees were not amused.
Marriage
While in college, I met and married the love of my life and wife of 36 years. We met in a “Psychology of Creative Communication” class (remember the era!) team-taught by a psychology professor and a communication professor, both of whom became important to our lives in many ways. Between the trust walks and self-disclosure exercises were a few pitchers of beer and dates that led to our marriage several months later. Her sensitivity to the needs of others and perspective on what is important in life have kept bringing me back to center over the years (no small task). Living daily since college with her lifelong efforts to help disadvantaged children have the chance they deserve in life, and seeing the pain and challenges her children face, have helped keep my work and foibles in perspective.
Shaping Undergraduate and Graduate College Experiences
In college I double majored in American Studies and Speech Communication. The latter was, to be honest, more my “second” major, sustained by a couple of faculty that became important in my life, and extracurricular activities in debate and oral interpretation. When I decided to go to graduate school (and I'm not sure “decided” does not put too fine a rational point on it), the fellowship/teaching assistant opportunities in communication were much greater than any I was able to find in American Studies (an honorary scholarship at Princeton was not going to go very far). Looking back, as a naïve undergraduate I was not as awed as I should have been about my conversations with people like Robert Jeffries, Beverly Whitaker Long, Jim Anderson, Jesse Delia, and Ruth Ann Clark as I struggled to make my decision. Ultimately, it was visiting Jesse in his now somewhat legendary office surroundings of chaotic books and papers and figures on springs hanging from the ceiling, experiencing the warmth and kindness Ruth Ann Clark exudes, devouring burgers and beers with University of Illinois graduate students, and the preferences of my Princeton mentor that led my wife Betty and me to choose U of I's program. My decision was driven, as so many key ones seem to have been for me over the years, by people and relationships.
Graduate school was a joy and another level of transformation for me. The faculty at the University of Illinois became lifelong friends and mentors. David Swanson's recent death was a loss that is too close and painful to try to describe here. My graduate school friends included: Brant Burleson, Susan Kline, Dan and Barb O'Keefe, Julie Burke, Kathy Rowan, Claudia Hale, Sidney Ribeau, Ron Pelias, Daun Kendig, Jane Donovan, Amanda Borden, and others. We lost Daun to cancer in another hugely painful experience. (For those who believe in some engaged God who controls life—we need to talk.) Overall, that group has an almost legendary status in U of I lore and has gone on to make huge contributions to the discipline and higher education. They are great people as well.
I think my work in graduate school was respected. However, I do not think my path to success was normal. For a time I was known as the “king of incompletes” (nothing seemed quite right at semester's end). Receiving the NCA's Golden Anniversary Award for my dissertation was a culminating event. I remember going into the hotel bathroom when I found out and having a conversation with my father. I hoped he was proud. I defended my dissertation the afternoon before I was to teach my first class in my first job at the University of Kentucky (typical). However, also typical was the supportive experience my committee provided me in that event. They didn't test me as much as they launched me into a successful career.
Start of My Career
Although choosing to return to Kentucky to start my career was not easy (didn't Thomas Wolfe say something about this going home thing?), it proved a wonderful life-fulfilling choice. I do not have space here to cover in any detail my twenty years in the department there. Suffice it to say that I worked with a unique group of talented people who found a way to be smart, academically recognized, supportive, and fun in a way only truly good people can. They nurtured me and when I came to a certain point unselfishly pushed me to do what they knew was best for my passion and my career. Together we moved a masters-only department to a Ph.D. program that is, in its area of focus, one of the best in the nation. I learned much from my colleagues there.
During that time Betty and I had our first child, Alexis, shortly after leaving graduate school. Our second child, Dylan, did not arrive until I was 41. However, they each in different ways helped me keep a perspective on everything else. Alexis, growing up while I was an assistant professor, grounded me at a time when the pressure for success can be overwhelming. She was a joy and as an adult is now a friend, someone I like, love, and respect. Our second child Dylan, conceived after some very difficult times as older parents, is a joy, an anchor, and a fellow baseball lover. As a senior academic, with a young Dylan in the house, I confronted daily the challenges that career and family posed for my younger colleagues. That was a good thing.
American Council on Education Fellowship
During all of this I had the tremendous opportunity to serve as an American Council on Education Fellow. It transformed my professional life. It changed completely the way I looked at our discipline and higher education. It also redirected my work away from traditional academic concerns and centered it on efforts to engage better my own work and the work of American higher education with the needs of society and the people who need our help.
The Fellowship informed my department work and focused my work as a university faculty senate chair. As the perspective developed there matured, it ultimately defined my tenure as President of the National Communication Association as I sought to promote the concept of an engaged discipline. It also led to my decision to leave the university and become Vice President for Academic Affairs for our state system. How I made this shift is another convoluted story of people and relationships. The bottom line is that I have devoted the last eight years of my life to helping postsecondary education at the state and national level to engage more effectively the needs of society, by embracing a public agenda rather than an institutionally-driven one.
Before concluding with a description of my work as a part of the dark side of the force (academic administration), since this document is the result of an NCA initiative, I should probably say a bit more about my work in NCA and its influence on my life.
National Communication Association
NCA was a source of professional growth for me from graduate school and through my time as a department chair, professor, and association president. NCA gave me the opportunity to test my work and connect with fellow scholars, and ultimately provided a national stage on which to live my commitment to an engaged discipline and postsecondary education system. When I began my tenure as a national officer at the comparatively young age of 47, I had the privilege to work with some of our best people, enduring the destruction by fire of our national headquarters in Annandale (which included the loss of much of our work planning the 2000 Seattle convention, by the way) and the relocation of our headquarters in the district, celebrated by a wonderful event at the Washington, DC, Mayflower Hotel.
I made national contacts with kindred spirits across disciplines and in the higher education community generally who shared my passion for creating a system more engaged with public problems and needs. Those contacts have served me throughout my career. I hope I contributed to the discipline. We established lasting relationships with other disciplinary associations, the Council of Graduate Schools, AASCU, AACU, Campus Compact, and many other organizations interested in promoting engaged teaching and research. Some programs I initiated, like the Communicating Common Ground partnership with the Southern Poverty Law Center, Campus Compact, and other national groups, continue to grow. The convention continues to celebrate work in the scholarship of teaching and learning, service learning, and engaged scholarship. We tried to focus more attention on supporting funded research, a commitment of mine that was a successful focus in my home department. Subsequent leaders have dramatically expanded the relationships with the NSF, NIH, and foundations.
Again, I am most thankful for the opportunity NCA provided me with to advance the public agenda for higher education that was and is my passion.
The Last Eight Years
While I was an officer of NCA, my home state of Kentucky went through a major restructuring of its higher education system under the leadership of a visionary governor, who brought one of the smartest highest education policy people in the country to Kentucky to lead the effort. The focus of the reform was on better linking the work of higher education to the needs of the people and the state. Opportunity doesn't knock much louder than that. I was blessed to be in the right place at the right time with the right passion. I left the university to join the reform effort in the capital. At first, I was on loan from the university. During that time I brought millions of dollars into the state to allow more low-income children to go to college. I also began to focus on the needs of adults who needed postsecondary education to save their lives. Ultimately, I became the Vice President for Academic Affairs for the state, and left the university. My job is to give more people access to postsecondary education, improve the quality of what we provide, graduate more of our students, and connect university R&D to economic development so our graduates have fulfilling employment and serve the common good. It doesn't get any better than that.
My work over the last eight years has been rewarding and exciting. I have hired some of the best people in the country from top universities with an interest in policy to drive innovation and program developments that have brought the opportunities afforded by postsecondary education to record numbers of Kentuckians. I work with national groups like the National Governors’ Association, the Education Trust, Campus Compact, the U.S. Secretary of Education, Congress, and others to influence the quality and engagement of the work we do in higher education nationally. Many of these groups have recognized our work in Kentucky as, in many ways, a model for states across the nation.
Conclusion and a Note about the Future
And now, as I finalize this essay, I have taken a new senior position at one of the largest philanthropic organization in America, the Lumina Foundation. Their work is focused on increasing college access and success for low income, minority, and nontraditional students. I hope in this new position to have the chance to influence the work of higher education nationally so that it better serves those who need it most and better contributes to the common good.
We cannot afford nor can the nation or the world afford for higher education to be dominated by “castles on the bog” as one of my mentors described it, doing our work behind a moat while the people around us sink further into a morass of poverty, intolerance, and despair. My communication background continues to serve me as I seek to be an agent for change: doing my part to create an educated citizenry that is global in its vision, desirous of diversity, green in its environmental values, prepared to succeed in a knowledge economy, and resistant to ideologues and hate-mongers who would divide us into warring camps.